Pug Hill - Alison Pace [100]
“Now, which one is Evan?” Mr. Gerard pipes in before I can answer all the way, before I can explain that it’s really for the best. “It gets so hard to keep track, heh, heh.”
Heh, heh, I think, and really, I’m about to jump in and explain that there is no longer any Evan, that really there never should have been any Evan, but then I hear the as-far-away-as-you-can-get-from-dulcet tones of Mrs. Gerard’s voice. “You know, Walter, you met him last Christmas at the McNeill’s? You remember.”
Mr. Gerard looks at her blankly.
“The one who looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo,” Mom shouts back from her perch at the front of the boat.
Why she feels that this is what she must add to the conversation is beyond me. Thanks, Mom, I think to myself, narrowing my eyes ever so slightly as I turn in her direction, wondering when it happened, when Evan managed to revert from schmuck, back to his previously revoked status as Jean-Paul Belmondo look-alike.
“Right, right,” says Mr. Gerard, nodding his head in thoughtful remembrance, “nice fellow, banker, right?”
“Well, he worked at a hedge fund, so it’s a little different,” I explain. I feel that speaking of him in the past tense is as good a place as any to start, and now, here’s my moment, I jump in before any more praises of Evan can be sung. “But we’re not dating anymore.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Mrs. Gerard says to me right before she yells up to my mother, “Caroline! Why didn’t you tell us that Hope was single again?” My mother, now occupied with pointing out every sailboat we pass to Betsy, either doesn’t hear her or pretends not to. With a concerned tilt of her head, Mrs. Gerard turns back to me. I’m sure that if I listened closely enough to her, something which in actuality I will go to great lengths to avoid, I would be able to hear her making a little cluck-cluck sound. “What happened?”
“Uh,” I say, and as I say it, I know it’s long past the time to say that it was all Evan’s fault. I know it’s long past the time to explain that Evan was too critical and too in love with squash, and The Club, and the cold. In the end it doesn’t even really seem to matter that Evan loved all those things, along with Republicans, because when it came right down to it, he didn’t love me, and I didn’t love him.
“It just didn’t work out,” I say. I think how that’s really, given all the things I could say, the nicest thing to say. Maybe when I was with him, I wasn’t all that nice to him, like he said. So I say only that, and think that being nice to Evan in memoriam, being nice to him now, is better than nothing.
“Oh, I see,” says Mrs. Gerard, sagely nodding her head.
“What?” I ask, even though I know better.
“You’re just not ready.”
As we leave the protected cove, and begin cruising around faster through the open water of Lloyd Harbor, I am thankful for the noise of the engine. We pass all the beautiful houses right on the water, and even though we’ve all seen them so many times before, Dad points them all out, yelling loudly over the engine, “Look at that one, Caroline.” “Hope, look to your left.” “To your right!” Betsy’s barking is muffled, too, and I can see that Mom has one arm around her and is pointing out houses with the other. I think I can hear her saying, “Yes, Betsy, feel the wind,” but it’s entirely possible that’s all in my head.
I can feel Mrs. Gerard staring at me and I know that as soon as we stop she’ll be all over me and I look around, feeling very much like a trapped rat, and I try to plan my escape. As soon as we stop, I think strategically, I will head straight past my dad and Mr. Gerard and up to the front part of the Whaler and sit with Betsy and Mom. And that will be so much better. Even though Mom will slowly drive me to despair in her own way because she will be cooing to Betsy and pointing things out to her like the water, and other boats, and seagulls, and truth be told, no matter how old I am, when she does things like that it makes me feel very second-rate, and truth be told, I’ve never really gotten over always feeling like that