“You believe that?” His tone was easy enough, but his eyes settled on hers.
“Yes,” she said, and she found she was serious too. “I do.” She was the same as when she had been a kid. The reliable child who stuck Stouffer’s lasagnas in the microwave for herself and Sarah for dinner, who kept track of her sister’s orthodontist appointments, who made sure that someone stopped at Vicente for milk in the morning. She was the same girl who followed the rules, who liked having rules, the type of kid who got high and got the munchies for salad, of all things. She had a hard time forgiving herself, then and now. (“So you fucked up,” Claudia would say with a shrug. “Who hasn’t?”) Being here in L.A., her father’s death, hurtled her back to being seventeen and the one mistake she felt like she could never undo. For years as she ticked off each accomplishment—graduating from a fine college, getting into a top law school, landing an associate position in the appellate department of a reputable firm—she felt like she was trying to prove, to her father and to herself, that that one night didn’t define her.
It tired her, this realization. And it made her feel, for reasons she wasn’t quite sure she could articulate, lonely. She hung a shrimp by its tail, dragging it through a glistening pool of oil. “You obviously feel differently, though.”
Max didn’t answer for a moment. “Yes, I do,” he finally said. “Partly it’s my line of work, and partly it’s a question of age. I believe you can make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes—”
“Of course—”
“But sometimes making such a mistake—an irrevocable mistake, with true repercussions—is what makes you change. You see the way things might have been, and they’re not like that, because you messed up. Undeniably. I’ve seen it with clients. Things that you thought might not be such a big deal, things that you thought you might be able to explain away, loom large. There’s nothing you can do about them.” He played with the lip of a squat unlit candle in the table’s center. “And maybe it’s regret like that that fuels change.”
“Of course,” Lizzie repeated. “But as long as you’re not talking about mass murder . . .” It was a lame stab at lightness, and the second she said it, she regretted it. He had defended murderers. He knew about regret.
Or he could be referring to his divorce, the wreckage of his marriage. He had a stepdaughter, Lizzie remembered, a shy little girl she met years ago at Joseph’s house, poolside. What was her name? She must be close to college age now, Lizzie thought.
She sipped her sangria. “Sometimes I think I regret too much,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in some parts of my life, I have a hard time letting go. I wish I could just make a decision and not look back, move on.” It was strange to hear herself admit this, and so freely too. Had she ever spoken to Max for more than ten, fifteen minutes at a time?
“Who does?” Max looked at her with his eyes grayer than blue, the color of rushing water.
“Most of the world, apparently.” She was thinking of Claudia and her sister when she said this, wishing she could be more like them.
“You don’t really believe that, do you? If it’s something truly important?”
“No,” she said. “I suppose not.” He was still watching her, and she hoped what he was seeing did not disappoint him.
She looked past Max, beyond the restaurant patio. Out on the sidewalk, a man in a dirty puffy parka rattled a shopping cart crammed with objects. She spotted a desk lamp, a sofa cushion. The air was growing cooler, the day shifting. Lizzie could see across the street a strip of park lined with prehistoric palms. Beyond it she could make out the rising lift of fog. The water and the sky seemed to commingle, bleeding together in the same implacable color of bone.
“You know, your father used to tell me what a good lawyer you were,” Max said. “He was very proud of you.”
“Thank you,” she said a little too quickly; the mention of her father cracked something open in her. She liked to think Max was right. She could remember the evident pleasure etched across her father’s face that warm May day when she graduated from law school. They stood on the corner of Amsterdam and 116th, among a sea of graduates in shiny blue robes, and he kept grabbing her hand as they tried to catch a cab down to Jean-Georges. She thought of the time they went to the fish market on Wilshire last summer. When it was finally their turn, her father introduced her to the young fishmonger plunging his hand into a vat of raw shrimp. “Ed, this is my daughter, the lawyer from New York,” Joseph told him, and Ed looked up and barely muttered hello to Lizzie, but there was no denying the pride in Joseph’s voice.
Did her father know how much she adored him? He did, didn’t he?
The terrace was nearly empty. An old couple was barely talking, and at a round table sat a trio of young women, lipsticked and bright-eyed. One kept repeating loudly—“So I said, ‘just leave your pants on! Leave them on!’”—as her friends hooted and guffawed. How was it possible that all these people were here and her father gone?
“Tell me something else about my dad.” Lizzie, her voice shaky, turned back to Max. “Tell me something I don’t know.” She picked at the Manchego.
“Let’s see, a story about Joseph,” Max said. “Well, you know how we met.”
“My father started coming into your parents’ gallery.”
“Yes, I was working there during law school, helping my parents who were helping me. It was at the start of your father’s collecting frenzy, and he was”—Max paused— “immeasurably proud of his recent endeavors.”
“So he offered you some ridiculously low price on a Modigliani sketch,” she guessed, “thinking he knew more than you did, and you refused.”
“Not quite. He came in carrying a painting that he had found at an estate sale. A Utrillo. He had been very happy with his purchase.” Max fell silent for a moment, and gave her a small smile. “And I had the distinct pleasure of telling him it was a forgery.”
“Really?” How had she never heard this story before? “He must have hated that,” she said, but it pleased her, the thought of this unlikely start to their friendship.