White Ivy(45)

11


IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING THE Finley’s barbecue, like the tide pulling back and forth from shore, Ivy’s confidence waxed and waned. She purchased a test prep book and spent her days struggling to solve convoluted logic problems—There are exactly three recycling centers, exactly five kinds of material are recycled at these recycling centers, each recycling center recycles at least two but no more than three of these kinds of material. The following conditions must hold… —which made her feel frustrated and inept, as if she were back in high school, afraid of Nan’s scoldings for bringing home abysmal test scores. At night, while Gideon slept beside her, Ivy replayed the day’s events like a film reel: golden-eyed, broad-shouldered Gideon in soft crew sweaters and double-breasted blazers, with his irresistible grin that felt like a present; Gideon with the clean, square hands, the birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of an apple, and the blue-green veins running up his arm when he held her, raised and pulsing with blood, was enough to make her knees weak. But also: Gideon of the smiling mask, Gideon going days without calling, working himself to death at the office, without complaint or explanation, working with the still determination he’d had since childhood. The Celtics had lost in the playoffs, he’d taken her to Game 7 against the Magic back in June and they’d screamed themselves hoarse, wishing, cheering, stamping, clapping, and still it was not enough; the entire arena went home despondent, many weeping, and it seemed to Ivy now like a bad omen. Each morning when she looked in the mirror, the shadows underneath her eyes were darker. She lamented the fading of her hard-earned beauty; her heart grew uneasy.

One afternoon in August, Sylvia texted out of the blue. Let’s catch up! Can we get together for dinner tonight? Ivy immediately agreed. She’d been waiting for something like this for a while, and had been getting antsy, wondering if Gideon’s sister’s silence was a form of rebuff. It’d been raining since daybreak. What would have been a fifteen-minute drive to the restaurant Sylvia had suggested took an hour through the crawling traffic. Ivy’s Camry was in the shop again, for brake replacements this time, so she hailed a cab but they got stuck behind a fender bender four blocks from the restaurant; she got out of the cab and ran. Sylvia wasn’t there. Ivy waited another fifteen minutes before Gideon’s sister arrived, wearing a navy trench coat over a low-cut black dress, the glass beads around her neck rubbing together in a pleasant clinking sound as she walked across the room. Men’s eyes followed Sylvia but in a different way from how eyes followed Andrea. It was the difference between wanting something obvious and wanting something impossible, which was only a more distilled kind of wanting.

“The Haymakers Theater is in the middle of nowhere,” Sylvia apologized, her white-gold head still glistening with a halo of raindrops. “I had to wait forever for the driver to find me, he’d driven all the way to Amherst…” She kicked off her heels underneath the table and waved the waiter over with requests for “the Chiang Mai, please. And for God’s sake, make it strong. Did you order yet, Ivy?”

“Not yet.”

“The curries here are excellent. I’ll have the Massaman.”

After they placed their orders, Sylvia explained the reason for her tardiness—she was at a rehearsal concert for her close friend Victor Sokolov, a cellist. He was a modern Stravinsky, more lively than Elgar but with the same beautiful themes. She said she’d met Victor while he was at Juilliard. He trained afterward at the Vienna Music School, he was brilliant, he was the real thing.

“My friend Andrea is a violinist,” said Ivy. “She plays for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.” Sylvia’s expression revealed neither admiration nor curiosity. “I’ll let her know about the album,” Ivy added. “I think she would love it.”

“Victor’s very experimental,” said Sylvia, “so I don’t know if a pure classicalist would enjoy it. Now with that said, I think Victor’s arrangements…” Like Gideon, she was so good at small talk that Ivy almost believed Sylvia had invited her to dinner solely to discuss classical music. The waiter brought over their curries. Sylvia waited until Ivy had placed her napkin on her lap before exclaiming, in somewhat breathless amazement, “So!… You and Gideon!”

Ivy smiled. “You hold your chopsticks really well.” Even this tiny amount of power—withholding a second longer information Sylvia wanted—felt like a win. This comment detoured them on a tangent about how Sylvia learned to use chopsticks—she loved sushi—and their favorite Japanese spots around Boston.

“Anyway,” said Sylvia, “back to Gideon. He won’t tell me anything about you! I only found out you two were still seeing each other when I saw the cupcakes you left in his fridge. ‘Ivy brought them over.’ That’s it. They were delicious by the way, you must give me the recipe. You know, it’s so typical of Giddy… all this hush-hush. I bet you’re the reason he’s skipped the last few dinners with the parents. Didn’t want to lie when they ask about his love life. They’d know by his stutter.”

“We’re keeping things on the down-low,” said Ivy. “Both of us are private people… everything feels more special this way.” She almost meant it. Since they’d had the talk-that-was-not-a-talk back in May, she’d cautiously waited for Gideon to invite her to one of his parents’ Sunday dinners in Beacon Hill, or even a casual weekday dinner. But every Sunday afternoon, as she got dressed to return home, he never suggested that she might stay, nor had he asked her to be his plus-one for a cousin’s wedding back in June. This had upset her at first, but she knew better than to pressure him. Pressure only worked on easily manipulated men, and she had never been able to respect any man she could easily manipulate.