by Meg Wolitzer
Amy imagined this woman perpetually in motion, all wound up and then slowly winding down. But then it occurred to her that some people might in fact ask the same question about Amy: What did she do with herself all day?
THE COUPLE was already waiting in the cafeteria of the Met when Amy Lamb arrived. Penny’s hair was falling loosely from its knot, and Ian Janeway wore a tie only half knotted and no jacket. Seeing them from the entrance of the huge, bright room, Amy thought how vivid they always appeared, whether separately or together.
Over the fall, from her fixed place in Holly Hills, Jill Hamlin had become increasingly and transparently annoyed at Amy’s friendship with Penny. “Just observing the whole situation objectively, I would say you have a little bit of a crush on her,” Jill had said recently, when she’d come into the city for the day. “One of those girl crushes. I’m thinking back to that party at Penn.”
“The girl I kissed?”
“Yes, James Dean. The androgyne.”
“You just like saying ‘androgyne.’ Penny is not androgynous like that. She’s completely female-seeming.”
“So maybe you have ecumenical tastes when it comes to women.”
“I have no tastes. It’s not a crush. Is it really so shocking that she would want to be friends with me? Are the women who work supposed to be completely separate from the ones who don’t? Do we need separate drinking fountains?”
But she couldn’t tell Jill that while she didn’t love Penny, she did love Penny and Ian together—the idea of them, the couple they were, the way they softly inflated her days. She wished she could tell Jill about Penny and Ian’s affair, and then Jill would understand why Amy was somewhat evasive and protective whenever the topic of Penny Ramsey came up. But she couldn’t tell her. She had promised she wouldn’t, and so there were occasional moments like this one, in which Jill revealed a jealousy that was childish yet almost touching, and Amy could do nothing to lessen it.
Penny often called Amy to relay the latest piece of affair non-news: “Ian sent me a big piece of truffle cheese at work. My assistant Mark carried it in, and it smelled very strong. Mark kept looking at me.” Amy, hearing one of Penny’s anecdotes, would laugh or exclaim or do whatever was called for, but always she would be on Penny’s side; that was what she was meant to do. Once in a while, Ian himself called Amy’s cell phone. In his accent he would say, “Hullo, Ian Janeway here. Have you spoken to her today? She’s not picking up her mobile.”
To which Amy would say that she thought Penny was at a meeting of the museum board or at a parent conference, and Ian would say, “Right, brilliant, I totally forgot.”
Amy sometimes served as a go-between, but usually she was a simple witness. At lunch this afternoon at the Met, she sat across the table and watched their faces with a kind of slow, appreciative interest. They were lively, connected, sexual. They liked to talk about themselves in the way that adolescents do, lazily unaware of how much space and time they are taking up, and how no one on earth is really entitled to this much of it. But in the same way that the world indulged adolescents, Amy did too.
“So Penny here is actually letting me see her the weekend after next,” Ian was saying. “At her apartment.”
“Really?” Amy said. “On the weekend? Oh right, it’s the father-son thing.”
On that weekend all the boys from the fourth grade and their fathers would be traveling on coach buses upstate to the Nature Exploratorium, where they would sit in the cold around a campfire and then spend the night inside warm cabins before being returned to their families. Amy would be alone overnight for the first time in a long while. She couldn’t remember the last time that this had been the case. Leo traveled a lot to see his clients, but Mason was usually home.
“Yes, and my girls are both going to go on sleepovers,” Penny said. “I promised Ian that he and I could have an extended playdate, so to speak.”
“A sleepover,” said Ian. He grazed on his salad thoughtfully for a moment. “If you’re married and you have an affair with someone,” he said, “there’s a word for it. And there’s also a word for you if your wife has an affair. But why is there no word for what you are if you get involved with someone who’s married?”
Around them in the enormous room the sounds were relentless but acoustically pleasing. There was no doubt that their conversation would go unheard by anyone else; the cafeteria was too big, and no one would even think it would be worth it listening to. This wasn’t a place to stoke or even vigorously disguise love. It was a place for schoolchildren in groups of thirty, blowing the wrappers of straws aloft, and for old people in groups of two, shattering crackers into china bowls of minestrone, and, at least at this back table beneath the skylight, for a pair of animated middle-aged women and a slightly younger man, talking with great familiarity about the topic of surreptitious love.
It had become a common topic for the trio. Any conversation that dipped into other topics—the resurgence of museum culture, or the way that warlike America was now hated by much of the world, or really anything at all—might slowly turn itself toward this subject. “That was around the time when Penny and I started our thing,” Ian might say in the middle of something else, or Penny might say, “Yes, and ever since, I’ve been sleeping with him,” or Amy would begin a sentence, “As the keeper of your secret…” and the couple would settle into the enjoyment of all this attention.
For who else received attention like this in adulthood? By the time childhood ended, all the benevolence that had been directed toward you just because you were young and your hair was silky and you hadn’t yet been spoiled by the grit and hailstorms of life unfairly changed into a kind of indifference. Suddenly you, who had once been youthful and golden and special, were now treated as just another customer waiting in line for something. The world was suspicious of you; you weren’t so special after all.
Unless, of course, you were in love. Briefly, two people in love received the attention of everyone. Weddings were celebrated and wept over; the couple was always seen as temporarily beautiful and perfect and in no need of anyone else. Amy remembered how special she and Leo had felt early on, walking along the street to work in the morning after a night that had included the kind of sex that was every young person’s divine right. Leo had appeared brooding and reflective as they walked, and she supposed that she had too; perhaps the people who passed them perceived that they were sealed inside the contemplation of their own love. With Penny and Ian, Amy was still the only one in the city—“the only one on earth, if you want to be exact,” Penny had said—who knew about the affair. “I haven’t told anyone else. Greg can never find out. So I’m just shutting up.” Without Amy’s knowledge, it almost seemed as though the thing itself wouldn’t exist. For who would be there to say it did?
Since that afternoon in September when Dustin Kavanaugh was mugged on safety walk and the friendship with Penny was set into motion, Amy had folded the couple into her pliable routine. Beforehand, she’d been thinking about getting some kind of full-time volunteer job, but that idea had somehow gotten lost after the mugging. For now, Penny and Ian seemed to fit neatly inside her brain, clasped in an embrace like twins in utero.
At lunch at the Met, sitting across the table from them, Amy said to Ian, “It’s just as well that there’s no name for you. This way, it almost seems as if you’re just a bystander.”
“He is not a bystander,” said Penny. “He’s an instigator.”
“So there is a name for me after all. Why, because I told you I liked the way your ramen noodle soup smelled that day in your office?”
“No, because of what happened later.”
And with that, he did something to her under the table, some quick feel or pinch or squeeze, and Penny drew back and said, “Ow, Ian, stop!” in the tone of a teenaged girl having her arm twisted by a boy. “You’re such a baby.” Then she lifted her foot onto the free chair and rubbed at her ankle. Amy glimpsed her little bootlet made of fine-grained brown leather
fringed in some kind of fur that made her look like a cantering Shetland pony.
Penny and Ian would sometimes rise up from the swell of their own self-interest and draw Amy in too, and she was gratified to be asked questions and to have their eyes upon her. “So, what about you?” asked Ian now. “Do you think marriage is inviolable?”
“Apparently not,” Amy said.
“We’re a very bad influence,” Ian said. “Penny says you’re happily married. That’s a nice thing to hear. Have you been married long?”
“Thirteen years,” said Amy, and for some reason she thought of Leo on their wedding day. She remembered how the white flower in the buttonhole of his jacket had reminded her of a miniature version of his face, poking out bravely, openly, waiting for her.
“That’s an impressive amount of time,” Ian said. “I can’t even imagine it.”
But now Leo, off in his own environment, was so separate from her. He didn’t want to sleep with her anymore, and he no longer needed her to be his comrade. He had his colleague Corinna Berry, with whom he commiserated about the workload and much else. Sometimes he and Corinna talked on the phone at night too. It had been a long time since Amy had stepped into Leo’s law office, and yes, she could picture his walls with their textured wallpaper and diplomas and photographs. And surely there was a picture of her and Mason there from a few years earlier; she seemed to recall her son’s corrugated, empty front gum, awaiting the shingle of a tooth. But what did she really know anymore of life in a law firm—the use of Juxtapose BriefScan, the way it all worked?
Leo’s daytime universe was now as foreign to her as the enclosure of anyone else’s world. As a little girl, Amy had loved gaining even brief entry into any small and previously unexplored place: the clothy sepia darkness below the kitchen table; or the provisional tent made from her bedsheet with its strawberry pattern on the edges, draped across two chairs; or the space beneath the desk in her father’s study, while he sat at his desk chair, grading economics papers. She could see her father’s trouser legs and his long feet in black socks, and she would grasp one of his legs as if it were a safety bar on a ride at an amusement park. It was her father’s space she was in; she could feel the sense of him there, just as Leo’s office was suffused with Leo, and just as her own office had once held the sense of her, until she had abandoned it.
Leo, in his work life, traveled every month or so, going to see corporate clients out of town for one or two nights, staying in those business-traveler hotels where the robes were thick but the grain of the terry cloth was flattened from continual business-traveler wear, as person after person, tired and alone, slipped into the garment and sat on the bed with the remote in hand, sending the channels streaming by.
Amy and Leo had become separated from each other over time; she knew that she could have used Penny and Ian as a way back to him. She could have ignored Penny’s explicit request for secrecy and instead told Leo everything, and then he would have been drawn into the story too, and there would now have been two couples in the mix, not just one. She could have told Leo all the details about the love affair, and maybe they would have been restored to each other.
“I think you should use this information against her,” Leo might say after Amy told him. “Threaten to tell the hedge-fund husband. Extort big money out of her. Hey, tuition time is coming up.”
“Or at least I could extort her for a family membership at her museum.”
“Yes! But wait until they have a really good show there. Like…an exhibit of photos of immigrants in babushkas walking down the gangplank into the New World. Do you think they’ll ever have an exhibit like that?”
“Oh, Leo, the question is, will they ever not have an exhibit like that?” And they would both laugh unfairly and embrace each other in the marital bed, secure in their love and their openness and in the fact that they had far more than Penny Ramsey and Ian Janeway would ever have together.
But Amy didn’t tell Leo about the couple. She didn’t tell Jill either but let everything languish, unsaid, and she didn’t tell any of her other friends at the Golden Horn over the stirring scents of coffee and butter, which theoretically could make anyone confess something of an erotic nature. She kept the secret close to herself, as she’d been asked to do.
It was slightly unsettling to see Penny regarding Ian with such a crooked, besotted expression; it was not unlike looking at Penny’s tiny foot encased in leather and fur. Ian, with his hair that never seemed quite combed, and the spray of freckles upon his face and neck and the back of his hands, had no real power at all except what he had over Penny. He was charming, but mostly he seemed to be one of the obscure and transient floaters who passed through the city so easily each year, absorbed into its undulating crowds, barely noticed by anyone.
“How will I manage over Christmas?” Ian asked. “Amy and I will have to see a lot of each other. You’re going to be here, Amy, right?”
“Oh yes.”
She and Leo probably couldn’t afford to go anywhere, she knew, which was disappointing but not unexpected. Winter break was still in the distance, and the Ramseys would be on the island of St. Doe’s, while Amy and Leo and Mason would be at home. They had made no plans, though at the tail end of Mason’s school vacation, Amy’s mother, Antonia, was coming to visit for several days when she traveled down to New York for her women’s conference. She would move into the tiny study in the apartment and sleep on the inflatable mattress on the floor.
“You know, Amy, you could come to St. Doe’s too,” Penny said now.
“No we couldn’t,” Amy said, but it was pathetically wonderful to imagine lying side by side with Penny on a white beach, while their sons played in the waves. Penny and Amy would coax the last of the sunblock from the snouts of bottles, would talk in discreet voices about Ian Janeway: where the relationship was going, whether Ian was “too much” in love with her. “It’s out of reach for us,” Amy went on. “I can already hear Leo’s response.”
Penny paused. “Are you positive? Don’t you have any mileage you could use? That would take away at least a little of the cost.”
“We do have mileage,” Amy said, suddenly too loud, the way Jill’s daughter Nadia sometimes spoke when she became excited. For maybe it could work, she thought, maybe it was doable. She would ask Leo tonight.
“I have mileage,” Ian put in, pointlessly.
After lunch the three of them walked through the galleries, stopping before a cluster of paintings by Magritte. The man with the green apple wasn’t there now, but still Amy recalled that day with Mason so long ago. She read a placard about Magritte’s relationship with his wife. Georgette had posed for him early on in their life together, and he considered her his muse. “I guess they were very domestic,” Penny said to Ian. “Not wild at all. She posed and he painted, and then he got famous and they traveled a lot and were very close.”
“Live with me,” Ian said quietly.
“Shh,” said Penny.
There on the walls were the floating objects of dreams, but set among them, almost scattered discreetly, were occasional female nudes, and Amy thought that maybe these were all based on Georgette Magritte, who populated her husband’s thoughts and gave him big ideas. Could that ever be enough for a full life? Karen Yip liked to please Wilson and make him feel good, and enjoy their life together. It would never be enough for Amy, though. She didn’t know what would be enough in the long run. For now, she was content to stand here, watching. Ian said something softly to Penny, then glanced all around the gallery before coming close to her and putting his lips to her forehead. They were both small, well-designed people—as compact as sexualized children. She felt oddly proud of them for their love, as though she were their generous chaperone. She thought again about the trip to St. Doe’s and wondered if it was possible to go. The couple stayed for a moment like that in the dim gray light of the gallery, and it seemed, from where she stood, that they shone, if only for each other.
Mason had rece
ntly told Amy yet another fact in his store of endless knowledge: in satellite maps of the earth, he said, you could always tell where the people were, even from great distances. Their faces, upturned slightly, gave off a shine that was like nothing else on earth—useful in love and a liability in warfare. Humans, no matter what they did, could not hide their incandescence.
NOW, IN THE NIGHT, when Leo began to groan and quiver slightly through his nightmare, Amy laid her hand on his broad bare back, and he turned toward her.
“Why did you wake me?” he said.
“You were having a nightmare. You were making those noises.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“You always deny it, Leo. But you were like a rabid dog.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He rubbed his eyes. “I shouldn’t eat before I go to sleep,” he said, nodding toward the plate on his night table that held crumbs from pecan shortbread cookies. “But right, I did have a bad dream. I was very upset,” he said, slowly remembering. “Something terrible was about to happen, and I saw you and Mason walking toward the woods—I don’t even know where we were; it didn’t look familiar—but it was dark in there, and I didn’t want you to go, because I had a feeling that you’d never come out. It was sort of apocalyptic. Although I guess with apocalyptic you can’t have ‘sort of.’”
He lay back down in the darkness, Amy close against him. “I think it’s because you’re already thinking about the father-son weekend,” she said.
“The weekend. Shit.”
“It’ll be okay, Leo.”
“It’ll be okay for you,” he said. “You get to stay home. But I’m dreading it.”
“It might not be so bad.”
“It’s not even as though we have to sleep in tents,” Leo went on. “We’ve got cabins with electricity. But think about it: all those fathers and their sons in one place. And Mason and I are supposed to take a hike together. I don’t hike. I’m not one of those dads who climb up the rock face of K2, or wherever they go for fun. Dads who hire Sherpas. I’m not like them. I don’t have their money; I’m not aggressive the way they are.”
