And Eric didn’t mind, for reasons of his own.
I might never have found out about those reasons, and might have left for London in the fall feeling as though Eric was still the love of my life, if it hadn’t been for my father’s visiting New York in the last week of August and asking to see me for lunch. He had a new book coming out, a collection of short stories, and was in New York to meet with his American agent and his American publisher, and to give a reading at Strand Books. He hadn’t invited me to the reading, which wasn’t a surprise. I’d asked him once—my junior year of high school, I think—if I could go to one, and he’d replied, “God, Lily, you’re my daughter. I wouldn’t expose you to that. It’s bad enough you’ll eventually feel the need to read my books, let alone have to listen to me speak them out loud.”
So I took a day off from the library and caught the train to New York City. My father and I ate lunch in a swank restaurant attached to the lobby of his midtown hotel, and we talked about my upcoming year in London. He promised to e-mail me a list of friends and relatives I had to visit, along with a few of his favorite London landmarks, most of which were pubs. Then he drilled me for tidbits about my mother and the new boyfriend. He was very disappointed to hear that the linguistics professor was, on the whole, a decent man. After lunch, we parted ways in front of the hotel. “You turned out all right, Lil, despite your mother and me,” he said, not for the first time. We hugged good-bye. It was a strangely nice day for late August in the city, so I headed downtown, toward Eric’s office, a place I had never visited. The air that had been stifling for the entire month was suddenly free of humidity, and I was just happy to be walking along the quiet midday corridors of the city. I hadn’t decided whether I would intrude on Eric’s workday to surprise him or not, but was considering it, beginning to imagine the look on his face as I stepped into his office. I was taken out of this reverie by hearing someone shout my name. I turned to see Katie Stone, a junior at Mather, and someone I knew from St. Dunstan’s parties, crossing the street and waving at me.
“I thought that was you,” Katie said, stepping onto the curb as a yellow cab hurtled by. “I didn’t know you were in the city this summer.”
“I’m not. I’m at my mom’s house in Connecticut, but my dad’s here and I had lunch with him.”
“Do you want to get coffee? I got let out of work early. God, New York’s depressing in August.”
We went to a chain coffee shop at the nearest corner and both ordered iced lattes. Katie prattled on about Mather students we both knew, and several I’d never heard of. She was a gatherer and purveyor of gossip, and I was surprised that she wasn’t asking me about Eric, so I asked her, “Do you see Eric much?”
Katie’s eyes widened a little at the mention of his name. “Oh. I wasn’t going to bring him up. No, not much, but a little. He works around here somewhere, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. Why weren’t you going to bring him up?”
“I just didn’t know how you felt, now that you’re not seeing each other. I didn’t know if you wanted to hear about him.”
A cold flush went over my skin. I very nearly told Katie that of course I was still seeing Eric but something stopped me. Instead, I asked, “Why, what’s going on with him?”
“Nothing that I know of. I’ve seen him a little, but he’s never here on the weekends. His dad’s sick. Maybe you knew that?”
“No,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”