The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  “My aunt worshipped her,” said Ian. Then, to Amy, “In my family, we all worship powerful women.” He smiled slyly, and Penny laughed. She had turned slightly pink, Amy saw; even the round little tips of her ears had taken on color. Ian Janeway, it was established, was a curator at the National Gallery in London but was currently spending six months in New York working at the Met as a visiting consultant in the framing department. He also did freelance consulting to other museums.

  “I looked at those prints of yours,” he said to Penny. “If you want to talk, call me later.”

  “I will. When I’m done with safety walk.”

  The two of them were looking directly at each other, and Amy felt the distorting sensation of watching the scene through a keyhole. Her view widened all around to include the details she had missed before. Penny and Ian were gazing at each other’s splendid self, each swelling slightly under the other’s gaze, blood probably flooding the appropriate parts. As they looked, they talked about “the prints.” Were there even any actual prints to be looked at, she wondered, or was this all some sort of code? Their conversation became increasingly exclusive and dull. Something was said about whether a person at the museum named Donna Belknap would need to take a look at the prints too.

  They were letting the talk stall, and the boredom was meant to drum all but the devoted away, which would mean that Amy, after being drawn in, was now being encouraged to leave them to each other. But still she listened, because her middle-aged life was often barren of sex now. The ground had been partly stripped and strafed, and you didn’t even realize it until you found yourself standing on the street with an excited, secret couple, around whom entire luxuriant fields flowered. They continued to talk about the prints and about Donna Belknap, their voices soft and vague, each sentence ending with a suggestive rise. In the background, faintly, Amy heard some sort of commotion. It was an annoyance. Go away, she thought, I want to hear this.

  “What time will you be finished?” Ian asked.

  “I think we have another hour.”

  “You work all day, and then you have to trudge around. That’s not fair.”

  “Life’s not fair,” Penny said.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Amy watched them smile at each other and shake their heads at the joke that didn’t even have a point. In the distance, those other voices kept calling out, and as Amy stood watching Penny and Ian Janeway, she became aware that one voice was meant for them. “Help!” it cried now. “I’m being mugged!”

  Finally, as if lifting herself out of a stupor, Amy snapped her head away from the couple, turning to see a small crowd on the corner, with the bobbing form of a boy in the middle, dressed in an Auburn Day uniform.

  “What the fuck is that?” said Ian, and he sprinted toward the commotion, Penny and Amy following. The crowd split apart, and it was revealed to be comprised entirely of boys, none older than around fifteen, all of them black, wearing big, unseasonal jackets. On the ground sprawled the Auburn Day boy, a sixth-grader named Dustin Kavanaugh, unhurt but crying. Ian tried to grab at one or two of the boys, but they were too fast, their ripstop nylon jackets swooshing past.

  “Ian, don’t,” Penny said. She put a hand on his arm—the first public touch between them. “Just go.”

  “I should chase those shits,” he said, breathless.

  “No, it’s too late. Go.”

  And so, dismissed, Ian left, while Amy frantically pressed the button on her walkie-talkie to summon the school. Through tears, Dustin Kavanaugh explained that he had been walking along with his earbuds in his ears, eating a bag of little fried corn curls and listening to music.

  “Oh, honey, are you hurt?” Amy asked the boy, crouching down and giving him some tissues from her pocketbook.

  “No,” he said shakily, blowing his nose. “But they got my iPod.” Then he added, “And I met them before.”

  “You did?” Penny asked. “Where?”

  “On Hand-in-Hand Day.”

  Whoosh, thought Amy, picturing the well-meaning but still troubling Hand-in-Hand Day struck from the calendar of the Auburn Day School. The white boys would stay forever with the white, the black with the black, the Hispanic with the Hispanic, and even that single designated day of unity would be shut down. Who knew if these were really the same boys as the ones who had come in to play sports and eat baked ziti? The school might never even try to find out.

  The security guard from the school arrived along with a policeman, and after the women gave him all the information they could, the guard coolly asked for their safety vests and walkie-talkie, as if they were being stripped of military rank. There were no excuses; an Auburn Day boy had been mugged right on the block they were patrolling. They should have been able to break it up as it started, or stop it before it happened, but instead they’d been standing in a dreamy cluster with an Englishman, briefly forgetting the real reason they were here on the street in these orange vests.

  Only now, as the guard and the policeman tended to Dustin Kavanaugh, did Amy see how upset Penny had become. She seemed stunned, nearly unable to speak, so Amy thought to take her to the Golden Horn. In the coffee shop, leaning against the aqua booth, Penny said, “I just feel so bad. It’s my fault that this happened.” She began to cry softly, and a couple of people looked up in curiosity. Penny pulled napkins from the dispenser and wiped her eyes.

  “No it’s not,” said Amy, though she thought, it’s our fault. “Even if we’d been paying attention, they probably would’ve followed him around the corner. Don’t you think?” she added, wanting reassurance herself.

  “Maybe.” The two women sat glumly in the muted din.

  “Thank God he’s not hurt.” Amy added, “We could send him something.”

  “A new iPod,” Penny tried, blowing her nose. Her skin was so pale that the brief release of tears had inflamed her whole face. “I heard he likes show tunes.”

  “Yes, show tunes, he loves them.” All the mothers had heard this about Dustin Kavanaugh, and it was always mentioned with a certain knowing inflection.

  “Those kids, those muggers, they’re going to listen to his iPod and get a big surprise,” said Penny. “‘The Circle of Life’ from The Lion King.” Both women, despite the somberness, began to laugh a little.

  “And you know, we’re going to hear from Dustin Kavanaugh’s mother, and I don’t blame her.”

  “Oh, right, Helen. She will be very upset. Anyone would.”

  Helen Kavanaugh dressed as though she were the chairwoman of a bank, though she hadn’t held a paying job since right after college. Her stockbroker husband had made particularly good investments for them. As a result she was allowed to be motivated by something entirely unrelated to money, which distinguished her from almost everyone they knew. She was head of an antipoverty charity, and she was relentless in her involvement. Always, she was soliciting money; always, she was speaking at another banquet. Her altruism was entire and wowing. There was no hidden narcissism embedded in it. It was a force that awakened her in the morning and put her into the stiff shell of a suit and took her out the door. Mostly, the demands of the city didn’t allow for the purity of altruism; usually, altruism got mixed into other things, so that everyone ended up “doing what they could” and leaving it at that. Amy had always admired Helen Kavanaugh but now felt personally afraid of her too. She could hear Helen’s meeting-ready voice on the phone tonight, saying, “Amy? Hi there, Helen Kavanaugh. Listen, we ought to talk about the incident.”

  Everybody would be talking about the incident, Amy realized now. “We’d better get out of town on a rail,” she said to Penny.

  “With little hobo sticks.”

  Amy pictured the two of them walking side by side along train tracks. She saw herself playing a harmonica, and the scene was oddly peaceful. What if they could both escape their lives just like that, riding boxcars, ambling forward forever, unscheduled and untraceable?

  “Everything I do leads to something like thi
s,” Penny said.

  “What does that mean? You’re responsible for a whole string of muggings?” But Amy knew that her role was to be passive and listen, perhaps in a way that no one ever listened to Penny Ramsey, a woman who had few free moments in which to sit over a plate of eggs or the spokes of a grapefruit half or an iced coffee riddled with chemical sweetener, the little ripped packets scattered all over the table, and just talk.

  Penny stirred her seltzer with a straw, sending the ice chiming. “No,” she said, and then her eyes filled again. “God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a mess.”

  “It’s okay,” Amy said.

  “I’m in such a strange place. You think that your marriage and your whole life are going to be one way, and then suddenly, guess what, they’re not. You know?”

  Amy just kept looking at her. “Yes,” she finally said.

  Then Penny said, “I know you figured it out before, on the street. I could tell.”

  Amy paused. “Ian,” she said carefully.

  Penny nodded. “I’ve never done anything like that. But Greg is so totally corporate now. And he has zero misgivings about what his investors do.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Call it ‘munitions,’ among other things. Getting rich off funding this war, and war in general. I shouldn’t be saying any of this; I know it’s disloyal. Greg would tell you that his investors also build children’s hospitals. But he was different once. He tells me I don’t understand. That I should stick to the Triangle Factory fire and photomontages of…Hart Crane and the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge. Like he even knows who that is.”

  Amy thought of Greg Ramsey with his good shirts and nugget-sized cuff links and his hands-free cell-phone headset. He was a small, thick, vain man of forty-one, a scrapper, a success, and she suddenly remembered him at the Dads’ Pancake Breakfast last spring, standing front and center at the griddle, lofting his browned discs into the air while a few other fathers struggled over the uneven heat with their own spreading, unflippable islands of pale batter.

  Amy was here in this booth now in order to say to Penny Ramsey, “You can talk to me.” This was her line, and she didn’t even mind it. She suddenly wanted Penny to like her and be comforted by her; she wanted to appear like a soothing person who didn’t judge others. Amy said her line easily. At which point Penny said, “I’m glad it was you here today.”

  Had you been sitting across the room at the Golden Horn at the time of this conversation, you would have noticed the way the two women inched their asses closer across the booth and leaned their heads forward, as if they themselves were having a love affair. Oh, female intimacy! Amy thought with longing. She had missed it so much since Jill had left the city. She recalled lying across Jill and Donald’s bed on a weekday afternoon last year, before it was time for school pick-up, trying on clothes that Jill was thinking of giving away to a thrift shop. They’d talked about how their bodies had changed over time and how you had to accept this and not dwell upon it; each of them insisted to the other that she looked as good as she had looked back in college, and it wasn’t really untrue. “The thing about clothes,” Amy remembered Jill saying, “is that you never know which one will end up being your favorite and which one you’ll never wear—and will be just like throwing your money down the toilet.”

  “Yeah. You should be able to say to your new clothes,” said Amy, “‘One of you shall betray me.’” They had laughed and lain back together on the wide bed as though they were in college again. Amy had let her head drop down over the side, seeing the room upside-down, feeling a disorienting, teenaged blood rush.

  But their time together seemed stolen, pitched against the grain of family life. Marriage and children sometimes divided friends; the one or two women Amy knew well who had remained single and childless seemed almost unaware of the astonishing differences between their life and hers. They would call her on a weeknight, when anyone with kids would be in the prime of high-homework and arguments and general noise and distraction and preparation for tomorrow.

  “Hey there, Amy girl,” Lisa Silvestri would say on the telephone at eight o’clock on a Tuesday. “What’s going on? Is this a good time to talk?”

  Amy had once crammed with Lisa Silvestri in law school, sitting together on the chunky, modular furniture of the library lounge, and then later on, by coincidence, they’d had offices down the hall from each other at Kenley Shuber, where Lisa still worked along with Leo; she had been made partner, while he was forever to be a salaried associate. But Lisa Silvestri seemed to have little awareness of the rhythms of family life that often carried you away from your friends.

  Some mothers felt secretly pious about motherhood; they were sure their childless friends could never reach anything approximating the gorgeousness of family bedlam: the intensity of teaching a child to read, the drama contained in a tantrum, the on-call mother love that was more concentrated and ecstatic even than sexual love. Life with children was bigger than life without them, these mothers were convinced, and so the childless women could seem austere and prissy, though this could never, ever be said aloud, for it was judgmental and certainly unfair.

  When Lisa Silvestri called in the middle of the chaos of an evening, Amy had to casually say, “Listen, Lisa, I’ve got to call you back, okay? It won’t be tonight, I’m afraid.” In the background of Amy’s apartment, there might be a crash and shouting and the roar of bathwater running unchecked from a tap. Over at Lisa’s loft, the sound of light jazz noodled along softly.

  But even when you made time for your friends, Amy thought, and they made time for you, at intervals the center of your attention reflexively moved back to your family. You sat with the other women in the morning here at the Golden Horn, but you thought, Pick up shin guards for Mason. Or else, you even used your precious time with your friends to ask them, “Do you know where I could get shin guards?” One of the other women might name a new sporting-goods store called Outdoorland, and you would pull out your BlackBerry, which, unlike your husband’s—which was stocked with notes on depositions and meetings with clients—was stocked with names of shops and doctors and pediatric orthodontists and other mothers, and dates for meetings at the school about how to talk to your sons so they will listen. According to the school psychologist, Dr. Linda Kreps, mothers should never address their boys directly when they have something important to say to them. “Instead,” Amy seemed to remember that the psychologist had actually said, “you should go outdoors and engage with them in an activity in which you can’t stare into their eyes and intimidate them.” You should fish, she’d said, or drive, or walk along a city street or a country lane as you tell them that you and their father are breaking up, or that you are dying.

  Now Amy listened as Penny Ramsey told her the story of how she had become Ian Janeway’s lover. Ian, Penny said, had come downtown to her museum six weeks earlier for a meeting with a curator and had sat in the anteroom outside the executive offices upstairs, waiting. Penny had been at her desk eating a quick lunch, “something sad, like beef cup-a-ramen,” she told Amy, and Ian had poked his head around the doorway and said, “That smells good.” By which he might have meant, You smell good.

  Penny Ramsey, a harried woman in a good pale yellow suit with little flecks in the weave like vanilla beans, invited him into her office while he waited. He sat across the glass plane of her desk, inhaling her beefy, salty soup fumes and flirting so boldly that they both began to laugh.

  “You want some of my ramen?” she finally asked. “Is that it?”

  The sexual part started a week later, after he had called her on her cell phone half a dozen times. “Do you need a lunch date today?” he’d asked once. And, another time: “I call with urgent news from the world of framing.”

  On the day they first slept together, Penny had been coming back from a lunch meeting with a donor and was walking along the edge of the park talking on the phone to her assistant, Mark, when Ian text-messaged her. “Come see me,” he wro
te. “I’m home in bed.”

  She called him right away. “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “No,” he said slowly. Then, “I have to touch you.” He lowered the conversation to a teenaged level, making them both laugh in a dumb, drugged way. Penny hurried into the subway. There was still a little time before she had to return to the museum, so she headed uptown on the express train to meet Ian Janeway, a thirty-three-year-old British man who waited for her in his bed.

  Penny walked up the stairs to his apartment, a narrow one-bedroom in a tenement building in the upper Nineties off Fifth Avenue. Amy imagined the small bedroom, the slew of unframed prints angled at the foot of the bed, and the framer himself with his tentative scrape of a voice and pale narrow body lying against the golden complement of Penny, whose pretty clothes draped the chair. Amy saw Ian lowering himself down onto her, talking and cajoling in his wonderful accent, his mouth on her little breast, his body establishing itself against her, a finger going against and inside her until she was helpless and babbling, and then everything moving more quickly. The images were exciting, not because either one of the people in them excited Amy sexually but because she felt privileged enough to get a glimpse of the scene, at least secondhand. Now, unhappily, Amy tried to picture herself and Leo in bed, but she could only see her husband toiling away above her with the same diligence with which he toiled at Kenley Shuber.

  “Please say something,” Penny said to Amy. “I guess you disapprove.”

  “I have no opinion. I’m not your mother.”

  “My mother would die if she knew. She’s so impressed by Greg’s whole corporate thing. His money thing.” Penny paused. “I want you to know that I don’t go around talking about Ian. I have told no one else. You’re it.”

  “I’m it? Can I ask why?”

  “I don’t know. The mugging; I had to talk. I’m sorry to burden you.”