by Meg Wolitzer
“Well, I’m glad you’re not, obviously. Just be with him. I think that’s the point: ultrabusy fathers spending time with their sons.”
“I don’t know what’s fun for Mason anymore,” Leo said plaintively. “I don’t really have time to know whether he’s happy or not.”
Happiness had become an elusive state in them and in most of the people they knew, but still made frequent appearances in children. Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too. It was like unexpectedly spying a fawn paused on its stilty, trembling legs in a meadow. Without any self-consciousness you cried out, “Look!”
“I think he’s happy,” Amy decided. Then she added, “Once, an old woman in a museum said that Mason and I looked really happy. But it was a long time ago.”
She and Leo were quiet together in a moment of uncertainty about their son. They both felt the distinct strain of melancholy that accompanies the ritual relinquishing of a child to the world. But if it was their own happiness they were pondering at that moment, neither of them wanted to mention it. Leo closed his eyes and squished the pillow against the side of his face. Amy closed her eyes too and thought about Penny and Ian. Then she snapped her eyes open.
“About the Ramseys,” she said.
“Yes?” Leo opened his eyes again, looking right at her. Their noses were close, the points almost touching.
“I think I told you that they’re going to St. Doe’s over winter break,” Amy said softly. “She wanted to know if we could come. I told her we couldn’t.”
“That’s good,” said Leo.
“I know it’s totally out of reach.”
“Yes. It is.” He yawned. “In another life we can go,” he said. “In a parallel universe. For now, I can barely deal with the father-son weekend.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said.
There was a pause. “The guy who owns St. Doe’s,” said Leo. “He manufactures those biscuits, those Bing-Bongs. I wonder if they’re any good.”
“No idea.”
They lay in silence, and Amy listened for Leo’s breathing to shift, as it often quickly did, moving into a semi–sleep apnea that was troubling. Because he had gotten a little heavier in recent months, she worried that he would one day drop dead like that father in 14H. Sleep apnea happened in overweight men; you could hear the thin vibratory reed that was their air passage, and you lay awake beside them, knowing that all was not right. You were frightened, listening to your husband, the way a mother whom Amy had met in her Lamaze class a decade earlier had been frightened of her baby dying of crib death. As a result she had stayed awake all night in those early months, listening to the baby’s inrush and outrush of air, until finally the mother herself collapsed from exhaustion. But Leo’s breathing didn’t change at all now, for he wasn’t falling asleep. Both of them were awake; the conversation about St. Doe’s and, in a sidelong way, about money, had agitated them equally.
“You still up over there?” she asked.
“Yeah. I keep thinking about that island.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Forget it.”
“You know,” he said after a moment, “we do have mileage.”
Mileage! It was as though she controlled him like one of Mason’s electronic devices. Delicately, Amy said, “I wondered about that. Penny mentioned it, in fact. And what about those credit card points we have? But I didn’t want to bring it up with you. I know we can’t afford it at all. It’s an insanely expensive place. It’s not for us.”
“What reason did you give her that we couldn’t come?”
“I said I didn’t think we could manage it.”
“You said that? ‘Manage it’?”
“Well, it’s true.”
Leo shifted in the bed. “It makes me look failed,” he said. “Like I can’t take my family on a nice vacation.”
“Not to St. Doe’s, at least,” said Amy.
“So what did she say?”
“That was when she asked if we could use our mileage,” Amy said. “And then I thought about how we have a lot of credit card points too. Between all of that, maybe it would cover a substantial amount of the trip, wouldn’t it?” Leo didn’t reply. “We are always getting statements in the mail telling us that we’ve accumulated this huge number of points and this huge number of miles, and we always say we should do something about it,” Amy went on, “but basically it’s all theoretical. Can’t we go somewhere big, finally?”
Leo sat up in bed, dazed, his shoulders slumped, and she remembered the day on the street, after they had gone to look at the public school for Mason, when Leo had stood and done calculations on his BlackBerry in the rain. She could see that he was going into calculation mode again. “I didn’t mean that you should run the numbers now,” she said. “Obviously.”
Still, her husband rose from the bed in his boxers and with his thick bare chest, then plodded down the hall, which was vaguely lit by the pale green night-light that glowed from the guest bathroom. She followed him, saying, “Leo, don’t,” but he kept walking. The light made him look as if he were in the underground passage of a hospital, going on some ghastly, middle-of-the-night surgical mission or even some morgue mission. “Come back to bed,” she said.
But he was troubled, threatened, interested, and he sat down in the tiny study, that room that was even too small for a child to live in. Leo did not seem to fit into this room at all, and he adjusted himself in the creaky, too-low office chair and began pulling various papers from the little pigeonholes of the Sven desk. “Leo, stop,” she said. “Why are you doing this now? Are you just trying to make some kind of point? We can look at it tomorrow. You have to sleep.”
“Too late. I’m up now,” he said.
As he shuffled through papers, she saw the invoices and receipts from various business trips he had taken, and the interchangeable names of hotels in other cities: Omega Park Centre. Woodbridge Suites. The Inn on Dover Green. She watched as Leo continued to burrow through the piles.
“What are you trying to find?” she asked him.
“A mileage statement.”
He found one a few moments later. Usually the freebies that were offered in daily life were of a very low caliber, but always the act of receiving something for free was itself uncomfortably satisfying. For dinner they would sometimes order take-out from Szechuan Treasure, and if they spent twenty dollars there—which was easy to do—they would receive a free plastic container of cold sesame noodles, nestling vermiculate in a soy and peanut bath. O, free noodles! Amy would think, pathetically.
Still, even in this urban setting at a time during which everything was slightly beyond their means, something free was like a little miracle. It did not even really matter exactly what the free thing itself was: noodles, a certificate for a .05-ounce container of antioxidant face cream to be redeemed at a department store cosmetics counter after you filled out a “Facial Type” form handed to you by a distracted and facially perfect young woman. Amy would eat those free noodles and she would ask for her thimble of antioxidant just the same way that, if Leo finally said they had the mileage to get them all to St. Doe’s and then maybe enough crazily racked-up credit card points to grant them a big discount on a few nights in a beautiful room on that precious island, she would take it, she would grab it, she would do it.
“We’d probably have to leave at some terrible hour to get a decent fare,” Leo said. “And sit in the cargo hold.”
“I wouldn’t care,” Amy said.
“I’m just curious. What is it about Penny Ramsey that suddenly got you so interested?”
“She’s got a big life,” Amy said helplessly. “I like hearing about it, I guess.”
Leo nodded. His small desk was suffocated with papers and invoices and monthly statements. They were everywhere around him. He folded his arms and put his head down on top of it all. Amy recalled, distantly, that back in the beginning, when they had first met at Kenley Shuber, L
eo had worried that being a commercial litigator would “stunt” him; that was the word he had used. It was over this question of self-doubt that they had first fallen in love. They had gone to drink beers together one evening at Taggart’s, a bar frequented by all the young associates at the firm. It was the first time they’d ever been alone, except for brief moments in the elevator. During the conversation at the bar he had told her how much he’d loved college, how he’d gotten excited reading Tolstoy and Kafka and Thomas Mann. They’d both been literature majors—she in English at Penn, he in comp lit at Rutgers—but he couldn’t imagine doing anything bookish professionally. His term papers tended to be awkward and formal, yet he knew he would be a big reader his whole life; he was the kind of person, he said, for whom books were built. He told her that when he was younger, he’d imagined that the work of being a lawyer—the attention to language and phrasing and specificity—would allow him to retain some of his intellectual sheen, which would deepen over time into a burnish.
Mostly, though, Leo had been relieved by the idea that you could make a steady living from being a lawyer. His family had always been on the verge of being poor. His father would come home from the magazine stand he ran, bearing a new copy of Ladies’ Home Journal for Leo’s mother and Mad magazine for Leo. He and Leo would do the Mad fold-in on the back page and read that month’s movie parody, and then both of Leo’s parents would go into the master bedroom and argue about money for an hour. “We are being killed!” he had once heard his father cry. “We are getting it from all sides!” And his mother had shouted, “Calm down, you’ll have an aneurysm!” Leo prayed to God, “Please don’t let my dad have an aneurysm,” though he did not even know what that was. Becoming a lawyer himself would protect Leo against such strife. He would take care of his own family; he would valiantly save them from aneurysms, from being killed, from getting it from all sides.
But the dream of hard work and a steady salary didn’t take into account the idea that, in college, Leo would fall in love with literature and would then put it aside, the way many of the literature majors did. “The truth,” he had said to Amy at that bar, “is that college is like this beautiful forest. And then if you leave the forest to go to law school or business school or something, everything changes.” They sat side by side on bar stools, and as he spoke Amy imagined their two bodies rolling together in wet leaves inside the gates of that beautiful forest. “By the time you get safely ensconced in some corporate job,” Leo went on, a little drunk, “you realize that the way you’re going to spend the rest of your life has nothing to do with Tolstoy and Kafka and Thomas Mann.”
Why, she had thought, lightly drunk herself, do people always say “Thomas Mann,” instead of just “Mann”? Tolstoy and Kafka were one-namers, but not him. “Right. I know,” she’d agreed urgently, and she wanted to leave the dark bar and head into a bookstore and buy Leo a beautifully bound edition of a Thomas Mann novel to keep on his night table and read a little bit of before he went to sleep at night. And then she just wanted him to kiss her; she would have done anything to get him to kiss her.
She pictured herself and Leo Buckner running back to that beautiful forest, but somehow it wouldn’t be there anymore. Then Leo would look down at himself and see that he was dressed like an upgraded version of his potbellied, embattled magazine-seller father, Murray Buckner; and she would look down at herself and see that she was wearing a little skirt and panty hose, which she would have to take off and wash after work each evening in her single-girl sink and then wring into a tiny piece of seaweed and throw over the shower handle.
That night at Taggart’s, Leo and Amy discussed whether he ought to leave the firm and become a public defender. She imagined him working in a government office with posters pinned to the walls and poor single mothers lined up on folding chairs in the hall with their paperwork in their hands, patiently waiting to see him. The floor would be covered with the worst burgundy carpeting in the world; his cheap desk chair would screech in protest whenever he leaned back.
But both of them knew that such a job would make the rest of life difficult and in many ways unmanageable. For slowly they were getting used to the not-bad salary that Kenley Shuber gave its young lawyers and the little extras that this life casually offered. Neither of them was very acquisitive, and neither was willing to sell out completely. (“I won’t be representing Big Tabacky,” Leo had said. Later, they would joke that he represented Little Baloney, and Little Honey-Smoked Turkey.)
By the time Leo paid for the beers, his fantasy of working as a public defender had already been roundly rejected, as had the more briefly sketched fantasy of becoming a specialist in constitutional law and teaching at a law school, like a highly intellectual friend of his had done. Amy and Leo had stood up, wobbly from drink, and headed back for another late night at Kenley Shuber, where the desk chairs cushioned the sacroiliac like a loving mother’s hand, and a town car rolled the young lawyers gently home after hours. Leo stayed on at the firm, and his desire to be a public defender never again overtook him with ferocity. Recalling his parents’ anguish about money, and his own need for comfort, he subtly shifted his desires, becoming more skilled and sure-handed at litigation. Amy was a pretty good lawyer too, competent at what she thought of as the safe and reliable art of trusts and estates. Then, like so many other women, she left the job she had never loved the way she had hoped she would.
Now, in the middle of the night, Amy thought she heard Leo sigh at his little desk in the study, where he sat unmoving with his head on his folded arms on top of all those papers, though the sound might have just been the heat, crackling and clapping through the vents.
“So do you think we can actually go?” she asked him, and she waited for the answer. At first, there was nothing.
“What?” Leo finally said, lifting his head. He had momentarily fallen back asleep under the desk lamp at three in the morning, with his wife standing right beside him, watching. “Where?” he asked. “Can we go where?”
“Over winter break. To St. Doe’s.”
“Oh,” said Leo. Then, finally, “Yes,” he said. “We can go.”
Chapter TEN
Carcassonne, France, 1950
GEORGETTE MAGRITTE had modeled for her husband when the light was right. Although, as time passed, it became more difficult for other people to locate her presence in the various utilitarian objects that dominated his canvases, she knew it was there. Small bits of her were everywhere in those paintings. He wanted her with him always; her presence was a solace to him and a source of joy, and so she rarely denied him herself. Early on, after they first became lovers, he had asked Georgette for her patience and absolute stillness, and he would become agitated if she moved at all while she was posing for him. But often, when they both worked like that for the hours of an afternoon, she felt gratified, because she knew she was contributing something and also because she received the fullness of his attention. The least she could do was reward him with the fullness of herself.
Not every woman would have enjoyed this role. Many wives would have been bored and angry by the stillness, but it stirred her. He was so talented, and to be in the service of this talent was exciting. During the long days of being his model, Georgette felt her mind open like a strange blossom. Like workers in an office they stopped at the same time each day for lunch, eating bread and meat in the small garden behind the house, and talking of the painters who were their friends, and of the painters’ wives. Sometimes they talked a little bit of the love affairs they had heard about; it was very appealing for a safely and happily married couple to speak of such daring matters. They felt secure in their nest, with René at the easel and Georgette reclining or standing. She would position herself just so, then ask him if this was what he wanted, or if there was something else she ought to be doing. But usually her husband smiled and said no, it was fine, she was doing her job perfectly, and then he thanked her.
Chapter ELEVEN
SO WHEN DOES your vaca
tion with the Ramseys begin?” Karen Yip wanted to know. It was early evening, the road was dark, and they were traveling in the Yip family’s SUV, heading north. Karen sat up front with Amy beside her; in the back were Roberta and Jill; and in the very back was Jill’s daughter, Nadia, who sat with her face almost pushed against the glass, singing quietly as she watched the black road and the other cars pulse by. Even while she was talking, Karen was able to convert miles into kilometers for entertainment, each mile of course being 1.609344 k, and the numbers bowed to her touch as the total distance increased accordingly.
“We’ll leave on the Saturday after break starts,” said Amy.
“Will you travel with them?” asked Karen.
“No, no. We’ll meet them there. I don’t even know Greg Ramsey. And what I do know, I don’t love.”
“Which of course explains why you’re going on vacation with them,” said Jill quietly, and Karen listened to see whether this criticism of Amy would flourish into something bigger, as it had lately done between the two friends around the topic of Penny Ramsey. But Amy didn’t say anything. The others talked about their own upcoming Christmas vacations: where they would go, what they would do. Roberta said she and Nathaniel and the kids were staying home, as they usually did, but that this year she would be very busy, because she was actively involved in helping Brandy Gillop, that teenaged girl she’d taken for an abortion in South Dakota.
“We e-mail each other almost every day,” Roberta said. “She’s in the process of making slides of her artwork. I’ve seen a few. She’s got a lot of potential, actually.” Roberta leaned forward as far as her lap belt would allow and said, “Amy, I was thinking maybe you could pass along Brandy’s slides to Penny Ramsey.”
