Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  It saddened Nora to realize that the one thing that might have precipitated real hand-to-hand combat between them had overnight ceased to be an issue. Nora had poured a bowlful of kibble one morning and Homer had refused to rise in Pavlovian response to the clatter. She carried the bowl to where he lay and put it right under his nose, but he lifted his head and then put it down again. Charlie pulled their car out of the indoor garage, and the two of them drove together to the vet, Homer’s panting loud in the backseat. As she ran her fingers through his pied coat while he stood shivering on the stainless-steel examining table, Nora realized that there was no flesh between fur and bone. She kept telling herself that she was assuming the worst, but when the vet came in after the exams, the scans, she knew the news was terrible. She and Charlie held each other and cried, for Homer and for all the rest of it, as the vet gently pushed the plunger on the syringe and the dog’s heart ceased to beat beneath their joined hands.

  “He was always glad to see me when I came home from work,” Charlie said in the car, and Nora started to say, “So was I,” that way a wife was expected to do, and then she couldn’t and she started to cry again. She was still crying when they ran into Linda Lessman on the pavement, Nora with the leash dangling at her side. “Homer?” Linda asked, and when they nodded wordlessly she threw her hands in the air and said, “Oh, Lord, everything is falling apart.”

  “We have to tell the kids,” Nora said in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of wine.

  “Can we wait a couple of days?” Charlie said. “I’m pretty played out.” And he trudged upstairs.

  As far as Nora was concerned, they could wait forever. The afternoon they’d sat down together to talk to Oliver and Rachel would live inside her for the rest of her life. Both of them had been home for the wedding of a friend from high school, and Nora and Charlie had waited until Sunday afternoon so as not to poison the exchange of vows between Emily Sternberg and Jonathan Ward at the Metropolitan Club, dinner and dancing to follow, festive dress.

  “Your mother and I have something to discuss with you,” Charlie had said, choking up almost immediately.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re getting a divorce,” Oliver said.

  “God, Ollie, of course they’re not getting a divorce,” Rachel said.

  Afterward Nora replayed those two sentences over and over, wondering if anything either of them could have said would have been worse. Would it have been more terrible if they had both assumed that was the case? Or was it more punishing that somehow she and Charlie had allowed them to think that this would never happen to them, what had happened to so many of their friends? Nora had been in a bad car accident in high school; they’d been T-boned at a stop sign, the little car her friend Amanda had been given for her birthday rolling twice before it came to rest on its side on the shoulder. Nora could still feel that moment in her body, all these years later, the sound of collapsing metal, the hard thrust of the seatbelt along her hips, even a shiny smudge on the dash where one of them had spattered some soda. It was the same with this. She could see the grain of the wood on the dining room table, the faint shadow of a circle where someone had put down a wet glass, a spike of light through the upper panes of the French door and then one of the chairs falling sideways as Rachel stood suddenly and thudded up to her room.

  “This sucks,” Oliver said flatly. “This really sucks.”

  “It does, buddy,” Charlie said.

  It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and it was everyone’s fault. Nora had been married to Charlie without seeing him for a long time. She realized that they all assumed that if their marriages ended, it would be with a big bang: the other woman, the hidden debts. Nora had had more reasons than most to imagine that, veteran of a grand passion built on a big lie. But now she thought that was an aberration. The truth was that some of their marriages were like balloons: a few went suddenly pop, but more often than not the air slowly leaked out until it was a sad, wrinkled little thing with no lift to it anymore.

  Because the children changed, they required attention, drew the eye: the year Oliver’s room started to smell like unwashed man, the year Rachel began to shut her door and frown when Nora knocked on it. The strep throat, the failing course. But the sameness of husbands, of wives, too, meant that in some sense they might cease to exist on a daily basis. They were like drapes: you agonized over choosing them, measured and mulled, wanted them just right, and then you hung them and forgot about them, so that sometimes you couldn’t even remember what color they were. Almost without noticing it, the young man who had kissed Nora on the forehead after walking her home from The Tattooed Lady had become a sad man who had seen the line of his life running off the reel like it was being dragged by a big fish in murky water. All the men, they feared loss of potency, of position, but what it all came down to was fear of death. Ricky’s van might as well have been a hearse.

  Charlie wasn’t a bad man or even a bad husband. Like most men of his generation, he had grown up thinking that the basic maintenance of his life would be handled by women. And it was, by his assistant, the housekeeper, and, to a lesser and less solicitous and therefore less satisfactory extent, his wife. But arranging things for someone is not the same as loving him. It’s work, not devotion.

  Of course there had almost immediately been a woman after Charlie had moved out. Maybe she’d even been there during the months when he was sleeping upstairs and Nora was on the floor below. Why wouldn’t that be so? Charlie was a nice man, freed from the accumulated weight of the petty grievances of ordinary married life. All her friends said women left because they were unhappy, and men left because they’d found someone new to be unhappy with. Nora realized how far they’d come when Charlie told her he was seeing someone and she realized she wasn’t as upset as she’d always expected to be. The woman was the nurse in his doctor’s office; they’d gotten to talking when he was waiting for the stress test during his physical. Nora could almost see it, the woman nodding her head sympathetically, Charlie confiding how hard the last months had been as she put a blood pressure cuff on his arm. She probably played golf, or at least was willing to learn. For her, a golf club would simply be a golf club.

  “Transitional woman,” Christine said. “The one who gets a guy from wife number one to wife number two.”

  “At least she’s not younger than Rachel,” Nora said.

  “You sound pretty okay.”

  “I am pretty okay. I just worry about the kids. You know how you’re supposed to tell them it’s nobody’s fault? We did, and maybe Oliver believes it—who can tell—but I think Rachel has decided it’s definitely mine.”

  “Rachel is fine, Non. I see her every day. She’s doing really good work, and she’s made some nice friends.”

  “That’s not how she makes it sound when she talks to me. She says all it does is rain there.”

  Christine laughed. “Nonnie, all it ever does is rain here. Calm down. She’s just confused. And sad.”

  “She told me one night that she’s in mourning for her life.”

  “That’s Chekhov. The Three Sisters, I think, or it could be The Seagull.”

  “She knows I was a history major.”

  Christine laughed. “I don’t think she’s trying to test your knowledge of Russian literature. She’s just dramatic. She’s always been dramatic, although I’ve got to tell you, she doesn’t bring the drama to work, not one bit, or she wouldn’t be doing as well as she is. Don’t worry. You’re a great mom. She has so much confidence. If I had a daughter and she felt like that, I’d feel like an enormous success.”

  Silence.

  “Non?”

  “Sorry, that was the sound of me crying.”

  Along with everything else, there was the inevitable split from Charity. Nora knew it was silly, the idea of having her stay on once the house was sold, the children scattered, Homer only a tin canister of ashes stu
ck in the back of a closet, behind the shoe boxes. Charity had not abandoned her. She had helped Nora pack Charlie’s things up, sent the clothes Rachel wanted to Seattle, put boxes into storage, but then the tasks were done and it was time for her to move on. She’d taken a job with a family she’d met in the park the year before, before everything changed. Nora couldn’t blame her. The family had two little girls, ages four and two, who were probably doomed to hear a fairy-tale rendering of the perfect manners and unquestioning obedience of Rachel and Oliver Nolan for years to come while they ate their after-school snack. Charity’s sister Faith, who worked only as an evening and weekend nanny for a family in Chelsea, had agreed to clean and do laundry once a week for Nora. So at least there was that. Charity said Vance thought that was a good arrangement.

  Selling the house was a relief, since every time she passed the Fisk house she couldn’t help but think to herself, Ah, that is the place where the Nolans started to unravel. Of course it wasn’t the Fisk house anymore. It had sold quickly, and Sherry had bought an apartment in the same building as her office. “They say you’re not supposed to make any sudden decisions,” she said as she and Nora had coffee in her new living room, with its view of the river, the same view that Nora had had during her morning walk for so many years. “Another thing they say that’s ridiculous. Has your house sold?”

  “It’s under contract but still being shown,” Nora said. “We had a full-price offer in ten days. It’s insane.”

  “My sons keep talking about how great it is that I’m not in a place with stairs anymore,” Sherry said. “They actually say that. Obviously they’re already worried about the widow Fisk, and how she’ll get around in her dotage.”

  “Oh, nonsense.”

  “No, it’s true. I don’t even mind. Thinking of me that way is good for them.” She peered over the edge of her coffee cup. “I’m seeing a man who lives in my building.”

  “Seeing?”

  “You know. He’s an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History. He’s very…” Sherry searched for the right word. “Sweet,” she said finally. “I told him my husband was the man who’d beaten someone with a golf club. He’d never even heard or read the story. It was so nice. I met him in the elevator. It means he doesn’t have to stay over. I’ve always preferred sleeping alone, and he doesn’t mind. He just goes three floors down to his own apartment. The one time he fell asleep here, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought Jack was sitting by the closet, glaring at me, when it was only the extra blanket I’d thrown over a chair.”

  Nora scarcely knew what to say. She thought Jack Fisk was exactly the sort of man who would come back from the dead and glare at his wife.

  “I don’t think Charlie would do that,” she said.

  “Ah, but Charlie’s not dead,” Sherry said. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  “Oh, God, no. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what happened.” Nora lifted her cup. “I know it sounds stupid, but it’s like we just ran out of steam.”

  “That doesn’t sound stupid at all,” Sherry said. “It’s actually fairly typical. What’s not typical is that while many marriages run out of steam, most of them keep on going. Or at least endure, steamless.”

  Nora lifted her hands and shrugged.

  “It was what happened on the block,” Sherry said, a statement, not a question, and Nora didn’t even bother to disagree. “It changed everything.”

  “I don’t know,” Nora said. “It feels to me like everything changed but we’re all still somehow the same. Does that make any sense?”

  Sherry shook her head. “I have a friend who lives in San Francisco, in a beautiful new co-op building. Lovely, lovely apartment, so much space and light. Last year they found out the building is sinking. It’s already gone down a couple of feet. The apartment doesn’t look any different in any way, but she says when she lies in bed at night she has this feeling like she’s falling. It’s not rational, but it’s real.”

  “Is she selling?”

  “Who would buy it?” Sherry said. “I hear the Fenstermachers are selling.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Nora said.

  Nora was not seeing anyone, although she was surprised at the attempts, most for what the twins had taught her to call hookups. Even Jim, whom she’d run into at a restaurant one afternoon, had asked her for a drink. “I hate to say it, but I always thought you and Charlie were a mismatch,” he said, shaking his head. “No, we weren’t,” Nora said. She figured that would make Jim think the split had been Charlie’s idea, that she was still pining, but she didn’t care. She hated the way so many people acted as though part of divorce was a happy erasure of the past. Only Jenny, of all people, said, “You stayed together for almost twenty-five years, and you had two great kids. Your marriage was a huge success. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

  Bob Harris had called her the week she found her new apartment, as though from forty blocks south he could sense the sound of closing documents being prepared. “I hear you’re getting a divorce and your dog died,” he said. “I’m sorry about the dog. Good dog?”

  “The best,” Nora said.

  He’d sighed. “That’s a bitch,” he said. “I had a springer spaniel that was worth ten of any person I ever met. Anyhow, now that you’re getting unhitched, any chance you’d have dinner with me?”

  “None,” Nora said.

  “You sure?”

  “My husband works for you.”

  “I could ease him out. The fact is, I’ve been thinking about easing him out for a long time. He’s a nice guy, but there’s just something—I don’t know. There’s something missing.”

  “Please don’t let him go. He loves his job.” This wasn’t really true, hadn’t been true for ages. But as Sherry Fisk had said what seemed like years ago and was only last winter, without it Charlie would be nothing. He’d be like a vampire looking in the mirror: no reflection. In their world a man without a business card was a man who can’t get out of bed in the morning. Even Ricky had had a business card.

  Bob Harris had invited her in to talk that same afternoon, although she had put him off for weeks, despite the fact that she didn’t have a job anymore. His persistence was obviously one of the things that had enabled him to be a success in business. His patience, too. He had waited a long time for Nora to come around. He tapped his hand on his desk, thinking, then said, “What if I trade a couple of dinners for keeping Charlie on?”

  “That is cheap and low,” said Nora.

  Bob Harris grinned.

  “And you are married,” she added.

  “Ah. Now how do you know that?”

  “I don’t know. That way you know things. You’re married to your college sweetheart and she lives most of the time at your horse farm in Virginia.”

  “Alpacas,” Bob Harris said. “She raises alpacas. You know what alpacas are?”

  “Pretty much like llamas?”

  “Exactly, except people who raise alpacas don’t like it when you say that. It’s like, Stu Ventner. You know him? He tells me he’s on the advisory board of the library. I say, What’s the difference between being on the board and being on the advisory board. He says something, something, something, bull, bull, bull. Whatever. Leeanne says alpacas are friendlier and better-looking than llamas, and you can make things out of their wool, and llama wool is good for nothing. I have no clue whether any of that is true.”

  He kept on tapping his hand, looking down at it jumping around as though it belonged to someone else, finally saying, “The truth is that Leeanne and me haven’t been what you’d call legally married for a long time now. But don’t go spreading that around. I don’t want to wind up in one of those stories about the eligible bachelors of New York, which always means the richest bachelors in New York. Then people who do what you used to do show up asking for money and women who are a lot of troub
le suck up to you at parties. Sometimes literally. Hell, forget I said that. Why I asked you here in the first place, I’ve got all my ducks in a row on this foundation now, and I still want you to run it.”

  “How closely associated will it be with Parsons Ridge?”

  “Not at all. Offices elsewhere. Whole different thing. No connection except the money, and me.”

  “The Bob Harris Foundation?”

  He shook his head. “I already filed the papers for the Beverley Foundation. That’s what it’ll be called.”

  “Because?”

  “After my mother. She was a second grade teacher.”

  Nora sat back. “Well, aren’t you a boatload of surprises?”

  “Not if you put on your 3-D glasses, honey.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This because your husband, or whatever he is, doesn’t want you to take the job?” Bob Harris was studying her face. He was the kind of man who took a lot of pride in being able to read people, and it seemed he read her correctly. “Hmmph. If I were married to a woman like you I wouldn’t sell her short.”

  “Yeah, you all think that. You all think you’ll like it, but when it happens you don’t like it at all.”

  “I didn’t say I’d like it. But I’d like to think I’d take advantage of the opportunity.”