White Ivy(27)
Tears sprung to Ivy’s eyes.
* * *
AFTER A LONG bath, Ivy found herself in an excited, uneasy state. Her cheeks were hot from her soak; she’d forgotten to bring her slippers to the bathroom and her wet footprints across the wooden floorboards looked vaguely ominous. She wished violently for someone to talk to but her roommate, Andrea, wasn’t home yet from rehearsal. Why do I have no friends? she despaired, drawing up the blinds to catch the last rays of twilight; her quick, rather forced self-pity evaporated with the icy draft leaking in from the windowsill. She’d never craved friendship with other women, and she did not believe platonic friendship could exist with men.
She crawled under the covers and huddled against the tepid radiator. “Gideon Speyer,” she whispered into her pillow. She hadn’t said the name in over a decade. It brought back all sorts of hopeful sensations she thought she’d never again feel after the breakup with Daniel. Just yesterday, she’d been bedridden with stomach pains from unexpectedly receiving his postcard in the mail—a stock photo of a mountain range; standing on the peak next to a Saint Bernard with his back to the camera was a man wearing flannel and a Russian beaver hat. Happy Holidays! he’d written on the front, no return address. Two years of her life and she hadn’t even been worthy of a return address.
He’d dumped her a week before Thanksgiving, right before their trip to Vermont. Andrea had been sure he was going to propose. Why else would he have invited her to meet his family around the holidays? “I know you don’t care about these things,” said Andrea, “but I think the Sullivans are loaded.” Ivy winced. Andrea began rattling off indications of what she thought was Daniel’s secret wealth—the lakeside cabin, the Florida vacation home, annual hiking trips to Kilimanjaro and Mount Fuji, not to mention the frequent four-day mountaineering escapades to the White Mountains in New Hampshire for which he took time off his job (as VP of finance at his mother’s jewelry company) with seemingly no consequences—and Ivy pretended not to have noticed any of it.
But there had been no Vermont, no surprise proposal, no flowers for Mrs. Sullivan. “I just can’t see myself marrying you,” Daniel said in the suffocating heat of his car, a statement that’d come on the heels of an ordinary dinner followed by an ordinary movie, which made it that much more of a betrayal. “Who says I want to get married,” Ivy had replied. Daniel pressed his glasses into his nose and exhaled slowly, making a noise like a teakettle. “See? This is what I’m talking about. You’re so guarded. I never know what you’re thinking.” One thing led to another and before Ivy had grasped what was happening, he was telling her it was over, there was nothing to be done. He held her for two minutes while she cried—“I’m not guarded, I’m so honest with you… I’ve never opened up to anyone the way I opened up to you…” Later, when she returned home, she writhed in agony to remember how she’d groveled.
After the breakup, to achieve utter renunciation, Ivy slept with seven—or was it eight?—different men in December. She and Andrea frequented a swanky bar on Commonwealth Avenue called Dresdan’s. The men there were mostly pharmaceutical reps and finance guys from other M states—Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota—and they wore uniforms of khaki and cornflower blue. Andrea sucked them over with the force of her luscious lips cocooned over the tip of a cocktail straw, while Ivy angled her body away from the table, the modest friend to Andrea’s overt appeal, occasionally glancing around the room as if she were restless. Later, when Andrea said “You’re so quiet, Ivy! Come over here and join us,” Ivy would pretend she’d just noticed the men’s presence. “What do you do?” they would ask her. “I’m a first-grade teacher,” she would say, “at the Kennedy School.” Only a true Bostonian would have heard of it because they’d all gone there, or to its various sister schools, but whether these men knew of the school or not, they’d all smile like jack-o’-lanterns, place one hand on her knee, and say, “You must be good around kids. I love kids. My niece…” There was always a plethora of nieces and nephews whose pictures the men would pull up on their phones and thrust into her face. Ivy often felt contempt for Andrea, for the open pleasure she took in these tacky seductions, but she felt greater contempt for herself. She played the same games, felt the same cheap thrills of conquest, yet she felt the need to hide her pleasure. What did that say about her sense of propriety? Her sense of shame?
The day after Ivy’s run-in with Sylvia Speyer, Nan called to say she’d received Ivy’s three-hundred-dollar check—a monthly guilt offering Ivy sent in lieu of her own presence—and asked if she was still bringing Daniel to Clarksville for New Year’s.
“It didn’t work out,” Ivy said curtly, having put off this admission for weeks, but which somehow seemed tolerable now that she had the hope of seeing Gideon Speyer again as mental armor against Nan’s criticism.
“What happened?”
“His parents are divorced.” She thought this was ample reason to evoke her mother’s disdain, but Nan made a noncommittal grunt.
“You’re almost twenty-seven now. You shouldn’t be so picky. Aunt Ping’s friend’s daughter is your age and she’s already pregnant with her second child. I had a hard time conceiving you and you have my genes. Don’t think you can just put off having children. You have to start planning. Each year that passes—” Ivy could hear Meifeng’s voice in the background agreeing vehemently, asking for the phone.