“You’re saying the soup smells amazing like you’re reading a line in a play.”
Well, shoot.
“Serve yourself some soup and tell me what’s wrong.”
Serve yourself some soup and tell me what’s wrong.
That was a perfectly reasonable sentence under the circumstances, but it also felt, at that moment, like the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.
It was disarming. It made something catch in her throat.
She wasn’t sure she could talk on account of that thing in her throat, so she concentrated on executing the first part of Jack’s directive. She even smiled a bit when he brought over a stack of extra bowls and said, “I, too, was planning to have more than one bowl, but I thought I’d go serially. But I can see the appeal of simultaneity.” She didn’t have a ton of dishes in the pool house, so the eight bowls he produced were a combination of four actual bowls and four of the giant mugs he hated.
The coffee table was set with full water glasses and empty wineglasses, so she made two trips with her various soups. When he followed with a bottle of wine and gestured to her wineglass with it, she nodded.
She settled in and took a sip of the wine. Her insides were… unkinking a bit. There was something about the soup in the mismatched bowls and mugs. About being in her house but not actually her house, so she didn’t have to worry about blanket folding or kitchen cleanup.
Or maybe it was more that there was something about Jack.
Her first bite of soup was the grilled cheese, and it was heaven. She almost said something to that end but decided that would be the coward’s way out.Serve yourself some soup and tell me what’s wrong.She ought to do part two of what Jack had suggested.
So she did something hard and said, “When you asked me why Reggie and I broke up, I told you the truth. We diverged. But the split was, I think, set off by this one particular argument. It wasn’t thecauseof the split, but it was kind of… emblematic, you know?”
He nodded, and she suddenly realized that in some ways, Jack’s silent grumpiness was more about the silence than it was about the grumpiness. In Blair’s regular life, when she had conversations, at work or in her personal life, everyone else was always talking. Which she realized was a dumb thing to think. What was a conversation but people talking?
But there was more than one kind of conversation. There was the kind you had 90 percent of the time, where it went ABAB. Call and response.
But then there was Jack. He left room for AA. Sure, sometimes he did that because he was an insufferable snob who disapproved of what you were saying, but sometimes… he just left room for you to think through things as you spoke.
“I used to get a lot of stuff done to my face,” she started. “Botox, fillers, lasers. Never went under the knife, but I pretty much did everything but, and I’m certain I would have moved on to surgery as I got older.”
Even though she’d just built Jack up in her mind as the perfect listener, she half expected him to react somehow to what surely seemed a non sequitur. He did not. Just beamed his inquisitive stare into hers, looking like he genuinely cared. He might be a good faker, but it was enough for her.
“And then one day about four years ago, I was readingGreen Light. Have you read it?”
“Yes. Just since I got here.”
Which probably meant he’d read it because of her. She was more flattered than she should have been.
“I got to the part where Gio takes the blame for the car accident. And it was…” She didn’t know how to explain it other than “Oof.”
“One of those chasms you talked about, opening in your chest?”
“Yes. Exactly. You, too?”
“No, but I can see it. It was a great book. I’m just not sure I was the audience for it in that way.”
She smiled. The Jack she used to know, the Jack of the Zoom of Doom, would never have been so politic. “The gut punch wasn’t for you.”
“The gut punch wasn’t for me,” he agreed.
“Esme was fourteen at the time. She was big into ballet. She had an important performance coming up, and she had this monster zit. She asked if we could go to the dermatologist to see if anything could be done. I didn’t hesitate. I took her to mine. We were sitting in the waiting room and I had this realization that the place was full of women who didn’t look like they were there for skin cancer or eczema or even acne. I would like to say they were all middle-aged, but some of them were pretty young. And there was a TV silently playing this loop of ads for various procedures. Everyone in the waiting room and on the TV had smooth skin, and almost everyone had their hair pulled back in buns or ponytails. It started to give uncanny valley vibes. I mean, they were all beautiful, but they were all beautiful in the same way, if that makes any sense. And they were all there to make sure they stayed that way.
“Esme saw it, too, I could tell, even though she probably didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it. We didn’t talk about it, but Ithought about how maybe I should find her a pediatric dermatologist for next time.
“But then that night, I was back to readingGreen Light, and I got to the line, which was pretty much ripped off straight from Fitzgerald, about how the best thing a girl can be is a fool, a beautiful little fool.”
Jack sucked in a breath.
