by Kate Ledger
“I got all misty when he broke Lou Gehrig’s record.”
She smiled. “You? Sports? I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“I don’t follow the games. It’s the pageantry I like. The symbols. Americana. How we have a weakness for streaks. For iron men.”
It was so strange, sitting with the Will of now, imagining the Will of then. The core seemed the same, the iterations between their meetings impossible to fathom. “You used to hate all of that Americana. The commercialism, the consumerism. Remember how you wouldn’t do the ad?”
He laughed. “I couldn’t figure out how I fit in. I couldn’t change any of it. And I didn’t want to be part of helping it grow. I guess I’ve gained an appreciation. Anyway, Ms. Partner of the Firm, proud of your accomplishments? I’m sure your father would be.”
“Ah.” She smiled. “I’m sure he’d say I settled.”
“He approved of success. Ambition. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.”
Then, for some reason, the way she’d dared to present herself seemed false—even shameful. “I have a confession.” She played with the nipped-off wrapper from her straw, rolling it into a ball between her fingers. “I wasn’t exactly truthful the other day about how he died. He took his own life. I don’t make a point of it with most people because it puts a damper on things. Who he was. But there it is.”
Will seemed to take a long breath. “I didn’t know.”
“He was never diagnosed,” she continued, “but I believe now he was bipolar. People back then said moody, but some days he was throwing parties and spending money and running off to Milan, or trying to phone Andy Warhol, and then sometimes he didn’t want to see anybody, and then he was impossible to get along with. Didn’t even seem to come out of his studio. There was nobody to keep up with all his swings after my mother died.”
“Ah,” Will sighed, and she was touched not by his tone, but that he knew so well where she came from. “Judith, too?”
“A bunch of years before him. That was a brain hemorrhage, which, thank God, was quick. A little while before Simon and I met. Her last years were—well, her priorities had sort of melted into my father’s career, and she was a little, I don’t know, lost? I’m glad she never knew about his suicide,” she added, even more wryly than she intended. “She hated for things to go to waste.”
“I’m surprised about Al,” Will said, pensive. “That must’ve been hard. For Aileen, too.”
Aileen. It was almost strange hearing her sister’s name, realizing that they were still connected to each other. She’d grown up thinking of Aileen as the model for everything—what kind of music to like, how short a skirt should be, the tone of voice to use when answering the phone—and yet she’d always felt the threat, like a distant pulse, that Aileen would be moving away. Aileen was a tall girl, like Emily, with an intelligent face. People were always commenting on her brains, but she must have struggled to feel at ease, Emily realized later. Her hair was kinky and she spent hours blowing it dry to tame it. She battled acne, and she had an awkward, loud laugh that hit many registers like a bell’s peal. What she possessed, ironically, was a singing voice that made music teachers swoon. Every year she was assigned leads in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, and yet she had to be bribed and threatened by her parents to participate. She hated being part of anything mainstream. Emily sat in the dark of the community theaters, awed by the rippling melodic sounds her sister was able to produce, eager for the applause that would come, and hoping—just hoping—she might get to go backstage after the show. Emily just wanted to be included, but Aileen hated all the hoopla and got her revenge when she discovered her life’s passion, joining antiwar protests and marching for women’s rights and organizing demonstrations for Mayan communities in Guatemala. She fought with Al and Judith about their self-centered desire to rise in society and their shameful lack of social awareness, until Al threatened to cut her off financially. And through it all, Emily was aware of that drumbeat in her own chest, counting the moments until her sister’s departure. “Aileen might still think it was a heart attack. I’m not sure. She’s in South America somewhere. You could say we’re out of touch.”
“She needed to get away, huh?”
Emily sighed. “There are people in the world who believe they serve humankind. Like they have a higher calling to help the truly disenfranchised and dispossessed. They’re not always able to be there in the simplest ways for the people closest to them. Ever noticed that?”
“Gandhi apparently neglected his wife. I read that somewhere.”
She looked at him again, as if she couldn’t imagine how the Will she knew might have information to cite. “Anyway, enough about all that. People don’t know about the suicide, so please, um . . .” Her eyes implored. “The obits reported it as a heart attack.”
“Loyal of you to keep his secret.”
This was what she’d remembered about Will: He had a way of giving back to you your best even when you were most uncomfortable. She looked down again, rolling the paper between her fingers, thinking that she much preferred the version of the heart attack than the one of the man self-destructing, and that it was unfortunate that her mother was dead because parenting had turned out to be an inscrutable practice, and even poor advice now would be better than none at all. At that moment, she even missed Aileen and all of her sister’s righteousness, though she couldn’t possibly have said why. Glancing at Will, she remembered what it felt like, lying in his little New York apartment with the pipes crisscrossing over their heads, as he snapped pictures of her. A prickle crept up her neck and across her scalp, and she suspected then that she’d sleep with him again, not only that she’d want him, but that it would feel right, and that there would be no surprise. About as fast as a train should be. “I’m happy to see you,” she blurted. “There. You’ve got my real confession.”
“I’ve got one, actually,” he said. “It wasn’t really a coincidence that we ran into each other the other day.” He was smiling. “I knew you worked there. I was just hoping I might see you.”
“You did?”
“I wasn’t anticipating a physical confrontation in front of the building, but I’m glad it was you I almost knocked over.”
“You mean me and not somebody else?” She laughed. “You did almost take me out on the sidewalk.”
“All these years, I’ve wondered where you were, if you were happy.”
“I’ve wondered, too,” she said, remembering how he’d almost been present as she pared the bottoms of candles. “About you.”
He sat back, ran his hand over the stubble on his head. “My family’s been my focus. Lindsay, my daughters.” He looked out the window of the café. “My photography, the newsletters, even traveling, everything’s been secondary to my home life. It’s a bit of a shock to be getting divorced.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He looked back at her, and he seemed to sigh. “You look beautiful, you know. Even more than I imagined. I wasn’t sure if you’d have aged. I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize you,” he said. “You seem good.”
She smiled in gratitude, another shy smile. “I’d say it’s been hard, in its own way.” The waiter dropped off their check and hovered, making it clear that the shift was ending and he was eager to get them out. Will reached for his wallet. She picked up the tab and waved him off. “You came all the way to find me,” she said. “I’ll get this one.”
“No, let me. I almost knocked you down.”
On the plane, traveling back from Florida, she had anticipated a quick return to the office after meeting him, but they lingered in front of the café, delaying the imminent good-bye. Shake hands? she wondered. Kiss on the cheek? She no longer remembered what it had been like to kiss him. It was sad how the mind erased what was once essential but left you with an image, something random, a trick with an orange. What did she need with that?
“I’ve missed you, Hemily.” Of course he’d said “Emily,” but it sounded
like he’d named her himself.
“You too. This was nice.”
“I’d ask you to walk back with me, but it might seem . . . unseemly,” he apologized.
Men had hit on her over the years. There was a trainer at the gym who tended to touch her a little more than was necessary, and once, as toundingly, a reporter who followed her after a press conference whose “follow-up questions” included an out-and-out invitation back to his apartment. There was a drunken congressman who put his hand on her ass in a coatroom. She’d laughed at them and ignored their advances. She considered herself savvy enough to realize their interest satisfied her ego. Indulging any more than that would be—well, what would be the point? And yet she had a feeling that everything was different with Will, as they stood awkwardly in front of the café. Maybe it was that she already knew him or maybe it was the poignancy of the question he had posed—“Happily?”—that had made her take note of the stillness in her chest. She looked at him, that twinkling expression in his eyes.
“I’d walk you back,” she had replied, “and I wouldn’t be offended.”
“Oh,” he had said, just like the Will she’d known who didn’t know anything and was always slow to understand.
“You came all this way.” She had directed in a soft voice that left no ambiguity, “I’ll walk there with you.”
The Acela slowed though it didn’t stop in Wilmington. Emily glanced up as travelers edged by her, apparently changing cars. A thirty somethingish woman in a short gray skirt with a silk blouse wheeled a suitcase through the aisle. She had an air of self-importance that Emily keyed into at once. Then the woman turned and stood over the seat next to Emily.
“Anyone sitting here?”
With an upturned palm, Emily invited her to take the seat. The woman heaved her suitcase onto the overhead rack and settled herself. Emily turned to the window, absorbed in thought. On the way to Will’s hotel, that first time, they’d barely spoken. And then upstairs. He released the lock with a magnetic card, flicked on a lamp, and she stepped into the room, barely breathing. The door clicked shut, and then he turned to her and held her face in his hands. So familiar: the feeling of his fingers on her cheeks, his palms on either side of her chin. When he looked into her eyes, she felt like she was very small, and for a moment, she thought she might cry. Her throat tightened, and she felt weak, all her bones fragile in his hands. Instead, she threw her arms around him and kissed him. Hard. He’d pulled back, surprised, and looked at her, but she kissed him again as if she could not take his tongue deep enough into her mouth, suck enough of the taste of him out of his lips.
She waited for the feeling that she was doing something she’d regret later, but it never came. In the hotel bed, the change in her life felt as welcome as an unraveling. She felt it: the yank on the exact thread in the knitting, rows of careful stitching coming undone one by one. Only when she left did her stomach surprise her, bounding in a loop-de-loop of uncertainty. He wanted to walk her downstairs to say good-bye, but she insisted she should leave the room alone. “People know me” were the words that came out of her mouth, and while they were true about a certain segment of D.C., and it was almost the dinner hour when that element would be leaving work, they couldn’t account for the sensation in her belly, like the thrashing of a fish. In the descending elevator, she reached into her bag for her sunglasses, which seemed appropriate for anonymity, but her hand found her cell phone first. To her surprise, she called home. Jamie, who was alone, answered after several rings.
“I’m on my way home,” Emily said, turning slightly toward the wall as a man wearing a gray pinstripe suit stepped into the elevator.
“Yeah?” Jamie replied, sounding bored. “All right.”
Why had she bothered calling? It was clear Jamie couldn’t care less. Emily stared into the wood-grain paneling of the elevator. Where did she belong? Home had become—there wasn’t even a word for it. Simon wasn’t due back from his parents’ for at least another day. Jamie was probably having a grand old time entertaining herself in the house, maybe getting ready for full-body tattoos. Emily gripped the phone. Something had compelled her to call, and she groped to keep the conversation going. An idea occurred to her. “So I thought maybe I’d bring that rotisserie stuff you like. Boston Market?”
“If that’s what you want,” Jamie answered in a monotone. “I already ate.”
“How about I bring it anyway. If you want some later.” Jamie didn’t respond with any kind of enthusiasm. In fact, she didn’t respond at all. The elevator stopped at a floor, opened, but whoever had pushed the button had already chosen the stairs. The doors closed again. Emily still wasn’t ready to hang up. “So whaddya do today?”
“Um, I don’t know. Not much. Read a book. Watched TV.”
Then, the elevator doors parted to reveal the lobby. “Okay,” she said into the phone, stepping past the man who held the doors wide with one hand. She gripped the phone. She was trying, wasn’t she? Would she have to keep trying until she got a real response? She ducked her head as she passed the main desk. “So yes to the chicken?”
As soon as she hung up, she reached into her bag and put on her sunglasses. It wasn’t remorse she felt, she realized. It was the shock of having done something that needed defending. It rattled one’s identity. She was standing on line at Boston Market, adding to her order a side of mashed potatoes, as she realized that what had happened with Will didn’t feel like a betrayal of Simon. In fact, it felt separate from her marriage, connected to the past and to parts of herself that had once been—brighter, shinier, more filled with light. In a way she couldn’t explain, what had happened with Will felt like she should have known it was coming. But there she was, heading home with her rotisserie offering, and what came to her were the words Mean people suck. She thought them in Jamie’s voice, and when her own voice fought back, You couldn’t possibly understand, she felt her stomach flip again.
What she hadn’t anticipated was that the thing with Will would continue, but she discovered she was in its grip. He had stayed on in D.C. for an additional week, and she’d left work early every day, like a person slightly crazed, to make love with him in his Dupont Circle hotel room. Then, in the following weeks, he’d driven back and forth between Philadelphia and wherever she’d arranged meetings, and she’d rushed off after her speaking engagements to meet him. He entered her slowly, watching every motion of her face, and she responded like a person wracked with hunger. Their bodies twisted up, their knees interlocked, his calf muscle fitting like a puzzle piece against the instep of her foot—all of it felt right. That admiring expression of his—God, it flipped a switch inside her. How long had it been since she’d just smiled and smiled? Wondrous, incredulous, she found herself where she’d never been, kneeling before him in the shower, the stream of water running over her face, feeling the water mat her hair and thinking that she had never, until that moment, so desperately wanted someone to receive what she had to give. And all of it seemed a matter of survival.
Now she was a woman on a train, coming back from a conference in Philadelphia with quickly showered legs and lips bruised from kissing. The Acela had not moved. The lights blinked for a moment, and the air-conditioning system sighed. Then the electricity revved up again and then slowed. An overhead announcement apologized for the delay, the result of a mechanical problem that would be fixed shortly. She smoothed her skirt. All the heaviness of her life with Simon seemed further away than ever. Taking care of myself, that’s what it is.
The woman sitting next to her on the train was straining her neck and looking around for a conductor. “This isn’t supposed to happen on the Acela,” the woman complained. “We’re supposed to get there sooner, not forty-five minutes late.”
“They should reimburse us,” Emily commented, “the difference between this and the Metroliner.”
But the woman didn’t stand up to demand her refund, and when the conductor passed through, she merely asked the projected time of their arriv
al. Once, long ago, Emily had chosen Simon because she imagined that life with him had a comprehensible trajectory. Don’t you get it? There are no assurances. For once, she didn’t mind the delay on the train. She was in no rush to be home.
When she was with Will, it felt like they’d tunneled back in time to the den of his old basement apartment. But they were also better than before, she thought. He was more knowledgeable, perhaps more confident. She was able to be more tolerant of him, appreciative of his rough edges and less judgmental. He still managed to suprise her. They were naked in bed in a hotel in Wilmington, Delaware, eating blueberries one by one out of a cardboard container. He told her that what he loved best about her was the sense of something childlike just under the surface. “Kind of careful and watching,” he said. “You’re checking out life’s goodies, but you’re not sure.” Goodies, she thought. What a word. She considered herself someone who was careful, yes, but she didn’t feel sorry for herself. She must have stared, because immediately he smoothed her hair away from her forehead, cajoling away the effects of his comment. “Did I say something bad? I didn’t mean anything negative. Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to make you mad. Are you mad?” He kissed her softly on the lips, taking back what he’d said, moving the carton of blueberries from between their bodies, asking forgiveness with his tongue.
But he was right, she knew. She was a careful watcher. She was still thinking of the comment when she left that afternoon to give a talk in the gilded second-story conference room of the fancy Hotel du Pont in downtown Wilmington. It was a presentation she’d delivered countless times, this afternoon to a gathering of young women inductees to the American Public Relations Council. “Believe in your clients,” she advised. “Sounds simple, but the deeper your conviction the better you’ll project them.” She watched heads nod. “Know their strengths, but be aware of their weaknesses,” she said, and illustrated with the case study of a public relations team that had attempted to glamorize a seafood distribution company as “eco-friendly” without first investigating its documented maritime infractions. “Know your audience,” she told them. The attendees (pert, eager communications majors; followers of at least one daytime television soap opera; readers of at least one self-help book in the last year; subscribers to at least one women’s lifestyle magazine) took furious notes. “Understand the reach and power of each media vehicle,” she advised, watching the reaction, and launching into an anecdote about a young mayoral candidate who’d based a creative, energetic and successful campaign solely on talk radio appearances. Last, she told them, “Know exactly where you intend to head when you put your best foot forward.”
