“I know, and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” She looked at the car. “I should get her home.”
“Yeah, go ahead. And don’t worry, I’ll bring Matt home after practice today.”
Iliana nodded and climbed into the car.
“And go get your phone fixed!” Jodi called. “I never want to go through this again!”
Later that night, Iliana came downstairs and curled her body against Marc’s on the family room sofa, pulling his arm around her shoulder. She wanted to be held and comforted, reassured that she wasn’t a bad mom for not being right there when her daughter needed her. There was a time early in their marriage when she knew Marc would have done exactly that. He wouldn’t have even had to know precisely what was bothering her; he would have sensed that she needed his love, and he would have given it to her easily. But that had been a long time ago. Tonight he just kept watching the market wrap-up on the Bloomberg TV channel.
“Is she asleep?” he finally asked, switching to CNBC.
She nodded. “They both are.”
“Then why do you look so jumpy? You’re not getting sick, too, are you?”
“No,” she said. “Just having a hard time calming down. Long day.”
“You think your phone’s broken?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was just buried in my bag so I didn’t hear it. I’ll take it to the phone store tomorrow if it acts up again.” She snuggled in closer.
“You think it’s a virus?”
“My phone? Oh, you mean Dara. Yeah, probably. There’s a lot going around at school. I’ll keep her home tomorrow and see if the fever goes down. If not, I’ll take her over to the doctor.”
“Good thing the cocktail party got changed to next Tuesday. You probably wouldn’t want to leave the kids alone tomorrow night.”
“Cocktail party?”
He looked at her. “The one to celebrate the new Cleveland office. I told you about it when I saw you in Midtown. We talked about it the other night, too. What, did you forget?”
“No, it just slipped my mind for a second. I’m thinking about Dara. Relax, okay?”
Marc settled back on the couch. “It’s also a send-off for Keith Rein, he’s moving to Cleveland to run things. His fiancée’s going with him. It’s a huge promotion—they threw a ton of money at him to get them to relocate.” He looked at her sideways. “What do you think we’d do if I got an offer to relocate?”
Iliana caught her breath. “Why? Do they want you to relocate?”
“No, no. I’m just wondering. What do you think? What would we do?”
She looked down at her hands in her lap. She wanted to say she would go wherever his career took them. She wanted to say the kids were resilient and would adjust, and that she’d adjust, too. She knew that’s what he wanted to hear. He wanted to know she was behind him, and he could count on her no matter what. But the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. She just couldn’t mindlessly agree to follow him anywhere. She would want to know where they were going and for how long, and what the move might mean for her. She’d want to know that she could be happy in her own right, and not be expected to be happy simply because he was. She was a person, too. She wasn’t his employee, she was his partner. She had to have an equal voice.
She looked down. “It’s hard, you know, to talk in hypotheticals . . .”
“You mean you wouldn’t go?”
“I don’t know—”
“You wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to make our kids’ future more secure?”
“Marc, why are you attacking me? I forget about the cocktail party for one second and you act like it’s a federal offense, and now we’re fighting about a job you never even had.”
“Forget it, okay? I was just asking,” he said, turning off the TV and going upstairs.
Later that night, she climbed into bed and soon found herself stroking Marc’s chest and kissing his neck. She desperately wanted to connect with him. She felt bad that they had fought once again. She couldn’t shake the feeling that by pursuing Jeff Downs and neglecting Dara in the process, she had played Russian roulette with her marriage and family. It made her feel like a stranger in her own home, something she had never felt before. She thought that being close—even just physically close—with Marc tonight would make her feel safe again. She desperately wanted to feel safe.
“Of course I’d go with you no matter what,” she whispered, even though it was a lie.
He rolled toward her and lifted her T-shirt, and she took his face and kissed his mouth, deeply and forcefully. She wanted the lovemaking to be as tender as it was last week, but something had changed in her, causing her body to betray her. She was restless and aggressive, pressing her legs against him, shifting and turning, and when he tried to kiss her arms or her neck, she kept pulling his face back up to hers.
Finally he pushed himself up on an elbow. “What is going on with you?” he said.
“Nothing,” she whispered.
“Then why are you acting like this?”
She rolled away from him, onto her side. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel so bad that my phone didn’t work.”
Dara’s fever was down the next morning, but her throat was sore and her nose stuffed, so Iliana devoted every ounce of her being to taking care of her daughter, trying to make up for being unreachable the day before. She carried Dara’s comforter and pillow—as well as Fluffy, the worn-out plush kitten she’d been sleeping with since she was three—down to the family room sofa, and happily studied the movies available on demand, renting Frozen when Dara saw it on the list and nodded. She brought over a big cup of apple juice with a bendy straw, and gently covered Dara’s pink-pajama-clad body with the comforter when she fell asleep. She scooted out for a quick trip to school to drop off Matthew’s forgotten violin again, enduring another scolding from the school secretary. She was annoyed that she had been too distracted that morning to check that Matthew was carrying it—but more than that, she was glad that she had been available to answer the phone when he called and to bring him what he needed.
At lunchtime, she made a pot of Lipton noodle soup and called Dara into the kitchen. Watching her daughter crumble two saltines into the bowl and then slowly sip from a wide spoon, she thought about the day before. She was lucky it hadn’t all been worse. Dara—or Matthew, for that matter—could have been really sick, appendicitis- or pneumonia-type sick. There could have been a bus accident or a school emergency—a gas leak or a power outage—and her kids would have been abandoned. Dara could have tried to walk home if Jodi hadn’t been there to get her, in the freezing cold through busy intersections that she had no experience crossing by herself. She could have been hit by a car, she could have been killed or seriously hurt, and there Iliana was, giggling over some stupid M&M’s idea she had when she was twelve. Gushing over this little private baby-world she made for Matt when he was an infant, gushing that Matt had taught her the meaning of life. Was this how she treated the people who gave meaning to her life—abandoning them just when they might need her most?
And she had betrayed Marc, too. He had told her on their first real date, after they met on the train, that he wasn’t sure he wanted children, because he was scared of screwing them up the way his parents screwed up him and his brother. They never knew what they’d come home to—broken dishes on the kitchen floor, a telephone ripped out of the wall, evenings waiting for a dinner that never got made. “Our children will always have dinner,” she assured him months later, when they started to talk about marriage. “Meat loaf or baked chicken and broccoli, rice on the side, a tall glass of milk, ice cream for dessert. Our kids will always know what to expect,” she promised.
And they would, from now on, Iliana told herself as she picked up Dara’s soup bowl and wiped away the cracker crumbs. The pretending and the sneaking around were over. She was not going to visit Jeff
in Mount Kisco, she was not going to even get in touch with him, and he had no way to reach her either. She would no longer tell Jodi lies about phones breaking and jobs that didn’t exist. Her life would be an open book. They could talk about the kids, the laundry, the upcoming orchestra concert, Chelsea’s annoying favors. Regular stuff like that.
Dara went upstairs to take a nap, and Iliana followed behind, carrying up her bedding and Fluffy. She tucked Dara in and made sure she was comfortable. Then she went back downstairs and sat at the dining room table, looking at the dark computer screen. She knew what she had to do. It was the one thing that would confirm she had broken completely with her crazy pursuit of the past two weeks, the one thing that would show she was truly sorry for taking her family for granted.
She woke up the computer and typed:
Hi, Stuart,
Unfortunately, the article I emailed you about isn’t going to work out. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Iliana
She took in a deep breath and pressed the “Send” button. Off it went.
Lacing her fingers together, she rested her chin on them, her elbows on the table. The thing was, she knew the article would have been extraordinary—far better than any article about mattress or appliance stores. It had been evolving in her head for the last week or so, simmering on the back burner while Jeff Downs displayed his blankets and Jodi reviewed Chelsea’s lease, while Dara played volleyball and Matthew ran out of the car without his violin, while Marc envied his colleague’s promotion and obsessed about the Seattle contract. And ultimately she knew it could be something far more important than a profile of a man who found a second career peddling blankets. It was a story about promise and disillusionment, about growing up and believing in dreams, and getting hurt and getting smart. It was about a guy who soared to the stratosphere, and the millions of girls like her who found a way to navigate the agony of adolescence by hitching a ride. And she was on the brink of learning and of telling the world what it means—what you gain and what you lose and what you’re left with—when you rise so quickly and fall so far.
It would have been a story that people read and thought about and talked about. It would have been a story that people loved. It would have been a story with impact. It would have been a story that only a true writer could write.
She got up and loaded the lunch dishes into the dishwasher, then straightened the cushions on the sofa where Dara had been resting. She gathered some used tissues that were on the coffee table and took them to the trashcan in the kitchen. She sprayed some Lysol in the family room. No need for all of them to catch Dara’s virus.
As she was going to put the Lysol back under the sink, she heard the beep that signaled an email. She went back to her computer. It was from Stuart:
Just as well. He’s pretty much a lightweight. It wasn’t right for us anyway.
A piece of her wanted to cry. But she told herself it was all for the best. It would be good to put this whole strange chapter behind her. She wasn’t a sneak or conniver by nature, and she wasn’t up for all the stress and guilt that the pursuit of a major story would entail for a stay-at-home mom like her.
She hoped that at some point soon, she would actually believe it.
Chapter 9
Dara recovered, Matthew apologized about the violin, and the week flew by. Iliana threw herself into her routines, planning her schedule extra carefully for Tuesday so she would have plenty of time to shower, dress, and arrive at Marc’s office promptly at seven thirty for the cocktail party. But that afternoon the tailor in Tarrytown gave her some other kid’s orchestra tuxedo, which she didn’t realize until she got home, so she had to go all the way back to get Matt’s. That made her late to pick up Dara from school, so they missed her orthodontist appointment and had to wait in the office an extra half-hour until they could be slotted in. Then she had to run across the library parking lot in a downpour to track down Matt inside, since the cell service in the building was weak and he didn’t get her text that she was waiting.
Soaking wet and slightly carsick from the stop-and-go traffic, Iliana rushed upstairs as soon as they got home. Fearing that the bad weather would make the trip into the city slow, she decided to forgo the shower and just dried her hair and threw on some makeup and her blue suit. She had thought about wearing the dress she’d worn to the Bloomingdale’s meeting, but just looking at it made her feel guilty again about missing Dara’s call. Running downstairs, she kissed the kids and gave them money to call in a pizza, reminding Matt that he was in charge and should call Jodi if there were any problems. She didn’t have time to eat anything, and she didn’t have much of an appetite anyway, so she grabbed a packet of nuts from the snack drawer. She figured she and Marc could stop somewhere for dinner on the way home.
“Great, you’re on time!” Marc said as she walked into his office. “I heard Dan’s wife is going to be late. This will give us some time alone with Angers before they show up. I can really use the extra face time with him.” He got up from his desk and kissed her on the cheek. “You look great. I don’t remember that suit.”
“No?” she asked. It was dark outside, and the tinted windows worked as mirrors. Peering at herself across the room, she adjusted the jacket. Somehow it didn’t look as good as it had that day in Jeff Downs’s office. “I wore it to your cousin’s wedding,” she said.
“Don’t remember it. I don’t know, maybe I do.”
He went to get his own suit jacket off a hook on the back of his door, which gave Iliana a moment to glance around the office. On the credenza was a photo of her taken many years ago, to accompany her Business Times column. The photographer, while setting up the lighting, had entertained her with observations about a male colleague who was smitten with him, and Iliana had found the story charmingly off-color. He snapped her at the precise moment when she was most enjoying his recollections, and the contrast between her business clothes and her amused expression made the photograph sexy. Marc saw it in the magazine while they were dating and asked for an eight-by-ten print, which he had framed and kept on display ever since.
She picked up the picture, remembering how much fun the photo session had been, how much fun just being in Manhattan had been. The city was crowded and diverse, and everyone she met—from the photographers and designers who lived in the Village to the corporate executives who worked in Midtown office towers and even the Russian drivers who answered her call for a car service when she had to work late at night—had stories to tell that surprised her or enlightened her or made her laugh out loud, and she sometimes regretted that she had to leave it behind to go back to her apartment each night and sleep.
“Come on,” Marc said. “I hear the elevator opening.” He took her hand, and they rushed down the hall. “Now remember to talk about how glad you are to be going to the Jena Connors thing,” he said. “And try not to mention that you were a reporter. Angers was annoyed with the financial coverage from the Seattle deal, and that would just remind him about it.”
The cocktail party was on the twentieth floor, in the circular lobby near the executive suites. There was a high ceiling, and the light from the enormous crystal chandelier made the silvery marble floor shine. Across from the elevator was a long mahogany bar, behind which bartenders in crisp white shirts and red bow ties mixed drinks. Iliana had frequently gone to cocktail parties when she was at Business Times, at cool downtown lofts or showy Midtown hotels. It was at these venues that she heard about and talked about businesses opening or dissolving, ideas being launched, and deals taking off or sometimes falling apart. She had been an integral part of the commerce that powered the city. And nobody had ever scripted her in a hallway, she thought ruefully, as she and Marc stepped out of the elevator.
Marc looked around, then took her elbow and led her toward an older couple, a hefty man with curly gray hair and a slender, blond woman. “Richard,” he said. “The place looks great.”
&n
bsp; “Marc, right on time as always,” the man answered. Then he turned to Iliana and extended his hand. “Nice to see you again, Iliana. Glad you could make it.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Iliana said. “What a lovely party.”
“Do you remember my wife?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Hi, Karen.” The women shook hands.
A waiter carrying a tray of cosmopolitans approached, and Iliana nodded and took one. Richard took one and handed it to his wife.
Karen took a sip, and the enormous diamond ring on her finger glimmered. “How old are your children now, Iliana?” she asked.
“Fourteen and twelve.” She felt Marc’s eyes on her. “Oh, and I should tell you, I’m so pleased to be included in Jena Connors’s program. I’m looking forward to it.” It was hard to get the words out—she really hated that Marc had told her what to say—but she reminded herself she was there to support him. She took a sip of her drink and immediately coughed, pressing her fingers to her mouth. Boy, was it strong! She told herself she’d better take it slow. There wasn’t that much food around, and she’d only had that pack of nuts to eat in the car.
“It’s always quite an event,” Karen was saying. “The women are so interesting, and the speaker sounds wonderful. I love fresh floral arrangements in the house. Not that I have any time to make them lately—we’re in the middle of this major renovation, enlarging the front entranceway and adding a second patio behind the dining room and a gazebo near the pool—”
“Karen, can you come here for a moment?” Richard called. He and Marc had moved a few steps away, and now Richard was talking to some other people.
Karen touched Iliana’s hand. “Anyway, it should be wonderful. Will you excuse me?” She stepped away and joined her husband, as Iliana breathed a sigh of relief. She truly had no idea how to talk to women like Karen Angers, who were so rich and lived in such luxury. Giving her empty glass to a waiter, she took a full one from his tray. She didn’t want to drink too much, but the cosmo tasted delicious, and she hoped a little more liquor could help her feel less awkward around any other Karen Angers types she might meet.
The Last Dreamer Page 9
