The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  She knew then that if she were to look through the pigeonholes of the Sven desk—this place that had always been as boring to her as a gift shop was to Leo—she would find at least a couple more receipts like this one. “Client Dinner,” one would say. Or, perhaps, “Drinks with Client.” She knew it with alarm and dread, even as it also made her feel she had no idea of what drove Leo or of what he cared about now. She understood that the pigeonholes of the desks of other overstressed working people all over the city and dotting the surrounding towns contained similar receipts, and that the world was swollen with these piles of paper, and that wherever you looked, you could always find somebody asking somebody else to pay up.

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  Montreal, 1973

  THE GIRLS DIDN’T HEAR him come home from work, for he was a quiet man, discreet with his key in the door. They were in the living room deeply engaged in something—at first he didn’t know what—and he stopped for a moment to listen. It wasn’t like eavesdropping; it was more like getting some information about his daughters with whom he shared a house but who seemed bewildering to him, the way his wife did sometimes too.

  “Jane, you and Helen Burns must walk around and around in the rain as punishment for your sins,” Naomi was saying to Amy in an attempted deep voice that Henry Lamb supposed was meant to signify maleness.

  “Please don’t make us do that, Mr. Brocklehurst,” said Amy. “I beg of you.”

  “Please don’t,” echoed Jennifer.

  “I am afraid you have given me no choice. You are all terrible children, and you must learn humility.”

  “You don’t even know what humility means, Naomi,” said Amy.

  “My name is not Naomi, it is Mr. Brocklehurst. And of course I do. Humility is the thing that the Christian martyrs had. It is…their thing. And you have to learn it as well.” Then the youngest of his daughters reached out and lightly began to shove the oldest, and then the middle one joined in too, the three girls engaged in a mock fight that seemed to them to be deeply satisfying. Their father watched, still unnoticed, as they banged and goofed around together. Amy fell against a standing lamp, knocking it to the rug but not shattering it. The couch moved slightly out of position, complaining a little on its casters.

  Henry had come home early today because his stomach was slightly upset, and the house, in the late afternoon, always seemed to be such a soothing place. He would walk in and see his daughters playing one of their complicated games, and he wished he could join them for the entire day. He had gotten used to being with them after the nights when Antonia had banished him and the girls upstairs. He had slowly learned, in those moments, how much he liked that enforced child time. It comforted him more than macroeconomic theory ever had. He’d never been particularly brilliant in his field, but instead he was hardworking, drawn forward since boyhood by some generic notion that he was meant to succeed. But truly, if the world had been different—if it had been a freer and stranger place—he might have said to Antonia, “You go off and do your work. I will stay here all day.”

  Those words, said even to himself, seemed sort of sad and peculiar; they sounded like the sentiments of a man in a midlife crisis. In the fall he would have to serve as department chairman; it was a position that rotated, and finally it was to be Henry’s turn, but he dreaded the constant do-si-do of meetings, the intradepartmental memos he was supposed to send all the time, and the way he would have to take charge of that little duchy called the Economics Department, when all he wanted was to run his own household.

  If he were in charge at home, then the house, at four-thirty in the afternoon, would already be alight with the first smells of food, as it had once been: Perhaps there would be lamb chops snapping with fat in the broiler or even the earthen smells of a chocolate cake. Children loved to be in a house in which a cake was baking; nothing made them feel more content. Yet his three daughters in the late afternoon of a school day were pretending to be at Jane Eyre’s orphanage. The rooms they inhabited were chaotic and lively and slightly out of control. The rug bunched; someone would inevitably trip over it soon, he thought, but he didn’t want to go in and straighten it, because then they would see him and stop playing and grow self-conscious. He wished so badly that he could be in the vicinity of his daughters’ play more often, that it could just flourish near him without stoppage; he wished he were allowed to putter around among the girls’ true nature, as ignored but central as a mother who stayed home all day.

  For a long time, Antonia had seemed to enjoy that role, but then she’d been struck by new desires. As a result, his daughters had become more independent too, and this wasn’t a bad thing at all, but Henry Lamb would have liked to step into the breach and cook those lamb chops, and straighten that rug, and do so much more, at least for a few more years, until the girls got too old and were completely lost to him.

  Early on, he’d had an inkling of the ways in which he and Antonia were different from other couples. She had been a sexy, somewhat advanced girl from Halifax who had been enchanted by Henry’s bookishness and leanness when they met there in the summer of 1958, when he was visiting his cousins after finishing up at the University of Toronto. “All the other men I know are boors,” she had said as they sat in bathing suits on the rocky shore, and he had just finished explaining to her his interest in John Stuart Mill. “You’re not.”

  At first he thought she’d said “bores,” though later on he realized he had been mistaken. He might in fact have been boring to her; he bored himself sometimes. They had had sex in her parents’ seaside house when no one else was home, on sheets that smelled saline from being hung out to dry in that coastal air, and he wondered if she liked it but could never find the bravery to ask. She certainly made a lot of noise during those sessions, rolling her head around and clenching her toes in a death grip, and it embarrassed him slightly, but then again most things did.

  By 1973, married for thirteen years, he didn’t think Antonia was interested in other men, but he didn’t think she was very interested in him anymore, either. Partly, he’d done it to himself. When he found himself kissing Ginny Foley, the department secretary, at that Christmas party in 1969, it had been an accident, and an act of desperation. He had been so quietly unhappy within the narrow straits of his life at the time and was trying to find some way to salvage meaning from the world of the Economics Department.

  There, then, was little redheaded Ginny. Even at the party she’d been at her desk, as always, and he had smiled at her benignly, then taken one of the sour candies that she kept in a jar, and said, “Hello, Ginny, I hope you can get away from your desk and have yourself an eggnog.” He kept walking, and she followed him to his office. She stood in the doorway and said to him, “Professor Lamb, you know you’re the only man in the entire department who treats me like a person.” Then she took him by the shoulders and leaned up and kissed his mouth.

  He had been shocked. He was sucking on her sour candy at the time, and his tongue and her tongue played a bit of ping-pong with that little orb, which cherrified the kiss and made it seem all the more salacious. It was as if Ginny Foley was a metaphor for all the pleasure and comfort that was missing from his existence at the university. The kiss reminded him of how little joy he took in most things. If only he could find a consciousness-raising group for men, then he would immediately go sit in some other husband’s living room and tell everyone, “I wish I could just stay home and raise my daughters, and cook lamb chops and bake cakes, and watch my wife march off into civilization the way she wants to, and then watch her come home and listen to her tell me all about it.”

  But supposedly men did not need such a group. Men were happy with the way the die had been cast. They had held on to their power over the centuries; they ran departments to their liking, and they had long ago set the tone of the world, and though the women were taking the world back now, bit by bit, everyone would always be aware that the men had gotten there first and had laid down their big, primitive footp
rints.

  In the car going home that night, Antonia had let him have it. To his horror, she had seen the kiss with Ginny Foley from the department hallway and had thought he was disgraceful. In her consciousness-raising group, she told him, they sometimes discussed the problem of infidelity and what to do about it. No, no, he had wanted to say. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. But he couldn’t find the words to tell her this, and so he sat with her in the overheated car, saying he was so very sorry and slowly working his way over the roads that stayed iced in Montreal all winter, and together they headed home.

  There were to be no more cherry-tinged kisses with Ginny Foley; within a year she had married an electrician and moved to Saskatoon. Henry retreated into his work. Occasionally he returned home early from the university, such as on a day like today, and for just a moment he would catch the tail end of his daughters’ rich and fully imagined inner lives. It was like being able to glimpse childhood, even as it evaporated.

  “Jane Eyre, you are wanted in the schoolroom this very minute,” one of his girls was saying to another. They were so beautiful, and he regarded them from the front hallway as if for the first time. During their younger years, he’d been involved in committees and in political jockeying within the department, and in publishing articles, panting slavishly after that all-important gold ring called tenure. His girls treated him like a slightly remote figure. Amy used to sit in his study sometimes, in the space below his desk when he was in his chair, and she would grab at an ankle and hold on to it, and he never shook her away but instead sat there for longer than he’d meant to.

  The world was changing, but not fast enough. Maybe soon a mother could go off and write all day without thinking of anyone or anything else, while a father could stay home and make a house smell like chocolate and play dollies with his daughters. But for now, as far as he could see, that couldn’t yet happen. In this house, at least, there would be a halfway version, in which Antonia was sometimes excited or conflicted, and Henry was often sentimental or bored. Their three daughters seemed not to notice much of it. They were girls, still caught in the expansive amber of childhood. He stood for a moment in the front hallway and watched them play.

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  A MY CALLED JILL frequently during the first week back from her trip to St. Doe’s, much the way that the two of them had called each other when they were in college. Her voice was flat with unhappiness. Jill remembered how, at exactly half their present age, they had telephoned back and forth on dorm-room phones and met for beers near midnight at a campus bar they liked where the walls were carpeted and you could sit in a corner and lean back against the spongy, unclean surface and say anything there was that had to be said. You could sing your song of sorrow—a boy no longer loves me; my mother is dead; I have no time to study for my Western Intellectual Tradition exam—and the other person would shake her head or touch your shoulder or agree that life could be so hard. They switched off being the one who told things and the one who listened; neither of them was particularly needier than the other. Although Jill, in those days, was still just a few years out from her mother’s suicide, she offset the trauma with her own quiet, methodical manner. Somehow, together, with their backgrounds so different but their modesty and fidelity similar, Jill and Amy formed a duo. They met at all hours of the day and night, and they told each other things, and they never regretted what they had said. You could be a girl crying as you gripped a dented plastic cup of beer and leaned against the furred curve of a wall; and now, as a forty-year-old woman, your closest friend would not hold you responsible for that earlier incarnation.

  Amy Lamb currently reminded Jill so much of that long-ago version of herself. Amy seemed, lately, like someone who had been formed and then unformed again. She had been tempest-tossed by Penny Ramsey, and it had hurt her; it still did. But now there was something else: She’d become sharply unhappy and angry with Leo, who had forged a few expenses, hoping to pick up some extra money. Maybe Amy was an innocent not to have known how common this practice was, and, though the cheating was small-time, it was still fraud, she told Jill, and its casualness shook her. She said she had always thought Leo was one of the good ones, that he was nothing like Greg Ramsey and those other piratic husbands.

  Late at night on the day that she had found the receipts, Amy had called Jill. It was midnight, too late to get a phone call, but Jill didn’t stiffen in the way that many people did when the phone rang at that hour, and this was for one reason: Her parents were both already dead. She’d long ago gotten those phone calls, the one about her mother so horrifying on that afternoon at the Pouncey School; the second one, about her father, years later and expected because he had pancreatic cancer by then. So really, as she lay in bed in the house in Holly Hills with Donald beside her and Nadia sleeping nearby, she had nothing much to fear when the phone rang at a time when it shouldn’t have.

  “Jill? I know it’s late. I’m really sorry.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Amy told Jill about the fake receipts that Leo had generated from their trip, and she said that he appeared to have been generating others for some time. “I found three of them that he hasn’t yet handed in,” she said. “The client gift and a drinks bill from the island, and a so-called client dinner from a Tuscan restaurant that we went to last month.”

  “So what was the client gift, really?” Jill asked.

  “Oh, some little paperweight I bought my mother.”

  “How much was it? I’m just curious.”

  “Just over two hundred dollars,” Amy said.

  “Wow. That’s a nice paperweight.”

  “It was pretty,” Amy said, her voice slightly petulant, so Jill didn’t pursue this.

  Donald cracked open an eye and looked annoyed. Jill took the cordless phone down the wide, dim stairs of the house and sat in the dark of the den. Though Amy was so unhappy, it felt comforting that they were talking like this, and that the topic, for a change, was not Penny Ramsey. They were talking about marriage, and life, the way they had done when Jill lived in the city. “Oh, Amy, come on,” she said finally. “Don’t magnify this. Don’t catastrophize.”

  “I’m not catastrophizing. It’s how I feel.”

  “So what did you do with them?” Jill asked.

  “The receipts? I left them there.”

  “I hate to sound blasé,” Jill said, “but this kind of thing is pretty common in business, isn’t it? Doesn’t it happen all the time?”

  “I suppose so. But Leo was always different. And please don’t tell me that you think morality is a fluid thing, Jill.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that. I wasn’t even thinking it. But now that you mention it, I guess it’s true. There are circumstances.”

  “But why would he secretly become this person who would cheat like this, even in this little, pathetic way? Or keep it from me?” asked Amy.

  “Maybe because it’s little and pathetic.”

  “I really have no idea of what he’s thinking lately. We are extremely detached. Not that he even necessarily knows it.”

  “You have to talk to him,” said Jill.

  “I can’t.”

  “Well, then I don’t know what else to advise.” There was quiet on the line for a moment. “Any word from Penny?” Jill asked finally.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’m done with that.”

  “And what about the boyfriend?”

  “He’s apparently lucky. I called the framing department at the Met. They said he’s supposed to go to some rehabilitation institute outside London. He’ll be okay, but it’ll take a long time. His aunt is taking care of him. I sent him some chocolates and a letter, but I didn’t really know what to say. I don’t even know him. I just told him that I was sorry about everything that had happened and that I hoped he got better soon. That kind of thing. The whole story has no real ending; it’s so strange.”

  “This is the ending. It’s j
ust not satisfying, that’s all. It’s just not ‘closure,’ like people say.”

  Jill realized that she almost enjoyed the slow burn of piety she felt about Penny Ramsey, but it was followed by sympathy for Amy. It was as though Amy was a child who had left home despite her parents’ entreaties that the world was a treacherous place. Now she had returned, broken and sad, because what her parents had said turned out to be true after all. When you reached the age of forty, Jill thought, you didn’t need new friends. Apparently you shouldn’t have new friends; they would only disappoint you.

  “I think you should go to sleep,” Jill said. “Talk to Leo about the receipts tomorrow.”

  “You should sleep too.” Amy paused and blew her nose. “Are you still taking that Noctrem? I should get some.”

  “Yeah, every night. It really works. I’ll give you a few.”

  “Thanks. You can be my dealer.”

  There was a pause. Jill might have taken this moment to suddenly say something to Amy about Nadia, to confess her anxieties about her daughter’s intellect in a much fuller way than she’d ever allowed herself, but she couldn’t.

  “I know,” said Amy, “that I’ve been a little obnoxious about the Penny thing. I realize you’ve been lonely out there, away from the city and all of us. And I never want you to feel, you know, abandoned by me.”