But maybe there was an implicit message in the gift. Maybe it signified the kind of woman Charles wanted her to be—a sophisticate who craved fancy undergarments, good-smelling soaps, and French perfume. A woman, say, like Mrs. Cox or Mrs. Batten, like the scores of ladies at La Marquette. Made-up even to do their weekly shopping. Preened even when drinking coffee. Not a shoelace untied, not a lash unpainted. Someone who would know how to dress for a dinner party. Someone who would wear a bikini without feeling self-conscious. Someone like Bronwyn.
Was that when things had begun to falter? When Charles had given her that underwear? And was that was what was happening— were they faltering? She pressed a hand to her forehead. She was forever trying to define things these days. What had before seemed so solid was now so unclear.
T he weather was so unseasonably glorious that Charles asked Joanna to meet him in the city to go out to dinner. Joanna took SEPTA in, suddenly feeling giddy and golden. When had she and Charles last gone out to dinner—a real dinner, not the local pizza joint or the Chinese place in the strip mall? Maybe it signified a change, all their petty tension washing away.
She got off at Market East and walked to the restaurant in Old City. It was a Friday; the bar was packed and Charles hadn’t yet arrived. Joanna flagged down the bartender and ordered a glass of pinot noir, settling into her stool and looking idly around at the dramatic purple curtains against the walls and the chefs that fluttered about in the open kitchen at the back. Other guests flitted around her, ordering drinks, swilling them back, thrusting their fingers into the bowls of mixed nuts at the bar. There were men and women who came straight from work, a couple talking about their apartment in Fishtown, a woman with a daughter of about eleven or twelve, the girl gazing off disinterestedly at the passing cars on the street. Joanna suddenly realized how much she missed Philadelphia. She missed the crowds and the smells and the anonymity. She missed sitting in a bar without everyone staring at her pityingly, wondering why she was alone.
Joanna was almost halfway through her wine when she suddenly saw Charles waving at her from across the bar. Hey, he mouthed. He held a palm to the air as if to say, What are you doing all the way over there? He was standing with two other people, an almost-empty gin and tonic in his hand. The two people turned and looked, too. It was Nadine and Rob, two of Charles’s friends from Swithin who had gotten married. They lived in the city, though Joanna wasn’t sure where. Nadine wore bright red lipstick and was clutching a glass of water. She was hugely pregnant, cupping one hand over the base of her belly.
Joanna looked down, gripped with panic, wishing Charles hadn’t seen her. She didn’t want to talk to Swithin people. Not tonight. She wanted to remain on this side of the bar, safe and alone. But she picked up her glass and walked over.
“How long have you been here?” Charles asked when she reached him. His face was already pink from the gin.
“Um, twenty minutes maybe?” she answered, squeezing in beside him. There were no available stools on this side of the bar. Only Nadine was sitting.
“And you didn’t see us? I got here at six. I ran straight into these two. We’ve been here the whole time.”
“You didn’t see me, either,” Joanna said bitingly, though her words were absorbed by the din of the crowd.
“Well, now that you’re here, I can tell the hostess we’re ready,” Charles said. He considered his old friends. Rob still had his handsome, well-balanced features, but his once thick, longish hair was starting to thin. Nadine was as pale as ever, even her eyelashes. Her diamond ring kept throwing prismatic shapes all over the room. “You guys must join us,” Charles decided.
Nadine waved her hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “You guys don’t live here. Joanna probably came into the city so you could have a nice, romantic dinner by yourselves.”
“Nah, we’d love to have you,” Charles insisted. “It’ll be ages before we see you again. Right, Joanna?”
And then they were all looking at her. Joanna had no control over the muscles of her face. And now that this mood had settled around her, she couldn’t just untangle herself from it so fast. She didn’t want them joining their table. She didn’t want to struggle to make conversation. She thought of her comfy stool across the bar. She thought of her cozy couch at home. She could have stayed there and made pudding, watched television.
“Really,” she managed. “I don’t mind.”
And that was good enough for them. Nadine and Rob followed behind Charles and Joanna to a four-top at the back of the restaurant. Nadine struggled to sit down, Rob spotting her back. Diners at nearby tables glanced over and smiled. They both put their napkins on their laps and said that yes, sparkling water would be lovely. Charles gave Joanna an inquisitive look, a little eyebrow raise that seemed so say, Is everything okay? But he should know what wasn’t okay, shouldn’t he? Joanna smiled at him icily, and then turned back to her glass of wine, swilling back the rest of it fast.
They started talking about Rob’s boss—he worked at WXPN, Penn’s radio station, doing something for one of the show producers. “He made me babysit this band last week,” Rob was saying. “They were about nineteen years old but really sweet, came from some little town in Wales. What they wanted most was to see an authentic Philadelphia crime. They wanted to see guys in low-riders carjacking someone or, like, a shoot-out. They begged me to drive them into the worst neighborhood so we could see some action.” He rolled his eyes and then paused. Everyone laughed.
The conversation moved on to another story about a band Rob had dealt with, then to Charles and his job, and then to Nadine and her pregnancy. Around and around and around, though they kept skipping her. Intentionally … or by accident? She began to tune them out, watching the sous chefs scramble to and fro, mixing things, adding items to sauce pans, searing pieces of fish.
After the waiter took their orders, Rob looked at Charles. “So how’s your mom?”
Joanna snapped to attention. Charles paled. “She’s hanging in there.”
“Still doing all that stuff at the school?” Nadine asked.
Charles nodded. “Still ruling with an iron fist.”
Nadine glanced down at her menu. Rob took a sip of water. Of course they didn’t know about what had happened at the school. Not everyone’s lives circled around Swithin.
“There’s a new headmaster at Swithin, isn’t there?” Rob crossed his arms over his chest.
Charles nodded. “Jerome retired.”
“He did?” Nadine widened her eyes. “When?”
“At the beginning of this year,” Charles said.
“Wonder what the new guy’s like,” Nadine mused. “Maybe another stamp collector?”
The three of them laughed. No one filled Joanna in on the joke, so she ducked her head and took a hearty sip of wine. A stream of waiters carefully wheeled a tall chocolate cake with a single sparkler candle poking out the top to a nearby table. As they sang Happy Birthday to a beautiful older woman in a brown and white poncho, Rob and Charles began to reminisce about their days on the high-school debate team. Their coach, Gregory, would take them to an Indian restaurant in Malvern Friday nights whenever someone had a birthday. Remember the sitar player? Remember the poetry readings? Gregory took them to hear Bill Clinton, then just the governor of Arkansas and the Democratic candidate for president, speak at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Do you think he and Schuyler really had a thing?” Nadine leaned forward on her elbows.
“That never happened.” Rob shook his head. “It was just a rumor.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, some girls saw them talking and completely misconstrued it,” Charles said. “Remember?”
“Huh.” Nadine wound a pale strand of hair around her finger. “Greg always had eyes for the girls, though. Definitely Schuyler … and Bronwyn, too.”
Bronwyn. Joanna curled her toes. Charles breathed in, his face agleam. And just like that, Joanna knew he was going to bring her up. He was seriously going to talk about Bronwyn right now. Her heart pounded with resentment.
“Did you guys ever haze?” she blurted out.
Everyone stopped and looked at her. Charles clapped his mouth closed. He laid the piece of bread he’d been chewing back on his plate. “What?” Nadine said.
“On the debate team,” Joanna explained. Her mouth felt funny, way too large. “Like, for newcomers. Freshmen. Did you ever, like, make them eat toilet paper? Stand outside on a winter day in their underwear?”
“What, like in a frat?” Rob bit off the word frat, and held it tautly between his front teeth.
“Like bullying?” Nadine said at the same time.
“I guess,” Joanna answered.
“We didn’t do anything like that,” Rob said slowly, looking up at the pagoda-shaped light fixtures, as if trying to remember. “If the newcomers sucked, they didn’t debate. If they were good, they did.”
“What about on your sports teams?” Joanna asked. “Basketball? Football?”
She could feel Charles’s foot pressing down on hers. But when they were first dating, she’d explicitly told him that she didn’t like hearing about Bronwyn. It had been part of their early arguments, those first sticking points all couples needed to work through. It had been a difficult thing for her to say that to him, for she’d felt so vulnerable and petty. The conversation was still so clear to her; was it for him?
“We don’t have a football team.” Nadine said slowly, raising her shoulders.
“Wrestling?” Joanna tried.
“Joanna,” Charles growled.
He gave her a private glance. But she wasn’t going anywhere dangerous with this. She was just asking questions. “I always knew frats and sororities hazed,” Joanna said, turning to Rob and Nadine. “But I’ve been reading this article that it’s sort of prevalent in high-school sports, too.”
Nadine shook her head quickly. “Our school isn’t really like that.” “Maybe it’s more of a public school thing,” Rob volunteered sweetly. They were silent for a while, staring at their empty place settings. Out of the corner of her eye, Joanna saw Charles’s finger digging into the surface of the wooden table, as if to carve a groove. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he looked up. “So, Nadine. Are you having a shower?”
Nadine nodded, and then glanced guiltily at Joanna, who she hadn’t invited. Joanna looked down. “It’s going to be at my mother’s house,” Nadine said. “In Wayne. I’ll send an e-mail.”
“Did you track down Bronwyn again and ask her to it?” Charles asked.
Joanna breathed in sharply. Charles glanced at her, his expression eerily neutral.
“Because you guys were friends, I mean,” Charles went on. “Does she even know you’re having a baby?”
Nadine shrugged. “I haven’t heard from her. I think she’s still in Europe.”