The Last Book Party(44)

He looked up at me, his cheeks still splotchy.

“Honestly, I try to forget about it,” he said. “My father has the same allergy and he lets it rule his life. Doesn’t go to restaurants or shop in stores that sell fish. He can’t even relax at the beach. I refuse to live like that. To be like him.” He rubbed his eyes. “Do I look awful?”

The red circles around Jeremy’s watery eyes made him look like a raccoon who’d recently been crying.

“Not at all,” I said, thinking how much I liked this Jeremy, with his defenses down. “Your allergy is quite becoming.”





38





The dinner debacle took the edge off my nervousness about hosting Jeremy and the pressure off my mother from performing perfectly for the young writer. We lit a mosquito coil and ate our bowls of pasta outside. Jeremy had a second beer, and then a third. My mother gave herself a second generous pour of wine. By the time we finished our pasta, Jeremy’s face was back to normal, but he and my mother were slouching in their chairs. My mother’s questions got more personal. Jeremy didn’t seem to mind.

“When did you know you were a writer? Did you always know?”

“I wrote like a madman from the age of ten.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him.

“Eve dabbles in writing, you know,” she whispered, as if she was sharing some shameful secret. She refused to take my writing seriously, although I couldn’t completely blame her as I hadn’t published anything since college and didn’t share my drafts with her.

My mother went on: “But there has to be a fire, not just an ember, and a true gift to make it a worthy vocation. Eve’s older brother, Danny, you know, has a gift. Math is like music for him, and he has perfect pitch. It’s extraordinary.”

“Mom, Jeremy doesn’t want to hear about Danny.”

She continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “The way I see it, there is a fire or there is not. Danny has that fire. That’s all there is to it. And if there is not…” She rested her head on her hand, then launched into a story I had heard many times before.

“I was a talented pianist. As a child, I was like a little sponge. I was dutiful and practiced every morning before school and after—for hours every day. I sat straight, held my fingers correctly, played way beyond my years. As a teenager, I poured all the emotions of adolescence into my playing. Or so I thought. When I was sixteen, I auditioned for Juilliard. And was rejected. I overheard the Russian adjudicator say I didn’t have ‘the touch.’ The touch of genius. I was good, I was very, very, very good, but I would never be great.”

“Very few are great,” Jeremy said, reaching out and patting her hand.

“And if you are not among the very few, what is the point?” my mother continued. “If you are not among the few, then you must be a fan. A clapper. The first to jump up and yell ‘Encore.’”

“Do you still play?” Jeremy asked.

“Never,” she said.

“Do you miss it?” Jeremy asked.

She looked at Jeremy for what felt like a long time. He raised his eyebrows, like he really wanted to know. She stared back at him, her expression sad in a way I hadn’t seen before, and said, “A little.”

The disappointment of giving up her dream was clear on my mother’s face. But the story, so familiar to me, now struck me not only as sad, but melodramatic. If she loved piano so much, why had she stopped playing altogether? How could it be enough for her to channel all her creativity into home decorating and all her ambitions into her brilliant son?





39





Drunk and maybe a little embarrassed, after dinner my mother drifted off to her room. Jeremy was far more relaxed than usual, no doubt on account of the Benadryl and the beer. He sat on the kitchen counter, leaning his head on the refrigerator, while I washed the dishes. When I was done, we went outside on the deck, lying side by side on the two chaise longue chairs.

“I like your mother. You’re lucky. There was no conversation in my house growing up. Like, literally, none.”

“What about your sister? Didn’t you guys talk?”

He stretched his arms above his head.

“Debbie? We did as kids. But she got really angsty when she turned twelve. More than angsty. Seriously troubled. She started pulling out her eyelashes and eyebrows, literally yanking them out hair by hair.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

“Yeah, it was disturbing. And no one talked about it. We always had the television on at dinner. CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. It was either that or listen to my father’s humming and the click of my mother’s jaw when she chewed.”

“Sounds bleak.”

“You have no idea. I begged them to send me to boarding school. I heard about Choate from an English teacher and became fixated on it. When they said I could go, I was elated. I thought it would be paradise.”

“And it wasn’t?” I imagined Choate as a place for golden-haired trust fund kids, not for someone like Jeremy.

“No, it was. I loved it. Going to Choate was like traveling from black-and-white to color. I loved everything—even the din in the dining hall. I could talk there and barely be heard. I learned I could raise my voice, yell even, and it was totally acceptable. Verbal sparring was the norm. And it was OK to be intellectually showy. There was even a lacrosse player—a lanky guy with long blond hair—who would recite French poetry. At my old school, he would have been massacred.”