Elizabeth Berg - Until the Real Thing Comes Along

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 1999 by Elizabeth Berg
Reading group guide copyright 2000 by Elizabeth Berg and The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Until the Real Thing Comes Along is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Readers Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.thereaderscircle.com

Library of Congress Card Number: 00-190614

eISBN: 978-0-307-76342-6

This edition is published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

v3.1

Bergs writing is to literature what Chopins tudes are to musicmeasured, delicate, and impossible to walk away from until they are completed.

Entertainment Weekly

Berg mingles the real angst of loving the wrong man with the popcorn-munching laughs of a TV sitcom.

New Woman

Elizabeth Berg is one of those rare souls who can play with truths as if swinging across the void from one trapeze to another.

J OAN G OULD

Berg knows the hearts of her characters intimately, showing them with compassion, humor, and an illuminating generosity.

The Seattle Times

A warm-hearted story that gently offers insight rather than answers, Until the Real Thing Comes Along would especially appeal to those who have survived loss and crisis.

BookPage

Outstanding A compilation of real-life characters, hope, and great writing that entertains and engages the mind The writing in Until the Real Thing Comes Along is to-the-bone engaging, packed with witty insights and emotional detail you can sink your teeth into.

Metrowest Daily News

Sparkling and witty [A] poignant and clever tale [Bergs] smooth transitions between tragedies and joys are punctuated with lively humor. [An] endearing search for domestic fulfillment.

Publishers Weekly

Engaging characters and realistic dialogue make Elizabeth Bergs new novel a one-sitting book. The authors generous view of humanity is evident in her characters, who walk right off the page they are so well and truly drawn.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Flawless dialogue Reading it is like eavesdropping on an intimate female chat.

Showtime

Bergs landscapes are those of the heart and soul, the journeys of her characters provisioned by a wise network of family and friends.

Denver Post

True to reality rather than to the conventions of womens books, 1990s-style.

The Washington Post

Its curious that novels about marriage, children, and family are often labeled womens fiction, as if the other half of the human race were unconcerned with these matters. Perhaps someone like Patty, whose deepest longings make her feel like an anachronism in our careerist world, represents the sort of anxiety and ambivalence that is still so particular to womens lives. Books like Until the Real Thing Comes Along offer a kind of working-through of such issues, and the possibility, if not the promise, of a happy ending.

Chicago Tribune

Dream When Youre Feeling Blue

The Handmaid and the Carpenter

We Are All Welcome Here

The Year of Pleasures

The Art of Mending

Say When

True to Form

Ordinary Life: Stories

Never Change

Open House

Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True

What We Keep

Joy School

The Pull of the Moon

Range of Motion

Talk Before Sleep

Durable Goods

Family Traditions

For Julie Marin
and
Jennifer Sarene
and in memory of
James Allen Gagner

My editor, Kate Medina, and my agent, Lisa Bankoff, have been with me from the start, and I am grateful.

Thanks to Jessica Treadway, who read this book in manuscript with special intelligence and sensitivity.

And deepest thanksas alwaysto Jean-Isabel McNutt, whose skill and perseverance I so admire.

T his is how you play the house game:

Go for a drive to somewhere youve never been. At the point when the spirit moves you, start looking for your house. You can choose whatever you want, at any time; and once you choose it, it is yours. One caveat: after youve made a selection, you cant change your mind. If you pick the white colonial with the pristine picket fence and then in the next block you see an even better colonial, its too late; you must stay with your first choice.

I started playing this game as a little girl, and I still play it. And I always pick too early, so it almost always happens that a much grander choice comes along. I might be expected to feel regret at such a moment, but I never do. I can admit to the superiority of another house; I can admire it and see every way in which it is better than my first choice, but I am never sorry. I know a lot of people have a hard time believing this, but its true. I know a lot of people think its an odd characteristic, too, but I have to say it is something I like about myself. It is, in fact, what I like most.

I used to think that the best thing to do when you had the blues was to soak in a bathtub full of hot water, submerge yourself so that only the top half of your head was in the outer world. You could feel altered and protected. Weightless. You could feel mysterious, like a crocodile, who is bound up with the wisdom of the natural world and does not concern herself with the number of dates she has per month or the biological time clock. You could feel purified by the rising steam. Best of all, you could press a washrag across your chest, and it would feel like the hand of your mother when you were little and suffering from a cold, and shed lay her flat palm on you to draw the sickness out.

The problem with the bathtub method is that you have to keep fooling with the faucet to keep the water temperature right, and that breaks the healing spell. Besides that, as soon as you get out of the tub the solace disappears as quickly as the water, and you are left with only your annoying lobster self, staring blankly into the mirror.

These days I believe that museums are the place to go to lose your sorrow. Fine-art museums with high ceilings and severe little boxes mounted on the wall to measure the level of humidity; rooms of furniture displayed so truly the people seem to have just stepped out for a minute; glass cases full of ancient pottery in the muted colors of old earth. There are mummies, wearing the ultimate in long-lasting eyeliner; old canvases that were held between the hands of Vermeer; new canvases with emphatic smears of paint. The cafs have pastry as artful as anything else in the building; gift shops are stocked with jewelry modeled after the kind worn by Renaissance womenthe garnet-and-drop-pearl variety. I buy that kind of jewelry, in love with its romantic history and the sight of it against the black velvet. Then I bring it home and never wear it because it looks stupid with everything I have. But it is good to own anyway, for the pleasure of laying it on the bedspread and then sitting beside it, touching it.