That Part Was True Read Free Page B

how to respond to it, so she sent Ollie to fetch some champagne and busied herself for a moment squeezing orange juice.
    Izzy, recovering quickly, sitting, and finding that firm ground again between ersatz and heartfelt, went on, “And you needn’t ask. I’m not.”
    Eve washed the orange juice from her hands and set the husks aside for candying. In fact, it had not crossed her mind that Izzy might be pregnant. Izzy had known the circumstances of Eve’s own marriage because Virginia had told her—at too delicate an age, Eve had always thought. But she had felt at least that the knowledge might discourage Izzy from marrying for only that reason. Not, she realized now, that Izzy would. Times were different and Izzy was different. Different from Eve.
    â€œI won’t be waddling down the aisle like a hippo,” Izzy announced, straying back into false notes, but nevertheless confirming Eve’s thoughts.
    Eve did not respond. The issue done with, she initiated the toast, Ollie had opened the champagne, and “Congratulations,” she said again. “Here’s to many happy years.” She lifted her glass to the two young faces. Too young probably, she thought, and yet older than I was.
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    â€œHe’ll be wandering before the end of the honeymoon,” Virginia had said. Eve had heard the click of her gold compact case through the cubicle door in the ornate powder room of the restaurant where Simon Petworth, her husband-to-be, debonair beyond his years, had treated a group of friends and family to dinner to celebrate their engagement.
    â€œOh, I don’t know,” Dodo, Virginia’s only close friend, replied, “She’s very pretty. And you can never tell with those quiet types.”
    Eve, holding her breath for fear of discovery, which would have made the ghastly overhearing even ghastlier, could imagine them, intent on their own reflections, fiddling with their hair and applying lipstick.
    â€œBelieve me, I can tell,” Virginia’s voice went on. “He can’t keep it in his pants and she’s as exciting as boiled cabbage.”
    Eve, nineteen years old and nine weeks into her first trimester, had thought that she might faint then, but she hadn’t. What she had done was to resign herself, over the sound of her mother’s laughter, to the swift loss of her husband’s affections. Like a bird, whose heart gives out before the cat has killed it.

Chapter Two
    Jack, loosened by moonlight and boozing and a long evening’s philosophical talk with Dex, said, “She had a Ford.”
    The subject of Marnie’s departure had come up again, and this time he hadn’t resisted it. “I thought it was too domestic looking. Your wife’s lover’s car oughtta be something foreign. Something with flair, don’t ya think?”
    â€œA Porsche,” Dex suggested.
    â€œExactly. This was a station wagon. It had a bumper sticker on it that said, ‘I Heart Books.’”
    They both thought about this for a moment.
    â€œThat’s when I knew I really didn’t care enough,” Jack said, “when I realized that the element of the situation that I found most offensive was the ‘I Heart Books’ bumper sticker.”
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    The next day they were wordlessly engaged in the purposeful imbibing of medicinal bloody Marys, bacon, and pancakes on the back deck in the late morning sunshine when a light, female voice floated to them from the side of the house.
    â€œHello?”
    Jack, despite not recognizing the voice, tensed. He’d been parking his car in the garage, instead of leaving it in the driveway with the keys in the ignition as he usually did, for the past two weeks in order to avoid Lisa. So far, he’d managed it. She’d left a message on his telephone, though, and then, two nights before, had come to the kitchen door and, finding it locked, moved around to the front of the