Genuine Fraud(11)

“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.

“Imogen loved you,” said Jule.

“She was desperate about something. And she didn’t come to me.”

“She didn’t come to me, either.”

“I should have raised her so that she could open up to people, get help if she was in trouble.”

“Immie told me everything,” said Jule. “Her secrets, her insecurities, how she wanted to live her life. She told me her birth name. We wore each other’s clothes and read each other’s books. Honestly, I was very close to Immie when she died, and I think she was mad lucky to have you.”