“I’m very, very sorry about Gil,” Jule said. She meant it completely.
“He was sick forever. So many pills.” Patti paused, and when she went on she sounded choked. “I think after what happened to Immie, he just had no fight left in his body. He and Immie, they were my sweetie potatoes.” Then she pushed her voice again into busy brightness: “Now, back to the reason I called. You’ll come to lunch, right?”
“I said I’d come. Of course.”
“The Ivy, tomorrow at one. I want to thank you for all you did for me, and for Gil, after Immie died. And I even have a surprise for you,” said Patti. “Something that might actually cheer us both up. So don’t be late.”
When the conversation was over, Jule held the phone to her chest for a while.
The Ivy inhabited its narrow corner of London perfectly. It seemed custom-fit to its plot of land. Inside, the walls were lined with portraits and stained glass. It smelled like money: roasted lamb and hothouse flowers. Jule wore a fitted dress and ballet flats. She had added red lipstick to her college-girl makeup.
She found Patti waiting for her at a table, drinking water from a wineglass. When Jule had last seen her eleven months ago, Immie’s mother had been a glossy woman. She was a dermatologist, midfifties, trim except for a potbelly. Her skin had had a moist pinkish sheen, and her hair had been long, dyed deep brown and ironed into loose curls. Now the hair was gray at the roots and chopped into a bob. Her mouth looked swollen and manly without lipstick. She wore, as women of the Upper East Side do, narrow black pants and a long cashmere cardigan—but instead of heels, she had on a pair of bright blue running shoes. Jule almost didn’t recognize her. Patti stood and smiled as Jule came across the room. “I look different, I know.”
“No you don’t,” Jule lied. She kissed Patti’s cheek.
“I can’t do it any longer,” said Patti. “All that time in front of the mirror in the morning, the uncomfortable shoes. Putting on the face.”
Jule sat down.
“I used to put on my face for Gil,” Patti went on. “And for Immie, when she was little. She used to say, ‘Mommy, curl your hair! Go put on sparkles!’ Now there’s no reason. I’m taking time off work. One day I thought, I don’t have to bother. I walked out the door without doing anything and it was such a relief, I can’t say. But I do know it disturbs people. My friends worry. But I think, meh. I lost Imogen. I lost Gil. This is me now.”
Jule was anxious to say the right thing, but she didn’t know if sympathy or distraction was required. “I read a book about that in college,” she said.
“About what?”
“The presentation of self in everyday life. This guy Goffman had the idea that in different situations, you perform yourself differently. Your character isn’t static. It’s an adaptation.”
“I have stopped performing myself, you mean?”
“Or you’re doing it another way now. There are different versions of the self.”
Patti picked up the menu, then reached over and touched Jule’s hand. “You need to go back to college, sweetie potato. You’re so smart.”
“Thank you.”
Patti looked Jule in the eye. “I’m very intuitive about people, you know,” she said, “and you have so much potential. You’re hungry and adventurous. I hope you know you could be anything in the world you want.”
The waiter arrived and took a drink order. Someone else set down a bread basket.
“I brought you Imogen’s rings,” said Jule, when the bustle was over. “I should have mailed them back before, but I—”
“I get it,” said Patti. “It was hard to let them go.”
Jule nodded. She handed over a package of tissue paper. Patti pulled the sticky tape off. Inside lay eight antique rings, all carved or shaped like animals. Immie had collected them. They were funny and unusual, carefully crafted, all different styles. The ninth one, Jule still wore. Immie had given it to her. It was a jade snake on her right ring finger.
Patti began to weep quietly into her napkin.
Jule looked down at the collection. Each of those circles had been on Immie’s fragile fingers at one point or another. Immie had stood, sun-kissed, in that jewelry store on the Vineyard. “I want to see the most unusual ring you have for sale,” she’d said to the shopkeeper. And later, “This one is for you.” She’d given Jule the snake ring, and Jule would not stop wearing it, now, even though she didn’t deserve it any longer, and maybe had never deserved it at all.
Jule gagged, a feeling that came from deep in her stomach and rippled through her throat. “Excuse me.” She got up and stumbled toward the ladies’ toilet. The restaurant spun around her. Black closed in from the sides of her eyes. She clutched the back of an empty chair to steady herself.
She was going to be sick. Or faint. Or both. Here in the Ivy, surrounded by these pristine people, where she didn’t deserve to be, embarrassing the poor, poor mother of a friend she hadn’t loved well enough, or had loved too much.
Jule reached the restroom and stood bent over the sink.
The gagging would not stop. Her throat contracted over and over.
She closed herself in a stall, steadying herself against the wall. Her shoulders shook. She heaved, but nothing came up.
She stayed in there until the gagging subsided, shaking and trying to catch her breath.
Back at the sink, she wiped her wet face with a paper towel. She pressed her swollen eyes with fingers dipped in cold water.
The red lipstick was in the pocket of her dress. Jule put it on like armor and went back to see Patti.
—
When Jule returned to the table, Patti had composed herself and was talking to the waiter. “I’ll have the beetroot to start,” she told him as Jule sat down. “And then the swordfish, I think. The swordfish is good? Yes, okay.”
Jule ordered a hamburger and a green salad.
When the waiter left, Patti apologized. “Sorry. I’m very sorry. Are you all right?”
“Sure.”
“I warn you, I may cry again later. Possibly on the street! You never know these days. I’m liable to begin sobbing at any given moment.” The rings and their tissue paper were no longer on the table. “Listen, Jule,” said Patti. “You once told me that your parents failed you. Do you remember?”
Jule did not remember. She never thought of her parents anymore, at all, unless it was through the lens of the hero’s origin she had created for herself. She never, ever thought of her aunt.
Now the origin story flashed into her mind: Her parents in the front yard of a pretty little house at the end of a cul-de-sac, in that tiny Alabama town. They lay facedown in pools of black blood that seeped into the grass, lit by a single streetlight. Her mother shot through the brain. Her father bleeding out through bullet holes in his arms.
She found the story comforting. It was beautiful. The parents had been brave. The girl would grow up highly educated and extremely powerful.
But she knew it was not a story to share with Patti. Instead, she said mildly, “Did I say that?”
“Yes, and when you did, I thought maybe I had failed Imogen, too. Gil and I hardly ever talked about her being adopted when she was little. Not in front of her, or in private. I wanted to think of Immie as my baby, you know? Not anyone’s but mine and Gil’s. And it was hard to speak about, because her birth mother became an addict, and there were no family members who would take the baby. I told myself I was protecting her from pain. I had no idea how badly I was failing her until she—” Patti’s voice trailed off.