Martin sits for another moment, then uses both hands to push himself up. He leans down to the crate he’d been sitting on and tries to lift it, but the strain on his back is too much and he lets it drop back to the ground. Straightening, he surveys the jumble of boxes—too many to count, identical, equally impossible. He squints into the sun. A car approaches, loud and filled with children. A boy sees him with his boxes and waves. He waves back instinctively. The car rumbles out of earshot, and the small sounds of birds return.
VISA
THEY MEET in the parking lot. She supposes that this is one of the more dampening aspects of suburban dating, this kind of public, day-lit rendezvous. They shake hands on the strip mall sidewalk like business associates. He is tall—taller than she remembers—with a pronounced jaw that hinges on the brink of ugliness. For a moment, she is thrown. In the blush-toned glow of O’Reilly’s Pub, postmidnight, his profile had reminded her of a Roman statue. It is possible that she had even said this. Now, studying the flat-sloped nose and deep, suggestive cleft at the top lip, she understands that this is the kind of face that defies easy categorization. The kind of face that does not reveal itself at once, but alters with the faintest breeze of feeling.
In the Japanese restaurant they are enveloped by cool, regulated air, the sounds of synthesizers and burbling water. As they settle at their table, Camille watches his hands. Smooth and slender with neat oval-shaped nails, the type of quasi-feminine, erotic hands she notices on men from time to time. She meets his eyes—granite gray, dominating—and her initial distaste is interrupted by a slight shudder. All at once, the patchwork of his face seems to harmonize and become familiar, inevitable.
“So,” he begins, without prelude. “How old is your daughter?”
Camille smiles sourly. It is unfair to start this way. “She’s three.”
He nods. This is the moment when another woman might take the bait and lightly ask if he’d like to have children of his own someday. Perhaps he is already testing her. She drops her eyes to the menu, allows the moment to extend uncomfortably.
“You don’t look like a mother.” He is not smiling, but staring with a directness that creates an animal confusion in her, a concurrent swelling and shrinking.
They eat their sushi rolls carefully, with strict restraint. She has heard it said that surgeons are wild. As he looks at her over the bamboo bento trays, she feels a pull from these darkening eyes that seem to tunnel away light.
He’s never been married, he confirms in a neutral voice that reveals neither regret nor pride. A surgeon’s life doesn’t leave much time for meeting women, he says, especially in a place like this.
She pictures his condominium, a spare shelter like her own with few furnishings. He must make money, she thinks, and have nothing to spend it on. She can tell from his clothing, a pale gray dress shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, that he has a foundation for elegance.
“You must feel isolated,” Camille suggests.
“Sometimes,” he says.
Camille wants to reach across the table and squeeze his hand, tell him that she knows. Things are impossible here. Since Nick left, she’s been locked in a prison of women. Her days are nearly bereft of the male sex. She rarely sees Mark and Harris anymore and, anyway, they don’t count. From time to time a rogue father will join the crowd of mothers for preschool pickup. When this happens, she finds herself standing differently, out of habit, generating the old energy regardless of what the poor man looks like, however paunchy or beaten down. And he looks at her. They always do. She supposes that she receives some trifling pleasure from this, some pellet of reward, like a pigeon that pecks a lever for birdseed. But afterward, the satisfaction fizzles and she’s left with a vacant feeling, as if she’s shoplifted something too easily.
They finish a bottle of sake together. He asks questions and listens intently, gravely, as if the answers were credo. She hardly notices her noodle dish vanish and be replaced by pistachio ice cream, which vanishes in turn.
“I’ve always dreamed of living in Paris.” Camille allows herself to shift into a kittenish purr, leaning closer. “I was there once, during college. I thought someday I’d find an apartment with big windows and a fluffy white bed.”
“Mmm.” He smiles.
She laughs a tinkling arpeggio. But it is the truth. She has always romanticized living abroad—Paris, Barcelona, Rome—imagined herself living alone, the way a man might live. It is a quaint, clichéd nineteenth-century idea of liberation, perhaps, but the impulse to roam is native in her, and its continued denial a source of panic.
Of course, living alone is impossible now with Avis. So Camille has revised her vision of Paris to include a partner. The fluffy bed, she reasons, would be even better with a man in it. Now it’s only a matter of finding him, whose passion is equal to hers. Sadly, it’s nearly impossible to imagine such a man in a town like this, for whom the hills beyond the supermarket beckon with urgent promise. Nick, she has to admit, had been like that. He’d had that hunger in him. That much they had shared.
She does not mention Paris again, but it floats in the air between them like a specter. And the brief kiss they share in the parking lot, amid the doltish Volvos and Volkswagens, is like a pact, the first upward tug of a kite.
At home, the babysitter already has her coat on. Camille can hear Avis still awake in her room, singing to herself.
“I was supposed to be home by ten,” the girl grumbles.
“Can your mom pick you up?”
“I told her you were driving me home.”
On the road, Avis sits in her car seat in her pajamas and screams for a cookie. The cookies are in her other purse, Camille patiently explains, but her daughter does not relent. Already, within moments, she feels herself deflating.
“I wonder what your father’s doing right now,” she calls back, unconcerned about the preteen slumped in the passenger seat, listening. Let her hear it, let her be warned. Camille laughs bitterly. “Definitely not this, that’s for sure.”
Avis shrieks, and Camille rolls down the rear window to give her daughter a blast of cold air. Nick is fifty miles to the south, elevated in his pseudo loft on Spring Street, living some approximation of a 1980s fantasy with his black-haired, thin-lipped dominatrix. This is how Camille pictures the woman, anyway, the older coworker whose name, Victoria, she’d found infesting his call history. The fact that this Victoria is allegedly pregnant, thanks to some medical miracle, does not change the picture.
On the way back from the babysitter’s house, Avis falls asleep in her seat, and Camille carries her to bed. Asleep, she is a dreamy thing. Her eyelashes form a golden mesh, and her face is innocent, forgetful of the dramas and torments of the day. Camille puts her face close, inhales the sweet breath. These little moments are hers alone now. Let Nick try to find them with his new child.
The next morning, the sake has receded like the tide and left her brain dry and seaweed strewn. She goes out in big sunglasses, a shearling coat, and boots over jeans. The sun throbs in the sky as she leads Avis to the entrance of Bright Beginnings. The two self-appointed “class mothers” are there, flanking the door, smiling with their horse teeth. One of them thrusts a flyer at her.
“Hope you’ll contribute!”
Her hand trembles as she takes the sheet. A bake sale. All families are invited to contribute a healthful, nut-free treat. Gluten-free and vegan especially encouraged! She would like to throw the flyer into the recycling bin. In these first few weeks, she has received flyers discouraging plastic utensils at school, prohibiting tree nuts in the building, requesting awareness of branded clothing in the classroom.
“Twinkies okay?” Camille smiles broadly at the mothers, despite the pain of it, and herds her daughter through the door. Avis’s hair is still matted from sleep, gathered in two stubby pigtails like horns on top of her head. Still, she is the prettiest girl in the classroo
m. The other children are cropped and bobbed, uniformed in drab organic clothing. Avis regards them coolly through glass-blue eyes, her father’s best feature. She is long lashed and bubblegum pink in her ruffled skirt and sequined Mary Janes.
It delights Camille to dress her daughter this way, in the frothiest clothing she can find, if only to scandalize the other mothers. You would think the Disney princesses were succubi by the way these women talk. I just don’t understand why so many parents buy into the marketing, they say. They’re basically grooming their girls to become appearance-obsessed little consumers. These are the kind of primitive feminists, she is certain, who began referring to themselves as “women” at age eighteen, who sat with straight faces through college demonstrations of dental dams. She has no use for women like these, who would keep musty, second-wave feminism on life support. The rest of the world has moved on. It has thanked the poor, neutered mothers and grandmothers for the dreary work they did, and put on stilettos again with free-ranging pride.
So when Camille comes across such women standing together, their faces grave as crusaders, she finds herself pausing, despite herself, pretending to look for something in her bag. Always, she tells herself to back away, but feels her face heat. It is a public service to shut them down.
Excuse me, she’ll say. But I can’t help overhearing, and I have to ask, do you really have a problem with little girls playing dress-up?
The mothers will glare in their oatmeal bouclé-knit sweaters. After a moment, the most emboldened, ugliest mother will collect herself and reply, We don’t mean that they shouldn’t play dress-up. We just think it’s important to put some thought into what we offer our daughters. You know, rather than just accepting whatever’s marketed to them?
Mmm, right. The personal is political. Camille nods. But you know this stuff is marketed to little girls for a reason. Because they love it.
She knows they talk about her. That’s what happens to independent-minded people in this place, to anyone who isn’t brainwashed by beady-eyed mommy culture. They resent her, she knows, for preserving her pre-parent self, for dressing like a woman, for not surrendering to the dowdy, practical fashions that make the rest of them look like they’ve always just come from the gym, or bed.
Her only female friend in town is Madeleine Gaines, who’d risen from the city like a benevolent spirit. Her husband had been a colleague of Nick’s at Clarkson-Ross, and they had all gotten together once for tapas in Union Square. When Camille first saw Madeleine in town, shuffling through the grocery aisles in a fabulous retro block-print maternity dress, she called and jogged up to her in a rush of bonhomie. She’d invited her over that very afternoon, and their roles were set from there: Camille was the outrageous, demonstrative one; Madeleine the good listener.
Perhaps she calls too often. Madeleine would be too polite to ever say so. But, today, she doesn’t care; she’s just happy to have a confidante she can tell about her date. Her old city friends would be too loyal, or hostile, to Nick’s memory—like Mark and Harris, whose shared distaste for her ex still unaccountably rankles her. It is liberating to detach from them all, to begin a fresh history here.
They sit on beanbags in Camille’s bedroom, like college roommates, sipping Cape Codders from margarita glasses.
“Where does he work?” Madeleine asks.
“Some hospital around here, I guess. I didn’t ask.”
“What kind of surgery does he do?”
Camille looks curiously at her friend. This is the difference between them, she decides. This anchor of practicality—or its sweet absence.
“What the hell should I care?” Camille smiles and takes a drink. Madeleine lifts her eyebrows and smiles in return, then tucks her feet under herself like a cat. She had removed her shoes at the door, although Camille had asked her not to. This is one of the small changes she’s noticed in Madeleine lately. Concern about floors. Clothing that has shifted away from bright, geometric prints to dull plaids and country colors. Today she is wearing, of all things, a quilted vest.
“I think you should consider joining the book group,” Madeleine says, swirling her glass. “At least come with me to a meeting and see what it’s like. Really, it’s just an excuse to get together with other women.”
Camille stares. Madeleine, she knows, can do better than that. Last year, she and her husband had gone to South America and brought the baby. It was part of some spiritual quest of David’s, something that Madeleine does not like to discuss, but that thrills Camille. She knows that, since moving to the suburbs, David has undergone a drastic and mysterious change—abandoning convention rather than embracing it. According to Nick, he stopped attending client meetings at work and refused to use the computer. After his dismissal, he started hosting “clients” at home. This all makes Camille like Madeleine even more. To be married to a man like that, she must be a dissident, too. Camille praises herself for having unearthed a kindred spirit, for allying herself with the town’s only other fearless woman.
“Mmm.” Camille grins, holding her stare. “You know what I miss? The Cooler. Passerby. Do you remember those?”
“Of course,” Madeleine says, her face neither brightened nor clouded by memory.
“I wonder if we might have seen each other out somewhere. Oh, and remember Lit Lounge on Second Avenue? I think it’s still there.”
She keeps a lock on Madeleine’s eyes, seeking a hint of understanding. What she really wants to know is whether she still feels the burn. Does she, too, listen to music from her youth while driving and detect a carnal urge inside the traffic, catch the glances of strangers through car windows? It is an accepted truth, of course, that the reckless impulses of that music are dead now. There is nothing useful to be done with them. Still, the old rhythm catches in her, and she feels like a club princess trapped in a Toyota. In this state, she becomes aware of the hidden, parallel world beneath the mundane. Just beneath the surface of every defunct moment—waiting at a stoplight, finding a spot in the supermarket parking lot—lurks another moment, sexual, adulterous, waiting to be chosen. It shimmers faintly, a phosphorescent arc of lighter fluid ready to catch fire, detectable only to those attuned to it. She parks the car and watches the men and women going in and out through the automatic doors. Which of them are alight, secretly smoldering?
Madeleine waves her hand dismissively. She reaches into her tote bag and retrieves a copy of the book that her group will be discussing. Camille looks at the cover, a tablescape with dropped flower petals. Some bleak, bestselling woman’s memoir. She can think of no book she’d less like to read. Without checking the jacket flap, she is certain that the book has been marketed as “empowering,” that it is tailored to a nation of dispirited women looking for someone to pity, some way to cheer themselves.
“It’s a good way of meeting people around here. Really, it’s an excuse to get together,” Madeleine repeats.
Camille softens her eyes and smiles. What she wants to say is that she has no need to meet people. She only needs one friend, and Madeleine is it.
“I appreciate the offer, I really do. I guess I’m just not in the mood for reading right now.”
Later that night, Camille allows herself to type the doctor’s name into the computer. As she’d suspected, the name is so commonplace that nothing useful surfaces. She checks the rosters of local hospitals, hoping for a photograph of him, but there is no matching name, no matching picture.
“Oh, they never update their websites,” he says about the hospitals later. They are tucked at a corner table in a Spanish restaurant in the woods. “I’m at St. Joseph’s.” The way he says this is so offhand, so uninterested, that whatever seed of doubt Camille might have had is hurriedly interred.
His condominium complex has just been fumigated for termites, he tells her, so they go to her house instead. They wait in the driveway until the babysitter comes out to the car. The girl stares, and Cami
lle widens her eyes in imitation.
“Yep, home early.” She fights back tentacles of embarrassment while rummaging for cash in her purse. “Get in, let’s go.”
The babysitter sits in the back of the car, behind Camille and the doctor. It’s only a five-minute drive to her house—easily walkable, but nobody lets their kids live anymore—and Avis is safely asleep in her bed. Camille has no patience for the kinds of people who consider it criminal to leave a sleeping child alone for ten minutes. Those are the kinds of people whose lives are governed by fear, or at least fear of vilification by their peers. The kinds of people who, with all the late-night news they watch, remain ignorant of the practices of the real world outside their bubbles: the contortions and improvisations of those without resources, the risible logistics of single parenthood.
Still, the awkwardness inside the car is painful. Camille feels a slight irritation with the doctor for forcing her into this situation. She would rather screw in a fumigation tent for twenty minutes than go through this whole production. After dropping off the babysitter, they drive back to the house in silence, toward a flat moon netted behind tree branches. Camille watches her feet pass over the concrete walkway and, inhaling the sharp night air, is stunned for a moment by her own autonomy, the giddy sweep of her jurisdiction, so completely and finally adult. She can choose whatever she wants. And she chooses this. There is a feeling like expanding helium in her as she thinks of it, filling her head and groin.
A draft comes through the bedroom window, itself marked with dried edges of paint and the residue of old decals. Usually, while dressing and undressing, she prefers to leave the window shade open, just for kicks, but tonight she pulls it down. Her bed is a futon on the floor, the same she’s had since graduating from college, the same she and Nick shared for ten years. Beside it rests a stereo and vintage turntable, and above hangs a battered poster for Le Chat Noir, its slanted yellow eyes like a call to a more instinctual, hedonistic time. This futon and poster have been pillars of Camille’s environment for decades. She hasn’t bought a new item of furniture or decor in years—just entering a Bed Bath & Beyond gives her an anxiety attack—but that’s all right. It’s better to keep her bedroom minimalistic, unobtrusive, deferential to the sovereignty of its inhabitant.
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