Читать книгу The Family Tabor - Cherise Wolas - Страница 14

PHOEBE TABOR REPRESENTS MAJOR Los Angeles–based novelists, screenwriters, and playwrights, sculptors, painters, and video artists, musicians, bands, and composers. It’s her still-minor clients, those beginning to climb the vines of recognition and success, that she worries about most, because their expectations are consistently unrealistic. They walk into her office presuming fantastic offers are on the table, and she must return them to reality. And it’s always tough, because they have written the meaningful novel, the great script, the deep play, have created the phenomenal sculpture, the suite of inspired paintings, and it’s her obligation to tell them no one is biting, or the bite isn’t as big as they’d hoped, or the film director has rejected the neophyte composer’s score, or the gallery has rescinded its offer to mount the young artist’s new show. The facts are nearly as hard to deliver as to hear, but by the time Phoebe’s clients hug her, they understand where they are, yet still have faith in their futures, because she is a truth teller. Honesty is the pillar upon which she has built her law practice. Inside, past the heavy door with its stylish engraved nameplate, Phoebe Tabor, Esq., she commands a large retinue of lawyers, paralegals, and assistants, and insists that in all their firm activities, they heed her honest manner of transparently conducting business.

And yet recently, in her personal life, she has veered in the opposite direction, adopting subterfuge as her modus operandi, although calling it subterfuge is finely glossing the state of things.

At eight fifteen this Saturday morning, Phoebe, dressed in a black sundress and Grecian sandals, all of her limbs lightly tanned, stands at her closet mirror and arranges the hair her mother calls chestnut into a loose sexy braid. She assesses her image. Yes, she looks the part, will be viewed by her family as a woman in love.

She leans in close, fragmenting her pupils, and in those fragments she sees the unjustified complications she’s brought into her life. She pulls back from the mirror and her pupils reassemble, black surrounded by irises of darkest brown, eyes so falsely guileless she has to turn away from herself.

She rustles through closets and drawers, delving through sedimentary layers of acquisitions, flinging out her choices, and packing them into her small rolling bag—used for all her loverly weekends away: an old one-piece bathing suit for the laps she always forgets to swim, a new bikini for chaise sprawling and oiling up next to the big pool alongside her sister and sister-in-law, another summery dress purchased to wear with a man a few years back who pursued her hard for a date and when she at last gave in stood her up, tennis shoes and shorts and a tank top from her youth for taking a walk in the heat with one or some or all of her family members, a college-era tennis skirt and shirt in case her father wants to play, silky pajamas that hold memories of an enjoyable four-week romp during law school, and the totteringly high silver heels purchased last week for the gala tonight, along with the ice-blue gown, already in its hanging bag. In go the miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body lotion swiped from hotelsuite bathrooms these last six and a half months. Her lip-shaped cosmetics bag stowed inside the mesh netting.

She zips up the suitcase, sets it down on the floor. The tick-tick of the wheels on the wood puts Benny on notice. Until a moment ago, he was lounging on the unmade bed, but now lets out a quivering meow. He is her sweet affectionate thing, velvety fur hiding a small, solidly compact body. At night, he stretches out on top of her, his paws clinging to her neck, his purrs soothing her lonely heart.

Poor Benny. Her subterfuge has meant she’s deserted him for many three-day weekends since February, consigned to the care of her brother. Simon is responsible, showing up morning and night, filling Benny’s bowls, keeping his heating pad on the bed on high and cold water trickling from the bathroom sink faucet, playing with Benny for a few minutes before he heads to his own home, to his wife and children. When she returns from her weekends away, Benny is churlish, his outsized paws thumping when he lands on the kitchen counter, the dining room table, following Phoebe around, baying his disapproval at his most recent abandonment. When she is again in the bed that they share, Benny lets her know he’s forgiven her by arranging himself on her head, lashing her cheek with his sandpaper tongue. But Simon and family will be in Palm Springs, too, and Phoebe reluctantly asked a neighbor to care for Benny.

Raquel was thrilled when Phoebe knocked on Wednesday night. “I want a cat sososo much, but I haven’t pulled the trig. So how coolio. Yours. Def. No prob.”

Raquel is twenty-five to Phoebe’s thirty-eight, a secretarial temp slash aspiring actress slash aspiring model who might emote as well as the best but seems to Phoebe too short and curvy to model. And it irks Phoebe enormously that Raquel seems intent on believing they are nearly identical peas in a pod. This specious view of Raquel’s, and the fact that Raquel annoys her, has compelled Phoebe to ward off the young woman’s obvious desire to be friends. In her own defense, Phoebe would say that a friendship with any neighbor can too easily become an uncomfortable burden, and after an eventful workday, she’d rather not be accosted by anyone waving a bottle, saying, “Thought we might share this.” Only twice has Phoebe relented, and both times, watching Raquel swaying back to her own front door, Phoebe assessed the avenues of employment that would afford Raquel the ability to purchase such expensive wine. Ashamed by her assumptions, she has kept her distance from Raquel the last few months.

But Raquel was her easiest choice for cat-sitting Benny, and thinking about the young woman being alone in her house unescorted, peeking into her life, Phoebe is opening and closing cabinets, sizing her things up, determining what they say about her, if she needs to find hiding places.

She scoops out of her nightstand the few books of erotica, the vibrator, the hopeful, unopened box of condoms, and in the bathroom, the nearly full container of Percocet from her wisdom teeth removal last year, and stashes the loot at the bottom of her hamper, throws in the damp towel hanging over the shower door to be safe.

In her study, she slips folders containing client information into the desk drawer, along with her personal bills and checkbooks and bank and money management statements, and locks it with the key hidden beneath.

In the living room her brother calls empty and she calls minimalistic and replete with architectural details—rounded columns leading to the dining room, pristine nonworking fireplace with a mantel holding a single blue vase filled with bright orange gerbera daisies, massive window overlooking the street—she inspects, but aside from the suede sofa and chairs the color of tangerines, the three huge paintings on the white walls she accepted as payment for legal bills owed by painter clients, bookshelves categorically organized, high-tech sound system, and her objects of art displayed in the whitewashed nooks and crannies, there is nothing revealing.

As the coffee brews, she pulls out Benny’s dry cat food and cans of wet and places them on the kitchen counter. She wants to make it easy for Raquel, to keep her curtained in the kitchen, then a path straight out the front door.

She pours herself a first cup, hears her doorbell chime, and reluctantly pulls down a second cup.

“HI, FEEBS, REPORTING FOR duty,” is what Raquel says when she steps in. “I’m sososo jelly, where are you going? Tell me the deets.”

Phoebe hates that nickname to which she never responds, hates the way Raquel insists on shortening most everything. How much extra time does it take to say Phoebe, to say jealous, to say details? Is Raquel’s life so jam-packed she can’t waste a second, cares not a whit about being fully understood?

Phoebe gives her a big smile. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll give you some coffee, show you what you need to do.”

“Great, but first I want to hear about your hot and heavy weekends!”

What, Phoebe thinks, is Raquel is talking about?

“Please, please, spill the beans! I keep running into your gorgeous brother when he comes to feed Benny and he mentioned—Well, I got him to tell me why I’ve seen him so much. Because you have a new man in your life! Taking you away to cool places. Is he scrumptious?”

Oh. Raquel is talking about Aaron Green.

“Totally scrumptious,” Phoebe instantly says.

“So where to this weekend?”

“Home for a family celebration.”

“OMG, how exciting! Are you nervous? I’d be so nervous introducing my new man to family!”

Phoebe could correct Raquel’s mistaken impression, but says, instead, “No, I’m not nervous at all.”

“That’s when you know the love is real!” Raquel squeals.

And Phoebe, who doesn’t agree that’s the way you know, pours coffee into the cup on the counter, and points to the sugar bowl, and wishes seeing herself through Raquel’s eyes weren’t so inviting.

Phoebe would never confess to Raquel that the scrumptious man spiriting her away to cool places for long weekends, and whom she has just confirmed she’s taking home to Palm Springs, is fictitious.

She would never admit to Raquel that she created Aaron Green at midnight in late January, just home from the opening of a client’s new art exhibition, her family’s messages on her voicemail pissing her off, words throaty with exhausted hope that there might have been a man there who was “worth another look,” said Roma, Harry calling out, “Love is good, honey.” “Someone I would like,” Simon had said in his message, with Elena adding, “Just so he knows your true value,” and from Camille, “I hope he’s fuckable, because that’s always the point. No, I take that back, I don’t know what the point is,” and Phoebe, who had just hung up her short bronze dress and placed her high bronzed sandals in their box in the closet, stood nude in her bedroom.

She was tired of slicing open wedding invitations. From those she employs, selecting her dinner choices with angry checkmarks, writing the identical sweet comment on the RSVP cards about her excitement in participating in the joyful couple’s bountiful happiness, and from friends whose first marriages cratered—weddings she also attended—but their luck had held and allowed them to expunge past erroneous choices and move forward into another future: Please join us in an intimate celebration of our finding absolute true love—

From her mid- to late twenties, Phoebe was first in her seat at the monthly brunch with her band of girls, Sunday afternoons of sangria and silly talk about what their futures might hold. One by one, those girls turned into women when they became wives and mothers, delighted their lives had come together so effortlessly.

“You’re gorgeous and brilliant and your turn’s coming,” they said to her, and when Phoebe’s turn never did come, they peppered her with questions: Did she really want to marry, have a child, make room in her industrious life for others?

Disbelieving when she said, “Professional success isn’t the sum total of me, it’s not all that I want, but I don’t seem to be having any luck.”

Her friends, her friends, would say, “Well, if you really want it, as you say you do, then—,” that then so forbidding, undefinable, completely elusive, as if they held the secret and were unwilling to share, as if their attainment of the marital, the maternal, the pronoun replacements—from I to we and then to us—resulted in their crowning, their elevation, while she remained on the ground, assumed to be lacking the requisite nurturing abilities that would give rise to love and marriage and motherhood.

All day, every day, Phoebe nurtures everyone, her clients, her associates, her support staff, attending their opening nights, their launches, their engagement parties and weddings, and when dancing is required, she dances as if delighted to be there—what better proof is there that she possesses the necessary talents for success in her personal life? And yet she hasn’t attained love, marriage, motherhood, the poles of the true shelter she seeks, with her wished-for family, a solid place against inclement weather, toasty inside, living each day together, making plans for the future.

As full as she has made her life, as large as it often is, that she might never again feel crazy in love, never feel her child growing inside, that she might spend the rest of her years alone—it is incalculable sadness, bottomless grief, wide and swollen rivers of self-pity. What is she supposed to do with the pulsing love in her heart, the love she has to give, if husband and baby never appear?

Raquel is still chattering, and Phoebe hears her say, “Really, that’s how it works, you only introduce a real love to the family. Right?”

“Right,” Phoebe immediately says.

The art opening had happened; the client was real, an ageless sprite named Zabi, with her magenta lipstick and Turkish slippers, her enormous fired-metal pieces hanging off the walls, like devices to protect the soft innards of some forgotten race of people less strong than sun-fried Los Angelenos. Zabi introduced Phoebe as her lawyerly god, and Phoebe had smiled, feeling her white teeth perfectly strung in her mouth, and all the time she was scanning the crowd, wishing for just one man who might make her laugh, who would know instinctively how to metaphorically strip her to her core. But there had been nobody. Or rather, there had been many, including attractive men who smiled at her, but none had taken even a half step in her direction.

Driving home, she’d thought about how she insists her clients identify their professional aims, and the personal problems that might hamper their achievement, and she took stock of herself. She was beautiful—an acknowledgment, rather than an assertion of vanity; she had an excellent brain, and a big heart, so why couldn’t she achieve her personal aims? What was missing?

It took a quarter of an hour before she realized what was missing was luck.

When it came to love, she’d once had an abundance of compelling luck. Second grade loves that lasted an hour or a day; sixth grade boys who handed over their pencils when hers broke; high school boys with crushes she turned into boyfriends. College and law school admirers had lined up, relationships in which she determined when they started and ended. Then, well, him, and her luck held for a while, then sputtered and died.

It was luck she needed to rebirth, but how did one rebirth luck?

And what she thought was love begets love. There was a particular energy one exuded when in love. She’d experienced it herself long ago, the way she became a magnet for even more love, love she couldn’t then use because she was already happily in love.

How could she again draw the energy of love directly to her?

That steamy, decidedly unwintery January night, Phoebe deleted her family’s messages, then walked naked, as she never did, into the living room, and searched the spines of her novels, flipping through their pages, finding a name to bestow upon the man she was inventing, a love story as balm, trips to places ripened by dreams.

It was the only way she could think of to remagnetize herself, and when she found real love, no one would ever need to know that to obtain it, she had feigned being a woman in love.

Raquel has sugared her coffee and sipped—“De-lish”—and Phoebe says, “Follow me. Benny’s on the bed. I want him to get used to you,” and Raquel follows along, beneath the kitchen arch, into the dining room and out, a left down the long, well-lit hallway, and across the transom.

“Jesus, Feebs. SOS, big time. You should get those trees cut back.”

Phoebe takes in the big bosomy leaves of the rubber trees pressing against the large north-facing windows, preventing the entry of outside light, causing the dim watery atmosphere of her bedroom in which she sleeps, dreams, and dresses. She ought to call someone, but she’s grown used to the intimacies of her life spent alone in this oxygenated version of being underwater.

“OMG, OMG, I always forget how totes adorb he is,” Raquel says. Always meaning the two times she’s been invited over, when Benny kept to himself, hiding away in here, behaving unlike the social creature that he is. Aware of the change in airflow, Benny, on the bed, cocks open an eye, gives Raquel a hard stare, then rolls himself tight into a ball, crosses his paws over his head. Phoebe feels proud.

She shows Raquel the heating pad, the trickle of water in the bathroom, how much dry and wet food to set out in his bowls on the black-and-white checkerboard kitchen floor bright with sunshine.

Raquel jerks her head at the coffee machine.

“Sure. Help yourself.”

“Am I taking care of Benny because your brother’s going to Palm Springs, too?”

Phoebe is as nonplussed by the disappearance of Raquel’s usually overexcited voice as by the words Raquel has spoken.

“Yes. With his family. He’s married, Raquel, with two kids.”

“Oh, I know. But he’s the kind of solid guy I want to end up with. I love chatting with him.”

Simon chatting with Raquel? Phoebe can’t imagine what they would chat about, but her brother is that kind of very nice guy, wouldn’t blow off his sister’s inquisitive neighbor in case he did any harm.

She looks at Raquel, takes in the wide blue eyes, the pink bowed mouth, the itsy-bitsy top from which pulchritude overflows, the extremely short shorts, the bare feet with toenails painted watermelon, for she has come into Phoebe’s apartment shoeless.

Could Simon find this girl attractive? No, too obvious, too overly flirtatious. Especially compared to Elena, who is tall and lithe, a combination of sweet and tough. Her brother’s eyes have never roamed since the day he met his wife.

Simon has Elena.

Camille has Valentine.

They are cozy in love, and it spears her straight through, skewers her heart.

Why is she the crescent moon waning when her siblings seem always to be waxing?

Her mother says Phoebe’s the kind of woman men do not quickly release, and boys from various stages of her life still occasionally beat their man-sized wings in her direction, raising the air around her, blowing the dust off their joint old times, a checking-in, a checking-up, wanting to know if Phoebe has allowed someone to stick, to roost—not them, they know, though they had all tried hard.

But her mother also says that the men from Phoebe’s past will always hang on, because she gave them up in the limerence phase, when romantic euphoria is at its peak. Maybe her mother is right; maybe that’s why she has no flesh-and-blood man, only the perfect golem she dreamt up.

Raquel is holding her coffee cup and doing calf raises at the kitchen counter, and Phoebe says, “Raquel, you have to keep the dry food bowl filled, okay. And fresh water in his bowl, morning and night. And if he hasn’t touched the wet, just dump it out and give him a fresh dollop or two.”

“It’ll be like having my own baby for a few days. I want my own, like right this minute, but I’ll wait until I land my first really big role or a global campaign.”

Phoebe has never asked Raquel the questions she’d ask if they were becoming friends—if she graduated from college, or went to acting school, or auditions regularly for roles, or what category she is considered to inhabit as a model—and it dawns on her that perhaps she’s misjudged, that Raquel must have some measure of success because the rents in this lovely two-story building are high.

“Is there anything big on the horizon for you?” she asks.

“Yes! The Brazilians love me. I’m on billboards there selling Fanta and suntan lotion. And in a month I’ll know if I’m the face and body of a hot Rio designer’s clothing line.”

The look on Raquel’s face is absolutely honest—she’s not telling any lies. And Phoebe is certain that life will turn out ideally for Raquel—she’ll book that new campaign, find a solid man like Simon to love, be pregnant by next year.

Unfair, unfair, she thinks. Raquel will have it all. Simon already has it all. Camille seems to have no interest in marriage or a child of her own, but Phoebe wants those things. She strives and succeeds and reaps the benefits, but the rewards she desperately wants remain out of reach.

Best as she can, she abstains from thinking about a child because there are tsunamic emotions and morning hangovers. All that control exercised in her earlier years, all that prophylactic womb-protecting, when now, even if unguarded, likely nothing would stay behind, take root, reside within her walls for the duration. She is, after all, two years from forty.

Her weekends away with the imaginary Aaron Green, meant to uncover love, haven’t panned out, have instead become indulgent curatives she uses to try and settle into the truth: no one is going to show up—not the man to love, nor a child, a cooing baby in her arms, fairy-tale-named Annabelle or Daisy or Giselle. When the charges appear on her credit card statement, she is always surprised that she indeed spent that weekend eating, drinking, and treating herself at the hotel spas, and spending some amount of time researching on her laptop where she supposedly is with her lover, noting it all down, because her family always asks for detailed recitations of her trips.

Last month, at the Laguna Niguel Capri, she was impressed with how adept she has become at eating by herself in sumptuous hotel restaurants, sampling intricate cocktails perched on stools at burnished bars or outside under the stars, and found herself having impulsive relations, loud and uninhibited, with a Philadelphia heart surgeon there for a conference. He had been swimming laps in the hotel’s pool, and she, on her way to swim laps herself, was diverted by the whirlpool and by the pool boy asking if she would like a cocktail, and was lounging with a specialty drink in the hot bubbling water when the heart surgeon joined her and struck up a conversation. He was married, twenty years and counting, ten years older than she, with a nice build and manner, and she had gone with him to his room, engaged with him as she hasn’t with anyone else during these weekends away. He has since sent her several long romantic email missives, a poet misshaped as a doctor.

She responded only once because the love of her life will not take the form of a married man. When she received his latest email, she had nearly typed, Best to your wife!, then deleted it. Why raise his infidelity when it affected her not at all, when she had no intention of ever seeing him again? Who was she to judge another, when she had a pretend lover named Aaron Green?

Raquel hugs her tight, says, “Have a blasto time. Benny will be fine. He’ll be alive and happy when you come home. I promise I won’t lose your spare key.” Then she is gone from Phoebe’s apartment.

PHOEBE RINSES THEIR CUPS, locks the front door, snuggles Benny to her chest, and rubs her forehead against his. Then she is at the back door, hanging bag over her arm, wheeling her suitcase out, bumping her way down the stairs, along the concrete path bordered by the rubber trees that prosper, and the hapless, wilted flowers that struggle under the heavy shade, to the row of small single-car garages that belong to the building, where her own car is housed.

It isn’t that she, as the eldest Tabor child, expected to outshine her siblings—they all heard their father’s exhortations that success in life turns on elements more substantial than money. That fiery lesson he instilled when he burned the dollar bills she and Camille once fought over, saying with the force of paternal disappointment, “We do not fight about money in this family.” It seemed a fortune he sent up in smoke when she was nine, especially since he bellowed when they left lights on in rooms they had vacated. She’s learned Harry’s lesson, about money not being everything, although at that age she’d been confused—were they poor and in danger of the lights being permanently turned off, or rich if money could be burned? It was six years before she stopped worrying, learned they “had money in the bank,” as Harry said, dating back to his stockbroker days, the earnings accruing because of his deftness at trading for his own accounts, but that even with deftness, success in the market was mostly a matter of uncertain luck and the exercise of a discipline that forbade seeking out the big score. “Losing it all can happen so fast, it would make your head spin,” he told her during that same conversation. “I left the stock market behind in nineteen eighty-six and have never again ventured in. You are not to enter the market at all.” And she never has. She earns serious money these days heading up her own firm, and follows her father’s precepts and actions for a well-balanced, useful, and honest life, doing mitzvahs, like offering her legal services pro bono to talented, impoverished artists, but she has failed anyway. She was sure by now she would have attained what her parents attained, what Simon has, the natural additions to that well-balanced life: a beloved spouse, a child or two, road-trip vacations with the kids to places they would not otherwise see, just as Roma and Harry had done with the three of them.

Objectively, she isn’t, but there are times she feels like the loneliest girl in the world, and she refuses to emend the terminology, for a lonely woman seems infinitely more pathetic than a lonely girl rightfully still wrapped up in teenage angst and despair.

Still, the critical question remains: How does she keep hope alive when this solitary existence is stunting her as surely as the rubber trees stunt the flowers wriggling hard up through the dirt, only to find themselves in shade, their petals curling, browning, falling away. Death comes early to flowers, to most living things, when there is no sunlight. It’s not hard for her to imagine a similar outcome for herself if love and motherhood escape her forever.

She unlocks the garage door and pushes it up. She drops the suitcase in the trunk, hangs the bagged gown on the backseat hook, and backs out of the small garage. Then she is out of the car again, pulling down the door and locking it, strapping in, checking her rearview mirror, backing out into the street, shifting into drive, reaching the long traffic light, which has just turned red.

She tries casting away the momentary descent into darkness by listing her attributes: mildly eclectic, highly educated, the owner of a voluminous vocabulary, which she flexibly mines. Lovely smile employed frequently, contagious laugh. She knows her thoughts are self-absorbed, but if not she herself, who will consider her life? Not her parents or her siblings, or her clients, who range from amenable to misanthropic, whom she handles with a preternatural ease. Given her level of engagement in their singular worlds and the busyness of her firm, it would seem right to assume that her personal life is similarly riotously full. For bursts of time it is, or has been: hours racked up in weekend exercise; in classes where she has learned the rudiments of Chinese cooking, advanced conversational French, wine appreciation, the construction of crossword puzzles for beginners; and in a multitude of rounds of internet dating. In that vein, before she constructed Aaron Green, she toyed with the notion of hiring an old-fashioned Jewish matchmaker, and briefly considered dialing up the level of Judaism she was willing to accept—from Reform, as Phoebe and the rest of the Tabors are, to the more involved Conservative branch—to enlarge the pool of possibilities. Since her college days, she has tried to remember to light Shabbat candles when she is home on a Friday night, saying the prayer in Hebrew, speaking aloud the wishes she harbors inside. And she is a good holiday Jew, driving to Palm Springs to join her parents in the preparation of Rosh Hashanah dinners, attending services at the temple they’ve belonged to forever, returning ten days later for Yom Kippur dinner and services and the next endless day spent in temple hungry and thirsty, breaking the fast with bagels and cream cheese and the salty types of fish her father particularly likes from his childhood in the Bronx.

When the light turns, she makes a left onto Olympic. Not far from her apartment are two Jewish neighborhoods, one thick with Orthodox, black hats and beards and ear curls, and the other, Modern Orthodox, mostly clean-shaven, identifiable by their kippahs or baseball caps, the acceptable substitute for honoring God above, appearing otherwise normal, but who require a nearby temple within walking distance and are wholly unavailable from sunset on Friday nights until after sunset on Saturdays, rendering null romantic weekends. Studying those two subsets of religious men, she had retreated entirely from the thought of a Jewish matchmaker.

There’s a coven, a pride, a flock of the ultrareligious right now, walking on the otherwise empty sidewalk. The men with the sidelock curls, those dangling peyot, hands clasped behind their backs, bodies tilting forward, overdressed in their dully black coats that absorb the morning sun. Passing them, she uselessly admonishes herself to not dwell on what’s missing in her life.

A bright red car whizzes past. She is like that car, carrying herself with spangle and spark, but the strength that has long held her up is weakening. In Palm Springs, she’s going to disappoint everyone when she walks in alone, without Aaron Green. Should she throw out a few hints that the relationship may be experiencing a loss of acceleration?

God, no. Nothing has come of his supposed existence, except for the homework she must do and the need to keep everything straight, but she’s not ready to resume her old role as the Tabor offspring unloved outside the familial circle.

Is it wrong that she wants the warmth of her family’s attention, to retain their newly revived belief that love is not beyond her reach, that love has found her again?

Absolutely not.

And not telling the truth is kinder—she wouldn’t want to be responsible for torching Harry’s big award weekend.

That’s not the real reason.

She’s a coward, plain and simple, lacking the kind of bravery needed to come clean about her whale of a lie.

And that makes her think of the story from Hebrew school that she never got straight—was Jonah saved, regurgitated out of the whale’s massive mouth, and into the cleansing water, as she could be if she came clean, or did he die in there? He probably died in there.

The pretend lover, the few relationship details she has coyly shared with her family about Aaron Green, illuminate what she tries to forget: the Phoebe who existed at twenty-three, in love with a long-haired boy named Elijah, who threw himself into life with abandon. The only former love who has never reached out to her.

Over the years, she has debated whether the way she let him go has been responsible for her perennial single status, the diminution, then disappearance, of that magnetism she once took for granted.

Sometimes late at night in her office she searches for Elijah’s name, but no engine finds him, not even one other person with his name seems to exist in the whole great world, and she wonders if he went off the grid, as he swore he wanted to do someday. Or if he is dead.

She was a foolish young woman back then, and did him wrong, did herself wrong, too. She had lacked the courage to face him and explain she didn’t possess his audacity to live an explorative life, that the idea of dropping out, even temporarily, frightened her, that the life she was living gave her the comfort and certainty she needed and desired. She had disappeared on him, shunned his calls, deleted his emails, hid in the tiny bathroom in the small apartment she then had, until he removed his finger from the buzzer, until his rapping against the door stopped—she imagined him putting his tongue to his knuckles and tasting the blood, inhaling the iron scent of confusion. It had taken four months before he gave up, before she sighed in relief, then flinched in horror, that she had murdered something so rare with silence.

It sounds like a bad country song, Phoebe thinks.

Then she thinks, no, it feels biblical, the resultant suffering she has endured since tossing away that long-ago love.

The mundane intrudes. Her car requires fuel and she swings into her regular station. At the pump, she listens to the rush of the gasoline, watches the gallons ratchet up. On the other side of the tanks, a man extracts himself from his low-slung convertible, runs his card through, and starts doing the same.

“Happy Saturday morning,” he says to Phoebe across the concrete divide. He is rather handsome. His smile is nice, so are his eyes. But drawing love to herself would never happen at a gas station.

“Bonjour,” she says.

“Are you French?”

“Oui.” And with that floating oui comes the thought that she’s wrong about where love could happen. It could happen here, but it’s too late, she’s declared herself French. Why didn’t she simply say hello in her native English?

“Are you visiting, or do you live here?”

This interest of his, surely it’s been triggered by the allure of her supposed foreignness. If she’d said, “Hello,” he would have said, “Lovely day, enjoy it,” filled his tank and driven away.

Because it’s a lost cause, she shakes her head and says, “Je suis désolée. Je ne parle pas l’anglais.”

“You don’t speak English?”

“Non.” She could backpedal the lie that she doesn’t speak English, but not the lie that she’s French.

She feels his eyes on her as she hangs up the hose, screws on the fuel cap, enters the car, shuts the door, and starts the engine. At the exit, she glances in her rearview mirror and the man is looking in her direction, his hand raised in what could be a wave.

When she’s back on the road, she yells at herself. He could have been the one, and what a story they could have told, about how their love ignited over premium unleaded at Shell. Real love, maybe, rather than the illusory love she shares with Aaron Green, whose invention was to find the real thing.

She cranks up the music and the first artist loud out of the speakers is like a finger wagging in her face. One of her favorites, with a stage name that’s a play on Chet Baker. She’s never listened to Chet Baker, but she likes Chet Faker, his cool, moody music, and she forces herself to sing along, to drown out how aptly his stage surname applies to her—faker, faker, faker.