Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel

LISE AND I ARE SHARING A ROOM AT THE MOTEL IN DES MOINES. I’m waiting for her to finish getting ready to see Steven. She comes out of the bathroom dressed in a blue sheath dress and a string of pearls, her usual pearl studs. Low, bone-colored heels.

She sits on the edge of the bed, her hands tightly clasped, looks at her watch.

“Ten minutes.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My heart rate is one-sixty.”

“You look really nice.”

It’s as if those words launch her back into the bathroom. She comes out in a couple of minutes changed into a pair of black pants, a plain white button-down, sandals. The necklace is off.

She sits back down on the bed and looks over at me. “Better, I think.”

“You looked lovely in that dress. Was it new?”

“Well, that’s right. That’s part of the problem. I want to be comfortable, and I can’t be comfortable in a new dress. Or … in a dress period. Better to be comfortable.”

“You still look nice.”

“Thanks. Cece, will you wait outside with me for him to come?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a gray Avalon we’ll be looking for. Help me to look for a gray Avalon.”

“I will.”

“Do you know where Renie and Joni are? I don’t want them to come out there. I don’t want it to be … a spectacle.”

“They went to the pool. They said they were going to have a soak in the hot tub.”

Lise nods. “I wish that’s where I was going.”

I reach over to touch her hand. “You’ll be fine. You need to do this. The cards said it would be good.”

“They didn’t say that.”

“Well, they didn’t say it would be bad.”

She looks at her watch. “Okay. Five minutes of. Let’s go.”

We go down to the lobby, and she looks out the window. “Oh God, he’s here.” She looks over at me. “I shouldn’t have done this.”

“Just … Have a good time. Have a good time! We’ll see you later.”

She goes out toward the car, and a tall, silver-haired man gets out to open the door for her. He’s good-looking, from what I can tell from here. He closes the door and goes around to his own side, and I see Lise make the tiniest wave at me. I wave back, then go and change into my bathing suit. It doesn’t matter how old I am, it doesn’t matter how I look in a suit (though this black halter-top one was designed by a compassionate person and I really like it). Putting on a bathing suit always gets me a little jazzed; I’m ready to have a good time. I cannot remember ever having a bad time in a bathing suit. I think about this in the elevator, on the way down to the pool, and it’s really true, I haven’t.



JONI, RENIE, AND I are back in the hot tub after having gone out to Dairy Queen, where we had sundaes and onion rings for dinner. A young couple comes into the pool room in their bathrobes. They stand a few feet away from the hot tub, watching, then leave the room. Almost immediately, though, the young man comes back and says, “Are you going to be in there much longer?”

“We just got in,” Joni says. “But there’s room for you two, if you want.” She gestures, in a halfhearted kind of way, to the other side of the hot tub, where there is indeed room for two more people.

“That’s okay,” he says, and leaves again.

But now the woman comes in and walks over to the edge of the hot tub and crouches down beside us. “Could I just tell you something?”

“Sure,” I say.

“We just got married? And we wanted to sort of have the hot tub to ourselves?” She’s a pretty girl, an open-faced blonde with a well-placed beauty mark above her lip. Her husband, too, is a fine specimen, though a little on the blank-eyed side.

I start to climb out and Renie yanks on my arm to pull me back down.

“I so know what you mean?” Renie says. “But we got here first? And you’ll just have to wait your turn? To have sex in the hot tub?”

“Renie!” I say.

“What?”

“They’re not going to have sex in the hot tub!”

“Yes, we are,” the girl says, giggling.

“We’ll be out in just a few minutes,” I say.

“Or whenever we feel like it,” Renie calls after the girl as she walks away.

“Age before sex,” she tells me.

“People have sex in public hot tubs?” I ask.

“Duh,” Joni says.

“Really?” I start to lift myself out.

“Oh, if you only knew,” Joni says. “But don’t worry, they put stuff in the water to kill everything.”

I hang there, half in the water, half out. Part of me is thinking, Oh, relax. It’s too late now. Whatever is in here is in you already. I sit back down.

A few minutes later, the door to the pool room bangs open and here comes Lise. I can’t read her face.

She pulls a chair up to the edge of the hot tub, slides her sandals off, and sticks her feet in.

Nobody says a word and then she says, “Well, this was a bad idea.”

“Was he a jerk?” Renie asks.

Lise shakes her head no.

We wait, and finally she says, “He was wonderful. I’d forgotten how witty he is, how smart. I’d forgotten that he was such a bad tipper, too; I slipped some cash on the table when we were leaving. How can you not tip on the whole bill? How can you exclude the alcohol? Especially when you’re making a ton of money; he’s making a ton of money.”

“But what happened?” Joni asks. “What else happened?”

“I’m going to tell you. But first I’m wondering if I should go and put on my bathing suit.”

“It is really nice in here,” I say.

“Don’t go and put on your suit!” Renie says. “Tell us what happened!”

Lise sits still for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Then she rolls up her pants legs neatly and puts her legs in farther. “So,” she says. “He’s the same, but he’s different. He’s … Well, he’s grown up, I guess you’d say. As have I. And I …” She looks at me. “Oh God. I really like him. I like him again.”

“Uh-oh,” Renie says.

“We went to his house after dinner and he put on a really nice Thelonious Monk CD. I asked him when he had gotten into Monk. He said he had always loved Monk, I just hadn’t known because I’d never asked. His house was nice: earthy colors, comfortable furniture. I saw a picture of Sandy and at first it was so jarring. I thought, What is he doing with a picture of my daughter? And then I realized, of course, that she was his daughter, too. And that just seemed so cozy and convenient and nice.

“We had a really good talk about her and he said he had no idea she was so awful to me, that in fact she spoke very well of me when she was around him. And when I went into his bedroom I saw a framed note on his dresser from Sandy saying she was sorry, he was right, and I realized that she must give him a hard time, too. But apparently he’s able to have a sense of humor about it, a necessary perspective. I realized I need to do that, too. And he is the perfect one to show me how.”

“His bedroom, huh?” I say.

She smiles. “He had this huge bouquet of flowers on his dining room table, and he said he’d gotten those for me, did I still like roses? I said, ‘So you figured we’d come back to your place, huh?’ and he said he’d only hoped for it. And then he put his hand alongside my face and I … Well, I started crying. And he kissed me, and we … Anyway.

“Afterward—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Joni says. “What came before afterward?”

“Afterward,” Lise says, “we had a really good conversation. Really honest. And we both admitted to some flaws we’d never admitted to before. I admitted to my … Well, I can be uptight. Sometimes I’m a little uptight.”

“You?” Renie says, mockingly.

“I can be looser, though,” Lise says. “If I want to.” She looks around the room, then back at us. “Watch this,” she says, and slides fully into the hot tub.

“Huh?” she says, and spreads her arms expansively along the sides of the tub.

“Great,” Renie says. “You got wet with your clothes on. Very wild. Now tell us more about what happened.”

“Okay. I’ll just say it: I think he might move back to Minneapolis.”

A stunned silence. Then everyone starts talking at once.