How I got the job at Bernard’s restaurant. The easy camaraderie between us. The night he stopped by after closing while I was working on some new items for the menu and made me a perfect, fluffy fresh-herb omelet swimming in butter and poured me Armagnac older than me and made passionate love to me, telling me I was a goddess and that I tasted like the finest wine and that our sex smelled like truffles. We ate an entire bowl of chocolate mousse naked on the kitchen floor. That we kept the affair a secret for months, as his ex-wife, Claudine, was still part owner of the restaurant. Despite the fact that their breakup was due to compulsive adultery on both their parts—for him an endless assortment of women of all ages, shapes, and sizes; for her, a string of much younger men—from the moment he moved out of their cottage and into a small town house near the restaurant, her jealousy had amped up, and it was easier for him to just keep his relationships a bit on the quiet side. She was volatile and violent, with a midday cocktail habit that didn’t look good on her. Once we went public, she became a constant thorn in my side, showing up at the restaurant with her girlfriends to poke fun and be snarky and complain and send every dish back twice.
I told them how I had never been in love like that. The longer Bernard and I were together, the more beautiful and sexy and special I felt, and the more I imagined a lifetime with him. I told them about the week my period was late, and how he kissed my belly and called it Bouboune, a nonsense endearment, and said that we would have the most beautiful girl. And how he cried in my arms when I eventually got my period, like a dream had died for him.
“Ex-wife,” I say, taking another sip of wine. “Sort of. But not from how she behaved. She was a jealous nightmare.”
“Well, just because she let him go doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard to have his new girlfriend right in front of her,” Lynne said, picking some asparagus out of the salad bowl with her tapered fingers.
“I wasn’t flaunting anything, just living my life,” I say, scooping up some of the velvety celery root puree on my last crust of bread. “Small town, impossible to disappear.”
“Well, I think it sounds awfully French,” Teresa says reverently, which makes us laugh.
“Oh, it was French, all right. Passionate, fabulous, perfect. Right up until my dad got sick. And then it was all, mon amour, it’s been nice, don’t let the door hit you . . .”
“He did not,” Teresa says, her mouth hanging open.
“He most certainly did. Said that he was sorry for my dad, but if I left without a return ticket, I wouldn’t have anything to return to.”
“Ouch,” Lynne says.
I shrug. “What could I do? I couldn’t just come for some sad good-bye visit, and I couldn’t in good conscience just leave him there without a sous chef for an indeterminate period of time. I had to give him leave to replace me professionally, and unfortunately, he was not the kind of guy who could be expected to not replace me personally as well. Then, of course, it turns out that the whole thing was a lie. He and the ex had never officially filed the paperwork—some sort of tax issue; just told everyone they were divorced. And they never stopped sleeping together, not even when he was with me. Then, within months of when I left, he knocked up my replacement.”
“What a jerk,” Teresa says.
“What an asshole,” Lynne says.
“Whatever,” I say. “Who needs a French man when there is French cheese? Half as stinky and twice as smart.” I bring over the cheese platter, moving the chicken out of the way. I’m already regretting telling them about Bernard. He is something I don’t like to think about, let alone talk about. When I heard from my friend Jean-Marie the truth about his nondivorce and infidelities, it tainted every good thing he’d ever made me feel about myself. She said everyone presumed I knew, since it was, after all, Bernard. Lawrence is the only other person who knows the whole story, and his reaction was that Bernard made me completely distrust not men, but relationships and my own judgment. He had his own Bernard in his past, and said we were peas in a pod. That I should do as he has always done, take companionship and sex when it presents itself, save love and long-term relationships for friends, family, and dogs. Easier that way, and not without its benefits. Except that Lawrence gets laid fairly regularly, and I do not.
“I’ll drink to that,” Lynne says, raising her glass.
“Me too.” Teresa winks.
We demolish the cheese, and huge slices of Teresa’s cornmeal pound cake, perfumed with vanilla, crunchy on the outside, and meltingly tender on the inside, and repair to the living room with little glasses of Madeira. We look through the yearbook, laughing till tears are rolling down our cheeks at some of the less flattering pictures of our classmates, remembering the good times and us. Then Lynne picks up the Fabulous at Forty paper off the table.
“Oh, hell no! I remember this assignment,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you saved it.”
“Me too!” Teresa says. “That was a fun one. I have mine, in my memory box.”
“Of course you do,” says Lynne. “I threw all that shit away. Just boxes of crap.”
Teresa shrugs. “I thought it would be nice for my kids someday.”
“Yeah, not anything I will ever have to worry about,” Lynne says, reading the list, and then turning it over to read their notes. “We were sure something.”
“Teresa, I don’t remember your list, what was on it?” I ask her, sipping the sweet wine.
“Nothing surprising.” She chuckles. “I wanted to have a great husband, four kids—two boys, two girls—a nice house. I wanted to take over family holidays from my mom, do some volunteer work for the church, maybe work part-time when the kids were in school. And the two of you said that you couldn’t think of one thing to add for me, by the way!”
“You failed so miserably!” Lynne says sarcastically. “Three boys and no girls?”
Teresa’s face gets a bit sad. “We lost a little girl second trimester about a year and a half after Antony was born, and then two more first-trimester miscarriages. Decided our blessings were plenty, and stopped trying.” Her eyes shine a bit brighter.
“Oh, honey, so, so sorry for that. It must have been so hard on you guys,” Lynne says, squeezing her hand.
Teresa shrugs. “I have three healthy boys who are turning into lovely young men. They are plenty. Someday I’ll have daughters-in-law and maybe granddaughters. What about you, Lynne, do you remember anything on your list?”
“I think I said I would go into advertising, make my first million before I was thirty, and marry Wesley Snipes. And, Teresa, you said Wesley and I would have three goddamn kids, and, Eloise, you said I would open my own firm.”
“Mmm. Wesley Snipes,” Teresa says. “Blade. I mean, damn. These children and their Robert Pattinson nonsense, they do not know from sexy vampire.”
We laugh. “Well, Wesley aside, things seem to be going well for you,” I say.
Lynne shrugs. “I beat my million deadline by a year, and perhaps if I had married Wesley instead of Mr. So-Very-Wrong I wouldn’t be single now. But I can’t complain.”
“So funny. The way we thought things would be by the time we were forty, and now, we just have eight months,” Teresa says. “Things are so different.”
“We should make new lists!” I say, joking, refilling everyone’s glasses. “What we should do before we turn forty.”
“Yeah,” Lynne says, laughing. “And add in our stuff for each other like we did last time.”
Teresa smiles. “And then we should make a bet that we have to do it all before we actually turn forty or . . . or . . .”
“Or we have to run naked down Michigan Avenue,” I say.
“Or we have to donate a lot of money to something!” Lynne says.
Teresa suddenly gets a look on her face. “We should do that.”
“What?” Lynne asks.
“That. We should remake our lists together, and have to do them before our birthdays or we should have to donate, like, five grand. In Mrs. O’Connor’s name.”