“Listen,” Max said, “let’s drop it. What’s done is done. I’m leaving New York. Johnny’s staying. I wish you well. Enjoy the apartment.”
“Of course I’ll enjoy the apartment!” I said. “It’s mine. I paid for it. And don’t try to pretend that I’m taking it from you, or that you even want to stay here. You’re moving to Chicago because Julia’s uncle can get you a job in the Merchandise Mart.”
The sad and wounded expression that Max had been wearing finally failed, becoming apparent for what it was, a mask. He balled his napkin up and threw it on the table. “I don’t have to sit for this if that’s the way you want to play it,” he said.
“I’m not playing, Max. I just think we should tell the story straight. We owe it to Johnny, if not to each other.”
That was an underhanded move on my part, and to no end. If Max recognized it as bait, he didn’t take it. He was a hard, brash, handsome man to the day he died. “The story’s been told, Lillian,” he said. “The story’s over.”
“Yes,” I said. “Between us it is. And your next story is already well underway. You’re going to be the suburban lord you’ve always wanted to be.”
“Sure. Will it make you happy if I agree? Julia’s my mulligan. My do over.”
“Right,” I said. “Because this is all as consequential as a round of golf to you.”
Then there was the ma?tre d’, hovering tableside in a vaporous cloud of solicitousness. “Is everything quite all right here?” he asked, leaning in and speaking quietly.
“Yes, everything is perfectly sane,” I said, standing. “Perfectly fine. I was just saying good-bye. The gentleman will pay.”
And I walked out alone, out of Delmonico’s, into the dime-gray light of Wall Street.
It seemed so long ago that Johnny had been the first to mention—furtive on the sidewalk, staring at my feet before we walked into our building, one late afternoon after his singing lesson—that Max had been spending time with another lady, the lady from work. Prior to that I had had my suspicions, but I hadn’t pursued them, primarily out of inertia. I could barely keep going at that point as it was, and even one more thing to contend with would have laid me out completely. Max’s extracurricular fun could go ignored and undealt with so long as Max didn’t know that I knew, and so I thanked Johnny for telling me and told him not to worry.
But a few months after that, my knowing became public, and I had to decide how to respond. Max’s friend Frankie, a fellow import-export man, was in town from Boston, visiting us at our place. I’d never liked Frankie—bluff and loud, with little sense of when he might be wearing out his welcome or inconveniencing his hosts—but we’d put together a little party for him anyway with a few of our friends. There Frankie sat, in the middle of our sofa, duller by the moment, this strange, well-meaning malefactor, too merry, too mirthful, telling us all to join him in having another, never mind that he’d make us late for dinner, never mind that the next day most of us were expected to get our children to school or ourselves to the office. A cocktail pig hysterical with joy at the sight of free booze, that was Frankie, setting his cup wherever while rattling on. I had fairly freckled the face of the living room with coasters, but darling Frankie simply could not connect the dots.
I was whisking his martini from tabletop to more hospitable cork when he turned, quite drunk, to Max, and said, “Where’s that little gal of yours, that Julia, the one you introduced me to last month? She really knows how to have fun.”
And just like that, Max’s infidelity was laid out before me, and before others. I could no longer proceed in the semblance of sweet obliviousness. I had to do something. React. I hated the situation, and I hated Frankie, and I hated Max, sitting there gasping after mis-swallowing his drink, and I hated how embarrassed and humiliated and absurd it made me, cast suddenly in some cinematic melodrama where the score hits the unflattering key of the woman wronged. We carried on as normal that evening—dinner, the theater, good-byes to Frankie—and afterwards Max swore that Julia meant nothing to him and he was sorry about Frankie bringing her up, but that I was the one for him and couldn’t I find it in my heart to forgive.
I loathed him all over again for filling our bedroom with those shrill clichés, but I didn’t fight him. I had no appetite for it; I lacked the strength. I said okay, okay, let’s patch it up, and we set out on the circuitous scenic route to our inevitable destination of divorce.
I wrote Max I don’t know how many letters and cards over the years after that last lunch—and he often wrote back. But I only saw him in person three more times: once apiece at Gian’s graduations from high school and Bowdoin, and last of all at Max’s funeral. He succeeded in dying before I did, too, preceding Julia on my list of fortunate people felled relatively early by heart attack.
I was the renowned wit, but it was Max, ultimately, who proved to have the better sense of timing.
10