by Kate Ledger
She made her final point with the example of a prominent restaurant that had overshot its grand opening PR, instantly ruining its reputation by being unable to fulfill demand, but her thoughts began to stray as she recounted the story. In her own life, did she know where she was heading? She stammered as her gaze happened to fall on a redheaded woman sitting in the front row wearing a black and white polka-dotted headband. An impressive, daring choice, Emily thought, for someone with hair that color. The woman’s pen had paused, and she seemed to be smiling at Emily. What was the goal Emily was aiming for? Did she need a plan? The spots of the headband popped in Emily’s field of vision, and she revised her opinion about the style. Cartoonish, she thought, indulgent. Was she missing out on life’s goodies because she was so intent on having a plan? Emily set her gaze beyond the red-haired woman and wondered midsentence if she’d just misspoken in front of the entire audience. “And that’s all,” she concluded shakily. “Welcome to the field.”
There was a burst of pleased-sounding applause as Emily stepped away from the microphone and began to collect her belongings. When she looked up, the redheaded woman stood in her way. The dots of the headband reminded her of a Lichtenstein from someone’s apartment, from the era of her father’s parties. Suddenly, she found them jarring and impetuous.
“Excuse me,” the woman stammered, extending a slim hand. “I just had to say, that was great. I thought yours was the best presentation all day. Most useful, at least.”
“Thanks,” Emily replied, glancing toward the door. “I hope it helps.”
“I remember you,” the woman went on. “I used to work for Nestor and we contracted with Frith. You made a great impression. Even our CEO was, like, wow. That woman knows her stuff. Nestor was going under.”
“After a lawsuit on behalf of the shareholders? I remember.” Emily nodded. She realized she held the woman’s headband as a strike against her. She wasn’t even sure why. Then she checked her watch. “Well, thanks.”
“Would it be possible—I’m changing fields—I was wondering whether I could sit down with you for an informational interview. Just to get your thoughts on the field and what I should be doing?”
“Sorry,” Emily said. “Wish I could say yes, but it’s an issue of time. If I sat down with everyone who wanted to . . . Don’t you have an adviser who can help? A former boss? Someone who knows you and your particular skill set?”
“Well, I guess.”
Emily hoisted her bag onto her shoulder. “Excuse me, I do apologize,” she said. “There’s somewhere I have to be.” She liked to think there was a time she might have said yes, but she couldn’t indulge the woman right now. For the first time in what seemed like forever, she was the one at the top of her own agenda. “I like your headband,” she said, moving past the woman toward the door. She hailed a cab from the lobby and traveled back to Will for more.
When she was with him, she felt like she could see her life more clearly. Her marriage, with all of its ill-defined distresses, gained lines around its edges. It also felt far away, like some other country, where there was another code of behavior and even her name sounded different. All the strife with Jamie seemed remote too, and she began to convince herself, thinking from a distance, that the adolescent furor might be general and nonspecific and not directed at her, merely one of those uncomfortable phases that humans have to pass through, like teething.
But their appetite for each other was almost insatiable. A week after Wilmington, they met in Annapolis. And then half a week later, they were lying together in a rumpled Hilton bed in Princeton, New Jersey, having just made love. Shortly, she would have to get up and get dressed and take a cab to the train station to head back to Baltimore. “Is he aware of where you are? Does he ask?” Will wondered. His hand rested on the inside of her naked thigh.
She propped her head on one hand, with her elbow dug into a pillow, and studied the lines of his face, the ridges at the corners of his eyes. They looked meaningful, she decided, even the color of his eyes, which were green flecked with brown. In another bed, in a different city, she had listened to him talk about Lindsay, and the strains that had led to their separation. Lindsay had become a vegetarian and gotten into Reiki and then began exploring a kind of ritual chanting. Each venture had seemed isolated and even intriguing until Will had begun to put them together and realized there was a pattern of retreat: Lindsay against the rest of the world. And then she had become short-tempered with Will and distracted and she didn’t want to have sex, it seemed, ever. She worried about her body, but she wasn’t interested in his declarations of approval or his reassurances. She didn’t know what she was searching for or what she was struggling against, and she didn’t talk with him about it, and so there was no room for him in her journey. Emily listened to all of this with wonder (laughing out loud at the image of the woman doing chants), but mostly she marveled at his ability to interpret even the smallest gestures. She had not shared much about Simon or Jamie. “Funny how you can call him ‘he’ and I know exactly who you’re talking about.”
“Well?”
“Simon,” she reflected, “is famous for his kindness. Great, mind-boggling acts of generosity. But it’s pathological niceness.”
Will seemed to think that was funny. “How’s that?”
“Really. One time, the cleaning woman—I’m sorry, yes, don’t hate me, we have a woman who comes and cleans once a week—anyway, it was her birthday. Her fiftieth. Simon went out for a gift and came back with a flat-screen TV.”
“So?”
“So a picture frame would have sufficed. A nice robe from Macy’s. The point is, it’s all show. He’s angry.”
Will traced a shape along her naked leg with a single finger. “A flat-screen says he’s angry? I don’t get it. Did you want the TV?”
“It’s hard to explain. Tons of energy, excessive, over-the-top generosity, all for strangers.” Her gaze fell on the hotel TV. In its gray screen, she saw the reflection of their forms on the bed. She wasn’t sure she could make Will understand. She wasn’t even sure she understood. What she shared with Simon had the changeability of an Escher painting—was that a pattern of birds you were looking at or the heads of wizened men?
She knew deep in her core that Simon loved her. Loved her and needed her. And that they were bound by some shared image, however hazy, of what they’d intended when they’d gotten married in the marble, two-story hall of the Peabody Conservatory with four-foot candlesticks and garlands of roses and a veritable orchestra. Like it or not, they were also bound by what they’d suffered. There was an intimacy—maybe that wasn’t the right word—a common understanding, even in the things that remained unspoken. But the fact of that love didn’t make a relationship, it turned out. Something fundamental was missing. Every time she turned around, he was finding ingenious and devious ways to make her uncomfortable or inconvenienced, all the while orchestrating a show so that he managed to come off to everyone else as a nice guy. “It’s kindness past the point of being appropriate,” she said. “And all the time, it’s like he’s sticking it to me.”
“Ah,” Will said, nodding. With a single finger, he traced the shape of her kneecap, and then a long trail down the front of her shinbone. “What’s he angry about?”
“Probably that I don’t believe he’s so nice,” she said simply. “No, he doesn’t know where I am.”
Will, quiet and thoughtful, lifted her hand and pressed it to his lips. She wondered whether he was forming some sort of judgment, but when he spoke, he surprised her with a change of subject. “Want to meet Anne?” he asked.
“Anne?” she repeated.
“My daughter. The younger one. She’s taking the year off from school, and she’s leaving for California. I’d love it if you could meet her before she goes.”
He wanted to introduce his daughter? To her, the married woman he was sleeping with? Typical Will Garth, she thought, suddenly annoyed. Will of the days of yore, who had a stirring of feeling a
nd wanted to live it to the hilt. “I’m not sure we’re ready for that,” she said. As right as it felt to be with him, she continued to be prudent. She’d spent quite enough of her professional career salvaging the reputations of people caught mid-affair to know the wisdom of good judgment and timing. She’d personally advised countless powerful figures who suddenly found themselves in danger of becoming defined by their public trysts or doomed by their idiotic licentious text messages. Even as she counseled them about how to manage the press and how to rebuild their images, she believed, deep down, they must have craved some kind of relief from the lives they were living. What they wanted was for the world to take care of their choices for them. She was not about to be so careless. She insisted on being discreet. Each hotel room she booked was a cab ride away from her conference. They never ate in restaurants, ordering room service instead. They departed separately. But she realized that even more than being concerned about having the relationship come to light, she wanted the opportunity to digest what was happening between them.
“It’s just that she’s leaving.”
Emily said nothing. Was he about to give her some speech about throwing all caution to the wind? She wasn’t ready. Then something occurred to her: “She knows about me?”
“I don’t hide things from them.” He lay back and his hand rubbed the velvet stubble on his scalp. “My kids or Lindsay.”
Emily felt stunned and suddenly embarrassed. “Lindsay knows?”
“I didn’t give anybody a play-by-play, but it’s been a month and a half. I had to tell people where I kept running off to and why I was busy.”
She said nothing. She hadn’t been able to control the flow of information, what was said and to whom. And if she met his daughter, would she eventually have to meet the ex-wife? And didn’t that catapult them to the question she knew was looming: Where was all of this headed?
“What does Lindsay say?” she asked. “Are you imagining we’ll all play Scrabble together, the guy, the new lover, the ex-wife, and everybody’s fine with it?”
He laughed and rolled on top of her, cupping her ass with his hands. “First thing, you’re not a new lover, you’re an old lover. And to be honest, I’m not sure Lindsay would be so comfortable hanging out. She knew I always had a thing for you. But my daughters want me and Lindsay to be happy, and they understand. And they’re grown up enough to understand how we came to this decision together.”
Grown up, she thought. Of course they were. They were all reasonable and rational people with vocabularies that could pry loose and offer up their feelings on silver platters. They were able to have sane conversations, and each of them cared what the other one was going through. If she told Simon—well, there was no telling what he would do. Something drastic, she was sure, and she dreaded the melodrama. She dreaded having to explain his own behavior to him, what his actions said versus what he claimed he meant. And of course he’d refuse to own up to any of it. But telling Jamie—a nervous wave rolled through her stomach again. Explaining to Jamie would be another story altogether. She’d have to present herself properly, and of course, Jamie would never be able to fathom any fault in Simon. Emily would be culpable for yet another motherly transgression, and how would they ever manage between them to mend this one? She knew a woman who’d left a husband who beat her and the daughter still blamed the mother for the breakup of the marriage. “I can’t meet your family,” she stated.
“They understand what’s going on,” Will reassured her. “There’s no pressure. It doesn’t change anything between us.”
“Exactly what is going on?” she asked. “I’m not even separated yet.” But there it was. As she heard her own words, she knew she’d crossed over to the other side. The word “yet” hung there between them, with all of its hesitation, all of its promise. She shivered.
“No, that’s true,” he said.
They were silent for a moment. Then she demanded, “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“A little bit, of course,” he admitted. “But I can’t help it. I want to see you.”
She considered the flattery, but skepticism overtook her. “There’s some thrill, is that what it is?” Her tone accused. “You’re proving something?” She hadn’t considered how she might play into his needs. She hadn’t even thought about his needs, whether he had come to find her in order to mend the hurt from their breakup so many years before. Were they each experiencing a completely different relationship? Was she reevaluating her entire life while he was living out some trivial ego thing?
But leave it to Will to take a conversation seriously, to think over the underlying impulses and own up. “I don’t know. Maybe the tiniest little bit. I’m human, aren’t I? I certainly wasn’t out to prove anything when I came looking for you, but I’m sure, on some level, I was curious.”
“Whether you could sweep me off my feet?”
“Whether you’d be even a little interested. But if it were only that, we wouldn’t still be here after so many weeks, right? So many hotels? We wouldn’t be in—” He looked around, feigning disorientation. “Where are we again?”
She grinned. “Princeton.”
“Yeah, Princeton. And there’s this.” He leaned into her, kissing her neck, her jaw, her lips, and she let him until he pulled back to look at her. “You tell me.”
Well, so what, she thought, if the past threw various shadows on the present. How could it not? They weren’t new lovers. They were old lovers. And wasn’t it bound to be complex? The point of it all, of figuring out how to take care of herself, was to stop doing exactly what she’d been doing, which wasn’t working, and to seek something new.
“I might be, soon,” she suggested, and she didn’t have to choose a word, “separated,” “divorced,” “out,” to make him understand. “Then I’d meet your family.”
“Soon, then,” he echoed.
Nobody met her at Baltimore Penn Station when she returned from Princeton. She wouldn’t have expected it, and she was relieved to slip into an anonymous cab. The hour was pushing nine. As the cab pulled into the circular drive on Greenway, she spotted the line of cars parked alongside the north end of the house. Almost nine p.m. and he was still seeing patients.
Once, a long time ago, when Jamie was a toddler, they’d talked about cutting back their hours, making plans, having family meals. They’d both agreed that it made sense and sounded important. But they had the conversation and, as if the acknowledgment of intent had been sufficient, they proceeded with their routines as before. Simon, quite possibly, became even busier. Now they had developed terrible habits and they no longer apologized. But letting herself into the house, she could hear the muffled music of Jamie’s stereo coming from the bedroom upstairs, and she felt uneasy. Here’s what an affair did to you: It made you feel like you were intruding on your own space. Even the clanking of her keys felt like a disturbance. She wondered about Jamie, hibernating upstairs, certain that it would hardly matter that Emily was home.
What crept up on her, however, was the smell. So faint at first, she couldn’t tell whether she was imagining it, but with every breath there it was, a vaguely perceptible sourness in the air. She opened the refrigerator, peeled back the foil on a dish that Lorraine had left, and sniffed it. She opened the milk, wafting the air over its spout toward her face with a few quick flutters of her hand. She took the tops off the juice bottles, smelled them. She poked into the vegetable bin and, not knowing what else to do, threw a questionable broccoli head into the garbage.
She turned as Jamie came tromping down the stairs.
“Where’s your father?”
“Downstairs, I guess.”
“This late? Have you left your laundry down here?”
“My laundry?”
She sniffed the dishrags, the sponge, the garbage. “Do you smell it?”
“Yeah,” Jamie agreed, “it stinks.”
She lifted the blue garbage can out from under the sink, tied the kitchen bag closed and heaved it out in h
er fist, far from her body, as though she were holding a feral animal by the neck. Reaching way back into the cabinet, emerging with a bottle of bleach, she took the blue can out on the back patio and poured bleach directly into the bottom. She unwound the patio hose with its firearm nozzle and fired it at the bleach. She came back in, appearing satisfied, but after a few moments, the stench surrounded her again. She sniffed the garbage disposal. She dragged a broom against the bottom edge of the refrigerator and smelled against the wall. Getting down on her hands and knees, she took a sponge and scrubbed the baseboard of the cooking island, feeling for sticky spots where food might have dribbled.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s like something died back here.” She scrubbed, aware of Jamie watching her. The girl was just standing there, ogling, while she scoured on her knees. “You can help, you know. It wouldn’t be completely beyond the pale for you to pitch in. Do you need an embossed invitation? The whole summer at home, and you barely even go outside. What do you do all the time? Holed up in your room like some kind of squirrel or something. Piercing your belly button. I mean, really. Don’t you have friends around?” She looked up from her knees. “Do we need to be worried about you?”
