“Not a lot, but she seems to be getting her bearings. She emails, and I know she’s had a FaceTime with Jasmine.” The waiter collects our plates. “I was thinking the other day about how much she adored me when she was little. It’s nice to get some of that back with Jasmine, but it also kills me to know she’ll grow out of it.”
“All the more reason to have things in your life that matter to you. Like your art.” He touches his lips with a napkin. “You’ll tell me if I drop something in my beard, won’t you?”
I grin. “Of course.”
“Are you going to write another book, do you think?”
“That’s a question I’ve been getting a lot, actually. My publisher would like me to, but I really wrote that one because I wanted to have something appropriate for Jasmine.”
“Ah, that’s nice. But isn’t it you and Suze?”
I take a breath. “It is. I’d been working on a comic book about us for years, and it just emerged like this.”
“Well, I think it’s quite a beautiful book. I’d love to see you do more.”
“Thank you. It has been remarkably lucrative, actually.”
“I’d think so.”
“When I was in art school, I thought I had to do everything the way the other artists were doing it, but I love illustration.”
“Isn’t illustration art?” He shifts, and I feel his warm body along the side of my hip. I want to press closer, but allow it to just be for now.
“Technically, yes, but in the kind of art school I attended, there’s a lot of emphasis on fine art, and the only true mark of success is showing in big galleries, becoming an artist people want to collect.”
“Did any of the people you went to school with get famous?”
“One of them, a woman from Omaha nobody really took seriously because she was so pretty and blonde and earnest. She does these gorgeous portraits.”
“And you,” he says. “New York Times bestseller.”
His voice is deep and warm, his body so near. “Yes,” I say, claiming it aloud. “Me too.” I take a sip of water, shift the conversation his direction. “Is it okay to ask about the fact that you don’t have kids?”
“I think we’re moving into that level of intimacy,” he says, and I can tell by his tone that it’s slightly tongue in cheek. We’ve been pretty intimate conversationally for a while. “I did want kids. Never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have any. But my wife didn’t, and she would have had to carry a lot more of the burden of care. Her career was very important to her.”
“Like Suze.”
“A bit, I guess, but Suze had a baby, right? Gave it up for adoption?”
It’s not something we ever talk about, not Suze and I, and certainly not Ben and I. It startles me a little. “How do you know that?”
“Small town. Everybody knew.”
“I guess they probably would have.”
“Well, and her shaved head. It had to have been hell to come back to school with her short hair and that label hung around her neck.” He puts the words in air quotes: “Unwed mother.”
I nod, a wash of remembered shame moving through me. I wasn’t the friend to her then that I should have been, but I also didn’t really know what to do. My own life was a mess with my parents getting divorced, selling the Portland house, feeling so bereft at the loss of the life I was comfortable with. In my fifteen-year-old self-centeredness, I’d believed our pain to be equal.
How could I have ever believed that?
The waiter brings our salads and the conversation lightens, turns to the flower plans for next year, some new cultivars he wants to try at the farm, and the series of paintings I’m working on, and how much fun it is to have Jasmine with me. As we’re winding down, ordering coffees and one slice of their famed blueberry cobbler to share, he mentions that it was one of his wife’s specialties. “She grew up in Michigan,” he says, “and they have great blueberries there, but nothing like ours.”
I smile. “Oregon: everything is better.”
“Agreed.” He touches my hand lightly, lifts it away.
When the cobbler comes, I ask about his wife. “You met her in . . . was it Cairo?”
“In a hotel restaurant, actually. She was on a break from an archaeology dig, and I wanted to see the Nile.”
I want to ask if it was amazing, but I don’t want him to get distracted, and of course the Nile was amazing. I mean, what an absurd thing to even ask. I lean on my hand, watching his face as he remembers. “Why did you like her?”