On the other hand. Sleep. She needed it. The caffeine hangover was about to hit hard—already that telltale ache was beginning to surround her brain, warning of an incipient crash—and the fatigue of all that insomnia, all that stress and pain and deprivation of ordinary habits, seemed to be leaching into her bones.
She could go home. She should go home. Hector was home.
No! Bad brain. Hector was off-limits. Hector had Claire. Hector—
Her cell phone buzzed against the table.
For a second or two, she stared warily at the device as it rang and rang, sliding a few millimeters to the right at each long vibration. The squat antenna hummed with purpose. It was a new phone, a blue Nokia to which she’d upgraded a few months ago, and Patrick had entered all her contacts and speed dials, putting himself at number one. It lay facedown, so she couldn’t see the caller ID. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth ring, the point of decision, she picked it up.
A Manhattan number. Not Patrick. She pressed her thumb against the green button.
“Hello? Ella Gilbert speaking.”
“Ella, it’s Travis. Travis Kemp.”
“Oh! Hi, Travis. I was just thinking of emailing you, actually. There’s this firm I’ve never heard of—”
In her relief, she hadn’t noticed the note of unleashed thunder in his greeting, such as it was. She wasn’t expecting thunder from Travis; he was the reasonable one, the partner you wanted to work with because he never lost it, never had tantrums, never even raised his voice, no matter what the heat from the client. No matter how badly you’d screwed up. Some of the other associates thought he was kind of cold, actually, but Ella admired his sangfroid. She really did. You might even say that she trusted his sangfroid—trusted that Travis could keep his cool, would protect her from any client pissiness, unlike the other partners who happily hung you out to dry when the client was pissed.
His interruption therefore shocked her.
“Never mind the fucking email, Ella. You’re off the account.”
Ella felt as if she were falling. Her fingers went cold, her head went dizzy. “I’m sorry,” she squeaked. “What did you say?”
“What did I say? I said you’re off the account! You told me, Ella, you told me you had no conflicts of interest at Sterling Bates”—she could hear him actually spitting into the phone—“and today I get a call from some—some—I don’t know, some guy at the SEC that your fucking husband works for them!”
Ella opened her mouth and tried to speak.
“Well?” Travis’s voice rose up to some kind of outraged octave. “Is that true?”
“Yes—I mean, he works—he’s not in munis, actually, so I thought—and I thought you knew—”
“Cut the stammering, Ella.”
“And we’re not together anymore. We’re separated.”
There was a strange, cold pause. “You’re separated? You’re saying this is all okay because you’re separated?”
“He works in a completely different department. Nothing to do with muni bonds. And you knew he worked there; I know I told you that. Several times. At the Christmas party, I know I told you then. So I figured you wouldn’t have asked me to—”
“For Christ’s sake, Ella. I’m not going to remember what you told me at a fucking Christmas party! Didn’t I tell you what a high-profile case this was? And now the fucking SEC is calling me to let me know that my lead associate is fucking married to a Sterling Bates managing director!”
“But I thought—”
“You’re off the account, Ella. Wipe your laptop. Leave the files on the conference table and lock the door. When you come into the office Monday morning I’ll let you know if you still have a job.”
Ella opened her mouth again, but there was a sound in her ear like the bang of a gun, like Travis had slammed the phone into his desk, and instead of speaking she lowered the dented Nokia to the conference table and folded her hands in her lap. Her eyes stung. Her throat ached. There was some grave injustice here; she knew that Travis had known that Patrick worked at Sterling Bates. It was on her list of disclosures, for God’s sake, the one that every associate kept on file. How could he not have known? And Patrick was a technology banker. About as far removed from the snoozy world of municipal bond underwriting as you could get.
Injustice. Life wasn’t fair, Mumma had always told her, like every mother had told every child since Homo sapiens first conceived the abstract idea of fairness, and yet Ella never could accept injustice. When you followed every rule, tried your best to please, and still somebody accused you of wrongness. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to demand the name of this hairy idiot at the SEC and pull out his fingernails. Her hands were shaking. She picked up the phone and touched the buttons and set it down again. Outside the window, across the street, Manhattan blinked its fluorescent office eyes at her. A million people at work, but not her. Not her. She rose and sat down and rose again. There was a sob rising in her throat; she pushed it down. Turned to her laptop and began dutifully erasing files. Stacked all the documents in a neat pile in the center of the table. Gathered up her things. Put on her navy wool coat. Left behind all the Sterling Bates documents, because she always did what she was told; she hated the disorderliness of disobedience.
Of course, Travis didn’t say anything about her own notes. Her own yellow legal pad, tucked into her laptop bag, containing all the interesting scribbles of the past week.
ELLA TOOK A TAXI HOME—SHE was calling it that now, home—and changed into sweatpants. In the kitchen, all the bottom cabinets had been ripped out. The pots and pans and food sat in a cardboard box next to the wall. There was a note attached. Hey, Sherlock, we need to talk re your awesome new kitchen. Knock when you get home. H. PS: water’s on!!
She smiled a little, from the corner of her mouth. Walked out the door and went upstairs.
BUT WHEN SHE KNOCKED ON Hector’s door, nothing happened. Not a sound, not a note of music drifting from within. She waited a minute and tried again. Stepped back and checked the bottom of the door for light. Nothing.
So she turned around and trudged back downstairs, and as she turned the corner of the landing the woman in 4B, who was just locking her door, looked up and smiled. She had a slight Southern lilt and impeccable brunette hair, and Ella had been looking for an excuse to see if some kind of friendship might be possible between them. Except she couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Something with an S. Sadie? Sarah?
“Looking for Hector?” she said, in the kind of between-us-girls voice that said, I know what you’re after, bless your little heart, and I don’t blame you for trying.
Or maybe Ella was only hearing her own guilt. She blushed and pulled out the keys from her pocket. “He was supposed to meet me to talk about the flood damage? You know, from that burst pipe yesterday?”
“Oh, yeah. What a pain. So sorry. Weird, though. I mean, they just did some major plumbing work there when the last tenant moved out. I thought the pipes were all new.”
“Really? Hector said …” Ella’s voice trailed off. Trying to recall exactly what Hector had said yesterday.
“Anyway, you’re out of luck, honey. He went out a couple of hours ago. I think he was meeting Claire or something. Friday night and all.”
Something about the way she said Friday night made Ella conscious of her own sweatpants, her own conspicuous lack of plans. Her catastrophic failure in the conference room at Sterling Bates; the job she had possibly lost entirely. The tense, empty weekend ahead. She turned the knob and pushed the door open, into the cramped, odorous darkness of her apartment.
“Good for him,” she said.
THE LIGHT WAS BLINKING ON her answering machine. She held her finger over the playback button and counted the small, red pulses. One, two, three. She counted all the way to fourteen before she squeezed her lips together and pressed down.
Her mother’s voice. “Darling. Not sure where you are. I’m at Vivian’s. Just arrived. Horrendou
s traffic. Remember we’re on for Maidstone Meadows tomorrow morning. Nine sharp. I expect you’ve probably forgotten, so do try to clean yourself up a bit. [Slight pause.] Hope you’re well, darling. Daddy’s meeting us for dinner afterward at the—what was it, Vivs? [Offstage murmuring.] Oh, Balthazar. Only the best. Should be laughs. See you tomorrow. Kisses.”
Well, Mumma was right. Ella had forgotten about the pilgrimage to Maidstone Meadows, where Great-Aunt Julie held court in a kind of elite dormitory for the WASP ancien régime, a couple of hours’ drive from midtown Manhattan at the eastern end of Long Island. Third Saturday of the month. Mumma always came up from Arlington to join Aunt Viv and whichever cousins happened to live in New York and had regained liver function by nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Aunt Viv packed two Thermoses—one full of coffee, one full of Bloody Mary—which she administered as needed. Usually Ella looked forward to the trip. First, there was Mumma and Aunt Viv, who could pack more entertainment into five minutes’ conversation than most women packed into a year. Second, there was Great-Aunt Julie, who had pretty much lost whatever remaining damns she’d ever given about anything.
And third, nobody could mix a Bloody Mary like Aunt Viv.
But tonight, the idea of dressing up—Aunt Julie always required appropriate dress—and meeting the Glamour Sisters for a four-hour round trip in a ten-year-old Mercedes station wagon that smelled of wet Labrador and Chanel No. 5 held about the same appeal as an acid peel. Especially if there were any cousins involved. Ella loved her cousins, but everyone knew each other’s business, discussed each other’s business, had fucking opinions on each other’s business.
In short, she was going to need a hell of a lot of Bloody Mary to get through this.
Unless she didn’t go. Unless she picked up the phone and called her mother’s cell (which Mumma never answered) and left a voice mail (which Mumma rarely checked) to say that she wasn’t feeling well. That she had to finish cleaning out the debris from her flooded apartment. That the last place she wanted to visit in the middle of March was the gale-beaten tip of Long Island, for God’s sake. She could do that. She could just … not go. What did she have to lose anymore? What had being a good, dutiful little girl gotten her, after all?
Do it, she thought. Do it now, before you talk yourself out of it.
She picked up the phone.
BY MIDNIGHT, ELLA HAD FILLED two large green garbage bags with ruined objects and humped them down the stairs to the bins in the back courtyard. The sky was still clear, the air as cold and fresh as it could be in the middle of New York City, inside a communal courtyard where everybody kept their trash. Ella swung the bags mightily over the edge of the bin—twinge of guilt, so much landfill—and stood for a moment, hands on hips, catching her breath. Tasting the metropolitan flavors of garbage and rotting vegetables from some nearby grocery.
Except the nearest grocery was a couple of blocks away.
The faint, reedy, intricate voice of a clarinet touched her ear.
Almost by instinct, she looked up. Canted back her head until she found the window of the fifth floor, the top floor, and saw that it was dark. Because Hector was out. Out with his girlfriend, Claire, as he had every right to be. As Claire had every right to expect.
The clarinet grew a little louder, as if feeding on her melancholy.
Ella looked back down at the pavement, at her feet in their L.L.Bean slippers: the ones Patrick hated. She looked at her hands, long and workmanlike, nails bitten, knuckles bony, bearing no rings whatsoever. Whoever played that clarinet was really good. Not just technically good, but expressive, too. Like he had a lot to say, all bottled up inside him, and this was how he was going to say it.
She turned her head in the direction of the neighboring building. The heavy steel door next to its own garbage bin. The clarinet’s voice seemed to be floating from that direction, and as she squinted through the sodium haze of the security light, she thought that maybe it looked ajar.
There was no railing, no division between the two properties. Ella turned and stepped off her own back stair, the back stair belonging to 11 Christopher, and took a few paces toward the back stair belonging to the building next door.
Just close enough to see that a thin plastic wedge held the neighboring door open by a couple of inches.
Um, that would be trespassing, the old Ella scolded in her ear.
Let’s check it out, said the new Ella. The reckless Ella. Clubbing the old Ella over the head.
And the real Ella stood in the courtyard, torn between the two Ellas inside her skull, the good girl and the wicked girl, the one who stayed virtuously in her apartment and the one who went out hunting, until the clarinet shifted into some strange, inviting melody that circled her thoughts in large, sensuous loops, strangling both voices. She began to walk toward the wedge of space in the crack of the door. Her arms felt light and unburdened, her thighs like jelly after the effort of carrying the garbage. She reached for the handle. The door was heavier than she expected, resisting her strength, almost as if someone were trying to hold it closed from the inside. But Ella fought back. She braced her foot on the doorjamb and gripped the lever with both hands and pulled, pulled, until the door gave way in a sudden rush and Ella stumbled backward, landing on her knee.
All right, she thought. If that’s the way you want it.
She picked herself up and charged through the doorway, taking care to close the door on the plastic wedge, just in case. The clarinet quickened, grew louder, eager, like it was welcoming her home. Some home. Not a hallway, but a broom closet, damp and cramped, reeking of bleach. Ella thought, What the hell? Who leaves their building through a broom closet? She spread her fingers out before her and felt for the wall, for some kind of opening, yarn mops and brushes and metal pails, claustrophobia gripping her chest like a panic—and she wasn’t even claustrophobic, damn it!—until she felt a small knob, turned it, burst out into an old tile vestibule, open door to a bathroom opposite, metal stairs leading up in a spiral, solid cinder-block wall where the rest of the basement should have been.
And the sound of the clarinet, filling the air nimbly from nowhere in particular.
THE PHONE RANG AT SIX in the morning, startling Ella from a dream about rain that turned out to be real, battering her window in furious waves. She picked up the receiver without thinking. “Hello?” she said, an instant before thinking, Oh, shit.
“Got your message, darling,” her mother said. “I sympathize, I really do. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to be a big girl. We’ll be outside your building at five minutes to nine.”
“But, Mumma—”
“Ta-ta!”
Click.
ACT IV
We Have a Change of Plans
(ain’t that the truth)
LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK
1924
1
THE SUN may shine fierce from its cradle of blue, but the air don’t care. I instruct Billy to lay on the brakes and put the rag back up on his breezer, and he obeys me. Whistling some tune between his happy lips. He climbs back in and delivers me another kiss. And I kiss him back, with maybe a little more strength than he was expecting.
“Miss me, did you?” he says.
“More than I can say.”
Billy grins and puts the car back in gear. “Just you wait, darling. Just you wait and see what I’ve got planned for us.”
The roar of the Hudson’s six-cylinder engine precludes my reply, or maybe I just choose not to speak. Huddle down deep in my coat while the atmosphere slowly warms in the combined heat of our two human bodies. We cross the Queensboro Bridge and work our way eastward. The sun drops behind us, the air turns gold. I press my knuckles together and watch the buildings blur past, the storefronts and houses, the parks turning into meadows, brown skeletal trees and dead winter hills. How terrible a time is the beginning of March. In a month there will be daffodils and the sudden blossoming of orchards, but you wouldn’t know it now. You have
to take spring on blind faith.
When the last tendrils of New York City disappear behind us, I speak up. Ask Billy what he’s been up to this past month.
“This,” he says, reaching for my hand.
“And you couldn’t telephone? You couldn’t write?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise. I wanted to amaze you.”
“Well, you did that. I thought you were gone for good.”
“Really? You didn’t look all that surprised when I turned up. You looked like you were expecting someone.” His hand goes still on my fingers. “Say. You haven’t taken up with some other fellow, have you?”
“Of course not.”
“Because if you have, I—well, I’m not going to force you into anything—”
“Applesauce. I’m here in this car of yours, aren’t I? Nobody forced me into anything.”
“Then you mean it? Really? You’ll do this with me? On the level, now.”
“Do what, exactly?”
“What I said before. Run away with me. Start a new life.”
“In the land of milk and honey, where the sun always shines and the lilac blooms all year long?”
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