“What do you want to talk to her about?” Robbie asked.
“If you don’t mind, Marissa,” Leo answered.
She looked at Robbie, and he shrugged. She knew that if her husband was ever going to stand up to his father, it would’ve happened a long time ago. She got to her feet, conscious of the risk of knocking her chair backward.
“What are you guys going to talk about?” asked Adam, suspiciously, eyes moving back and forth from Leo to Marissa.
Leo only turned and walked from the door. Robbie gave Marissa a bemused half frown. She didn’t know what else to do besides follow after Leo. “Why all the drama?” she heard Laila say as she went out.
“If you think he tells me anything, you’re out of your mind,” Roz replied.
Marissa followed Leo’s back—broad, slightly stooped, draped in the maroon cardigan—down the stairway to the end of the hall, into his office. He closed the door behind her as she walked in. It struck her how open and airy the rest of the house was compared to this close-walled room: dark-paneled, a perfect square, the only windows a triptych of rectangles at the top of one wall, letting in three patches of light that fell with a kind of uselessness on the red ikat rug. Leo’s desk, stained a color like merlot, stood low and imposing before ceiling-high bookshelves, stacked and stuffed with books: leather-bound tomes, scar-spined paperbacks, fat dictionaries, rows of numbered volumes. You could call the room cozy, or you could call it claustrophobic, but in the grip of her deepening dread, it struck Marissa as something vital, and sinister, like she’d joined Leo inside the organ of some animal. The photographs on the walls were a little reassuring, at least, in that they featured people: portraits of Robbie and Laila as teenagers; black-and-white images of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, a few other black men she didn’t recognize. The largest photo was of the bearded man she knew to be Robbie’s grandfather, marching at the head of a crowd beside Martin Luther King Jr.
“Have a seat, please, Marissa,” Leo said, motioning to the leather upholstered chair opposite the desk. She sat, crossed her legs, arranged her hands on her knee, felt stupid, and put her hands on the arms of the chair. She was reminded again of the time Robbie had first invited her to dinner with Roz and Leo at the ramen restaurant. She’d been so nervous that afternoon she went to a Barnes & Noble, stood in the aisle and read three chapters of an etiquette book. But there was no silverware on the table at the restaurant to choose from, and Robbie had laughed at her when she mentioned writing a thank-you note.
Leo regarded her with his usual impassiveness, his eyes, the precise shade of brown of Robbie’s, at once still and stinging, like an ice cube melting on the back of your hand. The desk was bare except for an ink blotter, a lamp with a triangular paper shade, a stack of books in one corner (A People’s History of the United States, The Wretched of the Earth, Oil!). It occurred to her this was the first time she’d ever been alone with her father-in-law.
Leo announced, “I’ve decided to run for governor.”
Marissa pressed her lips together uncertainly: This was why he wanted to talk with her? “Robbie didn’t tell me that.”
“No, I haven’t told the children.”
“Well, that’s . . . That’s great news.”
“I’m too long in the tooth, no voter outside of Boston has ever heard of me, and I’ve been in office so long I’ve made enemies of half the statehouse. Still. There’s a school of thought I’ll win.”
It was almost as if he were asking her opinion—though this had to be impossible. “Um, congratulations,” was all she could think to say.
He pulled at the white tuft in his beard, as though irritated she wasn’t taking his point, or maybe with his own difficulty making it. Evidently taking a different tack, he told her, “I’ve always tried to make you feel welcome in this family.”
“Thank you,” she said, though if this was true, she hadn’t noticed.
“I can appreciate that it’s no simple thing,” he went on, “becoming part of a family. Does Robbie ever talk about his grandparents on his mother’s side?” Marissa shook her head. “I wasn’t welcome in their home while her father was living. It’s not that I was black, mind you, though I doubt that helped. It’s that I wasn’t Jewish. And these people were communists, mind you. But somewhere the communism ended, and the Jewish stayed put. They were probably as surprised as Roz.”
Marissa felt more lost in the conversation than ever. “No, yeah, he never told me that.”
“Robbie may not know. We told him, but he may not have listened. Both Roz’s parents were dead by the time the children were born. All in all, it was pain that benefited no one. Everyone wants to do better than their parents,” he continued. “It’s the solemn promise you make yourself when you see your child for the first time. I expect you know what I mean?”
Panic spread from her stomach to her fingertips—but no, she told herself, he didn’t know. He was talking about Mona. “Yeah,” she said. “I do know what you mean.”
“My father,” Leo continued, “was a great man, but a very hard father. A very fearful father, you might say. His father was an Alabama sharecropper, and from what I’ve been given to understand, my father was very gentle, compared with him. Did your mother ever put her hands on you?”
She had an inexplicable instinct to defend her mother. “She would never do something like that.” And now she was angry, hearing herself sticking up for Mona, the greasy fast food odor as if still fresh in her nostrils. “But yeah, there were a lot of things she did to me and my sister I’d never do to my kid.”
Momentarily, his expression softened, something nearly sorrowful appearing briefly in his eyes. “I admire you, Marissa. You never let your origins hinder your rise. And that’s what America is supposed to be, isn’t it? We’re judged by the content of our character.” Abruptly, he grinned, a long, crooked, unsettling smile. “I’ve been wondering a great deal lately about the content of your character.” He placed his palms flat on the ink blotter. “Okay then,” he said, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. With his right hand, he slid open a drawer, took out a manila envelope, and placed it in front of her. “No one else has seen this.”
The envelope was unmarked, bulging, sealed with a little gold clasp: bland, ominous, immutable. After staring at it for a moment, she realized she had stopped breathing. She looked back at the photographs hanging on the wall. One featured a man wearing a sort of conical fedora, a cigarette dangling from his lips, the keys of a piano reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses. “Who is that?” she asked.
Leo turned his head slightly, looked back at her, took his time answering, as though he suspected this might be some sort of trick. “Thelonious Monk,” he said at last. “A great American jazz pianist.”
When he said the name, she remembered where she’d seen the face: It was tattooed on Adam’s arm. And it seemed to her again such an awful fucking waste—Leo loved music; Adam loved music. So why shouldn’t they be upstairs in the conservatory, listening to records, arguing about musicians and bands no one else in the house had heard of, maybe eventually playing together—becoming, against all odds, and despite every expectation, something like friends? No point wishing for a better world now, she reminded herself.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said.
“You need to open that, Marissa.”
But she didn’t. She knew perfectly well what it contained, and would not stoop to the indignity of opening it and reading through its contents while he sat behind his desk and watched. Her fury made it very easy for her to compose her face, but she worried if she undid that clasp, pulled out the first damning piece of evidence, the airplane-falling, stomach-plunging sensation she was enduring might get the better of her. It was all very simple: She had been caught.
“It’s necessary to be practical,” Leo said. He added, “We had to be sure.” Then: “A man wants to be governor.” She looked at him, astonished, because it sounded like an apology, and an apology would be a greater cruelty t
han even he ought to be capable of. “It is not a matter of trust. I hope you understand that. It is a matter of being thorough, as thorough as our opposition will be. Every unknown requires looking into, and by us first. We hoped there wouldn’t be anything to find . . .” And it was like the envelope burst open to fill the silence that followed, and she imagined everything she assumed was inside swirling around her in the air: photographs of her and Brendan, sworn testimony from their waitress, a swatch of the sheet on which they’d fucked . . . He was still talking; she realized she’d stopped listening. “. . . admiration for you. But I can’t allow my family to be embarrassed.” For the first time he sounded angry. “This adulterous behavior cannot continue, Marissa.”
She managed to get offended. “I made one mistake, I’m not a . . .” But then she realized what he’d assumed. “No, Adam isn’t—”
“I don’t care what he is,” Leo interrupted. “But that man is no flight attendant.”
There was no point explaining—the truth wouldn’t help her. Adam was a stranger she’d met in a hotel lobby who she’d brought to their Thanksgiving dinner under false pretenses. And yes, she did it for good reasons, but those reasons wouldn’t help her, either. And now Marissa laughed, laughed like she’d never heard herself laugh before, the way Adam sometimes did: a miserable, air-wringing sound. Saint Marissa—when what she’d needed to do was leave his ass at the gas station; when what she’d needed to do was be more like her mother.
“I don’t expect you to have a perfect marriage,” Leo went on. “Robbie is a particularly . . .” He seemed uncomfortable finishing this thought. “I don’t expect you to have a perfect marriage. But my position aside, what father would abide what you’ve done? You cheated on my son. You brought this other man into my home. It is what it is, Marissa. I have my obligations to Robbie to consider. Therefore . . .” Like his son, he didn’t wield the sharp end of his threats; but unlike Robbie, he made his meaning unmistakable.
“Therefore, if I don’t tell him, you will,” Marissa finished for him.
“It is what it is.” He folded his hands over the ink blotter. “We hoped there wouldn’t be anything to find.”
“Who is ‘we,’ anyway?” she asked, her indignation gaining traction again. “Who did you have watching me?”
“Frankly, I don’t know. I never met anyone face-to-face. These are people, professionals. From experience, I’d assume it was a middle-aged white man. The type that’s invisible in public spaces.”
He’d paid strangers to follow her, men he’d never bothered to meet in person. She lifted her hands to her head, closed her fists around her hair, pulled until she knew she wouldn’t start screaming at him the next time she opened her mouth. He was right, she had to be practical. “Please,” Marissa said. “Please don’t do this to us.”
“I don’t feel I have a choice. You were the one who had a choice.”
Tears sprang to her eyes; she closed them until she had herself under control again. “This will kill our marriage.”
He joined his fingers on the ink blotter, to signal that he and Marissa were finally getting down to business. “I don’t see that that has to be the case. I don’t see that that has to be the case at all. The survival of a marriage is a matter of evolution. A marriage can take many forms. I’m prepared to pay for a couples counselor I know in New York. I think you’ll find you both can live with more than you’d think.”
Something in the comment repulsed her. All of it repulsed her: the room, the envelope, the men watching her, and most of all him—ripping her and Robbie’s relationship up by the roots and holding it before her eyes, without even altering his inflection much. He really would be governor.
“As I said, I admire you, Marissa. I take no joy in this.” She glared at him, wondering whether this was true. He pulled at the tuft in his beard contemplatively. “My father often said there were men in the movement who spent their whole lives climbing the mountain, and when they reached the top, they became the mountain themselves. But so be it. I intend to be a good governor. I intend to help people in this state. The people who are growing up in the same circumstances you did. I hope you’ll take that into account.” Whether this was bullshit, whether it was sincere, she had nothing else to say to him. He’d found a way to live with himself. She would have to do that, too.
She picked up the envelope, pulled open the door and walked out, slamming the door behind her. She’d like to think the photographs fell from the walls and shattered, but she knew that was more justice than she could expect.
The hallway was dazzlingly bright. The light hit her with a wave of vertigo and she had to hold herself up with a hand on the wall. Eyes on the buffed floorboards, she made her way to the bedroom—the minaret room. (Who the fuck were these people?) She’d already repacked her rollaboard, her purse stood neatly on top. (Then again, who the fuck was she?) She needed to lie down, but equally she needed to flee, but before she could do either she heard Robbie’s voice. “Izzy? Where are you?” He was speaking to her over the house’s intercom. No, she had to flee: It was a necessity, as bone-deep-urgent as any need she’d ever known. She grabbed her purse, shoved the envelope inside, pulled her bag down the hall. The sound of its wheels rolling over the wood floor was so loud she assumed the whole house would come running. So she went faster. She knew she needed to talk to Robbie; but even fighting for her marriage seemed shameful now. The worst of her had turned out to be true: She was nothing but a skank Boston gold digger who’d fucked up the one good thing in her life because she couldn’t keep her pants on. She could hear her mother saying it, the staccato and dropped R’s and viciousness.
She yanked her coat from the hanger in the closet, stuffed her feet back in her heels, and hurried outside. Either there was ice on the first stone step or she forgot about the steps altogether—her feet came from underneath her, she reached out desperately but her hands found nothing but air. The next thing she felt was her lower back smacking stone as she tumbled down the steps until she skid face-first into the ice-slick snow of the lawn. Her purse had spilled open around her. Before the pain set in, she clawed after the quarters and lipstick and tampons, as if getting them back in her purse might fend it off.
By the time she’d shoved everything back inside, her ribs and back and left hand were screaming, the pain as if sharpened by the freezing air. But then—“Oh no, oh no, oh, please God, no—” She leapt up, her back clenching so fiercely she gasped. But there were no sharp, shooting pains in her abdomen—was that what it felt like? Frantically, she unbuttoned her pants, stuck her hand down the front of her underwear, pulled it out, and stared at her fingertips: no blood. She closed her eyes, forced herself to count to one hundred. She heard the retreating sound of car wheels on a gravel road. A breeze across the lawn played savagely at her stomach where her coat and sweater had gotten pulled up. She tugged them down. She checked again. Still nothing. Maybe she was okay.
“Izzy?” she heard Robbie say from the top step. “Are you bleeding?”
She couldn’t look at him, so she sat down gingerly on one of the steps. The lawn descended away from the house, overlooked an arc of spruce trees, boughs weighted with snow. A mottled gray sky rose behind them. “What the fuck? Are you all right?” He’d walked down the steps to stand beside her.
“I cheated, Robbie. I’m pregnant.”
The wind blew through the trees, shaking off clouds and clumps of snow. His voice very calm, he said, “This isn’t happening. This . . . this isn’t happening.” She lifted her hands to her face and began to sob into them.
“You’re a fucking bitch, you know that? You’re a fucking, fucking bitch.” He didn’t sound very convincing. But it didn’t matter; she believed it. Her hands were soaked with tears and snot, but it was like the sobbing would never stop, like it poured out of her from some inexhaustible well at the bottom of her, at the bottom of everything she’d done. “Who was it?” he asked, his voice squeaky and breaking, like he was going through pub
erty. “You don’t get to cry!”
She pulled in lungfuls of air over gasping breaths, and wiped her face again and again on the sleeve of her coat. Finally, she got the sobbing to stop, though she could feel tears still leaking down her cheeks. “He was nobody. An ex I saw again. Nobody. It doesn’t matter.”
“Who?” he demanded.
“Brendan. From high school. We ran into each other . . .”
“And you’re fucking pregnant? You are such—you are such a stupid little bitch.” The anger was sincere now, raw, like she’d never heard in his voice before. She curled over, waiting for him to grab her by the hair, drag her down the steps, around the corner of the house to the driveway—pummel her; run her over with the car. But Robbie would never, because Robbie was a good person. And she was so much worse than stupid.
“I’m sorry—” And she started sobbing into her hands again.
“Stop crying!” he screamed, his frantic, furious voice echoing across the lawn.
By the time she finished this time, she felt as empty as if she’d been scraped out with an ice-cream scoop. The damp on her face clung like it was frozen across her cheeks and chin and nose; her teeth started chattering. He sat down next to her. “Why?” he asked. She looked at him for the first time. It was as if each part of his face had been pulled off and then shoved back in place, he looked so shattered and astonished.
All she could do was try to explain. “I was lonely. I was angry at you. I don’t know, I don’t know. But Robbie—” She grabbed his shoulders, grabbed fistfuls of his sweater. “I will do anything. Anything, anything, anything.” The full force of her will condensed to this single vow: If he told her to walk on water, if he told her to punch her way through a brick wall, she would find a way.
But as she stared at him, she could see him retreating, she could see him drawing away from her as plainly as if he’d stood up and walked across the lawn. “But see, what I’m thinking right now is that I hate you.” He nodded to himself. “Yeah, I think that’s how I feel about you, Marissa.”
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