Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “I’m sorry,” he said, going to Todd. “From now on I’ll be good. I promise.”

  “I’m just worried about you,” Todd said. “You know how much I love you, right? You know that.” But he couldn’t look Marco in the eye.

  “I love you, too,” Marco said. He wanted to jump out the window of the motel, run to the Sound, and swim to the end of the world.

  Rebecca

  Everyone had come to the Diabolique opening night. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe and Liz LeCompte, all the Public Theater bigwigs, plus a few dozen of Stuart’s Hollywood friends, including Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney, Kate Winslet. On the press line, a few reporters asked Rebecca and Stuart about their son. Stuart got all Sean Penn on them, refusing to answer questions. His publicist, a tiny gay man with a shaved head, exchanged harsh words with the reporters and then turned to Stuart and Rebecca and apologized.

  Dozens of celebrities circulated through the lobby. Rebecca was introduced to George and Kate, and they were as electric in person as they were on-screen. They didn’t linger to chat with her very long, but they seemed interested in her because she was with Stuart, and this excited her.

  Diabolique turned out to be both visually arresting and gripping, though there were a few glitches with the elaborate video system, one in which it stopped working entirely for a few long seconds. The performance style was so choppy and disjointed that Rebecca hadn’t been sure there was a mistake until she looked next to her and saw Stuart’s cheeks turning red.

  The after-party was at the Knickerbocker on University Place, which Stuart had said was the new Elaine’s. Rebecca found herself at a table with Wes Anderson and the indie director Adam Epstein and several gamine women in their twenties. The directors talked about people they all knew, and the girls hung on their words.

  All night Stuart had been doing press and talking to well-wishers. Because an hour and a half had passed, Rebecca thought it would be all right to try to find him. She spotted him laughing intimately with Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney and decided to fortify herself with a G and T at the bar before approaching in the presence of such fame. By the time she came over, Clooney was gone and Stuart was one-on-one with Soderbergh.

  “Hi,” she said, slipping her arm around Stuart.

  He looked a little startled but put his arm around her, too. “Did you two meet?” Stuart asked Soderbergh.

  “No,” Rebecca said. “I’m Rebecca, Stuart’s girlfriend. I’m a big fan of your movies.”

  “Thank you.” He seemed normal, down to earth, even gracious. Because he looked nerdy and wore thick glasses all the time, he could probably ride the subway in near anonymity. She decided it was better to be a director than an actor; you could be creative without the pain-in-the-ass factor of being famous.

  “Steve and I were just talking about the bidding war for Les Diaboliques, the novel, when it first came out. He said that Edelberg discredits the story that Hitchcock missed buying the rights by only a few hours.”

  “Who’s Edelberg?”

  “He wrote the definitive biography of Hitchcock,” Stuart said. “Came out in ’07.” He spoke slowly to her, like she was a child, even though he had never mentioned the biography and she had serious doubts that he had read it himself. The books by the side of his bed were on Buddhist psychology or mountain biking.

  Turning his attention to her, Soderbergh said, “Stuart showed me pictures of your son. He’s adorable.”

  “Looks just like Stuart,” she said.

  “Spitting image,” Soderbergh said. “You guys have had quite an interesting path to parenthood.”

  “Steve,” Stuart said, “you cannot imagine the shock of learning that you have a baby you didn’t even know about.”

  “No, I can’t,” Soderbergh said.

  “There’s nothing like it. It’s unsettling, terrifying, and overpowering. In the end, though, I just feel so lucky that Benny came into my life.”

  She wondered why he hadn’t said “that they came into my life.” “So what do you do, Rebecca?” Soderbergh asked her.

  “I sell clothes.”

  “What kind of clothes?” he asked.

  “Vintage kids’ clothes, mostly sixties-era. Some fifties. I have a store in Brooklyn and—”

  “So are you in pre-pro on the virus movie?” Stuart asked Soderbergh. He rubbed Rebecca’s arm, as though to console her for having interrupted her. He did it so slickly, it seemed automatic to him, to cut off a woman midsentence and then console her with PDA.

  Soderbergh paused, as if recognizing the rudeness of Stuart’s behavior, and waited for Rebecca to continue. But she was too bruised to keep going. Soon Soderbergh started talking about the new movie he was directing, about a mutant killer virus, and his all-star cast.

  She watched Stuart listen, his face energized, his hand on her arm, growing clammy. This was who he was. He cared more about these people than he could ever care about her, and he probably wasn’t going to change. This was his circle, not hers, his element, not hers, and what galled her was that he didn’t know to pretend it could be different. Whatever misgivings he’d had about marrying Melora, they could navigate this world together. Rebecca was an outsider and always would be.

  She felt like an idiot for believing she could have a future with him. That was the kind of thing stupid women did, not women who’d made it in New York on their own. She wanted to be angry with him but was angry with herself. She had bought into a stupid fantasy: that his love for her was real, that he cared about her. Marco had known it was only a fantasy, he’d tried to tell her, but she hadn’t listened or hadn’t wanted to hear him.

  If only Theo hadn’t ruined things. A few months ago, she had been convinced that he was meant to be Benny’s father, but then he changed and everything got confusing.

  “I have to go,” she heard herself say.

  “What?” Stuart said, though it was unclear which concern was greater: that she was leaving the after-party or that she had interrupted Steven Soderbergh midsentence.

  “I have to go.”

  Stuart seemed to weigh the dual options of chasing her to placate her but being forced to cut short his conversation with Soderbergh, or staying put and continuing to chat. She could see him at war with himself, like in that Nicolas Cage–John Travolta movie. Finally, he said, “You’ll take the car, right?”

  “You take the car. I’ll get a cab. It was so nice to meet you, Steven.”

  On University she hailed a taxi. To her surprise, Stuart came out of the building. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I made a mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We shouldn’t be together.” She waited for him to protest, but he made a noble, pained face she had seen in a public-interest lawyer movie directed by Rod Lurie when Stuart’s character found out the drinking water in a small Arkansas town was polluted. She went on. “I’m glad you met Benny. You should know your son. But we made a mistake believing we could be a couple just because we have a child. You don’t love me.”

  “It was my fault,” he said. “I never should have told you to leave Theo.”

  A taxi had pulled up. “Go back inside. Go to Steven Soderbergh.”

  “He went to the men’s room. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll figure things out.” She waited until the cab had pulled up the street out of Stuart’s earshot before she leaned toward the partition and said, “Park Slope.”

  • • •

  Rebecca could hear her heartbeat in her ears as she took the stairs of Carroll Street two at a time. She opened the apartment door. Theo was coming down the hallway with a strange, concerned expression.

  A woman emerged from the kitchen. It was Veronica Leonard, Theo’s coworker at Black & Marden. She wore a tank top with no bra and a pair of Theo’s new expensive jeans folded over at the waist, revealing her hipbones. She was carrying a plate of pink cupcakes.

  The woman’s arms
were so long they seemed to extend to her knees. She set down the plate of cupcakes and extended a bony hand to Rebecca. “How are you doing?” Veronica said. “It’s been years.”

  “Can I speak with you privately?” Rebecca asked Theo.

  He glanced at Veronica and said, “Um, sure.” They went down the hallway. Abbie’s door was open and she was sleeping peacefully. Rebecca walked straight into the master bedroom and saw that the covers on the bed were rumpled.

  How could she even begin to say what she wanted to say? “I’m leaving him,” she said.

  “Really? Why?”

  “We realized it wouldn’t work. We don’t know each other, and we never will. I was stupid to think we could. I came back to ask for another chance. I didn’t know you’d have—company.”

  He held her gaze for a moment, as though trying to determine whether she was serious. Then he said, “That’s rich,” an expression he had never used.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s too late.”

  “How can it be too late? We have a child together!”

  “I’ve moved on. Veronica is smart, nice, sweet, and a brilliant architect. We talk about art. We went to the Nara show and sat in Central Park discussing it for three hours. We like so many of the same things.”

  “I would have gone to the Nara show with you!”

  “But you never did. That’s the thing, Rebecca—it’s not about what you could have done. It’s about what you did do. You’ll meet someone else. Some guy who’s a really good caretaker and wants to be with a high-maintenance woman.”

  “I’m not high-maintenance!”

  “I realized I don’t want to be with someone so selfish, someone who demands so much of me.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re out of touch with reality. It’s the pot.”

  “The pot just helped me see it. That’s another thing. Veronica doesn’t judge me the way you did. She likes Park Dope.”

  He had become someone new. As repulsed as she was, she didn’t suspect the egregious qualities would last. She wanted him to go through his midlife crisis with her, not with this knock-kneed brunette. “I want things to be how they were before,” she said.

  “They can’t be.”

  “I’m begging you,” she said. “I don’t care if you want to have a fling. It’s fine. I owe you. You have a free pussy pass. God knows it’s only fair. But let me come home.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  They trudged out to the living room. Veronica was at the dinner table, biting into a cupcake. “You want one?” she asked.

  Rebecca bounded down the stairs, with no idea where she was headed. She could call CC, but CC was probably with her new boyfriend, Twinkletoes. She could crawl back to Stuart, and he would let her sleep in one of the guest rooms, but how long would that go on? A night? A week?

  For the first time since she could remember, she had no child-care obligation and nowhere to be. Her husband was eating cupcakes with a knockout six-foot-tall architect, her son was safe in Manhattan in a thirty-five-hundred-dollar crib, her son’s father was rubbing shoulders with Academy Award winners. She could do anything she wanted—go out to dinner, sit at a bar, see a movie, hear live music—but all she wanted was not to be alone.

  Karen

  Through the French doors to the den, Karen could see Wesley doing repetitions with Jane Simonson. He had installed brackets in the ceiling so the clients could do exercises with elastic bands, and Jane was doing diagonal pull-ups. He was charging ninety dollars an hour and paying Karen forty dollars an hour for the space.

  Karen and Seth Hiss were no longer working together. After just over a month in business together, he had told her he’d met a woman and wanted to go back to straight massage. They tried a few weeks of it, but the appointments fell off and the money went down. Wesley got his NASM certification, and she got the idea for him to see clients in her den. Thanks to her contacts, he had a regular stream of business. Even though she wasn’t making as much as she had with Seth, she felt confident that Wesley’s list would grow, and she was happy to be helping him.

  Wesley and Jane came out of the room. “You’re going to have to limit your wine intake to three glasses a week,” he was telling her.

  “I go through that in a night,” she said.

  “You’ll find as you start to get healthier, your desire for that stuff will go down.”

  “You’re a very lucky woman, Karen,” Jane said.

  “You mean because I get trained for free?” Wesley put Karen in a mock headlock, and she giggled.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Jane said, “Gil and I are definitely coming to your dinner party next Saturday.”

  “That’s so great. Are Cathleen and Nick going to make it, too?”

  “Oh my God, you didn’t hear? She and Nick are separated.”

  Karen hadn’t imagined Cathleen as the type of woman who would get divorced. It was like hearing the Obamas were separating. “How did that happen?”

  “She found out Nick was smoking pot all the time. Some brand called Park Dope.”

  “I heard about that at a party,” Karen said. “I thought it was a joke.”

  “Nope, he got really into it and started going to indie-rock shows at night. He met some girl, and they’re moving into a loft in Bushwick. All those years Cathleen worried he was screwing hookers and he left her for a girl he met at the Bell House.”

  “That’s terrible,” Karen said.

  “Sounds like she’d be a perfect client for you,” Wesley said to Karen.

  “What do you mean, client?” Jane asked.

  Wesley drew Karen in close. “Karen’s going to start training to become a certified life coach.”

  “What’s that?” Jane asked.

  “It’s like being a therapist but without the licensing demands. I can complete all my course work in a semester. I feel like in this neighborhood it won’t be that hard to get business. NYU runs this program. It’s expensive but really good.”

  “I love it!” Jane said. “Every woman in Park Slope could use a life coach. We’re all either getting divorced or going back to work. Or trying to lose fifty pounds. You two should go into business together. You could work on the minds, and Wesley could work on the bodies.”

  It wasn’t a terrible idea. Maybe she and Wesley could join forces. Karen felt invincible. The past month everything had fallen into place. The temporary settlement had come through, with Matty agreeing to pay her six thousand a month plus the mortgage and maintenance, exactly what she had asked for. They were in divorce negotiations, and Ashley said she was cautiously optimistic that she and Matty’s lawyer could work it out without involving the court.

  Matty was renting an apartment in the South Slope, taking Darby every weekend, every Wednesday, and the occasional stray weeknight. He said he wasn’t dating anyone, and she believed him because he had a sad-sack quality these days, that of a man who wasn’t getting laid. Karen had filed the paperwork to change her name from Karen Bryan Shapiro back to Karen Bryan. When the court order arrived in the mail with her maiden name on it, it had been bittersweet. She had to say goodbye to the person who once loved Matty. But she liked her new name; it reflected who she was.

  After Jane left, Karen and Wesley decided to go to Thistle Hill Tavern, one of their favorite restaurants, down on Fifteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. She ordered a hot toddy and Wesley drank a light beer. He was staying over once a week—she would send Darby to her parents’ house and Wesley would leave Ayo with his grandmother. Karen was going to meet her this weekend for dinner at the house in Crown Heights. She hoped Mrs. Harrison wouldn’t see her as a spoiled Park Slope mother, an inappropriate maternal figure to Ayo. Wesley had said she was going to cook Nigerian food for them and Karen hadn’t figured out what to bring for dessert.

  She had finally told her parents about Wesley a few days ago. First she had given them the real reason Matty left her. She had to sit in their living roo
m explaining the difference between transvestites and transsexuals, and then she said that Valentina had stolen from Matty, and by the time she mentioned her new boyfriend from Crown Heights, her father looked almost relieved.

  She didn’t think she would ever tell them about his past in prison. If she did, her father would look him up on the computer, see what he’d done. Once they met Wesley, they would love him. They’d see how good he was with Darby and how beautifully the two boys played together. They would understand she was happy to have someone who respected her.

  Her hot toddy warmed her throat. It was early December, and there were Christmas lights strung along the ceiling. On the television above the bar, a football game was playing. Through the window she saw an attractive blond couple pass, both dressed in sleek, long wool coats, the woman in Hunter boots. They were arguing, her face strained and angry. She was tall, with a prominent underbite, and Karen realized she looked familiar.

  She had seen the couple on Governors Island with their children that hot August day with Darby. She felt delight at the knowledge that this beautiful Aryan couple wasn’t perfect, they had problems, no matter how many nannies or children or how much money the husband made or which bank he worked for that wasn’t being prosecuted for fraud. “You know them?” Wesley asked.

  “No, just seen them before.”

  Maybe they hadn’t been fighting at all. Maybe the wife just liked to gesticulate and Karen had misread the situation. Anyone looking at Karen and Wesley probably wouldn’t guess that he’d been in jail and she was getting divorced and that they each had sons but not with each other. She liked that tonight, she didn’t look like a mother. She had lost weight through training with Wesley and was starting to buy clothes that showed off her figure—slinky dresses from shops along Fifth Avenue, high-heeled boots, tailored coats. In the spring she would start showing her toes again.

  She didn’t feel like a Park Slope mother. She felt like a woman on a date with her very handsome half-Nigerian boyfriend, who had an Olympian body and a generous heart. And instead of looking at his BlackBerry or at attractive women coming through the door, he was staring right at her, about to ask what she was thinking.