“My what?”
“Your intensity, I suppose. Your drive.”
“There’s not much I can do about that.”
“Nor should you!” said Stephen. “That’s what I love you for.”
“Well,” she said. “I love you too.”
The baby moved again. Stephen’s face opened in delight. “I felt it this time! I really did!” And standing there in the strengthening summer sunlight, with the tourists just beginning to throng around them, her husband’s hand on her belly, Jane caught hold of the thread of a feeling that, if she pulled at it hard enough, she thought just might turn out to be contentment.
Later, after they had looked into some of the shops and sat for a while on a bench in the sun, Jane announced that she had to go to the bathroom.
“Okay,” said Stephen sleepily. “I’ll be right here waiting.” She spent a moment being offended that he wasn’t finding the bathroom for her, then set off on her own.
She entered a shop that sold only socks—oodles of them, in all shapes and sizes and colors—and asked the bored, pierced teenager employed there about the bathroom; the girl, looking from Jane’s belly to her face and back again, said, “It’s not for customers, usually. But I guess you can use it. It’s back there.”
“Thank you,” said Jane, and she thought later that she must have looked quite frightful retreating from the bathroom afterward the way she did, nearly knocking over a giant pile of pet-themed socks.
Stephen was on the bench where she had left him, eyes closed, face lifted to the sun.
“Stephen,” she said, and she knew her voice sounded shrill; a few people passing stopped to look at her. So she continued more quietly but no less intently. “Stephen, we have to call the doctor. Something’s wrong. There’s blood.”
Rachel was overseeing the first of three days of auditions for a tampon commercial. She had spent the previous two workdays calling agents, putting out requests for actors, talking about tampons, thinking about tampons.
“I can’t go to the beach,” the girl was supposed to say, casting a glance of longing and regret at her friend. “I have my period.” To which the friend would reply, in a voice of experience and reason, that there was a solution the girl hadn’t considered: the mighty tampon.
It was astonishing to Rachel, in this day and age, that not everybody knew about tampons, that the company needed to advertise them at all. Weren’t they rather a necessity of life, if you were young and female? Did anyone really learn about them from television? Was there actually a target audience for this commercial?
Then again, Rachel felt that way about most of the commercials she worked on. It all seemed unnecessary. It all seemed like a colossal waste of time and money and energy. People would either go to McDonald’s or they would not, they would buy a Diet Coke or they would not, they would eat a cracker or they would not: it seemed to Rachel that it would have very little to do with whether a certain commercial had played during American Idol or Desperate Housewives. She supposed it was this refusal to believe in what she was doing, this inability to pretend that it was remotely important, that ignited the feelings of lassitude and ennui that had lately engulfed her.
In her own defense, though, she had not gone into casting to find the perfect spokesperson for a tampon. She had gone into casting because she believed in theater, and because she believed in the power of a good play to change people’s lives forever, and because she believed in her own ability to be involved in that process.
And then, as she was limping toward that goal, she had met Marcus, and she hadn’t cared for a long time about what she was doing during the day; her time and energy had gone merely into getting through the day so she could see Marcus.
In the process she had got stuck where she was. Watching groups of girls come in and stand in front of her and recite an inane bit of dialogue about a feminine product, while in the next room, she knew, her boss, Tess, was preparing to call actors in for Streetcar, and that she had chosen another assistant, the obsequious Stacy, to join her for those auditions. So here was Rachel: peddling Tampax instead of Tennessee Williams!
They broke for lunch. Rachel was due to meet her friend Whitney at the massive Crate & Barrel in SoHo. Rachel told the next person in line, a slight, winsome blonde who looked barely old enough to have gone through puberty, that they would convene again at two o’clock.
The blonde nodded eagerly, and Rachel, looking around for her bag and the water bottle she had set down beside it, calculated in the tip for the driver along with the fare downtown, plus the cost of lunch, which she would have preferred to eat at her desk—quietly, cheaply, in solitude—but which she had promised to eat with Whitney.
She decided the subway was by far the wiser choice. So off she went into the bowels of the station, where she discovered her MetroCard had expired the previous day; she used her ATM card to buy another one, for eighty-one dollars, which brought her bank balance to a new and abysmal low.
She did not allow herself to dwell on how many days remained until her next paycheck would arrive, nor did she think for long about the stack of bills—slim, yes, but nonetheless insidious—that sat on her nightstand in her apartment, held down by a paperweight her sister Lillian had made for her twenty-five years ago at her first sleepaway camp.
Rachel stood on the platform near a couple in shorts and T-shirts consulting a guidebook. On the other side of them a young black woman rested her arms on a stroller in which a sweaty, chubby toddler was sleeping. They had the same coffee-colored skin.
The couple in shorts was possibly Rachel’s age and was possibly a year or two older or a year or two younger. Both wore shiny gold wedding bands. There was a possessiveness with which the woman took the man’s hand, wrapping her thumb around his wrist, and a languid way with which they studied the book and then the subway map in front of them, as if they had nowhere immediate they were expected to be. Newlyweds, Rachel said in her mind. Honeymoon. Then, Midwesterners, and for a moment she feared she’d said it aloud, for the woman looked up and met her eyes.
Near the honeymooners stood a teenaged boy and girl, with their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, listening to an iPod with a shared set of earbuds. The girl’s head bobbed in time to the music.
Everywhere, it seemed, were people who were more successful at maintaining a relationship than Rachel was; everywhere were signs that the rest of the world was moving onward and upward while she was not. In fact, here she was, eight years after college had set her on what seemed at the time to be a promising and glittering path, still single, still holding the title of assistant, and unsure for how much longer she’d be able to pay her rent.
For all of these things she blamed Marcus. Unfair, she knew, because most of them, except the rent, were not directly related to him. Still, it was easy to blame Marcus, to hate him, even. And on the subway platform, as the train snaked its way in, and as the couple with the iPod moved even closer together, if that was possible, hate him she did.
Two stories high, chewing up a significant amount of real estate, the store—even in the daytime—seemed to glitter with the promise of self-indulgence and decadence. Whitney had instructed Rachel to meet her near the wineglasses, but Whitney was late, so Rachel decided to wait for her in an oversized leather chair that bore a price tag of nearly two thousand dollars.
Even the size of the chair depressed her—it was big enough for two. Before she sat in it she spent a few minutes trying to work up a noble pity for anyone who would buy such a chair, and for the disorder that must certainly exist in their priorities to do so. She studied the specs and learned that the chair reclined—perhaps that accounted in part for the exorbitant price—and suddenly the word reclined reminded her of her father, who had asked for and received a La-Z-Boy recliner one Father’s Day when Rachel was in elementary school. That recliner, a brown tweedy number with a leg extension—her father was very tall—sat now in her parents’ den. Still, this many years later, if Will
iam was about, anyone who wanted to sit in it was required first to ask permission and second to surrender the chair the minute he wanted to take possession of it.
But this recliner: this recliner would be out of place in her parents’ home, where the biggest extravagance was her mother’s new washing machine and dryer—Rachel had not seen them yet in person, but had learned all about them in an e-mail—and where Rachel had grown up alternately mortified and impressed by her parents’ ability to make do with what they had rather than reach for something bigger and better. She supposed it came with age, that ability. Or perhaps not. Perhaps to some people it never came at all; perhaps to her it would never come at all. Her father, in fact, would think that this chair was an absurdity. If he saw the price tag, he would clutch his chest in a theatrical display of shock. He would mime a heart attack. Nouveau riche, he would call it, were he playing up his sophisticated side. Or, more basically, pointless.
And maybe, long ago, Rachel would have done the same thing. But now: well. She had lived in New York for far too long to be able to recognize the beauty of a simple life. She had surrounded herself too readily with people—Marcus, Whitney, everyone she knew on the Upper West Side—who could afford things that she could not; she had spent too many years trying to fit somewhere she did not belong to be able to dismiss it all with a wave of her hands and a fake heart attack. She had bought into the idea that there existed a natural order to society and class, and she had dedicated herself too fervently to moving herself out of one group and into the next. Because that’s what it was: an order. And she was caught at the bottom of it, where forever she would remain, scrabbling to get higher.
Rachel put her hands on one arm of the chair—she could not, from the center of the chair, reach both arms, and her attempt to do so made her feel as small and helpless as a child. Rachel tried to imagine a home she knew that was big enough for the chair in which she now sat: a home in which such a chair would melt seamlessly into its surroundings. If it stood out, she reasoned, it probably didn’t belong there at all.
She could, after some reflection, imagine the chair in her sister Lillian’s home, which was a stately four-bedroom near Boston, decorated with a mixture of taste and haste from the pages of a Pottery Barn catalog, and from the very store in which she now sat, admiring all around her the glasses and martini shakers, the flambé pans, the glass nesting bowls, and the bamboo salad sets.
She had thought that someday she would own a home suitable for such accessories, but that she would eschew the typical, look beyond the chain stores, and instead decorate with acrylic lounge chairs and rectangular suspension halogen lighting. She had thought, of course, that she would share the home with Marcus, and that they would fill it with two or three lovely children, on whom Rachel would bestow skilled and benevolent care, with the help of some sort of nanny who would allow her to keep rising in the casting world, to see what she believed to be her natural talent through to its fruition. She wanted, basically, to be Tess. With softer edges, and perhaps without the twins. One child at a time seemed like plenty.
Whitney appeared some minutes later. She was carrying a new Coach bag with a soft geometric print; her hair was judiciously moussed and styled; her engagement ring managed, somehow, to twinkle and shimmer enough to garner attention even in this store, which must see a hundred new engagement rings pass through its doors each day.
Not that Whitney’s ring was exactly new, of course: for one, she had been engaged since the previous September, and for another, her ring had been created from stones that had once adorned a necklace of the maternal grandmother—now dead, but very much remembered and beloved—of Whitney’s betrothed, Rob.
Whitney kissed Rachel on the cheek, holding her lightly by the elbow at the same time in a gesture that Rachel, no matter how she tried, despite all her years living in the city, had never been able to master, and said, all in one breath, “Sorry I’m late—a meeting ran over, and then the taxi took years, and then I had to stop downstairs and print out our registry—”
Whitney, then, had felt no compunction about taking a cab.
Whitney shook at Rachel a sheaf of papers she was carrying—this was the aforementioned registry list—whose heft and length proved that Whitney and Rob were on the threshold of obtaining the very existence whose impossibility Rachel had recently (privately, yes, perhaps shamefacedly, but still recently) been bemoaning.
“I was up all night thinking about wineglasses,” said Whitney. She rustled the papers. “Can you believe it?”
“I can’t.” Slowly, reluctantly, Rachel peeled herself from the leather chair and stood next to Whitney.
“Yes! I think we ordered the wrong ones! I think we made a huge mistake.”
Rachel was silent, looking over Whitney’s shoulder.
“You see? We put the Inga on the registry list, when really that would be a disaster. What we really want is the Mara. I think that’s what it’s called. I don’t know—they all seemed to be named after foreign girls. The Inga, the Mara. It’s easy to get confused. Now where is the Mara?”
Rachel summoned every ounce of kindness that she could locate and said, “It is easy to get confused.”
Whitney didn’t hear her; she was running her thumb down one of the registry pages.
“I mean,” Rachel continued, “you’ve still got some time before the wedding. No need to rush into a decision. Something as important as this, you don’t want to screw it up.”
Whitney looked up then and raised her eyebrows haughtily. “The wedding is in less than four months! But the shower—that’s only, what? Twelve weeks away? Eleven? People may have started shopping. I actually do need to make a decision.”
“I guess so,” said Rachel. As maid of honor it was her job, of course, to plan and execute the shower, but she had given over the reins willingly to Whitney’s mother, who wanted to hold the event at a particular restaurant near Whitney’s family’s summer home in Maine and who had promised Rachel that she could take charge of the favors, or perhaps the game to play at the shower, so that she still felt involved.
“A game!” Rachel had said, appalled.
“As long as it’s appropriate for a variety of ages,” Whitney’s mother said, placing two manicured fingers on Rachel’s elbow.
Rachel, her bank account reeling from the prospect of buying the three-hundred-dollar bridesmaid dress Whitney had chosen, had been immensely relieved by this turn of events. She hadn’t bought the shoes yet, nor had she committed to a wedding gift, nor had she allowed herself to calculate the considerable expense that would be involved in making her way to the town on the coast of Maine where the wedding was to be held and in staying for two nights at the inn whose entire reservoir of rooms had been reserved for the event.
At one time, when Whitney had first become engaged, Rachel had been certain she would be making the trip with Marcus, which meant that she would have someone with whom to share both the expense and the droll moments that were certain to transpire once Rob’s family, Whitney’s family, and an open bar found themselves in the same room. But now—no.
Whitney’s cell phone rang. She removed it from her bag, looked at the number, then shook her head. “My mother. I’m not answering. I’m sure it’s something to do with the wedding. She’s driving me crazy.”
“That must be difficult,” said Rachel. If she and Marcus had married, she wouldn’t have cared about the actual wedding. She would have been happy to wed in the guts of city hall.
“It is difficult. Particularly with my mother. And then you throw Rob’s mother into the mix… I just feel like I’m walking on eggshells. All the time.”
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel.
They had moved closer to the shelves of wineglasses, and Whitney was examining them, chewing on her lip. In the mirror behind the shelves Rachel could see Whitney’s expression, which was both studious and concerned, and eerily reminiscent of the way she used to look during exam weeks at NYU.
How was it,
Rachel wondered, that they had both strayed so far from the people they had been then, when then was not so very long ago? Had they strayed, in fact? Or was it just that the circumstances around them had transformed so significantly so as to reveal parts of their personalities that had been always present but for the most part had remained hidden? Of course Whitney had always had more money than Rachel. Of course she had, it was clear from the first day of their freshman year, when Whitney had arrived at the dorm lugging not one but two outsized pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage, both of them filled with clothing brands that Rachel not only couldn’t pronounce but really, truly had never heard of.
Finally Whitney gave a little shout of triumph and lifted a glass toward Rachel. “This is the one! The Mara glass. I knew this was right, I just knew it, but we were rushing through the end of the registering the day we were in here—”
“Well, there you have it,” said Rachel.
“And Rob had to be at the hospital, and I was determined to get it all done—”
Rachel made a small grimace that she hoped conveyed sympathy and understanding.
“And the other one just isn’t tapered enough, don’t you think?”
“I do,” said Rachel. “I couldn’t agree more. Not tapered nearly enough.”
Whitney looked admiringly at the glass. “Well, I really do love it.” Then she laughed. “Can you believe this is what I’ve turned into? Rach? Can you believe this is what I’ve become?” Rachel didn’t answer, but Whitney talked through the silence, not noticing. “So let me just make the switch on the computer, and then we’re done. I’m starving. Are you starving? What should we do for lunch? Diner, or Mercer Kitchen?”
“Diner,” said Rachel immediately.
“Oh, Rach,” said Whitney, folding the registry pages into her bag.
“What?”
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 8
