A nurse pops her head in, tells me to turn off my phone. “It might interfere with our equipment,” she says.
“Isn’t it fascinating that we are more worried about machines interfering with other machines than machines interfering with us?” Fisher says, a timely philosopher with a profound point. And if I closed my eyes, it could be Dad talking.
“This machine’s okay apparently,” Fisher says, turning on the TV that hangs precariously from the ceiling. We both sip coffee and settle on a channel that’s airing reruns of Law & Order. But exhaustion overwhelms. He is tired because he’s been up all night fighting for his life. I’m exhausted because I’ve been up all night fighting for mine.
I wake up when the door swings open. A small woman with frizzy dark hair flings herself at Fisher. The wife.
“Billy,” she says through fresh tears.
And with this, I can suddenly picture him as a boy. Billy Fisher. Not the cutest boy in class, but funny, and irreverent. And lovable.
“Mary,” he replies, and hugs her. He buries his face in her chest and I can’t see his eyes, but I think he’s crying too.
“I’m going to be just fine,” he promises her.
“What happened?” she asks, pulling away from him, wiping her eyes. And I wonder what these words really mean; if it’s the first time she’s dared ask such a dangerous, honest question in decades. And in his eyes, I see distance disappear.
“It seems your old Billy goat has a big bad broken heart,” he says, his voice both strong and cracking.
His wife giggles, awkwardly for a woman her age, and perches on the edge of his bed.
And I’m caught in the corner of this small room, an untimely impostor, witnessing a moment I shouldn’t. A moment of—dare I say it—love. Not perfect, but palpable. No sparkling wheat field. But no dying tree either.
I stand. And his wife turns and sees me, half her age, sporting bedhead, smudged mascara and all.
“My name is Quinn,” I say, offering my hand. “I work with your husband.”
She shakes my hand limply and searches my eyes for an answer I can’t give her. “I’m sure you do,” she says.
And it occurs to me that I am just another one. We’re all the same really. Sure, at one time we had our natural hair color and quirks and hobbies. But now we all have good manners and good highlights. We wear gray and navy and black, drink too much coffee and booze.
Interchangeable, really.
Then she takes the coffee cup from his bedside. “Are you allowed to have this?” she asks sharply, a simple question sprung from not-so-simple depths, fear and anxiety and anger dancing in her breath.
And Fisher becomes Billy, a little boy who’s in trouble but doesn’t know why exactly. He shrugs, catching my eye only briefly as I sneak out.
I book a flight for early the next morning. I go back to my hotel. To my room. For hours, I lie on that bed, that beige bed I should have slept in. For hours, I lie there alone and cry.
At the airport, the security line is long and moves slowly. Tired souls scrutinize photo IDs and tell us to remove our shoes. We fill plastic bins with machines—phones and computers and video games. We don’t speak. But we eye each other, sizing each other up, trying to smell evil among aromas of stinky feet and fast food.
“They should rename this the insecurity line,” a wise stranger mumbles.
At the newsstand, I stock up on tabloids and gummy candy. For once, I linger. I take time to look at all the silly items I usually breeze by, the cheap souvenirs that guilty husbands bring home for waiting wives and kiddies. Out-of-season snow globes, pens that light up, aprons with the shape of Texas emblazoned up front. I see a mug and grab it.
“The Best Way to a Fisherman’s Heart Is Through His Fly.”
I stop at a little sports bar and find a stool. Under the baseball game, a ticker reminds us that the alert level is orange. A bartender sidles up, and without thinking of it, I order a Bloody Mary. “Extra spicy,” I say, and think of Fisher and his Mary, that small hospital room that looks like all the others. And it occurs to me that hospital rooms are just like hotel rooms are just like us lawyers. We serve a purpose, yes. But we’re fungible. Each one of us is expensive, a generic copy of the next, sadly waiting to be filled.
I pull out my BlackBerry. For once, it doesn’t blink.
I take a large sip of my drink and type in “bypass.”
To avoid (an obstacle) by using an alternative channel, passage, or route.
I board the plane and walk to the back, past the forest of sad and aging men. I take off my jacket, roll it into a ball, and shove it overhead. No one says anything. The man next to me pulls out a weathered copy of Moby Dick, and flips to the middle.
The flight attendant reminds us to shut off our cell phones. And, happily, I comply. As if wireless signals are truly our biggest foe.
And as I dive into the rainbow pages of a gossip magazine and chew a fluorescent worm, bypassing brewing blockages and emotional malpractice, still gripping that porcelain mea culpa, a little baby cries.
Chapter 23
I follow the smell of bacon to our front door. As I fumble for my keys, I hear the hum of Saturday morning inside: Hula’s scratchy meow, the clanking of dishes, Wolf Blitzer’s Saturday morning growl.
Never before have I so appreciated the mundane sounds of a new day. And mere feet from him, on the other side of a door to which I have the key, I miss Sage more than ever; his sandpaper whiskers before he shaves, his toenails scratching me under the covers, the way he squints when he thinks hard about something.
I walk in, silly souvenir mug in hand, ready to pounce and surprise him, full of new stories and new remorse, ready to start over, to do this right, to prove old Plato and Fisher wrong. To let the tree thrive.
A giggle. I turn. Red toenails. Bare skin.
Kayla.
She wears Phelps’s old flannel, my secret souvenir, and leans against the kitchen island, drinking coffee, stroking my cat.
Sage hovers in the background in our sun-blanched kitchen, looking stunned. He wears nothing but those boxers with the fishing flies I gave him on Valentine’s Day.
Surprise.
I drop the mug and it shatters.
“Nothing happened, Bug,” he says, coming toward me as I turn to leave.
“Nothing happened,” she says too, harmonizing his lie.
It must be a lie. Because this is what we do. We betray. And then lie.
Hula hops down from the island and follows me to the door.
Anger would be the appropriate emotion. But it’s as if this emotion has been used up in me and instead anger’s not-so-distant cousins, fear and sadness and longing, stand in. Instead of sizzling like the bacon my fiancé cooks for another woman, I’m floating. A lonely island in a suddenly rough sea. Lost, unreachable.
When I reach the corner, I look back. Sage stands there, frozen on our front stoop under an unforgiving spotlight of September sun.
You can only go so far in bare feet and boxers, I tell myself.
On the way to the gym, my BlackBerry dances in my bag, buzzing with explanations and apologies waiting to be heard. And I turn off the device and keep crying, my mind somewhere between Texas and here, muddled by vodka and shock and guilt.
But, suddenly, a thunderclap of relief. I’m not evil. Just weak. Imperfect. Human.
And so is he.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. The clichéd words float in my head, mocking me, undermining my new and fleeting sense of comfort. Two indiscretions don’t cancel each other out. Even when they’re simultaneous.
But wait a minute, I tell myself, we’re not talking about raising a good kid, one who doesn’t yank hair, or bite. We’re talking about vastly more complicated things. Life. Love. Maybe, in these situations, childhood tenets simply don’t apply.
When I walk through the gym’s front door, a strong arm grabs me.
“You’re home early,” Victor says.
I nod.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says.
“I have,” I say, shaking.
Like he’s done so many times before when spotting or stretching me, he grabs my arm. But this time his grasp is gentle, concerned. He walks me to the gym café. And orders me a coffee.
We sit at a small rickety table blanketed in someone else’s crumbs. I sip bitter coffee and stare out the vast window as people march by holding hands, carrying groceries, pushing strollers. I wait for Victor’s questions, but they don’t yet come. Perhaps this man knows exactly what I need: time.
Among the swarm of strangers, I spot a familiar face. Avery. She walks in and doesn’t seem to see me, but waits patiently on line and orders a green tea. Her eyes are red and puffy.
She turns and catches my eye. I smile. She hugs me, nods at Victor.
“Sit,” I say. And she does. “Buff Brides must be getting intense these days, huh?”
She blows on her green tea and takes a delicate sip. “No more Buff Brides for me,” she says, lifting her left hand, splaying thin, ringless fingers. “It’s off.”
“I see that,” I say.
“No, the wedding. Goddamned lawyers. He wanted a prenup.”
“I didn’t even know he had money,” I say. As far as I could tell, Jonathan was like all the other preppy guys I went to law school with. Intelligent, ambitious, eager to make the money he never quite had.
“Neither did I,” she says, shaking her head. “Neither did I.”
“Who would hide the fact that they have money?” Victor asks. A fair question. “Most of us work hard to hide the fact that we have none.”
“Less than a fucking month before our wedding, he wanted me to sign on the dotted line.”
“You never say ‘fucking,’” I say.
“Only in emergencies,” she says.
“Maybe he wanted to protect you?” I say.
“From what?”
“Money can ruin people, Avery,” I say.
“It can also buy dinners out. It can also pay for private school tuition or an apartment,” Avery says. “The bastard told me we’d have to wait years to have kids because of his loans. He has no loans. Just millions. Millions that now he wants to protect from me. Since I’m obviously such a gold digger.”
She sips her tea and looks down.
“Well,” I say, looking at them both. “Men are animals.”
With this, Victor takes my coffee and Avery’s tea, stands, and drops them into the garbage. “Girls, this animal is getting you out of here. I think we need a real drink.”
“You never drink,” I remind him.
He links his arms in both of ours. “Only in emergencies,” he says, and leads the way. And like two little girls lost, we gladly follow.
Cilantro is buzzing with a Saturday brunch crowd, but we find a table in the back corner. Michael has responded quickly to this morning’s text SOS and zips through the front door as we settle in. The waiter pours our first of many pitchers of sangria.
“Did you know ‘sangria’ comes from the Spanish word ‘sangre,’ which means blood?” Victor says, sniffing the crimson liquid, fishing an apple cube from the surface.
“Does that make us vampires?” Avery says, and a smile glides across her face.
“Okay,” Michael says, taking a swig. “Why the sudden vampire convention?”
And now it’s my turn to talk about my animal.
“He cheated,” I say.
I tell them all about my morning. About Kayla barefoot and giggly in Phelps’s shirt in my kitchen with Sage.
“Slow down, Quinn,” Avery says. “It’s entirely possible that nothing happened.” And it’s good to see that a certain goddamned lawyer hasn’t drained her of her optimism.
I nod, eager to believe her. Maybe nothing did happen. Maybe I’m so drunk with guilt and remorse, I’m assuming the worst.
Michael and Victor look at each other and roll their eyes. A moment of male communication.
“She wasn’t wearing pants,” I say. “Hardly the portrait of innocence.”
“Okay, so it’s unlikely,” she says. “But you never know. I never did trust that girl. Speaking of trust…lawyers. They just fuck everything up,” she says, glaring at me, letting fly that word again.
“Ah, the clichéd prenup dilemma,” Michael says, catching on. “So, he has money. That’s a nice late-breaking development, right?”
“I don’t want his money. I want him,” she says through fresh tears. “I wanted him.”
With more sangria comes more courage. And truth.
“I saw Phelps,” I say. “In Texas.”
“You saw him from afar?” Avery says. “Or you saw him?”
“I saw him,” I say. “It just kind of happened.”
But even as these pathetic words escape me, I know better. Indiscretions, like marriages, don’t just happen. We make them happen.
“Hence the flannel shirt hidden away in the depths of your dresser,” Michael says in dramatic tones. “The leftovers of love.”
Glasses down. Eyes on me.
“Monogamy might not be my thing,” I say. “I’m not very good at it.”
Avery glares at me. “Wow. Lawyers do fuck everything up.”
I spare them the details. The gummy bears, the mini bottles of alcohol, the missing ring and pregnant wife. But I do tell them the pertinent details. The most important part. That I am immoral and lost and pathetic.
And for the first time in hours, our table is quiet and I hear the din of New York brunch, the snippets of conversation hurled back and forth between hungover lovers, parents pleading with a toddler to stop throwing food.
“Well, you’re not married yet,” Michael says. “There’s a reason people get engaged first. Monogamy takes practice.”
“Practice all you want, but you need to tell him,” Avery says. “Even if it turns out he’s no Boy Scout himself. Lies are never good. A last-minute confession beats a nonconfession.”
“But it was an accident,” I plead. “And accidents happen, right?”
But even as I say these words, I know I don’t mean them. Again, I know better. There aren’t any accidents. For the most part, we do things intentionally, don’t we? Like choose the people with whom we surround ourselves. Here I am with my brother who must love me no matter what. Avery, an old friend who keeps me honest, and optimistic, even in the throes of her own despair. And Victor, my trainer and so much more, with his surprisingly muscled mind and profoundly simple take on things.
Victor shrugs, looks at all three of us, and fills the silence. “This is just what we do.”
And even in my own liquored fog, even in my haze of guilt, I note a nuance in Victor’s wise words. He doesn’t say men, this is what men do. He chooses his words more carefully, it seems.
This is what we do.
Because it’s not just the men who are animals.
I sip sangria, nod, and realize that monogamy is like ghosts. Some people are fervent believers, they tell stories, point to examples. But the rest of us are maybe a little less convinced.
Avery and I stumble back to her apartment.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” she says, flipping the switch as we walk in. And for a moment, I wonder which one.
“I’m allowing myself a few days to grieve, but then I need to get organized. This is pathetic,” she says, slurring her words only slightly, clinging to her trademark decorum that another drink would surely snatch. She gestures toward her living room, a forest of pink florals. The books on her shelves are color-coded. Mail lingers in organized piles on a glass coffee table.
But the floor is littered with boxes and bags, gifts she’s prudently left unpacked. “I’m beginning to wonder if I knew it was going to end, that I’d have to return everything,” she muses.
In the small and spotless kitchen, she flips another switch and the dishwasher purrs. She uncorks a bottle of wine and pours two glasses and hands me one.
She steps over
boxes and opens her coat closet. “You would have looked so pretty in this,” she says, holding up my bridesmaid dress. It’s periwinkle, a color that’s pretty and safe, predictable for an early fall wedding, one that looks good on most skin tones. A color I’ve always hated.
Despite the boxes that litter her rose carpet, the apartment, like my friend, is peaceful. She lights twin lavender candles on the coffee table. I notice she still has pictures of Jonathan and her all over the apartment—a picture from their scuba trip where they sport matching sunburns and snorkels. A picture from the day they got engaged, mere minutes before she called me and could barely choke out the words through tears of joy.
“That’s my next project,” Avery says, apparently aware of my eye’s path. “Getting rid of the reminders—the pictures, the letters, his light beers in my fridge. I never drink beer.”
And I wonder if you can get past something like this by tackling projects, and methodically moving down a to-do list.
Avery stops stacking boxes, takes a sip of wine, and sits down at her dining table. I sit too. She moves the vase of fresh pink roses that stands between us.
“From him?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’ve been getting them every day. Men and their flowers. So pathetic,” she says. “Why do they think a nice-smelling bouquet is going to fix things?”
“Ever notice when people buy flowers? When a person or a relationship is dying. When it’s already too late,” I say.
But then, miraculously, a flame of optimism flickers in her again. “Or when people marry. Or when a baby is born.”
Undeterred, I continue to theorize about men and flowers, bozos and botany. “Maybe,” I surmise, “he wants to remind you of life when everything threatens to die.”
Avery shrugs and takes a large sip. “One day I’m going to meet a man who is going to love me enough to be honest.”
“Of course you will,” I say. A timely assurance, a potential lie.
“Someone like…” she says, and pauses. And we both know she was about to say Sage.
Life After Yes Page 21
