Belong to Me: A Novel Read online

  Still, now that Kyle had appeared, she registered his appearance with pleasure. The fine cloth and cut of his shirt, his suit-pant cuffs resting on his shoes in just the right spot, the precise and recent haircut. He was the very picture of a man who’d spent the last nine hours performing a lucrative, enviable job in a tastefully appointed office. And she admired the way these indicators of a well-spent day were balanced by the absence of jacket and tie, the smallest whisper of a five o’clock shadow, the gentle ruffling of his hair, as though he’d run a hand through it in the car on the way to the school.

  If he’d shown up in full, polished workday regalia, like a couple of the other men had, Piper would have experienced a distaste bordering on repulsion, but Kyle’s note of unstudied casualness, of not trying too hard was the right note to strike, and Piper loved it when people struck the right note.

  This was something Piper kept to herself, knowing that it could make her sound snobbish, which she didn’t so much mind, and also shallow, which she minded more, but she also knew that her love of the right note wasn’t evidence of snobbery or shallowness, not really. While she would never have put it quite this way, for Piper, appropriateness meant the opposite of chaos; Piper’s trust in it was akin to other people’s trust in God.

  Just two nights ago she’d woken from one of her usual nightmares—Carter sinking into quicksand or her daughter, Meredith, bouncing out of the convertible Piper drove, vanishing, screaming, over the edge of the roadside cliff—and calmed herself by remembering the socks she’d bought that day. Athletic socks, thin but not too thin, rising to just above the knobby bone of her inner ankle for a slimming effect (not that Piper’s ankles were thick, but she had to admit—not publicly of course—that they were not her best feature), at twelve dollars a pair, expensive but not ridiculously so.

  The crowning glory of the socks was their apparent seamlessness. Ever since Piper could remember, she’d hated the sensation of a sock seam across her toes. Her father used to tell stories of an infant Piper tugging at her socks and weeping, and Piper herself vividly remembered slipping into the cloakroom at school, sometimes three times a day, to remove her shoes and twist her socks back to the least uncomfortable position. These new socks were wholly suitable—perfect for kickboxing class, perfect for step class, perfect for jogging on the treadmill—and recalling their suitability, picturing them, four pair, white and folded, like sleeping butterflies, in her drawer, slowed Piper’s racing heart and mind, chased away her terror.

  As Kyle approached, Piper stood to greet him. The plastic cup of red wine in his hand precluded a hug—Piper wore white pants—but she smiled at him and gave his arm a squeeze.

  “Hey, pretty wife,” he said, “sorry I’m late.”

  “You’re not,” said Piper, running a hand along his arm, restoring the crease in his shirtsleeve where she’d squeezed it, “not very. A few minutes. Did you say hello to Bob and Betsy yet? They’re over in the corner, near the early reader shelves. He’s wearing a golf shirt.”

  “I just got here, Pipe,” Kyle said, a little wearily.

  “A golf shirt,” repeated Piper, musingly. “You think that means he decided to take that early retirement offer?”

  “I don’t know. I can ask,” said Kyle. His voice grew vehement. “He’d be a fool not to.”

  “Because of that golden parachute, you mean,” said Piper, raising her eyebrows and glancing again at Bob and Betsy. Bob was laughing at something; Piper noticed the pale skin around his eyes, a sunglasses tan.

  Kyle looked at Piper. “That, too.”

  “It means he’s expendable, though, which has to hurt.” Piper’s gaze drifted over her husband’s shoulder. “Oh, God, there’s Tom,” said Piper. “I should go talk to him. He looks like hell.” Tom Donahue was Piper’s best friend Elizabeth’s husband, and he did look like hell, although there was nothing remarkable about this fact. For months, ever since Elizabeth’s battle with cancer had begun, “like hell” had been Tom Donahue’s standard look.

  Piper smiled up at Kyle. “Give Bob and Betsy my best? Tell them we’ll do dinner soon. Okay? We’ll throw something on the grill. They’re over near the early reader books.” She gave him a tiny push in the proper direction. “Okay?”

  Kyle took a long sip of his wine, and his eyes did the squinting thing they did when he was thinking of something else. Fleetingly, it occurred to Piper that Kyle’s eyes had been doing the squinting thing a lot lately. If she didn’t know him better, if she’d been a different kind of wife, she might suspect that he was harboring secrets. The thought of Kyle with a secret life was so preposterous that it made Piper smile. Kyle noticed the smile, smiled back, and said, “Okay, honey. Will do.”

  Piper made her way over to Tom, who still stood just inside the library entrance, his arms hanging at his sides, his shoulders slightly hunched, and Piper couldn’t stand it that he stood that way, couldn’t stand the way he drew in breath after deep breath, as though he were preparing to swim the English Channel instead of to step into an ordinary room full of people he knew.

  For God’s sake, thought Piper, would you pull yourself together?

  All the women Piper knew agreed that Tom Donahue was a good-looking guy. He had a slightly-too-long, angular face—a face that would look at home under a cowboy hat in an old Western—offset by big, winsome blue eyes, baby’s eyes almost, with long, thick lashes. But when Elizabeth got sick—as soon as she was diagnosed, Piper thought bitterly, on the way home in the goddamn car—he’d begun to lose weight, to appear almost monstrously gaunt and hollow-eyed and lost. Defeated, Piper thought. Walking around the house with defeat written all over him, while his wife fought the battle of her life, a battle that wasn’t over, not by a long shot.

  “Tom touches me like I’m made of glass,” Elizabeth had told her a few weeks ago.

  Piper had followed Elizabeth’s gaze out her kitchen window to the backyard, where the sprinkler swept its great fan of water back and forth with languorous grace. Like a dancer, thought Piper, like a manta ray. The sprinkler’s beauty made her want to cry.

  She’d looked at Elizabeth, wondering if she’d noticed the sprinkler, too. But Elizabeth was running a finger around the rim of her teacup. “Not just like I’m fragile, but like I’m made of something besides flesh and blood. Like I’ve already turned into something else.” Elizabeth paused. “Although he’s probably not thinking that. Probably it’s just the way he makes me feel.”

  Suddenly, Piper had felt so angry she couldn’t speak. Silently, she’d swooped up their two cups of the vomit-tasting, curative tea some college friend had sent Elizabeth, strode over to the sink, and emptied them with vigor, the green-brown splashes ugly and dramatic against the white porcelain. Piper had stared into the sink for a long moment, then had turned around, smiled at Elizabeth, and said brightly, “Someone had to put that tea out of our misery.”

  When she saw Tom standing in the school library like a tired, frightened old man, the anger flared again, fresh and hot, but Piper felt people watching. She was aware of all those eyes full of sympathy for Tom. Poor bastard, thought the men. Poor sweet man, thought the women. Piper could almost hear the words.

  “Elizabeth’s the one who’s sick,” she wanted to tell them all, “and she’s getting better.” She wanted to scream it, but instead she gave Tom a reassuring hug, then took his arm and led him into the room. Piper felt the eyes on her now, imagined the voices saying, “Piper’s been a rock for that family,” and despite her anger and her huge, genuine worry, she felt a twinge of pleasure.

  She walked Tom over to the long table at one end of the room and poured him a cup of wine. Tom thanked her, took the cup, and was about to sip from it when he noticed the poster hanging over the table. An illustration of two pigs in party hats and a parrot hovering between them against a yellow background.

  “I recognize that,” he said, quietly. “I think my kids have that book.”

  “Toot and Puddle,” supplied Piper. Probably
every woman in the room would recognize those pigs, she thought. “And Tulip. The parrot’s name is Tulip.”

  Tom knitted his brows, then shook his head mournfully. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said with heavy consternation.

  Piper resisted a strong, sudden urge to punch Tom in the stomach or at least give his upper arm a hard, twisting pinch the way her mother had done whenever Piper had acted up in public. A grown man getting maudlin about a pair of pigs and a parrot. Lighten the fuck up, thought Piper.

  “No worries,” said Piper, with a light laugh. “Kyle wouldn’t know Toot and Puddle from the Cat in the Hat. And he might not know the Cat in the Hat.”

  Tom turned his sad eyes on Piper. “Elizabeth does most of the reading out loud around our house,” he said, bleakly. “She does voices and everything.”

  Piper would’ve socked him then, she was sure of it, but at that moment the headmaster, Rupert “Roop” Patterson, a short man with a thunderous voice, bellowed cheerfully, “I hate to interrupt this good time, but the prekindergarten teachers have put together a short presentation on what your children can expect over the next year. It’ll make you wish you were four years old again, I guarantee it!”

  Tom looked at his watch. “How long is this supposed to take?” he asked Piper. “The sitter needs to be home by nine o’clock.”

  Piper was the one who felt socked. “You got a sitter?” she said, biting out the words, one by one. “Did Elizabeth ask you to?”

  There was no sign that Tom had picked up on her tone. “No. I just called her. Abby Lau. We usually use her sister Lauren, but she broke a tooth this morning. She was playing tennis. It’s Abby’s first babysitting job, but she seems very mature for her age. Has to be home early though.”

  Grimly, Piper took hold of Tom’s elbow and steered him toward the seats.

  “How do you break a tooth playing tennis?” mused Tom, shaking his head.

  With an intense concentration of effort, Piper loosened her grip on his elbow. “I cannot imagine,” she said.

  It happened again in the middle of the pre-K presentation. Just as the teachers were beginning to describe the road to reading readiness, the ophthalmologist’s back reappeared, pushed its way through years and years to arrive still damp, the muscles finely articulated and breathtakingly symmetrical. So breathtakingly symmetrical that, before she could stop herself, Piper gasped.

  Oh, God, thought Piper, trying to shake off the memory with a slight shake of her head, what is wrong with me?

  This was her first official night as a Tallyrand parent; on one side of her sat her husband in the blue-verging-on-purple shirt she’d bought him for his birthday; on the other side sat the drooping scarecrow who was once the handsome, capable husband of her sick best friend, the drooping scarecrow who had hired a thirteen-year-old to care for his children, as though their mother weren’t right there, at home, with them. “You can’t be trusted anymore,” he might as well have told Elizabeth. “You’re already gone.” And here Piper sat, almost shaking with longing to touch a man she’d slept with a handful of times ages ago, a man she’d barely known and had never, not for one second, not even in her imagination, loved.

  Leave, she told the back, you have no business being here.

  “Resist the urge to push,” one teacher was saying—not Carter’s teacher, Carter’s was the younger, curly-haired one. Distractedly, Piper noticed that the teacher who spoke was wearing a pair of Taryn Rose sandals. Piper had tried on the same sandal in white at the beginning of the summer and had nixed it as too expensive. The teacher had chosen the red patent. Piper would never have chosen the red patent. The teacher continued, “What’s most important at this stage is getting them to feel at home with books.”

  Listen to this, Piper told herself, reading readiness is important. Reading readiness is crucial. She tried to think of her son’s face, the cornflower blue eyes she found unspeakably beautiful. Whenever Piper read to him, she’d look down to find him watching her. “Look at the book, sweetheart,” she’d prompt him, gently. “What do you think that pig there is thinking?” Or sometimes, “This letter’s an A. I think it looks kind of like a tent. Do you think it looks kind of like a tent?”

  Carter was intelligent, Piper knew that. But his intelligence wasn’t the kind that drew attention to itself. He wasn’t a show-off. Piper believed that Carter knew all his letters by sight, but, honestly, there were moments when he’d regard the alphabet refrigerator magnets so blankly, she couldn’t be positive. When the Tallyrand acceptance letter had arrived, she’d gone into the walk-in pantry and sobbed with relief. Whenever Piper thought about this moment, she would touch a hand to her ribs, remembering how the sobbing had made them ache.

  “Let them know that books are their friends,” the teacher was saying, and Piper repeated the words under her breath.

  Piper didn’t discover the reason for the ophthalmologist’s back’s sudden appearance until the following afternoon. She and Elizabeth were sitting in the big sunroom off Elizabeth’s big dining room, an unusual spot for them. Their usual spot was the kitchen, of course. As with all of Piper’s adult friendships, hers and Elizabeth’s took the form of a long string of conversations in kitchens. On playgrounds and at poolsides, too, but everything real, everything monumental between them had happened in kitchens. And Elizabeth’s kitchen was gorgeous since the remodeling last year. They’d knocked down a wall, gutted the old butler’s pantry, and gone high-end with everything: Sub-Zero, Viking, hardwood cabinets, Italian tile, and magnificent black granite countertops. The custom, built-in wine cooler loomed almost six feet high.

  Piper and Kyle had been privately skeptical of the expense. Supposedly, kitchen improvements paid for themselves at resale, but Piper and Kyle had their doubts. Still, Piper couldn’t argue with the kitchen’s beauty, especially the new windows—nearly the whole back wall was windows—the way the abundance of light deepened the honey color of the floors and set the countertops flashing with secret glints of pearl and blue. At certain times of day, the light appeared to billow into and expand the room, like air filling a balloon. If Piper had been in the habit of taking inventory of such things, she’d have realized that Elizabeth’s kitchen was her favorite place on earth.

  But when she’d arrived at Elizabeth’s house that afternoon, Elizabeth’s “Come on in, Pipe” had come from the sunroom instead, a room that, despite its name, was rather dim and cool due to the enormous (and, in Piper’s opinion, ridiculously, even horrifyingly, overgrown) rhododendrons that bordered the exterior of the room on two sides.

  Elizabeth reclined in a white armchair, her hair—the hair she’d been so grateful to keep—unbrushed and loose on her shoulders, her feet propped on the matching ottoman. The chair and ottoman represented an overstuffed style of furniture that Piper had always disliked, finding it bloated and mushroomy. Elizabeth looked frail in the huge chair, but as soon as Piper noticed this, she reminded herself that a fat, stupid chair like that would make anyone look small. She felt a twitch of annoyance, two twitches, one at Elizabeth for owning such a chair, and another at Elizabeth for sitting in it.

  “It’s a gazillion degrees out there, Betts,” Piper said. “If I don’t have iced tea running down my throat in two minutes, I will pass out.”

  Elizabeth smiled wanly and gestured in the direction of the kitchen. “Go for it.”

  “Okay, well, come on,” said Piper, her annoyance mounting. “Come with me and have some, too. I’ll grab a handful of that mint out of the backyard.”

  Piper extended her hand to help Elizabeth out of the chair, and Elizabeth took it, but she didn’t pull herself up. She just held Piper’s hand in hers and looked at Piper with an uncommonly sweet, tired affection in her eyes. Somehow, it was the last kind of look Piper wanted to see. No, she thought. She wanted Elizabeth out of that chair. She wanted Elizabeth to have iced tea in the kitchen. She gave her hand a tug, but Elizabeth shook her head.

  “You go ahead,” she said in a quiet, fi
rm voice. That’s more like it, thought Piper, releasing her friend’s hand. Elizabeth was famous for her stubborn streak.

  When Piper got back with her drink, Elizabeth was sitting up in the chair with her legs Indian style instead of stretched out on the ottoman and with her hair smoothed back into a ponytail. Piper felt like singing at the sight of her. She set the glasses of iced tea down on the coffee table, then pulled the ottoman several feet away from the chair, out of Elizabeth’s reach, and sat down on it, crossing her own legs.

  “Crisscross applesauce,” she said, giddily.

  “I have a bone to pick with you, lady,” said Elizabeth, narrowing her eyes. “You’ve been holding back about our new neighbor. Time to come clean.”

  “What do you mean holding back?”

  Piper had told Elizabeth about the cocktail party, about Cornelia’s ludicrously skimpy black dress and condescending jokes, the way she’d thrown her supposed sophistication in everyone’s faces. “And she had Carter’s exact haircut, I swear to God. And four-inch-high ‘do-me’ shoes.” “Fuck-me” is what she’d meant, but Piper only ever swore in her head. If she had been being completely honest, she’d have had to retract the bit about the shoes. Yes, they were high, but they were understated enough in other ways, little pale gold sandals with thin straps. But Piper could tweak a detail here and there if she felt like it, couldn’t she? She wasn’t a reporter for the New York Times, was she?

  “I mean the hunky husband! What else would I mean?” Elizabeth removed the lemon wedge from the lip of her glass and threw it at Piper. “Holdout!”

  “Oh, him,” said Piper, laughing and, in a single motion, scooping the lemon wedge off Elizabeth’s antique Persian and tossing it in the wastepaper basket in the corner of the room.

  “Yes, him. Parvee Patel-Price nearly had a heart attack this morning. She dropped off some food for us on her way to work…”