“Nice for them,” said Adam without looking up. It wasn’t clear from his answer if he’d already heard or not—only that he was in a bad mood, too. Which, to Wendy, didn’t seem entirely fair.
“Speaking of real estate,” Wendy continued, “I went through all the listings, and there’s nothing in our price range—not for a two-bedroom. At least not in the South Slope.”
Adam didn’t answer.
“So maybe it’s time we talked about you going back to work.” For the second time in one day, Wendy had shocked herself with her gall. Although the very words had been in her head all afternoon, she hadn’t planned on uttering them out loud—hadn’t felt it was her right, had feared they’d lead to a big argument or worse. (Every time she and Adam fought, Wendy worried they’d get divorced.) Her heart was now galloping at such an accelerated pace that it seemed possible it might come catapulting through her shirt.
Adam’s eyes were still affixed to the screen. “I thought you agreed to support us for twelve months,” he said.
Wendy sat down in a chair across from him, partially blocking the TV. “I did agree to support you,” she said in as calm a voice as she could register. “But I didn’t know we were going to get evicted. Also, would you mind turning off the TV for a second, since this is important?”
Adam eyed her coldly as he lifted the remote control off the coffee table and hit the power button. The talking heads stopped talking. Then he said, “My screenplay is important to me.”
“What screenplay?” she wanted to cry out. But how could she do so without admitting that she’d spied on his computer? Besides, there was always the possibility that she’d looked at the wrong file, that just today he’d been busy writing the denouement. Though what dramatic event that would entail, she couldn’t say. (The discovery of an untapped well of functional sperm on a distant planet?) So she said, “I don’t see why you can’t work on it at night, or in the mornings, or on the weekends.”
Adam let out a long sigh. Then he said, “Wendy, don’t you see what you’re doing here? You’re envious of Daphne’s town house, so you’re taking it out on me. Don’t you realize that money isn’t what make couples happy? Let’s say I went to work at Goldman Sachs tomorrow, and we moved into some mansion in Brooklyn Heights with fireplaces and wainscoting. Do you really think you’d be happy? Don’t you see you’d just be on to the next thing—upset because you didn’t have a baby yet, or a fancy car, or whatever? You’re never satisfied. That’s just who you are. You felt deprived as a child, and there’s nothing anyone can do to make it up to you. You could marry Bill Gates and still think you were getting fucked over.”
Blood rushed to Wendy’s face, and she gripped the side of her chair. Adam had touched on the truth, but—to her mind—distorted it beyond recognition. Which only made his accusations that much more maddening to her. “That is so fucking unfair,” she shouted. “It’s just a bullshit excuse for you not to have to do anything with your life! FUCK YOU.” With that, Wendy got up and walked out of the room. She and Adam hadn’t had that bad a fight in years. It was terrifying. It was a tiny bit exciting, too, if only because feeling estranged from your husband created tension that, after enough years together, wasn’t always apparent.
It was also like walking around with an icicle attached to your back.
Wendy and Adam were still talking only intermittently when, three days later, they left for Thanksgiving. “We need to stop for gas,” he’d say. “What time does your mother expect us?” she’d ask. “One or two,” he’d answer. They passed the hours listening to National Public Radio. But Wendy found the patient, soft-spoken voices of the program hosts to be immensely grating. Between bathroom, snack, and gas stops; Polly’s hourly need to relieve herself; and the near-standstill traffic on I-95 between the Bronx and New Haven, the trip seemed to go on forever. Secretly, Wendy felt bad she’d never learned to drive and therefore couldn’t relieve Adam of some of the burden of getting them there. But she was still too mad at him to admit as much. Finally, at quarter to four, they pulled into the Schwartzes’ circular driveway.
There was no sign of Ron, but Adam’s older brother, Bill, was there with his wife, Susan, and their two charmless pigtailed daughters, Rachel, five, and Briana, seven. Wendy had never known what to make of her brother-and sister-in-law. Bill, who was a tax lawyer like his father, had gone to Tufts for college and Fordham for law school. But his demeanor and dress suggested a man who’d had no previous contact with urbanity. He arrived for dinner wearing belted jeans and white sneakers the size of small yachts. Susan, meanwhile, wore a permanent expression of exasperation on her thin lips. Before becoming a stay-at-home mom, she’d worked for the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. (It was hard to imagine her talking anyone into visiting the state.) She addressed both children by their first and middle names. “Briana Rose,” she’d say, “will you please remove your elbows from the table?”
Phyllis must have sensed that something was wrong between Adam and Wendy. She spent the entire meal talking even faster and more relentlessly about nothing in particular than she normally did. “I couldn’t remember what time I put the turkey in. Isn’t that crazy? I don’t know where my head is these days! Wendy, can I offer you more sweet potatoes? What a cute top you’re wearing. Just the other day, I was thinking about that time you and Adam drove that U-Haul across country. I can still see you pulling into the driveway looking like you hadn’t showered in a week! I have to admit, I never thought you’d make it. I was sure we’d be getting a call from Logan Airport. I remember telling Ron…” She chattered on and on.
After the meal, the entire family climbed into Bill’s boat-sized Dodge Caravan and drove to Mass General, bearing flowers and fruit pie. Adam’s father was now speaking several words at a time. Which was several more words than Wendy spoke to her husband the entire night.
Adam accompanied Wendy back down to the city that Saturday, ostensibly to help look for a new apartment. But on Sunday, when all the open houses were held, he claimed not to feel well and went back to sleep. So Wendy, trying not to feel any more exasperated than she already felt, set out alone in search of new digs.
The first place she saw had a bathtub in the kitchen; the second had been advertised as occupying the “garden floor” of a brownstone, but only the upper half of the apartment’s two windows were aboveground.
At first glance, the third place Wendy visited—the top floor of an aluminum-sided frame house, five streets away from their current address—was scarcely an improvement over the first two. Proximity aside, it might as well have been located on a different planet. At one end of the block was a car wash, at the other a store that sold nothing but fire extinguishers. The concrete expanse of the Prospect Expressway was directly across the street; catty-corner to that was an entrance to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Wendy had to assume that the sound of traffic filled the living room at all hours of the day and night. The stairwell smelled like kitty litter. And the brokers were charging a fee of 12 percent of the annual rent for the privilege—or was it punishment?—of living there.
But on second glance, the place was clean and spacious enough. It had a small alcove off the bedroom that, in a crunch, could be used as a nursery. The R station was right across the street, on Fourth Avenue. Most important, the rent was comparable to their current one. Figuring they were unlikely to do better, and concerned that some other desperate couple might come to the same dreary conclusion, Wendy called Adam.
He sounded as if he’d just woken up. Or maybe he was still asleep. But after listening to a brief description, he muttered, “It sounds fine—let’s take it.”
“Don’t you want to come see it first?” asked Wendy.
“I trust you,” said Adam.
“The bedroom is in back, but it might be loud, especially at night,” said Wendy, wary of being held accountable if and when they couldn’t sleep.
“We’ll get used to it.”
“And you realize it direc
tly faces the expressway? I mean, you can practically see into the cars.”
“Whatever. It’s not about the view out the window.”
“Then what’s it about?”
Adam paused before proclaiming, “It’s about being with the people who care for you. Unfortunately, certain people don’t always realize that.”
“Point taken,” said Wendy.
But as she wrote a check for several thousand dollars and handed it to the broker, she wondered if she even agreed with the point that her husband had made.
5.
(LATE JANUARY)
WENDY WAS ON her computer at the office, perusing red carpet photos from the Golden Globe Awards, when Lincoln’s face appeared over the burlap wall of her cubicle. This time, there was no escaping his pockmarks. “Can I see you in my office?” he said.
Wendy’s heart shrank to the size of a pea. I’m getting fired, she thought with alarm—if not as much of it as she might have imagined she’d feel—as she rose from her chair and followed him down the hall.
Lincoln’s office was neat to the point of obsessive. The few stacks of papers that lay on his desktop were lined up at perfect right angles. The only decoration was a framed 1981 campaign poster from the Parti Socialiste Français, featuring a youthful-looking François Mitterand. “I don’t know if you’ve heard,” he began, “but Shirley resigned last night. Or rather, walked out.”
“Really?” said Wendy, who had not heard.
Lincoln grimaced. “She was unhappy with what she perceived to be our lack of coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Apparently, we only ran twenty-seven articles on New Orleans last year versus a hundred and six on the war in Iraq. She saw it as evidence of a racial bias on the part of the magazine.”
“Huh.” Wendy nodded. What any of it had to do with her was still unclear. She and Shirley Mansard, who was the only African American on staff, as well as the only other female editor at a senior level, were cordial without being close. Which is to say that the mere sight of Shirley, her bearing regal to the point of despotic, struck fear in Wendy’s heart and made her want to apologize for being white every time they ran into each other at the water cooler.
“We would have liked to bring in someone from outside,” Lincoln went on. “But we don’t have the money. So we’re offering you the job of managing editor.”
Wendy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She knew she ought to be insulted, but she wasn’t. “Really?!” she squealed with all the excitement of a schoolgirl upon learning that she’s won two free tickets to the Ice Capades at Madison Square Garden in a coloring contest. (In fact, precisely this thrilling thing had happened to Wendy when she was eight.) “Wow. That’s great. I mean, not about Shirley leaving, but about the job. Really, I’m honored.”
“But it’s a large responsibility, Wendy,” said Lincoln. “You can’t come waltzing in here an hour late every morning. And you’ll have to generate stories as well as edit them. Which means keeping up with the papers on a daily basis. And by papers I don’t mean celebrity gossip Web sites.” His eyes locked punitively upon hers.
“Of course,” Wendy said, wincing.
“We can offer you a raise of five thousand dollars.”
“Great.”
“And you’ll get Shirley’s old office.”
“Fantastic!” The raise was nice. But it was the prospect of having a door to close that excited Wendy most of all. Now even Lincoln would be forced to knock before entering.
Wendy was busy transferring the last of her Bic ballpoints into Shirley’s old office—rollerballs fell outside the limits of the magazine’s budget—when the first knock arrived. It was accompanied by, “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Alyson? Oh, and that’s with a Y. My parents got kind of creative when I was born.” She laughed. Wendy didn’t. It seemed that Lincoln had forgotten to tell her that in addition to a raise and a door to close, she’d also be receiving her own college intern to boss around. And not just any intern, but a New York University senior who seemed guaranteed to make Wendy feel old and irrelevant.
Her shiny hair was cut in an insouciant shag. Her high breasts flopped beneath some complicated jersey top with dolman sleeves. Her legs were so long that she appeared to be wearing stilts. That she was wearing ballet flats seemed, somehow, like the final insult. At five foot eleven—or whatever she was—she didn’t need the extra height. “Nice to meet you, Alyson with a Y,” Wendy said, smiling brightly. Now she’d have to worry about what she wore to work every morning, she thought unhappily.
“It’s great to meet you, too,” said Alyson. “And I just want to say, I’m so completely stoked to be working for my favorite magazine on the planet that I really don’t mind what you give me to do. Like, if you want me to get your lunch for you or something, that’s fine.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Wendy said, laughing. “But you can do some research for me if you want. We have a little library here in the office, but it doesn’t have all the periodicals we’re interested in. For some stuff, I might ask you to go to the public library on Forty-second.”
“Ohmygod, I would love to go to the library for you!” declared Alyson. “That’s such a cute idea. Also, you should know that I’m very left-wing. I grew up privileged, I guess you could say, in Rye, but it really sickens me to know that my parents are getting tax breaks on their capital gains income while millions of hardworking families struggle to put food on their tables every day. Also, I’m really, really opposed to the war in Iraq. I mean, people are, like, dying over oil! It’s so wrong.”
Wendy was seized by a sudden desire not only to be chilly and ungrateful, but to come to the defense of the Bush administration, attack poor people for being lazy drug addicts, and possibly even advocate the expansion of America’s military presence in the Middle East. She stopped herself by recalling the boredom and alienation that had accompanied her own college internship (at a travel magazine, where she’d done nothing but fact-check room rates). Besides, it wasn’t Alyson’s fault she had nice breasts. “Well, we’re glad to have you here,” said Wendy, attempting to rise above her base instinct—to kick the girl in the shins. Then she rolled her chair into her desk and hit the space bar on her recently reinstalled computer so Alyson would get the hint and leave.
“Ohmygod, you still use email?” she said, taking note of the software on Wendy’s screen. “That’s so adorable!”
“You don’t use email?” asked Wendy, confused.
Alyson shrugged. “I guess I just text, really.”
“You probably don’t have a home phone, either.”
She squinted quizzically at Wendy. “What do you mean by ‘home phone’?”
“Never mind.”
Finally, Alyson left Wendy to contemplate her various outmoded methods of communication in peace. But the pleasure proved short-lived. As the morning progressed, one after another of Barricade’s roster of middle-aged male editors—some, like Lincoln, with pockmarked skin; others with more superficial cosmetic defects like nose hairs that needed clipping and twenty-pound tires around their midriffs; all of them unattractive in some irredeemable way—began to poke their large heads through Wendy’s door. Ostensibly, they came to congratulate her on her new position. Actually was another matter. “A well-deserved promotion, Wendy,” they’d say while pivoting on one orthopedic lace-up to face the cubicle at which Alyson now sat, just outside Wendy’s door. “And you must be—”
“Alyson.”
Hand extended. “Welcome aboard, Alyson. I’m Ralph/ Don/Ed ___.”
“Nice to meet you Mr. ___!”
“Please—call me Ralph/Don/Ed. And let me just say, it’s a pleasure to have some young blood around these parts for once.…”
Wendy felt as if she’d just charioted in from ancient Greece.
Glancing at her feet, she couldn’t be sure that, beneath her boots and socks, her toes hadn’t turned an even deeper shade of purple than Lois’s.
Wendy arrived home from work that evening to find her husband playing his acoustic guitar. “ ‘He’s sure got a lot of gall,’ ” came the yodel-like cry from the bedroom, “ ‘to be so useless and all. Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall.… ’ ” Wendy proceeded to the kitchen, only to find that the faucet wouldn’t turn off. Standing over the sink, she didn’t know which of the many sounds filling the apartment she found to be the most grating—the metallic hum of the highway traffic outside, the Bob Dylan impersonation coming through the wall, or the drip-drip in her face. There was nothing she could do about the first one. As for the second two, in the interest of preserving her marriage, she decided to tackle the faucet, stuffing a paper towel up the spigot. She knew it was a temporary solution. On the other hand, it was unlikely to cause ill will. And Wendy had begun the new year trying to be more supportive of Adam, if only because nagging and berating him to go back to work and have sex with her more often seemed to get her nowhere.
At the very least, they were getting along better now. Ron’s accident seemed to have made Adam more sentimental about family, too. He’d attached a photograph of his nieces ice-skating in duck costumes to the door of their refrigerator. And the previous month, around the time that Wendy was ovulating, he’d consented to having intercourse twice in a forty-eight-hour period without first mocking her single-minded focus on reproduction.
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