This was stunning. Portia stood, even as the light changed, motionless and aghast. She and Mark, calm in stasis through the years as their peers coupled and came apart, sadly, angrily, viciously, tearing their children and friendships asunder as they disentangled themselves… no one had ever said this to her. No one had questioned the understatement between them, or so directly, at least. And she, if she did question, had never confided a thing, to Rachel, to her mother, naturally not to Mark. It had been such a long time, their two names on the mailbox, on the checking account, on the mortgage. On the invitations Mark liked to display on their mantel, which she never understood until her first trip to England when she saw that everyone did it there. “Mark and Portia,” “Portia and Mark,” the invitations read. They had outlasted far too many of the marriages they’d witnessed, expensive wedding confections of silk and rose petals and champagne. Why shouldn’t she feel smug? Even Rachel had struggled with David’s myopia, his habit of getting up and going to the office as if he were a single man without ties, every morning, every Saturday morning, every Sunday morning, every holiday morning, while “Mark and Portia,” “Portia and Mark” made coffee, ate bread and Harrods’s apricot preserves, and read The New York Times at their kitchen table, in silence.
They were made for each other. They were, she had sometimes thought, resisting and resisting the fading impulse to say how much, in their preoccupations, perfectly aligned. They simply did not have that kind of relationship, that sharing intensity, which was never, in any case, what she had wanted. What she had wanted—what she wanted still, she told herself—and what she had, was peaceful companionship in their home, and respect, and affection. She did love him, she sometimes thought, but mostly she appreciated him, and the ways in which he had suffered, and how kind he was. And when she looked around at the relationships of her peers, it was hard not to feel that she had chosen well.
“Portia,” said Rachel, “I’m sorry, it didn’t come out the way I intended. Yes, I see that you are in a committed relationship. What I don’t see is whether you’re happy. Are you happy?”
Portia stared at her. The others, who had edged away from them, sensing the conflict with animal precision, now crossed with relief as the light changed. She and Rachel and the seated dog stayed behind.
“I’d like you to be,” Rachel said. “I hope you are, but I don’t actually know.”
“I just don’t think like that,” Portia finally said. “It doesn’t mean I am, or I’m not. I just don’t think that way—”
She stopped. Before she could get to the next word, that door in the shape of a word, which opened to a place where she, like Helen of Oxford, might well burst into lamentations, and not, like Helen of Oxford, silent lamentations, and not because she was pregnant. That word was: anymore.
“That’s fine.” Rachel smiled a brittle smile. She seemed more than willing to leave the subject, and the corner. “Because you’re my friend. And I care about you.”
“Yes, I know,” Portia said miserably. “I don’t know how we got here.”
Puzzled, Rachel looked around.
“No, I mean, one minute we’re talking about Gordon Sternberg and the baseball bat and the next minute it’s, ‘Is Portia happily… unmarried?’”
“Right.” Rachel shrugged. “Well, I don’t give a fuck about Gordon, for the record. We’re going to be a lot saner without him around. He was a very brilliant critic, but as a colleague…”
“Yes. Though I’m afraid he’s going to haunt poor Mark for a very long time. Mark had to go to Pennsylvania yesterday. He spent most of the afternoon with the police, and they said he had to come back in a couple of weeks and meet with someone else about the case. It’s a case, now. And with the family absconded, Mark has somehow become in loco parentis, or in loco child. Or something. Plus, Marcie is making noises about not letting Cressida come over for her visit after Christmas. She says Cressida has to study for her A levels. Which is bullshit. And Mark hasn’t seen her since that trip in July, when Marcie was so awful. Not to mention,” said Portia, “the fact that we’re about to drive for hours on crowded roads to Hartland, Vermont, a place Mark hates, to a house he detests, to visit a woman he can’t stand. Seriously, I just don’t want to make it worse. I feel bad for the guy.”
“Okay,” Rachel said. “And now that you have taken a potentially very serious conversation about you and somehow diverted it into a defense of Mark, who I wasn’t attacking in the first place, let’s just leave it. But you’ll remember what I said, please, because I actually do worry about you.” She tipped up her face, catching a moment of bright winter sunlight. She had the beginnings of lines, faint filaments at the corners of her eyes, and silvery hair at the temples. She was without vanity, Portia thought. A happy woman who had measured the years of her adult life neither by coffee spoons nor by application folders, but by the children she was raising and the books she was writing, who didn’t care that those same years were beginning to show on her face. She didn’t even wear makeup, which was not something Portia herself could say. And Portia was younger by four years.
“Rachel,” Portia said.
“Here’s the thing,” said Rachel, turning to her with renewed intent. “You are thirty-eight years old. That’s not too late. But if you’re going to make changes, make them soon.”
“Rachel,” said Portia, horrified.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” said Rachel. “Marry him or don’t marry him. Have kids or don’t. Just don’t let somebody else make these decisions for you. They’re too important.”
She knew right away that she was going to cry. The light was red again, and already there were two people waiting on the other side and a woman and a young boy coming up behind them on Harrison. Rachel was looking at her, not critically, not angrily. She had, instead, an expression of open curiosity on her face, as if she had finally embarked upon a long-planned experiment and now could not wait to observe the results. Portia turned away, but from the newcomers, mother and child, rather than from Rachel. She would have walked away from Rachel by now if she had really wanted to.
“Come on,” Rachel said, taking her arm.
They crossed the street and turned left on Nassau. The dog strained before them, pointlessly, nose down. He stopped to sniff at a crumpled paper bag, but Rachel hauled him away. “Did I ever tell you,” said Rachel, “about this couple I met up at the dog park in Rocky Hill? Both total vegans. They had a dog they raised from a puppy, and the dog was vegan, too. The couple had fed it on, I don’t know, soy milk and tofu or something. Or rice. And they were always talking about nature and nurture, and how they went to a holistic pet healer instead of the vet, because they didn’t believe in vaccinations for dogs. They were, like, worse than any parent I ever had to deal with at either of my kids’ schools, which is saying something, I can tell you. So one day last spring, we were all up at the dog park. I wasn’t standing with them, but I saw this. There was a kid sitting on a bench eating out of a Burger King bag, and the kid dropped the bag on the ground. And the dog, the vegan dog, goes tearing over to the bag and just rips it to shreds. He ate that hamburger so fast, it was like he swallowed it whole. And the kid’s screaming and the kid’s parents are screaming, and this couple are just standing there, stunned. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Despite herself, Portia smiled. “Nature, triumphant.”
“Yeah. It was like, Folks, I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but your baby’s a carnivore. Deal with it.”
“What big teeth he has.”
“All the better to tear great hunks of bloody flesh into little slimy bits of bloody flesh.”
“What did they feed their dog after that?” said Portia.
“Oh, I have no idea. They never came back to the dog park. Too embarrassed, I’m sure.”
Portia laughed. “And so they should be.”
They had arrived at Maple Street. She hugged her friend and wished her a happy holiday. Sh
e and Mark would be back from Vermont on New Year’s Day, just missing Rachel’s family, who decamped to some family resort in the Caribbean on New Year’s Eve. Then Portia walked home, slower now without the dog to set the pace. She could see Mark at the end of the street, leaning into the open trunk of the car. He mustn’t have stayed long at the office.
“There’s coffee,” he said when she reached him.
“Thank you.”
“I want to go soon. I’d rather be stuck in traffic than sit here worrying about traffic.”
“Right,” she said, as if this made sense. She went upstairs and took the briefest of showers, then dressed and packed the rest of her things. She had two hundred folders from the office, bundled with rubber bands, zipped into a suitcase, and a biography of Jackson Pollock for her book group, which she hadn’t a prayer of getting to. When she made it downstairs, he was leaning against the car, reading today’s Times.
“Ready, then?”
He helped her with the suitcase. She went inside and poured a travel cup of coffee for each of them. Then they locked up.
As always, when one anticipated traffic, the roads were fine. The day, sunny already, promised only clarity and bright skies as they headed north, swinging around the city, sailing up the Merritt. Mark was an intent driver, which added insult to the injurious restrictions Marcie had set for him the previous summer. He didn’t have much to say, and even Portia, who had spent the preceding month arguing herself out of any real worry, began to feel uncertain. She too had been dreading this trip, and her mother at the end of it, and the pregnant teenager she was expected to be warm and generous to, and the care and placation of Mark, but most of all she had been dreading the drive and the buried worry that had been living with her and growing with her for weeks now: that she had no idea what they would say to each other when they finally had to speak, when they were trapped together in this moving car or trapped together in her mother’s house, that something had shifted beneath them that he had noted and that she had noted but refused to acknowledge. And if this was true, had she caused it? Had she come back different from that trip and that night? And did he, actually, know about it? And was he ever going to tell her how he’d found out?
She had met Mark his first week in America, standing in the produce section of Hanover’s then sole supermarket, looking shell-shocked. Admittedly, the Stop & Shop was poor hunting ground for fresh foods of any description, but it was also the middle of a furious winter, with power outages all that January and Interstate 91 converted to glass. Little had gotten through, and the pickings were slim. She had watched him lift and drop a couple of elderly string beans, letting them fall from his fingers like flaccid worms, and examine a yellow orange in disbelief. When he noticed her looking, he started to laugh and shake his head.
He was twenty-five then, his life defined—as it still was, to some extent—by the daughter his former girlfriend had given birth to, then withheld from him. Mark’s romantic and paternal life, a marvel of bad timing, had decreed that egg fertilize sperm just as the two of them were dissolving in acrimony, and Mark’s careful suggestion that Marcie consider terminating the pregnancy had the impact of an atom bomb. She would never forgive him. She would never, willingly, share the child, Cressida, and had taken every opportunity since to wage her war. Marcie, then an American postgraduate at Cambridge, had opted out of her degree course and returned home to suburban Atlanta, which was why Mark had gone on the market and taken the best American job he could get. That Hanover, New Hampshire, was some distance from Georgia posed one problem, but far more problematic was the fact that whenever Mark did make the journey south, he was met with any legal or practical obstacle Marcie could throw in his way: Cressida was ill with flu. Cressida had a school trip. Cressida had announced that she didn’t want to see him. He wouldn’t give up. He appealed to Marcie, to her parents (with whom she was living), to her regal, chilly attorney, and to the three attorneys he went through himself. He applied (on the advice of one) for custody, then withdrew his suit (on the advice of another). He suggested mediation. He tried sending his child support payments to escrow instead of to her. He attempted to behave as if he were not tormented.
After five years at Dartmouth, he told Portia that he needed to move south, and she agreed, though reluctantly. Emory offered Mark a job. Emory’s Admissions Office offered Portia an associate’s position, and so they began to detach from their lives in New England. They found an apartment near the campus, smaller than their Hanover house but just as expensive. Both gave notice. Portia told her mother. Then, only a month before their move, Marcie suddenly carried Cressida back to England, citing a teaching job. They settled in north London, with Cressida in a Montessori school. It took Mark a good two months even to find them. That was when he gave up.
She and Mark had never moved to Georgia, of course. They never considered following Marcie to England. What was the point? Keeping their daughter away from him had become Marcie’s occupation. (The teaching job, nominally her excuse for leaving the country, never materialized; instead, she became a volunteer at Cressida’s school.) Mark, for a time, was deeply depressed. He took a year’s sabbatical and managed to bang out his Shelley book, but his life coalesced around the summer trip to see his daughter in England and the occasional visits to Atlanta, where his time with Cressida was closely controlled by Marcie and her parents. Over the years, he had managed to get his daughter to Princeton only twice, and only with Marcie ensconced in the city, an hour away and in near constant telephone contact; and though Portia had been with Mark for most of his daughter’s life, she had actually met the girl only a handful of times and had never reached anything resembling intimacy with her. Cressida had been a complex child, suspicious (naturally) of her father and anyone around him, slow to show pleasure of any kind. Later, as an adolescent, she had begun to explore the forbidden fruits of her relationship with her father, taking obvious delight in the torment it caused Marcie, but with Portia she was still distant and mildly dismissive. In the last several years, and thanks to e-mail, father and daughter had forged a definite (if virtual) relationship, liberated from Marcie’s control, and Mark often spoke of Cressida now, not only to Portia but to his colleagues and friends, some of whom hadn’t known he had a daughter in the first place: Cressida’s fondness for Wertmuller, her large and growing denim collection, the Coldplay concert at Wembley, her choice of A-level subjects.
He was, in the most essential sense, a bereaved father, a man defined by what had been taken from him, which was why it had always surprised Portia that Mark had not asked her for another child. There was no other child, she had decided. There was only the stolen one, the rightful one whom he had failed in her first, fragile moment, then spent every moment since apologizing to. And that, she certainly understood. Though she had never told him how much, or why.
Near New Haven, they stopped at a Starbucks drive-through for coffee, then turned north. She was beginning to think herself ahead, to do the necessary self-adjustment for what lay at the end of the road. Mark would find the visit difficult enough, but Portia had a special burden: to salve his dislike of Susannah even as she mustered her own affection from its hiding places. And the girl, the pregnant girl. How she would meet this absurdity, this gruesome challenge, she had no idea. They were due to spend six days, returning Sunday. An actor prepares, she thought grimly.
“I need to stop,” Mark said quietly. Hartford loomed ahead, rearing up suddenly like the Emerald City. She looked at him.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not,” he confirmed. He took an exit for the city center. She turned in her seat, watching him.
“Do we need to go to a hospital?” she said, afraid. He had the look of someone barely contained: one nudge, one word, away from some terrible release. He guided the car around a one-way system of downtown streets. There was a park, a chain hotel, a pizza restaurant. He turned a corner and pulled over. “Mark,” said Portia, “what can I do for you? Are you g
oing to be sick?”
He shook his head.
“Mark?”
He was hunched forward, as far as the steering wheel would allow. She saw fingertips with bitten nails emerge from his thick, graying hair. He was making a sound she could not immediately identify, a fascination in itself. Not pain, but pain, emitted from a location so deep and so impacted that it seemed to emerge in wisps of labored breath. She put her hand on his shoulder, but he shook it away. “Don’t,” he said simply.
“Are you in pain? Do you need a doctor?”
“No, no,” he said, but she felt for her cell phone anyway and opened it. “I said no,” he said bitterly, and she stared at him.
“All right,” she told him. She was amazed at how calm she sounded. She was amazed at how she knew, suddenly, what was about to happen, what was already happening and couldn’t be turned back. And how drab the setting, after all: this dull little street in Hartford, a place, she realized abruptly, she had driven through hundreds of times but never actually seen. And never would again, she told herself. After this.
“I can’t go any farther,” said Mark. “I just can’t.”
“Do you want me to drive?” she asked. But she was only humoring him. She knew it had nothing at all to do with who drove.
“No.” He still had his hands over his face, as if he could hide from her. “I can’t go any farther. I can’t go to Vermont. I can’t go back to the house. I just can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
“Why,” she said dryly, “are you sorry? If you can’t, you can’t.”
Absurdly, she wanted to laugh. She was having a bizarre memory, of another Christmas trip, this time to Birmingham, where his parents lived. Mark’s mother, a round woman with soft white hair and the bluest eyes, who taught at a local teacher-training college. Mark’s father, tall like Mark and a bit stooped, in old corduroy pants and an ancient sweater. He was a university professor, an economist who taught in Sheffield. He had another flat in Sheffield and, it seemed, another family there. They all knew it, but nobody bothered to tell Portia, who made some gaffe about Christmas morning. The other family included little children, and Christmas morning was theirs. Here, sitting in the still running car on this ridiculous Hartford Street—within sight, it now occurred to her, of the train station—she was thinking of the blue bowl of satsumas on his parents’ dining room table as they all looked at one another, alarmed and aggrieved, and how bright those orange fruits were, and how sharp they smelled. She hated that house in Birmingham.
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