“These are the specials for tonight,” sighs the waitress, and she props a chalkboard against a ladderback chair with a long-suffering air, as if Jessica and Josh have requested some onerous exertion on her part. Famished after the laughably long drive over from the B&B on Route Twenty-five, Josh notes the attitude, as well as the young woman’s ridiculously large breasts, dismisses the former as a local intolerance for outsiders — that is, for rich people — and tries to concentrate on the food. It’s the kind of place, so Jessica told him on the way over, where you get a choice of fries, rice pilaf or a baked potato with your main; where the French onion soup will come in a “crock”; where the waitresses, in “colonial” gray shirtdresses and white pinafores, lifers all of them, will mother them and call them — both of them — “sweet-hat.” She offered up these proofs of authenticity in a tone of such triumph that Josh sensed that L.A. — and by extension himself — was being indicted. But now this martyr girl who can’t be any older than they are has appeared (albeit wearing the costume), and the entrées have been tarted up with Thai dipping sauces and herb-infused oils and — here it comes — a reference to “how our chef prefers to do it.” So now it’s Jessica’s turn to take it personally. Hands clasped in her lap, she listens much too intently, the look on her face so ominously pleasant that Josh loses track of the choices as he tries to remember where, in his girlfriend’s elaborate hierarchy of grievances, slights from service people fit in: More egregious than men at dinner parties failing to draw her out about her career? Less, perhaps, than insufficient groveling from Sandy, her agent? He’d like to think that her irritation has something to do with what’s at stake tonight. Despite the many conditional advances and retreats from both sides, she can’t be completely sure (can she?) that he’s bought the ring. For the tenth time since they left the B&B, his right hand feels inside his blazer pocket and closes around the velvet box from Tiffany’s. He’d like to go on holding it, if it didn’t look weird.
“. . . seared sea scallops with a celery-root remoulade.” The young woman mispronounces the last syllable, giving it a long a, and Josh, embarrassed for her, gives her an encouraging smile, which he then has to hold, idiotically. When finally she comes to the end of her list, the girl does something unexpected: Instead of bustling off, she boldly meets his eye. It’s one of those direct looks that are so wildly presumptive Josh doesn’t have the presence of mind to repudiate it before she’s gone, walking across the room with a tarty, self-satisfied smugness.
“Oh, my God, I know her.”
“Yeah?” says Josh eagerly, leaping at this unexpected conversational.
“Susan O’Hare — how crazy.” Jessica says, somewhat disingenuously, Josh thinks. After all it was she who chose the inn for tonight’s dinner — “the only gig in town, trust me,” she’d assured him, when he told her he wanted to go somewhere nice on Sunday night of the long weekend, when the wedding they flew out here for, of his writing partner, Rich, would finally be over. The town, in the southwest corner of Massachusetts, is called Maidenhead. And though she hasn’t been back in a decade, Jessica spent four years in its eponymous — blissfully eponymous — girls’ boarding school.
“Susan fucking O’Hare. I really can’t believe it.” Seeing that she’s determined to milk it, Josh steels himself for another boarding school anecdote — the weekend has been rife with them — in which he’ll have not only to show interest but also to hit upon the appropriate reaction (laughter? pity? consternation?).
“They used to call her ‘Hairspray,’ ” Jessica says and, as Josh takes a sip of his water so as not to fidget more obviously, she adds absently, with just the same vacant inconclusiveness, “because when she was giving a blow job to the drama teacher he supposedly came all over her hair.”
Josh spits violently into the glass. “Jesus. Now, that’s refreshing.”
Their eyes meet and they both turn, merrily, in their chairs to have another look at the girl. Their waitress is standing before the hearth at the end of the room, gloomily uncorking a bottle of wine. Despite her finesse at the task — the cork pops neatly out after an expert twist — she admits no pleasure in it, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper on the opposite wall (chipper-looking red and yellow roosters) as if to say this, too, shall pass.
She’s too severe to be pretty, but, Josh acknowledges, taking another glance, that squeezed-into-her-dress isn’t exactly a turnoff. Her heavy red hair, coiled now into a bun, is the dark chestnut variety, not the strawberry; Josh suspects she’s vain about it — and about her tits — despite the attitude.
“I always think of her when I hear that Lou Reed song, isn’t that funny — now, here she is.”
“Was she in that singing group, too?” Josh asks, opening the menu, thumbing the pages to find the booze. “What was it called? Twelve Little Girls with Surprisingly Big Tits?”
“Twelve Little Maids,” Jessica says huffily, “and no, she wasn’t.” With a dismissive look at the list of wines, Josh shuts the menu again. “Let’s just get the most expensive bottle they’ve got.”
“She couldn’t sing — she couldn’t sing a note. But we used to act together. We both did the plays.” Jessica looks quickly at Josh then, appraising him perhaps, and when she speaks it seems it’s the first time that night that her voice hasn’t been pitched to solicit a particular reaction from him.
(The fact is, he often gets the reaction wrong, responding, for instance, “God, that sucks,” as he did absently at the conclusion of one such good-old-days anecdote in the car tonight, his attention monopolized by the dead-black, snow-banked February roads, the crap steering of the rental car, when he was meant to say, in admiration, “Wow, did it really?” The story in question concerned her dorm room window in her sophomore year. It had apparently been left open during Christmas break and then stayed frozen that way till the March thaw. When she said “frozen,” Jessica punched the word a little, as if in meteorological reproach to L.A., whose weather, nine years out, she still maintains — aloud, anyway — a moral uneasiness with.)
But now, without any inflection at all, she says to him, “She was much better than me.”
Josh nods, seeming to absorb this. Then he says gravely, “Was she much better than you at giving head, too?”
“Seriously, Josh!” Jessica cries. “I wept the night I saw her in ‘Macbeth.’ I ran behind the schoolhouse and I leaned up against this tree and I literally bawled my eyes out because I knew I would never be as good as Susan O’Hare. It was, like, the moment I knew.”
“And now she’s a waitress and you’re famous,” Josh supplies, yawning, deciding on the flank steak, which comes with the best-sounding sides — fried onions, sautéed mushrooms.
Jessica fixes him with implacable brown eyes. “A, I’m not famous, you’ve got to stop saying that–”
“And B, she’s not really a waitress?” he says glibly, and inside his pocket he runs his index finger along the gold indent that separates the two halves of the ring box. It’s nothing dramatic or cheesy he’s got planned. No bended- knee prostration or diamond to be spooned up in the chocolate parfait. Instead he imagines some version of the walk under the cold night sky of her beloved evergreens, snow crunching obligingly underfoot (the result, as they’ve been told to repeated, comic effect this weekend, of a major storm the week before), and her hard blond dissatisfaction clinging to him for life. He glances impatiently around the room, takes in the low-beamed ceilings and wide-board floors, the pewter tankards lined up in graduated sizes along the hearth mantel — the unwitting local diners, modest, in their dress khakis and fleece vests, and he has the sense of anticipation that he imagines might precede a bold crime; he has the notion that the place itself will be marked and changed for good. After 250 years, the Colonial Inn of Maidenhead, Massachusetts, will never be the same.
“Forget it,” Jessica is saying airily. She examines her menu with consternation. She would like to play at giving him the silent treatment, but fortunately, Josh knows, she doesn’t have the willpower. “Go ahead: mock the waitress. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, come on–”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she interrupts — and he can hear the triumphant note in her voice as she chances on a specious shortcut to the moral high ground — “because you never had to work.”
“Right,” says Josh. “That’s right.” A not insignificant element of his desirability she seems to find the particular fact — on the days that it doesn’t strike her as fatally damning.
“Anyway, that’s not true,” Josh says suddenly. “I taught sailing two summers.”
“Had to work, I said,” Jessica says a little too quickly, and the rage in the remark seems to surprise even her. She takes a gulp of her water, and her eyes dart around the room in a detached avian manner, as if to distance herself from it. Barbs like this continue to spring from her lips, despite her success, despite everything. They seem to pick fights on their own when she, as she has frequently averred these last couple of months — her career finally on the trajectory she’s wanted and worked for her whole life — has no complaints about her life. (She makes the remark, Josh has noticed, in the tone of someone marveling at her capacity for goodwill: Do you know I gave five thousand dollars to charity this year? Do you know I have zero complaints about my life, Josh?)
Thinking it’s about time to regroup — start setting the tone for later — Josh reaches across the table, palm open. “I’m sorry I didn’t have to work,” he says solemnly. “I’m sorry I had dollar signs monogrammed on my bathrobe pockets. Underneath it all I was really just a poor little rich kid crying out for love and affection.”
Jessica notes the hand, raises her eyes, and impassively scrutinizes his face. “Susan?” she says abruptly. “Susan O’Hare?”
Part Two
Usually she has good timing — it’s something the casting directors cite when she reads for a part. But tonight she’s off. The girl was heading back to the kitchen it seems; Jessica has to haul her back, calling shrilly now, “Susan? Susan O’Hare?! It’s Jessica — Jessica Lacombe!”
There’s a ripple through the dining room. A middle-aged couple look askance at them in the opaque way of older, country people — not ready to excoriate her personally, the way a peer would in L.A. or New York, but startled, simply, by the unpleasantly loud noise of her shout, as if a heavy truck had rattled by.
“You recognize me, right?” Jessica says, with an anxious little laugh, when Susan stands above them once again. She means, of course: Do you recognize me as a former acquaintance? But Josh hears as well the innocuous display of someone new to fame gauging her public: Do you recognize me as someone who has a growing presence in film and television? The new pilot won’t shoot till March, but there was “The Sticks,” last year’s canceled show that the critics loved, the scene in “Eden’s Gate” with Tobey Maguire at Sundance — it won’t be long, he thinks, not for the first time . . .
“Jess-ica,” the young woman says. She draws the name out in the patronizing tone a bad shrink might affect, her voice so blasé that Josh thinks she must have recognized Jess earlier and planned this reaction. “Jessica Lacombe. How are you?”
Jess falters, agonizingly. “I thought it was you!” She clears her throat. “I told Josh, we’d probably run into some people I knew. We came in Thursday on the — the overnight flight,” she says, apparently rejecting red-eye at the last minute. “Josh’s writing partner — his — his colleague from work, got married in Salisbury. Of course, we had to drive over here for dinner, say hi.”
Josh lets her fumble on keeping up the pretense of camaraderie — he’s damned either way, experience tells him: If to refrain from intervening is not to care about her, to come to her rescue is to condescend.
“I was just telling Josh, oh, my God, Susan O’Hare was the most amazing actress.” Jessica slaps her palms on the table in a gesture that’s evidently meant to be a cheerful punctuation to this remark but instead looks awkward and odd. Josh is surprised she’d go there; she can be so guileless sometimes, so naïvely self-deprecating it backfires — redoubling the envy.
Susan lets the compliment pass with a magisterial silence, as if she’s awaiting permission to speak, as of course she would, Josh thinks, considering that they’re the paying customers and she is but a lowly service person. A knife slides excruciatingly to the edge of the table, clatters to the wood floor as Jessica grabs ineffectually at it. “But, gosh, it’s been forever,” she says, stopping herself — just — from bending to the floor to retrieve it when Susan makes no motion to do so herself. “How are you?”
At this response, Susan raises her eyebrows sardonically at Josh and though this is outrageous, Josh is no longer surprised. He’s identified her, by now, as the type of waitress who tries to make a private pact with the man, letting the female half of the couple immolate and go to hell. It’s a phenomenon they know well, from early in their relationship, when nobody in L.A. knew who she was but everyone recognized Al Stein’s — the studio head’s — son. Once in a Thai restaurant a cocktail waitress actually said to her, “And you are . . . ?” “Jessica Lacombe?” Josh said rudely, as if the girl was a complete fuckwit for not having heard of her. Josh shifts in his chair remembering — he got a blow job that night, yes, indeed; she loved him for that.
“I’m just . . .” Susan turns her palms up — looking for a word that will adequately express her joy. “I’m just great, Jessica. Things are truly great.”
“And you’re — you’re living here? In Maidenhead? Well, I mean, obviously, you’re living here . . . Wait, that’s right! You grew up here — you were a day student!” she remembers, as Susan waits, patient as a vulture, for Jessica to dig herself in deeper and deeper.
It’s funny, Josh thinks, watching her writhe and squirm, because usually poise is what attracts people, and Jessica is not poised. And it’s early to attribute the quick looks as they came in tonight to fame, though she will of course be famous. (He finds her dogmatic maintaining of uncertainty on this front an amusing, puerile superstition. She knocks a lot of wood, as well; touches the medal of some Catholic saint that’s clipped to the sun shade of her Miata when she runs a red light.) Nor is it her looks alone that you’d notice. If anything, the requisite blondness and thinness, the sad eyes countered by a mouth that smiles too easily, as if to preempt envy, undersell her. (Before he knew her, at the Oscar party where they met in fact, he’d heard her described, with telling condescension, as a “very pretty girl.” That had been his pickup line: “Those people over there are describing you as a very pretty girl.” It had been a thrill to him that she had gotten it — had known it wasn’t a compliment. He wanted to lead her off to a dark room and get his hands on her, yet at the same time, as he kept up the pretense of non-goal-oriented conversation. Interrupted here and there by an acquaintance of his, or hers, but mostly his, he felt a gnawing pit in his stomach, not dissimilar to the days leading up to his parents’ divorce, as if he had sensed that some self-defining possession of his was profoundly at risk.)
“Wow, still putting up with the Maidenhead winters. I was telling Josh” — Jessica gestures rather wildly to him — “how when we walked to breakfast in the mornings, our hair used to freeze — oh, but that was just the boarders, I guess. He grew up in L.A., so the idea of ice that doesn’t come in a rink with heated locker rooms–” But before she can finish her umpteenth dig at Josh’s spoiled half- sisters, who skate competitively at such a facility, Susan squats down beside their table and says in a bizarrely inflected stage whisper, “I am so sorry to interrupt because this is fascinating, but it would be soooooo helpful if you guys could decide what you want to order.” With a grimace for Josh alone, as if the two of them might yet be in this together, she jerks her head toward the kitchen to indicate some presumed demand.
“Sure, let’s order,” Josh says, and he can see Susan sucking out his eagerness to be rid of her and twisting it into a compliment– a desire on his part to personally help her out. “Do you want to just leave now and go fuck in my car?” he’d love to say to her, just to call her on it, except he’s too busy cringing as she whispers, “That is so nice, thank you,” and winces gratefully at him.
“What a fucking freak,” Josh says when she’s gone. He gives a loud shudder at the thought of her bizarre, implicating assumptions. “Bluuhhhh!”
Jessica is watching him pensively. She takes a deep calming breath, exhaling through her nose. “It’s actually really sad.”
No, not tonight! thinks Josh. He might have predicted she would go this way, but had assumed the ad hominem attack would quell the pity.
“She was genuinely talented, Josh.”
“Uh- huh.”
“She was,” Jessica says huffily. She’s taking herself seriously now — flirting with it, at least — trying out the righteous stance.
“And now, yes, okay, I’ll say it: She’s a waitress. And you know it could be me — it could be the other way around.”
“Talk to Sandy,” Josh says dismissively, sitting back in his creaky chair, authoritative. “Talk to my dad. I know the type. Those girls who go to auditions with their high school plays still listed on their résumé?” He shakes his head. “No way, no how. Not everybody has the killer instinct, Jess. Besides” — he looks around for Susan — “isn’t she kind of fat?”
“That’s so obnoxious. That is so sexist and obnoxious.”
He shrugs.
“Especially considering you know that my sister is obese. And that I’ve had eating issues as well, Josh.”
Josh makes a gesture like a traffic cop — “bring it on” — as a goateed waiter in a butcher’s apron appears to introduce himself and to tell them, “My personal favorite on the whites is the California chardonnay.” Over Josh’s audible groan, Jessica gives the young man a brilliant smile and says: “Great! That sounds really great.” She removes the menu from Josh’s place setting and hands it to the man. “Thank you so much . . . Kurt. We’d love to try it.”
“God,” Jess says, when it’s been brought and, over her objection — “I’m sure it’s fine” — tasted and poured, “it’s really awful.” Cautiously, she takes another sip. “No, I mean, obviously it wasn’t going to be good but this is — wow, seriously bad. Almost undrinkable.”
Josh just shakes his head, looks at her: What am I supposed to say?
“Never mind,” she says, and her voice catches.
“Oh, my God. You’re actually upset.”
“I’m fine.” Unaccountably, though, there are tears in her eyes.
“Jess! Come on! Who cares?” He looks at her across the table, gulping and pressing her lips together. “No use crying over oaky chardonnay,” he tries. The bad wine should be funny — something they laugh about and forget. But all day he’s picked up on this sense of desperation from her, more acute than the usual anxiousness.
It’s as if she designed this nostalgia day trip to Maidenhead in order to pitch her adolescence to him but has only just realized that she should have presented it to him in an entirely different genre: instead of the edgy, depressing, premium- cable miniseries that aired most nights the first several weeks of their courtship — all anorexia and best friends’ backstabbing, near date- rape and walks of shame — a, well, if not a sitcom, then something pretty close — an upbeat hour-long drama, perhaps; “Gilmore Girls” meets “Facts of Life,” filled with learned compromise and character-building challenges. She had gone through school with serious financial aid, after all. Boarding school had been by no means a given, not that she dwelled on it, or seemed to resent in any way the sense of outsiderness it might have created; she only brought it up when it gave her an edge in an argument — when she could play, as she had been playing a minute ago, the poor card.
In the early afternoon, skipping out on the wedding brunch, they had been to see the school itself, though it meant an extra roundtrip from the remote B&B. “I will say this about these New England boarding schools: They’re very picturesque, aren’t they?” she’d said, watching his profile carefully, as they drove up the long driveway, past the trim Greek Revival colonials that constituted the original campus, and turned down the river road (the jigsaw-puzzle chunks of ice floating in the running water as if she had cued them to underline the hardship — or at least the inclement weather — she’d overcome), at the end of which the modern buildings lay, the auditorium among them, which housed the theater.
“I mean, this is the image of a picturesque New England boarding school, isn’t it?”
“It’s . . . nice,” Josh had said uncomfortably, avoiding looking at her. It was clear she wanted the school’s archetypal attraction to confirm something for him, to satisfy some outstanding question she presumed he had. But while he enjoyed rounding out the picture with a quick visual to go with her story line, he was baffled by the urgency in her voice. He found himself tempted, as the tour dragged on (dormitories, sports fields, though she had never played sports), to say boldly, “I don’t give a shit about all this,” and would have, if her sudden eagerness to expose this part of her life to him hadn’t made him think that would be just a tad harsh.
Part Three
This much he knows: When Jessica was thirteen, she and her mother, Nancy, conspired for her to leave the Warwick (bumfuck central Massachusetts) public schools and go to Maidenhead. Up till then, boarding school was beyond the family’s ken, let alone their means. Vicky, Jessica’s older sister by three years, was plowing through Warwick-Dunham High School, head down, blinders on. But plump, embarrassed Vicky, her diffident father’s daughter, had never been into theater — that was Jessica’s thing; it and had been from the age of four, when she used to memorize and perform commercials for the family. By eight she was doing TV commercials out of Worcester: a family-owned Italian restaurant; a furniture warehouse — “Make Yourself a Home!”
With Nancy backing her up (or, Josh suspected, having grown up among the more extreme examples of stage mothers, lying awake nights to strategize), Jessica told Jim that she didn’t want to go to Warwick-Dunham because the academics were “pathetic. And only like one person every year goes to a four- year college.” This was close to the truth, but unlike her sister, Vicky, a worker bee and teacher’s favorite, Jessica was a haphazard student. The real reason she wanted to go to Maidenhead was that she had read an interview in Seventeen with the school’s one famous graduate — a TV actress from a preppie background, who now played the mother in a prime- time sitcom. The woman had cited the maidenhead drama program as having nurtured her ambitions — and Jessica wanted to be a movie star. Another thing she considered pathetic was when people were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up and they said, “A teacher, maybe?” as Vicky did, “or a vet?” or “I’m not sure yet, I’ll have to see” because she felt they just weren’t being honest with themselves and admitting that they of course wanted to be movie stars. Until that career ceased to exist, what else would anyone conceivably want to be?
“So, Jessica . . .”
With an unhurried, leisurely air, Susan serves Jessica her butternut squash soup. She sets down Josh’s walnut-cranberry-goat-cheese salad in front of him — gives the plate a maternal quarter turn. “…You’ve really done it, haven’t you?”
Jessica averts her eyes — preparing to be complimented, Josh realizes, amazed that she can continue to miss the antagonism in her old friend’s voice.
“We all saw your spread in Maxim.”
“Oh — right.” Jessica’s burned her mouth on the first spoonful of soup; she has to reach for her water. “God, that was a while ago.”
“Jason, the chef, gets it.” Susan giggles, hand to mouth, at the lasciviousness of this.
“You don’t say,” Josh says rudely, starting to get fed up.
“He brought it in one day and there you were on the cover.”
She turns to Josh.
“There she was! I couldn’t believe it.”
“Really?” Jessica frowns. “Well, you have to do it, you know. You’ve got to get yourself out there. Mine was actually very tasteful–”
“I almost didn’t recognize you! I mean, it’s not as if you’re actually naked, but…” She looks again to Josh, as if for confirmation.
“It’s pretty close!” he says. Now Jessica looks at him slowly, mistrusting what she’s heard.
Susan laughs aloud, again putting her hand to her mouth, a look of worried pleasure in her eyes, as if to say, “Oh, gosh, we shouldn’t gang up on her like this, you and I!” “So, are you an actor, too?”
“I’m a writer?” Josh says, the question in his voice a trick he finds useful to keep these interactions brief.
“Oh, wow. What do you write?”
“Television, mostly?”
“Like, scripts? Pilots? They’re called ‘pilots’ aren’t they?” Susan says, and giggles at her bold segue into shop talk. “Oh, did you write that show that Jessica was in–”
“For Christ’s sake!” Jessica says. “No, he didn’t write that!”
“–that only lasted six episodes?”
“She’s so jealous of you!” Josh makes his preemptive bid, lunging for her arm, before Susan’s even out of earshot. “She’s so jealous of you she can’t stand it. You just know it was her copy of Maxim. I’m sure she ran right out and bought it.” He swallows some wine though he keeps telling himself not to drink it, it’s that bad, and cracks up at his own picture: “I bet she owns the boxed set of your Clearasil commercials.”
Jessica puts her spoon down and looks out into the dining room, visibly trying to control herself, her mouth working, her eyes flashing. “It’s not funny.”
“It is, though — here she’s this fucking waitress . . . !”
” ‘Fucking waitress.’ You just can’t stop, can you?”
“Oh, come on!”
“Where the hell do you get off, Josh?”
“Bullshit, Jess — you can’t have it both ways!” Knowing he’s risking a blow-up, Josh sticks with his stance: “What’d you want me to do? Make a long speech about how you’re a serious actor? You want me to defend your career to some fucking waitress?” Defiantly, nervously, he picks up his fork and knife and starts on the salad.
“It’s not my fucking fault that your dad gave me my first job,”
Jessica says after a moment.
“My God, Jess!”
She begins to spoon her soup, her face tense with misgivings.
Josh wishes he could reassure her–none of that matters now: Dad was just a conduit. Like God, Al Stein helps only those who help themselves. But with the marriage proposal in the air, it’s become a taboo subject. And right now, as when he Googled her before their first real date (they’d slept together a few times but had yet to have dinner) and what he found left him omnisciently speechless in her presence, he’s afraid he’ll expose himself once again as knowing too much if he says anything now. A few months ago, just after she got the final payments for “The Sticks,” Josh found a crumpled Starbucks napkin in a Windbreaker of his that Jessica likes to borrow. On it was a budget of sorts, a list of income set against large itemized expenses — rent, food, clothing, car; a fifth category she called “personal maintenance.” He couldn’t fathom it, but it was definitely her handwriting. It took him a day or two before he understood it. She had tallied up an alternative life, one in which his parents don’t own the house they live in, in which she pays her own way and always had. On the napkin she had added up the money she would owe him now, as if she was contemplating paying him back. Uneasily, he had recalled a plan then, a short-lived plan, which he himself had never taken seriously: that when she moved in with him, she would pay him rent. He hadn’t cashed the first check she pressed on him (and there had been just the one). He thought he’d squirrel it away and drag it out in a couple years, give it to her framed — remind her of her salad days. As for now, he’d told her, pocketing the check, he would be demanding sexual favors instead.
“So was he at least hot?” he says, polishing off the salad.
“Who?” Jessica frowns suspiciously.
“The drama teacher whose dick she–” He pumps his fist to his mouth.
It’s a gamble, but she relents, the tiniest bit amused, and gives a long sigh, like a teacher dealing with a remedial student. “No. Mr. Tooker was not hot. Mr. Tooker looked like . .. Al Dalvecchio.”
“God, no wonder he was molesting all the girls,” Josh says broadly, but finds himself fighting a wave of uncertainty now. In his pocket, he grasps the ring again. This bonding over TV references: It reminds him of the kind of thing you talk about after a one- night stand with a girl, as they indeed — he doesn’t see fit to remind her — talked about the morning after what he assumed would be theirs (somewhat predictably, ABC’s “Love Boat”/”Fantasy Island” lineup of the early eighties). But then he reminds himself, exhaling, that it’s a sign of maturity that he doesn’t need them to have everything in common. He doesn’t need to be able to discuss the political situation in the Middle East with his fiancée. This was how he put it to his shrink, as he described what he called a “breakthrough”: “I don’t need to be able to discuss the political situation in the Middle East with her, you know?”
Part Four
At last Josh has coaxed her back with him, on the cozy track toward bliss. Generic cozy restaurant glow, which tonight is replicated by the fire in the hearth and enhanced by the black New England cold beyond the mullioned windows, has begun to infuse not only their faces and their fellow diners’ faces, but their thoughts as well. She makes herself vulnerable; he is generous. He tones down the glibness. They touch frequently across their entrées — the acceptably indigenous flank steak and halibut. A big wedding, he thinks, in Santa Monica — the beach, maybe, or wine country. He’s already assured his mom that she won’t want to be married at home.
When Jessica goes to the bathroom, he dares to upgrade the wine.
“Sorry,” says Josh, coming clean as she returns and tries the new stuff — an Oregon pinot noir he had missed earlier. “It had to be done.”
“Whatever,” she says, but he knows she can’t keep up the censure because she’s greedy about her wine and clearly likes this one. “It’s probably the high point of his night recommending the chardonnay — but whatever, Josh.”
“He’ll survive,” Josh says, topping off their glasses.
“So, anyway, you see her in ‘Macbeth’ with the boys’ school — Whiplash Soldiers or whatever–”
“Whipple, Josh — it’s not that hard–”
“Whiplash Johnnies or whatever, and it’s the worst night of your life.” While she was in the bathroom Josh decided he would be the good boyfriend and hear this one out. How she almost ended up a waitress, how but for a few chance strokes of Fate.
“Yeah, and after I have my half- hour crying fit I go back there to congratulate her.”
“God, that is so you.” He shakes his head at the realization that she was already following some arcane, self- flagellating code by the age of fourteen.
“And I’m really embarrassed because she’s such a loser, and I’m talking to her, trying to get it over with and get out of there, and instead of thanking me for the compliment, she’s like, ‘I think I saw you at auditions.’ I had tried out, but when I didn’t get the lead I said screw that. She’s like, ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but maybe next time. I’ll bet we’ll be in something together soon. It’s great you’re interested in drama. And he-ey’” — Josh laughs, she does a good dorky ingenue — “‘Didn’t I see you in the financial aid office at the beginning of the year, Jessica? I’m on financial aid, too. But I suppose it’s easier for my parents because, you know, I’m a day student, and it doesn’t cost as much.’ ” Jessica shudders.
“She was so — desperate, you know, to draw the line around us both.”
“Good luck!” Josh mutters.
“Exactly. I never even noticed I was on financial aid. It was like, who gives a shit? So, then at some point she tells me she’ll put in a word for me with Mr. Tooker, for “Our Town,” which they were supposed to be doing next. And I just can’t believe she thinks she can condescend to me like that, so I interrupt and I start asking her all about her special relationship with the guy because of course I’d heard the blow job rumors. I say, all sort of impressed and envious, ‘So, how far have you and Mr. Tooker gone?’ The latest was that she’d fucked him on this drama club outing to Hartford–”
“Hartford!” Josh interrupts, spearing a last bit of steak. “Of course.”
“And she’s not embarrassed at all! She’s like, ‘Mostly–’ ” But Jessica can’t continue because she has started to giggle uncontrollably. When she can manage to breathe, she locks eyes with Josh and murmurs, “Is she here? Is she in the room? Because this is really bad. It’s like . . . talking about your hosts or something, when you’re staying in their house. Anyway, she’s like — she’s like–” Jessica cracks up again. After two more false starts, she chokes out, ” ‘Mostly blow jobs — you know. I did let him ‘put it in’ once or twice, if you count All-State, but that was just for relief.’ ” As she dissolves into paroxysms of giggles, one of the older waitresses gives her a darting glance as she passes, hysterics unusual in this quiet, creaky eighteenth-century room, where indulgence is typically moderate — dessert, rather than another cocktail. Josh laughs, too, but his laughter is detached, like his shrink’s when the guy is legitimizing his worry, as if to say, Dude, you were right to be concerned.
“I’ll never forget her saying that: ‘That was just for — relief.’ God, I told everyone . . . I must’ve done that line twenty times that night alone: ‘That was just for relief.’ ” Jessica shakes her head.
“What?” he says, catching her in a half smile.
“No, I just — I just thought of this funny line from a horoscope I used to get: ‘The stars impel, they do not compel.’ So,” Jessica concludes happily, as if this were the foregone conclusion the story had been heading for, “I blackmailed him.”
Josh, who’d thought the punch line had come and gone, sits up in his chair. “You blackmailed the drama teacher.”
She nods. “Oh, yeah.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“I see him in the dining hall the next morning and I’m like, ‘Susan O’Hare was so great last night. I talked to her for a while after the play.’ And he’s getting all nervous and he’s trying to wrap up the conversation, but he’s scared to wrap up the conversation, because he doesn’t know exactly what I’m implying. So, I’m like, ‘Oh, Mr. Tooker? There’s just one thing — I’d love to talk to you about the auditions for ‘Our Town.’ I think I’d make a great Emily,’ I say.”
Josh gives a bark of a laugh at the shamelessness of it. It’s like listening to his father tell war stories from his early days in Hollywood — the shit he and Paul Furman used to get up to, the fake business cards they printed up — “Score One Productions” . . . He swallows, as a funny wave of unhappiness washes over him. He busies himself with pouring more wine, does the old everything’s cool outward glance toward the other diners. In a moment the feeling subsides, and the two of them drink silently, not uncompanionably, but with a certain tension in the air of something unresolved. Josh has the feeling of having skipped a sentence a page or two back. “So, after that — what?” he says. “You got all the leads?”
“What? Oh, yes, I mean — sure, of course, I did,” Jessica says deprecatingly. “But see, that was the pointless part of it. I would’ve gotten them anyway.” She sounds a little irritated at the waste of ingenuity, as if she’d been cheated of a victory. “She didn’t come back. After all that, Susan O’Hare didn’t come back. She dropped out at the end of the term. I never even had the chance to beat her.”
“Oh, right,” says Josh. He nods to himself with an air of finality.
“Of course.”
It’s not until they’ve ordered dessert and are waiting for their pie that Jessica narrows her eyes, as if studying the color of the wine in her glass, and says lightly, “I’m just curious — what do you mean ‘of course’?”
“I mean” — Josh turns his hands up, bored now — “of course she left.”
“Ri-ight . . .” Jessica says slowly, as if following a complicated argument. “But, I mean — why would you assume that she left school?”
Heedless — perhaps purposefully so — of the warning note in her voice, Josh says flatly, “Come on, your daughter gets raped by some pervert teacher, you’re not gonna pull her out of the school?” He smiles and says, “Now — on to something else? Un peu de champagne, perchance?”
Jessica regards Josh curiously. “Tooker wasn’t why she left. It was a tuition thing. They couldn’t afford it anymore. I heard — I mean, she told me herself.”
“Right,” Josh says. “I’m sure.”
“Yeah, I think her father lost his job. He was . . . laid off or something. I forget what he did.”
They are tucking into their mud pies when she says pleasantly, “Yeah, I mean, ‘rape’ is actually a bit strong. I heard — there was this rumor, I mean it was totally assumed — the whole point, Josh, is that she came on to him.”
“Oh, so it was her fault, was it?” Josh says with a laugh. Jessica’s argument is so absurd it’s as if she’s baiting him, as if she’s daring him to disabuse her of her foolishness. And his girlfriend does depend on him from time to time to sort through questions of morality lite, though more often his role is to release her from the agonies of guilt that attend her every success — to tell her she should be happy, she deserved what she got. “Look, legally, it was rape,” he says idly. “Legally speaking, it was statutory rape.”
“Well — statutory rape,” Jessica interrupts. “Date rape! Come on. The point is it wasn’t rape rape, it was — the — she had such a big chest, I can’t even tell you.” She laughs now, too. Part of her shtick with him has always been to be pointedly, provocatively un-PC. “You think she’s chesty now? I swear to God, she’s had a breast reduction.” She eats her ice cream blithely, gesticulates with her spoon. “I mean, if that was rape, we were all raped.”
“You all had sex with teachers?” Josh says pedantically, enjoying his prosecutorial moment. “You all let him ‘put it in’?”
“Well, that part — she got herself into that. She didn’t have to screw the guy.”
“That’s a bit harsh!”
“I’ve often wondered,” Jessica says reflectively, “what the hell was she thinking–”
“Isn’t that pretty obvious–”
“–going all the way with some skanky teacher.”
“Isn’t that, uh, blaming the victim just a tad?”
“He came on to me, too, you know.” Jessica says, so venomously that for a second Josh thinks it’s some kind of joke. He sits there swallowing, sweating in his shirt and flinching, wondering where this can possibly end. “My sophomore year, he started dancing me around the room — there was this cast party at his house. He’s saying, ‘I made you’ — and all this sick ‘Pygmalion’ shit. He’s got his hands all over my ass and then he’s trying to grab my tits. He suggests – get this — that I may want to stay late after everyone else leaves!” She leans forward across the table, and all at once her tone drops to gentle, coaxing — he’s the remedial student again. “You know what I did, Josh? I laughed it off! I went along with him for a little while so he didn’t freak out and then I went and hid in the bathroom all night. Big fucking deal.” Jessica drains a last drop from her empty wineglass, tipping it all the way upside down, her mouth gaping unattractively. “People were all saying, ‘Oh, my God, Jess, weren’t you traumatized?’ You know what? No, I wasn’t! It was one of the least traumatic things that ever happened to me. I still did the play — I did every single play, I got all the leads, why wouldn’t I? For three fucking years! And every year he was all over me. It was like, okay, cast party, here we go again, let’s just let Mr. Tooker grab my tits so we can get it over with.” She draws a dramatic breath. “You know what, Josh? He was a great fucking director. Tooker may have had his problems but fuck, he did sort of make me!”
There comes now the sheepish, fraught silence that follows an outburst; neither of them refers to any television show now. “So . . . now do you want to rethink your comment about blaming the victim?”
“Of course you laughed it off,” says Josh after a moment.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just” — he weighs whether to be frank — “it’s totally different. You were never not going to make it.”
“How dare you say that?”
He shrugs — no other response left, accused as he is of stating a fact.
She nods briefly, looking blindly into the room. “I’ll remember that the next time I fuck the boss’s son.”
Oblivious, Wine Guy brings the check. Josh tosses down his platinum card without bothering to look at it. “How’d you like the second bottle?”
“Well, I liked yours better,” Jessica starts to say, giving the waiter a brittle smile.
“So, I guess that was really onerous, huh? Fucking the boss’s son?”
“Okay,” says the young man, looking fearfully from one to the other of them and retreating a step. “A little disagreement here, I guess, ha, ha. Let me just go run this through.”
“You have no idea what it takes,” Jess says into the room, her voice trembling. “You don’t have the slightest fucking clue.”
Josh gives a strangled, frustrated sigh. “Why do you act like I’m accusing you? I just feel bad for her!”
“I’ll say it again, Josh,” she says, more evenly now. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“You take your time with this now,” says Wine Guy, returning and retreating hastily, with a frightened mug for the peanut gallery as he goes.
Josh signs; sighs. “So — what?” he says wearily. He’s lost track of the argument — can’t remember what he’s not allowed to say.
“You’re actually trying to claim with her it was . . . ?” He hesitates, looking down at the twenty in his hand, weighing whether to add it to the twenty he’s already put down as a tip. It’s a habit he got from his father Al, who always tips in cash.
“That’s too much,” Jessica says quickly. She’s much faster at simple math than he is. “That would be thirty percent. That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re actually trying to claim it was consensual? That this fourteen-year-old–”
“Sixteen-year-old!”
“–really wanted to be having sex with Al Dalvecchio?”
“She was really passionate about theater,” Jessica says, as Josh takes his wallet from his back pocket to look for a smaller bill. There’s the barest hint of deadpan in her voice now, the first indication, perhaps, that she knows she’s being absurd, that this will shortly end in laughter. It’s not the first time that it’s happened: She delivers the heated, accusatory manifesto, only to turn to him a few minutes later and say, “So . . . should we watch ‘Idol’?” “As you said, you know the type.”
“You’re so fucking naïve,” Josh says kindly.
“Excuse me?”
“How can someone be so fucking naïve and so fucking cynical at the same time? I honestly don’t get how the two strains can coexist in one mind. You, you blackmail a teacher to get what you want, you shake off his attempts at — molesting you — and yet, it never even crosses your mind to think that this other poor girl maybe didn’t have the resources you had, or maybe was actually pretty desperate . . .” Josh’s voice trails off as he sees the futility of trying to get her to acknowledge his point.
There’s a pause and then Jessica says coldly, “She didn’t have to go along with it.” The humor in her voice is gone and her face sets impenetrably. “She could have hidden in the bathroom, too.”
She sits stiffly in her seat, and after a moment, perhaps remembering that they’re in a restaurant, the ominously pleasant look from the beginning of the meal steals slowly over her face.
“This is so fucked!” Josh cries. Jessica doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react — the picture of composure. “I’m supposed to be the one who was so protected — who grew up with money, who’s been an insider my whole life. You’d think I’d be callous — and it’s like, it’s like–” He stops and looks at her caustically. “Didn’t poverty teach you anything?”
“We weren’t fucking poor, she says, aghast.”
“Of course it didn’t,” he says. “Because it had nothing to do with you.”
“You know what, Josh? I didn’t fuck the guy, okay?”
“You could have! And you still wouldn’t have ended up a waitress in the Colonial Fucking Inn!”
Susan has overheard. She stands a little away from the table, hands clasped behind her back, her eyes brimming, her chin trembling with mortification. “Are you guys all set?” she whimpers.
Looking down at his wallet, which has failed to turn up a smaller bill, Josh says, “You know what? Fuck it. Yes, we are,” and throws down the twenty.
Jessica slides the American Express bill protector toward her old acquaintance. “Susan, we’re going to need some change.” When she withdraws her hand, Josh slams his down, on the leather case. “Actually, that’s not necessary. It’s all set, Susan.” He looks at Jessica, still pressing his palm down on the case. “Let’s go.”
Jessica faces him tranquilly. “This night is over if you leave that twenty.”
“I can come back later,” mumbles Susan.
“That’s all right — you’re not bothering us.” Josh gets to his feet. Not realizing that he still has his eye on her, Jessica makes a grab for the bill protector. He physically stops her hand against the table and she shrieks.
“Why don’t you leave the ring, too, Josh?” she screams, rising to her feet. “Just leave the goddamn ring, too, while you’re at it!”
Part Five
About eighteen months later he sees her up on a billboard. He’s driving down Sunset and there she is. It’s goofy Jessica, smiling/grimacing Jessica, arms around Movie Hubby’s neck, knee right-angling for a fifties-style toe lift. It’s some heaven-sent reincarnation thing — there’s a gold halo painted on over her head. He nearly rear-ends the convertible in front of him, craning to see the expression on her face — whether the eyes are smiling as well as the mouth.
He always told her she’d end up in a comedy. She was better in motion than still, something fundamentally elusive — you could even say evasive — about her charm, as if to pin it down would be to kill it. Ironic, that when buddies of his, Rich included, used to give him the old good-riddance pep talk, they’d always remind him of what they saw as her fatal flaw — that she was incapable of having fun. That she just had to ruin everything. And that, Rich used to conclude, that would have gotten really, really old.
“‘Member that time we drive up to Ojai and we’re sitting there having champagne and it’s gorgeous and she’s just gotten ‘Eden’s Gate’ and she’s dating my buddy Josh Stein and it’s totally sick how nice it is and she can’t fucking stop talking about those orphans in Romania? That was not fun. That was the opposite of fun.” And aloud Josh would always acknowledge the point. He raises a hand from the steering wheel to signal “Sorry” to the driver of the convertible; starts forward slowly, chastened, leaving an exaggerated distance between himself and the other cars. But while the criticism, unlike most of the others (she wasn’t really a bitch, and she definitely wasn’t dumb), was valid, it never mitigated anything for him. The particular point of her being incapable of enjoying herself has never made him feel any better about being free of her. Lately, he’s kind of gotten over the idea that one day you get there, you stand alone as the fully realized humanoid, needing no one. It just started to bore him, all the self-actualization. Silently he would answer, But that’s where I came in.
