by Kate Ledger
He came out from behind the desk and sat on the edge of it. “Emily, I’m not sure how to have this conversation.”
Oh God, she thought, her stomach tightening. He knows. He’s going to call me out. I’m going to be shamed for having an affair. It’s worse than I imagined.
“I wasn’t going to say anything, but I feel I have to.”
They’re going to fire me, and she felt the blood rising to her face. For taking care of my own needs for one single minute. Men have affairs all the time. They have their cocks sucked in the Oval Office, and they don’t lose their jobs. Goddamn double standards. The instant a woman even intimates doing something out of line, they’re right there, ready to punish. I’ll sue, she thought. I’ll fucking sue every last one of them. She began to rack her brains for a name she might call for legal action against sexual discrimination, and she came up with two.
“I think I can explain,” she began.
“Let me give you my perspective first,” he said. “You might know that I’ve been undergoing the—therapy.”
“Um,” she started, not comprehending.
“I asked Simon to be private about it, but I figured he’d mention it to you, being his wife and all, so I wanted to say something first.”
“Simon?” she stammered.
“When he called me about the drug trial, I was so grateful to have another option. You probably don’t know what Valerie and I have been through, but it’s been nothing short of hell. When I heard Simon had something new, I was skeptical, but I also hoped. I’ve had pain ever since I fell, and I’ve done everything I can to put it aside and not let it bother me, but it’s been a constant struggle.”
She remembered the holiday party, the terrifying, sick look on his face. She cracked a small, hesitant smile. “You’ve been an inspiration, Jack.”
“I was so grateful when Simon called, I didn’t sleep that night. Not a wink. Like a kid on Christmas Eve. Eager and praying that this would be the thing.”
“Of course.” The smile was frozen on her face. She felt like she must look like a cartoon.
“I can only hope it lasts. I’m pain-free for two weeks, who knows why. I didn’t know if I’d ever feel like myself again.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“But I’m selfish, too. I have a reputation here, and I don’t like to advertise how sick I’ve been. People see pain as weakness. They think I’m getting old, and they start wondering if I’m focused on my job. They question my leadership. And when they hear that I’ve gone in for an unproven, unapproved new treatment, well. I don’t even know if it ‘worked,’ or if it was something else, but I have to be careful. I don’t want anyone to think I was just making up how bad it was. My point is, I don’t want pain to be the first thing people think of when my name comes up. I’m grateful to your husband, but I don’t want to be a spokesperson for his treatment. Now that he’s speaking to the press, I don’t want my name used. I don’t want to talk to anyone about it. I realize this might be a sticky issue, and I wanted to talk with you in person. There’s no end to how grateful I am, but I hope you’ll understand.”
“Of course, Jack,” she agreed solemnly. “You’re well, and you need to move ahead.”
“I don’t mean to seem unappreciative.”
“Of course not.”
“I hope you’re not offended.”
“Not in the least.”
“Vally and I would love to have you and Simon to dinner sometime.”
“Certainly.”
She smiled at Jack, and she congratulated him on his recovery, but under the surface of her skin, seismic rage rumbled. Her lips sealed in a tight line as she made her way back to her office. She had Suzanne hold her calls and she shut her door, trembling. The traffic started and stopped on Wisconsin Avenue and she banged her forehead against the glass, the dull thuds rattling into her jaw. Here was Simon with another one of those gestures, which looked like altruism to the world, but had another message, a secret one, that was directed to her. He might insist it was insignificant and trivial and utterly defensible. But she knew better. She knew because it was his way of speaking to her. After a thousand or so messages just like it, she knew she wasn’t blowing a small thing out of proportion. He was giving his made-up fantasy treatment not only to patients, but to her CFO, as if he had no boundaries at all—it was his way of reaching a long and meddlesome arm into her professional world, threatening her and demanding that she pay attention to him.
And then, everything seemed obvious. Will was right. She’d never, ever gotten angry. She’d been determined, reasonable, practical—but never angry. (Wasn’t that the best approach? Wasn’t she putting forth the best energy she possessed? She’d put everything into strength, perseverance, a stiff upper lip.) But Simon—after all these years, was making clear that she’d come up short. As if she’d let him down by not pointing the finger. And his way was to goad her with small threatening actions, denying all the while that he had anything but goodwill at heart. Everything made sense, Emily realized. He’d done an excellent job. She was angry. Moreover, it was clear: Not only had they not left the past behind, but as they thrashed against each other, they’d become desperately tangled in it. He would continue tormenting her with his small, damaging actions, to make them live constantly with their tragedy. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, let it happen.
She informed Suzanne she was leaving for the weekend, grabbed her bag and walked out. At first she wasn’t sure where she was heading. Not home, that was for sure. The gym, she thought quickly. She wanted to be alone, and far away. It was too early for spinning class, but she could bike on her own. She needed, even for a few hours, to be out of touch with everyone so that her mind could clear. She got into her car, turned onto Wisconsin Avenue, shifting lanes with too much vigor, driving too aggressively for the flow of afternoon traffic. Every car seemed to be moving as if the drivers were looking sideways and ogling the scenery. She changed lanes, cutting off a truck whose driver flipped her the finger. Didn’t that just follow suit? she thought as she banged the steering wheel with her palm. She was getting it from all angles.
So maybe she was angry that Simon hadn’t managed some kind of miracle with Caleb. But what was the use of that? Simon could go on about this or that being a gut thing, but more important was how you handled the emotion, what you accomplished with it. Right? She was proud of how she’d gotten by. It was a kind of heroism in itself. What came to her, as she stepped on the gas, was her father’s face, rosy as an alcoholic, blustery with arrogance. Must’ve been as he gabbed with a magazine writer: Show me a business model without grandiose delusions at the core. You couldn’t pin a thing on that man. He made mental instability seem enviable. How were you supposed to sift through the disappointments in one’s life and know who was at fault? And even if anyone were at fault—and nobody was—what was there to do about it? Certain turns of fortune nobody could control. Sheer bad luck, as Simon had said to Jamie when he picked her up from camp. Or was bad luck just something people used as an excuse? Random thoughts firing, Emily wove through traffic, dangerously, surprised as she happened to think of Aileen. Aileen, packing for college. Aileen storming around the bedroom they shared, tearing shirts off hangers and tossing them toward her trunk. She was fed up with their parents and eager to be away from their poisonous pretensions, as she announced with gritted teeth, You make your own luck. Crazy to think of Aileen now, and whatever that conversation had been about. Emily didn’t even remember. In all the years since Aileen had moved away, they hadn’t seen each other for longer than a weekend, but Emily could still picture the obsidian glint in her sister’s eyes at the moment of that declaration. She’d adored her sister (her favorite memory from all of childhood was the night six months before that day of packing for college when Aileen, at seventeen, had sneaked Emily, an impressively tall twelve-year-old, into an R-rated movie, glaring at the cashier who was trying to guess their ages). But she’d also been terrified of her sister, whose d
esire for drama seemed destructive, and beneath it all, the rumblings that at any moment Aileen was about to throw up her arms in disgust for the entire family. The nugget of truth was that loss was always imminent; you had to be braced for it. She’d spent a lifetime braced. And maybe it wasn’t apprehension she’d felt when Caleb was born, but the same threat of just-in-case. Just in case the most terrible thing occurred and you faced a loss that couldn’t even fit inside the words for it. She felt nauseated, and she accelerated with force that came not just from the ball of her foot but from the hip. If you didn’t give yourself to someone completely, you couldn’t get hurt. God, am I fucked up, she chastised herself, jamming on the brakes as the car in front of her slowed. Thinking of Aileen. Really. Luck or no luck, you couldn’t plan, of course. That was the take-home message from all of it. You could only figure how best to handle each situation.
But, God, did she not want to drive back to Baltimore. She wondered what Will was doing, but calling would seem cloying. She wasn’t using him—she was certain of that. But perhaps he’d been right about the way the anger simmered under the surface. It was impossible to see up close, as you were living it, but it ate at you all the while anyway. Nearing the Beltway, she glanced up as she approached a large, modern building of steel and glass. Fancy-looking and impressive, it appeared anchored in front by large concrete pillars. As she got closer, she could see that the dazzling exterior had been constructed around an industrial-looking structure. NOW OPEN, advertised a billboard along its side, LUXURY LIVING QUARTERS. She was a woman known as a careful decision-maker, but she was also capable of taking swift action. She steered into the lot, and her heels clicked hard against the pavement as she strode into the business office. The manager, a woman named Monique who wore stilettos and carried a ring of jangling keys, led Emily up to the third floor, bragging about the square footage of the units in the Whitfield and the recent write-up in Architectural Digest. By Emily’s count, she dropped the term “upmarket” four times. Emily followed, surveying without a word, thinking that she didn’t give a damn what it looked like, but as soon as the door to the apartment swung open, she knew she had stumbled across exactly what she needed. She leased the apartment with an electronic check (never blinking at the steep cost of the rent, the first and last months’ deposit that were required), and the manager handed over two keys and the code to an underground parking garage.
It was a two-bedroom, with an additional area described as a study that was separated by a pair of wide-open French doors. In the L-shaped bedroom, the sliding closets were covered with full-length mirrors, which she didn’t like—a minor quibble. The ceilings throughout were vaulted, and vast windows provided a view of the leafy treetops of a nearby arboretum. The generous architecture made her feel like spreading out her arms. The entire building had been a factory, recently converted, and the units were wide and bright, designed to compel people keen on entertaining guests. She didn’t have a single intention of entertaining, though. Quite the opposite, she realized. She needed that place for herself.
Even without a single piece of furniture or a single artistic embellishment, the apartment itself offered a kind of answer. The pale gray-blue of the carpet bestowed a sweeping, oceanic hue to the entire space. She stood at the top of three steps that led into the living room, and she realized that at one time she would have given herself to imagining furniture to suit the rooms, like Mies van der Rohe-style chairs with their clean lines and the illusion of suspension. But the idea of furniture seemed like clutter, and she realized there was comfort in the emptiness. She felt the swell and surge of her own decisiveness, her own heady, ingrained sense of self-preservation. She’d had that instinct in her youth. Good to know it was still in her. She had acquired a place to come and sit. To think. Far from home, away from the office, it was a hideaway to gain a little perspective. She would not reveal to Simon what she had done. She wouldn’t even tell Will, she decided. She needed to figure out what was happening, and to put some name to what should happen next. She walked around the apartment, looking from various angles at the views outside. Then, for what must have been an hour, she seated herself on the steps, staring across the bare living room. She had to tear herself away to drive home.
“You must be overtired,” Simon commented that evening when she responded curtly to his announcement of the latest inquiry into his pain treatment, a patient willing to travel all the way from New Jersey for a session. Jamie might have scowled at her, too, but Emily didn’t take it to heart. She said nothing about the new space to which she had just laid claim. Her thoughts were elsewhere, but they were subdued and surprisingly peaceful, toned in part by the gray-blue of the carpet.
The Whitfield became a secret daily detour. Each day that week, on her way to work, she drove directly to the apartment, as if participating in a weird ritual. She savored the defiance of her new digression, and a sense that she’d finally done exactly the right thing for herself. It’s me versus the rest of the world, she thought. (It took a while before she remembered she’d acquired the phrase from Will, and that it had signaled something rather uncomplimentary to him about Lindsay and her lack of communication skills. But it was possible, she decided, that some struggles were inherently personal and that you couldn’t invite anyone to understand them.) Some afternoons, she stopped in again on her trip home. The strangest part was that she did nothing while she was there. Mostly she sat on the living room steps, looking out the windows. The tops of the trees had begun to change with the crisp September air, inflamed with a dramatic trickle-down of color, like brushes seeping dye. Glorious, she thought, as if they burned for her alone. The one clear thought she had was that she wanted a different kind of life from the one she was living—one that felt different from the inside. But she couldn’t imagine what that other sensation would be or how a person achieved it. All she knew was she was missing what Will had described so crudely: life’s goodies. And time was passing, wasn’t it? What if you never figured out how to get to a place where you could enjoy them?
On Thursday, she talked to Will on her cell phone from the apartment; they were flirtatious, and she kept the chatter light. He tried to apologize for the conversation from the week before, but she wouldn’t let him. “I’ve been wishing I could kiss you,” he said. They began to plan the next time they’d meet at a hotel. “This weekend in Alexandria,” he suggested, and she agreed she’d try to arrange a reason to be there. He wanted to photograph in some historic churchyard. She didn’t mention the apartment, not wanting it to speak for her as any kind of promise, not sure how long she’d keep it. At home with Simon, when the urge arose in her to tell, she thought defiantly: There’s nothing to tell. Why shouldn’t a person have a place to think?
On Friday evening, a week after she’d rented the apartment, she was intending to stop in for a little while after work when she drove past an antiques shop in Bethesda. In the window she spotted an ornate rocking chair and a tall gumball machine, and above them hung a pair of worn ballet shoes. She pulled over, intrigued, thinking she might buy some kind of chair for the apartment, something to sit in front of the window. She wandered through the shop, and she didn’t find a chair she liked but soon found herself paying for items she’d never imagined she would purchase. They weren’t compatible with each other, and the combination of them didn’t establish any sort of decorating statement. She took a floor lamp with a curved stem and a fluted shade, and a small three-legged table with a round, inlaid marble top. No rhyme or reason to her choices. Her apartment needed drapes of some sort, she thought. So many windows—they were fine for the view, but she preferred a little privacy. She had an idea about art she wanted on the large wall. And then, as she was imagining what she’d hang in the large bald space, she realized she was moving in. When she got to the apartment, she called to order a bed, the same type of bed she and Simon shared. “How soon can you deliver it?” she asked. The manager promised the drivers would call ahead to let her know they were coming.
“And you’ll assemble the wood frame?” she asked. “We do everything,” he said. “All you have to do is let us in.”
She hadn’t fully considered the functionality of the space before, but now she began to plan and assign. The L-shaped room in the back, though longer and narrower, would serve as a main bedroom. The second room could be for Jamie, if she cared to have a bedroom there (the thought made her sigh out loud). Of course, Jamie would come there. Maybe not right away. But maybe in time. Jamie would be impressed by the factory-design elements that were still visible in the architecture, the pillars, in particular. The school year was around the corner, and she dared to imagine Jamie, hunched over a table, doing homework in the study. And then, on the days when Jamie wasn’t there, the space was large enough for Will to stay over without either of them feeling crowded. All the travel back and forth on the highway and the trains was growing tiring. She didn’t want to speculate where the relationship was going or what was developing between them. She wasn’t sorry she’d told him about Caleb or that she’d broken down—she was well aware that the kind of changes she wanted in her life would be uncomfortable, and that some kind of discomfort was probably necessary in order to change. And slowly, as she parsed all the possibilities of the space she’d rented, she began to see what she had done. But things happened backward sometimes. She’d taken the first action, and her course was obvious now, she realized with a full-throttle head rush. She was leaving Simon.
But oh. How would she tell Jamie? Dread gnawed at her again, despite knowing she was doing the right thing. She’d have to explain in just the right way. She’d explain as slowly and as honestly as she could. And she’d be careful not to malign Simon in any way. No child needed that. No, Emily would be sensitive. Jamie would not react well, and might even be angry for a while, but Emily would be patient with her reaction. She’d weather the anger, accepting it. She wouldn’t react to it. Emily couldn’t go back in time and start over, but she could resolve to change, to be better. She’d tell Jamie that, Emily noted to herself. I want to be a better mother to you, she imagined herself saying. I can do better. Jamie would crack up, just laugh in her face. She remembered how Will had described confronting his older daughter, Rachel, during that tumultuous year of rebellion. He’d put his relationship with her on the line. She could withstand Jamie’s response, whatever it would be. As far as Simon was concerned—she was ready to tell him. There was only to be honest now. Driving back to Baltimore, she was buoyed by a kind of giddy optimism, assuring herself the best she could do for both of them, to ease them out of suffering, was to leave.
