Chapter 116 – Discussion at the Birthday Party
On the drive back, Phoebe was still cheerfully reviewing the highlights of her catering debut, apparently quite pleased with how the evening had gone. Monica was quiet in the passenger seat, watching the city slide past the window, her mind somewhere else entirely.
At a red light on Columbus, she finally said it.
"Phoebe. What do you think of Richard Burke?"
Phoebe turned in her seat with the expression of someone who had been waiting for exactly this question. "Oh, he is absolutely gone for you. And you're the same way. The energy between you two could power the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree for a month." She said it with the cheerful certainty of someone stating a well-established fact. "You should ask him out."
"What? No." Monica shook her head. "That's — no. He's a friend of my parents. He's been my eye doctor since I was twelve. He's significantly older than me, and he literally just finalized his divorce."
"So?" Phoebe shrugged. "None of that is actually a reason."
Monica didn't argue further. She just drove. But Phoebe's words had a way of settling into places you didn't intend to let them, and by the time she pulled up in front of her building, they were already there.
A few days later, Monica booked an eye appointment at Richard's practice.
The exam itself was routine and professional. What followed, in the quiet of his office after the last patient had left, was not. The conversation started with something mundane — a question about contact lens solution, or possibly follow-up care, the specifics of it dissolved quickly — and then, in one of those moments that happens before you've consciously decided to let it, they kissed.
It was tentative and warm and then considerably less tentative, and the age gap and the family history and every sensible reason this was complicated all receded to a perfectly manageable distance.
When Monica told Ross, she told him directly, because there was no version of this conversation that benefited from a slow approach.
Ross stopped moving. "Dr. Burke." He said it as a statement, quietly, the way someone repeats a word to make sure they heard it correctly. Then the volume increased. "Richard Burke? Dad's Richard Burke? You're dating — you and Dr. Burke are—" He started pacing. "I like him. I genuinely like the man. He came to my Little League games. He has known me since I was nine years old. This is—" He stopped, searching for the word. "Why does this make me feel like I've walked into a parallel universe?"
"Because you're being dramatic," Monica said.
Rachel and Phoebe, who were on the couch and had been watching this with the attentive pleasure of a live sporting event, both nodded. "He's wonderful," Rachel offered. "Mature, smart, genuinely charming."
Ross stared at them. "Dr. Burke is charming?"
"Incredibly," Phoebe confirmed.
Ross sat down heavily. His pager went off. He looked at it — the museum — and set it face-down on the table, because he was not emotionally equipped for two things at once right now.
"He kissed me once, actually," Rachel said, in the tone of someone remembering something pleasant.
Monica turned immediately. "When?"
"I was maybe six or seven? I fell off my bike in front of his house and scraped my knee, and he came out to check on me, and to stop me from crying he kissed me on the tip of my nose." She smiled at the memory. "I thought he was the most sophisticated man I'd ever met."
"That is the sweetest thing," Phoebe said, with genuine wistfulness.
Ross looked around at all three of them and said nothing, because there was nothing adequate to say.
Despite Ross's complicated feelings and the week or so it took him to recalibrate, Monica and Richard settled into something that moved quickly from tentative to serious in the way that sometimes happens when two people have both decided, without much fanfare, that this is real.
It was still early when Jack Geller's birthday arrived.
The party was held at the Geller family house out on Long Island — the large colonial on the quiet street where Ross and Monica had grown up, the one with the good backyard and the neighbors who always came to everything. Bruce drove out with Joey, Chandler, and Phoebe, the four of them arriving to find the driveway already full and the house already loud with the particular warm noise of a party that's been going for an hour.
Ross and Rachel were already there. Monica and Richard were there too, standing in the living room with the careful, polite distance of two people who are together but reading the room about how together to appear.
Bruce made his way through to find Jack Geller, offer birthday wishes, shake the appropriate hands — and then he stopped.
In the far corner of the living room, talking animatedly with Jack and two other men his age, were his parents.
His father, Tom White, was in a navy blazer and khakis, the combination he wore to anything that required looking put-together without feeling overdressed. His mother, Ellen White, was beside him, laughing at something Jack had just said, her hand on her husband's arm.
"Mom? Dad?" Bruce crossed the room. "What are you doing here?"
Tom White looked up and smiled. "Bruce. There you are." He clapped Jack Geller on the shoulder. "Jack invited us."
Jack turned around with the broad grin of a man who has successfully orchestrated a surprise. "Bruce! Yeah, your dad and I got reconnected — I think you gave me his number at your grandmother's thing, and we got to talking on the phone, and it turned out Tom and I go way back. We were in the same neighborhood growing up, lost touch, and once we got back in contact we couldn't figure out why we'd ever let that happen." He shook his head. "Judy and I have been to their restaurant three, four times now — the food is unbelievable. We've even been bowling. Tom, remember that gutter ball I threw at Leisure Lanes last month?"
Tom White laughed with the ease of a man who had told this story before and enjoyed it every time. "Jack, a gutter ball implies the ball at least started in the lane. What you did was something different."
The two men looked at each other and laughed, and Bruce had the slightly disorienting experience of watching his father and his best friend's father behave like people who had known each other for years.
"So it's my birthday," Jack said, turning back to Bruce with a shrug that communicated the obvious. "Of course I invited Tom and Ellen. What's a birthday without your good friends?"
Ellen White pulled her son in by the arm and looked him over with the thorough, slightly critical attention that mothers deploy when they haven't seen their children in a while. "You look thin," she said immediately.
"I'm not thin—"
"You've lost weight." She straightened his collar without asking permission. "You're not eating properly, are you. Where is Grace? She didn't come with you?"
"She has a case she's working through — she's going to try to make it later," Bruce said. "Mom, the film is going really well, we're almost into—"
"The film." Ellen nodded in a way that indicated she had heard about the film. "That's wonderful. Eat something."
Jack Geller spotted Richard coming through the living room doorway and immediately lit up with the energy of a man who has been waiting to have this particular conversation.
"Richard! Get over here!" He put his arm around Richard's shoulders with the familiarity of a thirty-year friendship. "We were just talking about you!"
"That's never a good sign," Richard said, shaking his hand.
"Oh, come on. I heard through Johnny that you've been seeing someone. A younger woman. Significantly younger." Jack looked around at the group with theatrical delight. "I think that calls for a full report. What's it like? You feel twenty years younger? Because you look it, I'll say that."
Richard smiled the patient smile of a man who has learned that Jack Geller, when in this particular mode, cannot be stopped, only managed. "Jack. You have no idea what you're talking about."
"He's blushing!" Jack pointed. "Tom, the man is blushing! Come on, Richard — Johnny said you told him you might actually be falling for this woman. That's not a casual thing. Who is she? What kind of person makes Richard Burke, who I have watched stay calm in every situation for thirty years, actually—"
Across the room, Ross had gone the color of someone who needs fresh air and is not going to ask for it.
In the kitchen, the party had a different frequency.
Monica was helping Judy and her friend Barbara set out the birthday cake and the dessert trays, a task that required precision and gave her something to do with her hands. Barbara, who Monica had known since childhood in the way you know your parents' friends — familiar, slightly formal, always slightly assessing — was stirring a salad with the meditative calm of someone whose mind was elsewhere.
"So," Barbara said, with the lightness of someone raising a subject they've been waiting to raise, "I heard through the grapevine that Richard Burke has been seeing someone. Quite a bit younger, apparently. Someone in the city." She looked up. "Is that true, Judy? You'd know."
Monica's piping bag kept moving. Steady. Controlled.
"I've heard something like that," Judy said, without looking up from the flowers she was pressing into the frosting. Her voice carried the particular dry precision of someone choosing words for effect. "Apparently he's shopping in a very different section these days."
Barbara made a sound of amused disdain. "Well. I imagine the conversation isn't exactly stimulating."
"Oh, at that age it's not conversation they're after," Judy said.
A glob of cream hit the counter. Monica set down the piping bag, found a dishcloth, and cleaned it up. "Sorry," she said. "Slipped."
Judy glanced at her daughter — a brief, measured look — and then back to Barbara. "Young and firm, I suppose, is its own qualification," she said, and Monica felt the words land the way they were intended to.
"Can we talk about something else?" Monica asked, her voice steady.
The two women moved on, eventually, in the way that conversations drift when they've made their point. Monica picked the piping bag back up and finished the cake. Her cheeks were warm and she kept her eyes on the frosting, and she did not say anything further.
Bruce had drifted toward the back of the house, half-listening to the party sounds from inside, when his cell phone buzzed. He stepped out onto the back porch.
"Bruce, sorry to pull you out of wherever you are." Sam's voice had the tight quality of someone managing a developing situation. "We've got an issue with Owen Wilson. His agent came back with a quote that's well outside our budget range, and Owen apparently has some specific thoughts about how Luca should be played that he wants to talk through in person before anything gets signed. Michael wants all of us in the same room — you, me, Elena from casting, Owen, and his agent. They're at the Spotlight offices in Midtown. How fast can you get there?"
Bruce leaned on the porch railing and looked back through the sliding glass door at the party — his father laughing with Jack Geller, his mother watching the room with satisfied contentment, Joey eating something from a tray he'd intercepted from a passing plate.
"Forty minutes," he said. "I'll be there."
He went back inside and found his parents first. "I have to go — casting emergency on the film. I'm sorry."
Tom White nodded immediately. "Go. Handle it."
Ellen White's expression was less immediately accommodating. "You just got here."
Bruce took his apartment keys from his pocket and handed them to her. "Take these. You and Dad use my place after the party — rest, make yourselves at home. I'll be back as soon as the meeting's done, it shouldn't run past nine." He squeezed her hand once, quickly.
He found Monica near the kitchen doorway. "Cover for me with your parents. Work thing — I have to move."
Monica, who was having her own complicated evening, just nodded. "Go. We'll handle it."
He caught Joey's eye across the room, pointed at the door, and mouthed later. Joey gave a solemn nod and immediately helped himself to another item from the passing tray.
Bruce walked out through the front door into the cool Long Island evening, already thinking about Owen Wilson and what it was going to take to get him into the room on terms everyone could live with.
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