I met them at the Russian Tea Room. Really stiff place, not our usual kind of meeting spot but then I’d rarely hung out with these two like this, just us three. They were so nice, don’t get me wrong. They were good parents, even at the start, they were great people. They were just two great people that shouldn't have gotten married.
Mark was seeing Frances by then, June probably knew, and if June knew by that point then she knew I knew. If she hadn’t known by then she certainly knew by the end of that lunch, I’ve always been told that my face never hid anything.
So it was me and Mark and June then sitting at the table, the shadow of Frances behind my eyes, even though Mark never seemed to betray it. And what can I say, they were great, as always. If a fourth person was watching us, or if you asked the waiter maybe, I don’t think they’d say anything was off, just three friends meeting, just a man and his wife and their friend. The waiter wouldn’t say that exactly, the waiter knew who Mark was, most people at least recognized Mark, even if they didn’t watch TV or movies.
When he and June met, it was before his career really took off. It was back when he was still thinking of following his mother’s lead, going into law. He didn’t have the knack for it, that’s how he would say it. I would say he didn’t try too hard but he probably tried as hard was he could knowing it was never going to make him very happy, especially knowing it never made his mother anything but frayed at the ends. June was at the same school with him and then she packed up and moved with him out West and that’s when I met her, when she already had her first son and the second was on the way. I’m looking at her now, June I mean, and her eyes are the same, maybe they’re deeper but everyone’s probably get deeper as they get older.
She’s not eating anything. Mark is ravenous or he’s acting it. I’m fluttering in between them, acting like I’m the important one here keeping things together when really I know I’m doing the opposite. If Mark was less cool, if Mark was the old Mark, he’d be giving me the eye now, trying to lower my blood pressure by force of will. Where was I?
His career got big all of the sudden. It was a long road I mean, the long road part was full of rejection emails and some of the saddest voicemails you’ve ever heard but she stood next to him through it, June, and eventually the all-of-the-sudden started. The role was supposed to go to someone else and odd enough that guy died and suddenly Mark had a lead and everything after was blurry and fast and he had to figure out how to be known by the waiters and the he had to talk to these people he had only been reading the lines of and a thousand other personality altering things needed to happen quickly. I know how it sounds coming from me here. It sounds like I’m making excuses for him and maybe I am but if I am it’s only because I know a little bit about what it’s like, not only watching Mark go through it but I had a small batch of that as well, so did a few of my friends. And one person who knew all that just as well as him was Frances.
Frances, the one not at the table but the one who might as well be sitting on top of it, was someone Mark met in school. Not east-coast ivy-and-old-brick lawyer school but west-coast hippie-dippie school where you had to learn all the ways and methods and screaming and crying and all that. I don’t know exactly, I’ve only heard stories. But Brando went there so it must work a little right? Anyway that’s where they met. She knew he was married, he knew she knew. The way he would talk about it, and I think he’d be fine with me saying it, the way he described it was inevitable and unavoidable and “heavier” than anything before. “Anything before” I took to mean his meeting June but I don’t know that for sure. Frances had been three steps ahead of Mark you see, so he looked to her for how to do things, he looked to her for how to act, around new people and the writers and the old friends that didn’t get it and a thousand other things. He met her through her agent even. The agent introduced him to her as his next new guy and that’s how they saw each other that first time, isn’t that something. And more than that, and I hope this is alright to say, him looking to her in this way, this admiration and upper-classmen way, it was hard for him not to fall. His thing with her was so different in that way, than his thing with June. Even the directions he looked were the opposite, it felt like. I can feel this getting away from me.
So back to this lunch. Mark being Mark; for how much range allegedly had, he was extraordinarily consistent in times like these. June being June too. Light, an easy conversationalist, but, and this is my read so don’t go around saying it’s fact, she had another layer behind her eyes, a curtain. She watched me squirm and she knew that I knew I think. She sat there, never touching her fork, while I waffled and equivocated and hedged and mutilated a cobb salad I was half allergic to. And then me, the waffler, who just wanted to know who died or who was getting married or who I owed money to. Get to the point of this meeting and let me go home.
Eventually Mark did. Of course it was after he finished his lunch and his cocktail and his second cocktail but eventually he did finish and it turns out they were going on a trip, the four of them and they wanted to know if I’d watch the apartment and I laughed and felt my shirt sticking to my back with sweat and said yes and the relief wasn’t even worth hiding. After that it was another set of blurs and handshakes and I don’t even know who paid I just remember getting home and planning my apology to Mark over basically drawing a map of his affair.
I never apologized though. I convinced myself I was overreacting, maybe because I’m Irish and it was easier to do that than actually have the confrontation over it. And it didn’t matter anyway because years later I would find out June had known before that lunch, a year or two before. The affair would go another 3 years if you could believe it. She stuck it out because her parents had and her parents parents had and that was that. But eventually he’d marry Frances and to do that he had to break it off with June. By then he was someone else though. He had too many trophies, and they all got too heavy maybe.
They really were great though. They were two really good people. ■