Rushing Waters (25 page)

They were both startled to realize it was midnight when they left the restaurant. He took her home in a cab, and she thanked him for a wonderful evening, and reminded him of the date of her dinner party.

“I won't forget it,” he said, smiling at her. “And don't you forget that I hired you as my decorator tonight. I was serious about that.” He looked as though he meant it.

“You'll have to get your architect's permission,” she teased him.

“She'd better agree to it, or I'll fire her,” he said sternly, and they both laughed. She didn't invite him to come up. The evening had been lovely just as it was, and neither of them expected more. There was no rush. They were just getting to know each other.

He watched her walk into the building, and she turned to wave at him with a smile and then went in, and he went back to Central Park West thinking about how much he liked her and what good company she was.

The day of Ellen's dinner party, she spent the afternoon looking around the apartment, moving things slightly, fluffing up pillows, unpacking the last box of little objects she loved and photographs she'd brought from London, and arranging flowers. She had hired a woman to clean twice a week, and the apartment was gleaming when she left. Ellen was proud of her new home, and it started snowing that day at noon. She sent her mother a text, reminding her to be careful when she came to dinner, she didn't want her to fall on slippery streets, or ice, and she responded to Ellen while in a meeting not to worry, Jim would be picking her up and bringing her in his car. He was taking good care of her mother, and she was having a ball with him. Ellen was pleased.

She was humming to herself as she got dressed, and there was music playing on the stereo that she and Alice had spent a Saturday afternoon setting up. Alice was proving to be a gem, and was thrilled with her new job. She and Phillippa Skyped every day, exchanging information, shipping samples and floor plans back and forth, and keeping each other informed of details so they could keep Ellen up to date. The arrangement was working well, and miraculously, there was no jealousy between them, which was rare between assistants, and so far Ellen's clients didn't seem to mind that she was in New York. But she was also willing to hop on a plane to London at the drop of a hat, to reassure an anxious client, solve a problem, make a presentation to a new client, or be present at an installation. The transition had come off without a hitch, and she hoped her dinner party would too. She hoped it would be the first of many. She loved entertaining, and once she started meeting new people, and renewing old friendships, which she had promised herself she would do, she wanted to give small dinners frequently. It was good for her business, she loved doing it, and did it well.

She and George had given a big Christmas party every year, for their large circle of friends. She was going to miss it this year, along with their other traditions, and she wondered if he would be having the party with Annabelle. It made her sad to think he probably would. He had moved on very quickly, and with pressure from him, the divorce was advancing at a rapid pace. He might have said he missed her in a melancholy moment, but it didn't seem that way from the avalanche of paperwork passing between their two lawyers, always instigated by him. Once he made his mind up, and told her, he wanted it done.

Ellen was disappointed not to be giving a Christmas party of her own in New York, but it was too soon after she had moved there. She was planning to put up a Christmas tree that weekend. There was a perfect spot for it in the living room. The apartment already had a festive air, with dark red roses in vases and beautiful brown and yellow orchids. She was wearing black velvet slacks and a very pretty gold sweater with black and gold high heels, had brushed her blond hair till it shone, and had just put on small diamond earrings when the doorbell rang right on the dot of eight. She had offered to do it at that hour for her mother, who always stayed at the office late when she was busy. It was late enough by New York standards, where people dined earlier than they did in London. Her first guest had arrived on time—it was Bob—and she told the doorman to send him up. She had added several more touches since he'd seen it the night they'd gone to dinner. And she'd bought a few more pieces of furniture, and he noticed them immediately, after he admired how she looked. He loved both her simplicity and attention to detail, and he could easily see how talented she was at her work, as he glanced around the living room and saw the changes.

“The place looks fantastic, and so do you,” he said smiling at her, and handed her a small gift. “It's not a book!” he said disparagingly, remarkably shy about his work. It was a box of chocolates from the Maison du Chocolat, which were her favorites. She thanked him and set them on the coffee table for everyone to share. They were dark chocolates, which he knew she liked best, from observing her at Jim's. Like Ellen, he was a master of detail, and a keen observer of people, which served him well in his writing. He admired the orchids, and everything she'd done since he'd been there. She had added a beautiful chinoiserie cabinet she had found at an antique dealer while walking around her neighborhood. It was a handsome piece.

“I'm so happy you're my decorator.” He smiled at her warmly, as she handed him a glass of champagne. “I can't wait to get started.” And then he laughed. “After your mother finishes tearing the place apart. She's switching everything around. I can't even remember what the place looked like when I bought it.”

“She always does that.” Ellen laughed with him. “It's part of her talent. She always has a ‘vision,' and amazingly it always works. I don't think she ever misses, and her clients love the results.” It had been her success as an architect—she didn't impose her ideas on her clients, but she brought things out of them that they hadn't even realized they wanted and that suited them to perfection. She was sure she would do the same for Bob.

“She's creating the writing room of my dreams,” he said to Ellen, which reinforced what she'd said, “with a view of Central Park. I can hardly wait to write a book there. My office in Tribeca was like the black hole of Calcutta, although I loved everything else about the apartment. I just had a decent offer for the place, by the way. Someone with enough guts to live there in spite of the risks. They just moved to New York, and I don't think they had any idea what could happen. They didn't live through Ophelia or Sandy.

“I wish your mother would rethink it,” he said soberly.

“So do I. But you know my mother,” Ellen said as the caterer she'd hired brought out a tray of elegant hors d'oeuvres, and then Bob looked at her closely.

“What about you? Are you doing all right with all the legal issues in London?” He meant the divorce but didn't want to say the word.

“More or less. It's still kind of shocking. Sometimes I forget and wonder what I'm doing here. It's so strange to spend ten years with someone, and then they suddenly disappear out of your life. And a whole existence, a whole language, a whole way of thinking, and the person you're used to vanishes. It's like learning to walk all over again after an accident.”

“Divorces are like serious accidents, or a death.” He had experienced both, with the same person, and knew it well. “It makes some of us gun-shy forever, I'm afraid.” He looked at her apologetically, and then surprised her with what he said next. “I'd like to see more of you, Ellen. I'm a little erratic. I drop off the face of the earth when I write, which makes me bad company at times. Like most men, I'm not good at multitasking. When I'm working on a book, I can't think about anything else. And when you first found out about your husband, I thought it was too soon to say anything, or even suggest having dinner with you. And I think after that, I panicked a little and got lost in the book, conveniently. I'm not very brave about these things anymore,” he admitted with a sheepish look. “My relationship history is pretty dismal, a failed marriage I was in great part responsible for. I spent years feeling guilty and regretting what I lost, and wasting everyone's time trying to get her back, and then mourning her and turning her into a saint when she died, which she wasn't by any means. She was a lot smarter than I was, and she never wanted me back, although I damn near stalked her and hounded her about it. And looking back, I think my obsession with her was more of an excuse to avoid serious relationships after her. The women I went out with were damn tired of hearing me talk about my late, saintly ex-wife and the perfect marriage we'd had, which ‘inexplicably' fell apart when she woke up in a bad mood one day and left me. It took me years to take responsibility for my part in it, and once I did, I was too frightened to try again.

“But I'm turning fifty next month, and I realize now that if I don't take a chance once in a while, I'm going to be living alone with my typewriter forever. I thought about it a lot after the hurricane. We sit around waiting, licking our wounds and too afraid to risk getting hurt again, or we delude ourselves that time doesn't move forward and we'll be young forever, and one day you wake up and you're old and life has passed you by. I don't want that to happen to me. I want to live my life before I die one day, and none of us knows when that will be. You have to take risks sometimes, even though relationships can be dangerous business, but if you don't at least try, at the risk of being miserable if it goes wrong, you'll never be really happy either. There is nothing better than sharing your life with the right person, or worse than with the wrong one. I think our friend Jim is discovering that too. He's been alone for a long time. He's great company, and we've had some wonderful times together. I see less of him now, even living in his guest room, but it's a real pleasure to see him and Grace enjoying each other. They both deserve it. And I don't want to be his age when I figure it out. The hurricane made me think, what if we had all died? I've cut myself off from feeling anything for anyone except my children for years. I don't want to do that anymore.”

It was a brave speech, particularly for a man who rarely if ever bared his soul, yet he dared to do so with her, and she admired him for it. She understood what he was saying, and she was frightened now too. George leaving her had turned ten years of her life into a total waste, but she realized now that he had been right too. She had stopped seeing him as a person with needs of his own—he had become the vehicle for her to have a baby, which must have felt lonely to him at times.

“I've made my share of mistakes too,” she said seriously. “I think I stopped seeing my husband and looked past him to the baby I wanted. I lost that dream anyway, and I lost him in the process. And I lost myself for a while. There were a lot of things wrong with our marriage that I didn't want to acknowledge. I tried to be someone I wasn't the entire time. He wanted to turn me into one of the girls he grew up with, and I was young and foolish enough to try. I was never going to be one of them, and I forgot who I am while trying to be them. Now he has what he wanted, and I'm not sure he's going to like it as much as he thinks.” He was already discovering that, judging by their conversation when she was in London. “I lost him, but I got me back, which isn't such a bad thing.” It was the most important discovery she'd made, and it felt good sharing it with Bob. It also put him on notice that she wasn't going to give up who she was.

“It's a very good thing, from everything I've seen,” Bob said, smiling warmly at her, as she sat on the couch, and he in the big comfortable chair next to her. He wanted to reach for her hand and hold it, but he didn't know if he should, and hadn't had enough champagne yet to dare.

“I don't know if it's good or bad,” she said honestly. “But I want to be myself, not someone else's fantasy. Whatever I do next time, I need to be me, and not get lost in the shuffle to satisfy someone else's image of what I should be, or could be, or have to be for them. I'm not sure how that will work, maybe it won't. And I'm a little scared now to get too close to anyone. What if I get lost again?” She was addressing him directly, and he could hear the power of her words and the feelings and fears behind them, which were justified given what she'd just been through. She had made herself over to please a man who had left her in the end anyway for what he thought was the real deal and probably wasn't.

“I don't think you'll let that happen again,” he said to her quietly. “If we try hard, we don't make the same mistakes again. We make new ones.” He smiled at her. “The pull to repeat old patterns is strong, but you've put a lot of thought into it. And in an odd way, I think that the storm we lived through changed all of us. We all realized how short life can be, and none of us want to waste it or screw it up, if we can help it.”

“I think that's true. I haven't seen my mother go out with a man in years, and now she is. I think Hurricane Ophelia woke us all up. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, for those of us who survived it.” As though on cue, the doorman rang from downstairs and announced Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich, which made Ellen laugh. Downstairs, Grace looked shocked as he said it, and blushed as she glanced at Jim when they got in the elevator.

“I can't imagine why he said that.” She was flustered for a moment.

“That must mean we look good together,” he teased her. He hadn't corrected him and was amused. “Maybe someone told him about Miami,” he whispered, and she burst out laughing.

“For heaven's sake, Jim! We're having dinner with my daughter. We have to at least pretend to be respectable.”

“I think Ellen is a lot smarter than that,” he said comfortably, as they got out on Ellen's floor. She was standing in the doorway waiting for them with a broad smile. They were half an hour late, as her mother often was, cutting it too close when she came home from the office and had to get dressed to go out, and Ellen didn't mind at all. It had given her a good chance to talk to Bob, and she liked everything he had said. She wasn't sure she was ready to seriously date yet, but when she was, she agreed with his views about people and life. The hurricane had subtly changed her too. It had made her braver. Having faced terror and looked death in the eye made life that much sweeter. And she could tell it had done that to her mother too. She looked lovely in a black silk skirt, with a gauzy red blouse that was festive and uncharacteristically sexy on her. When Ellen complimented her on it when she took her coat off, she whispered that she had bought it at Chanel in Miami between visits to the art fair. And Jim seemed to like it too. Ellen made no reference to the doorman's faux pas, although she was tempted to tease her mother, but she didn't know how Jim would take it, so she didn't. He actually seemed more relaxed than her mother, and in subtle ways he made it clear that he was “with” her, in the way he spoke to her and about her and smiled at her in an affectionate, private way. Their romance was not the secret Grace wanted to pretend, and it seemed to be thriving, as she was. She had never looked better. They had all recovered from the hurricane better than expected.