Adam didn’t, either. But that’s different, of course.
Adam. Polly is, with the help of Mr. C’s wife, knitting him a sweater. She tries to tell herself that it will be more meaningful than any store-bought gift. And if a better knitter was working on it, this would be true. The fact is, even the wool, a sky blue that matches his eyes, strains her pocketbook. She’s beginning to think she will never have any money, that it was all a dream. Everything, her entire life, is a dream. There was never a girl in a yellow two-piece. She didn’t marry Burton Ditmars. There is no Joy, no Jani. There are no fires, no schemes, no Cath. She is not in Belleville. She never met Adam.
But her imagination snags; she cannot imagine life without Adam. For better or worse, this is her life. Lately, it’s all for the better.
She wonders what Adam will give her for Christmas. She tries to catalog the gifts she received from Ditmars and Gregg, making it a memory game.
She remembers:
A nightgown. The first Christmas with Ditmars. There was still hope.
A vacuum. The third Christmas with Ditmars.
A sweater. Not cashmere, but something almost as soft. Christmas number two?
Earrings. Amber, dangly. He liked dangly earrings. That was Christmas number two, the sweater was number three, the vacuum cleaner number four.
A Sony Walkman. Gregg, their first year. He wanted one, so he assumed she wanted one.
A pear tree. “Partridge not included,” Gregg joked upon presenting her with it on Christmas Eve. Bizarre, but she had liked him better for it. It hinted at some version of her that he had in his head, something funny and quirky. The kind of gift that a woman in a romantic comedy might get from a would-be suitor.
He probably saw it at some Christmas tree lot near a liquor store, while he was buying El Gordo lottery tickets.
She cannot, try as she might, needles clicking faster and faster as if to keep pace with her whirring memory, remember what Ditmars gave her their last Christmas together. She has heard somewhere that when it comes to a list of seven or more, whether it’s the dwarfs or the nine Supreme Court justices, the memory always comes up one short. But then, she also has heard that it was possible to memorize seven-digit phone numbers in a way that we can never remember the new ten-digit ones. The ten-digit numbers aren’t truly new, but they became common while she was in prison, and she thinks of the world that way, as if the years between her two selves, her two marriages, aren’t real. Those years are like scar tissue, the purplish, rubbery damage done by burns, thick and marbled.
Polly has a burn like that, high on her thigh, so high that a modest, skirted swimsuit can conceal it. By the time a man sees it, he doesn’t know how to ask about it. How does one get a burn there, beneath the curve of the right ass cheek? How does something hot touch that almost hidden place? How long would it have to be held there to do that kind of damage?
No one wants to hear the real answers to questions like that. No one. She has to assume as much, because Gregg never asked. Adam never asks. The scar might as well be a tattoo: If you can see this, you are too close.
She’s going too fast, and she’s dropped a stitch. Mrs. C showed her the fix for that, but it doesn’t come naturally to Polly. She wants to think that Adam won’t notice, but she’s kidding herself. He notices everything.
He’s certainly going to notice when she’s suddenly rich, but she already has a story picked out for when that day comes. Which will be soon, she’s pretty sure. It better be soon.
41
Adam can’t figure out how to make his move to Belleville plausible. There’s work enough, up in Wilmington, for someone who knows how to investigate insurance fraud, but how does he convince Polly that he fell into that line of work. She’ll see through him, she’ll figure out that he came into her life as a PI, murder riding his coattails. Will there ever be a right time, a right way, to come clean?
He distracts himself by deciding to drop a bundle on her Christmas gift, going into the once sacrosanct account, the money his mother left him. He can almost hear his mother whispering to him when he transfers $5,000 from his inheritance account to his regular checking. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to impress someone who truly loves you.
Of course, he doesn’t have to spend the whole amount. Money can always be transferred back.
But he does spend it all, and then some. He goes to Washington, D.C., one of those old-line jewelers who buzzes you in, assuming you don’t look like trouble, and Adam, with his blue eyes, always makes the cut. Adam knows Polly likes old stuff, vintage, but he’s helpless when the guy starts throwing terms at him. Art deco, art nouveau. He shrugs, wishing it wasn’t the owner himself waiting on him. He’d feel better confessing his ignorance to a woman, someone young and romantic who would be charmed by a man’s good intentions toward his girlfriend.
His eye is drawn to a diamond solitaire in an old-fashioned setting, really simple. It’s a whopper by his standards, almost two carats and, of course, the guy has to blah-blah-blah about purity and cut and resale value, how unusual good canary diamonds are. Adam has done enough divorce work to know that the resale value of gems is almost always overstated.
But he likes that this ring is simple. No pavé diamonds surrounding the stone, a slender platinum band. He’s not sure if it’s to her taste, but it looks like her, clear and bold and beautiful, with a flicker of light at the center.
It’s also $6,000. He dickers with the guy, gets him down to $5,200, barters his time. He probably could make Polly just as happy with a cheaper version of this ring, something from one of the mall stores. God knows, if she finds out what he spent, she’ll probably be angry at him. Five thousand dollars in their current circumstances could carry them to next summer, to a time when the High-Ho is thronged once more. She’s talking about the bed-and-breakfast business again, which strikes him as crazy. Escoffier reincarnated could open a restaurant in Belleville and it wouldn’t do enough business to go year-round.
He’s glad, watching the guy pack up the ring, that he came to this kind of shop. You can fool a woman with a ring, if it’s pretty and shiny enough. But you can’t fake the box, the presentation. This velvet box is a deep, deep blue, and when he looks at the inside, he wishes they made beds for people as soft and billowy as the white satin on which this ring sits.
He’ll wrap the velvet box inside something bigger, surrounding it with tissue, maybe even weighted things, to maintain the illusion. Maybe he’ll get a box for a hand mixer or a Dustbuster. He imagines her taking it from under whatever kind of tree they put up. Christmas Eve, not Christmas morning. The best gifts are the ones you open on Christmas Eve, whether you’re a kid allowed to open just one present before Santa arrives or, well, an almost forty-year-old guy who’s going to go down on one knee, say words he never thought he’d say again to anyone.
Or maybe, he thinks that evening, nursing a beer, waiting for her to finish up at the High-Ho, the blue velvet box like a tiny happy bomb in the pocket of his leather jacket, he’ll propose to her here. That’s it. He’ll reenact the night they met, then slide the box to her, cool as cool. What did she say that night? It was funny, he remembers that. He’d been trying to mock his own pretensions, called himself an asshole and she had one-upped him. Then later, she had made a joke about being a Pink Lady apple.
It’s so hard now to remember being dispassionate about her. Maybe he never was.
“Ready to go?” she says at closing time.
“Sure thing,” he says.