by Cate Holahan
A black-clad hostess collects Jake and his date. She leads them from the bar perpendicular to the window to a table pressed beside the glass. My spouse is sat with his back to the street so that his eyes remain on the prettied-up woman in the skintight cocktail dress, white with black piping on the sides to fake an hourglass silhouette.
“Excuse me.”
A hand drops onto my shoulder. Heavy. Warm. I whirl around, clutching the baby carrier buckled to my torso.
“Is everything all right?”
A slight woman stands beside me in a power suit. Her strained smile deepens the marionette lines around her mouth but fails to form any crow’s-feet. She must see my smudged mascara, applied earlier in the hopes of surprising my husband or at least avoiding embarrassment in front of Battery Park’s well-heeled stroller mafia.
I swipe beneath my eyes with my knuckles. “Yes. Everything’s fine. I’m—”
“So hard being a new mom.” She gestures to the tiny hat peeking above the BabyBjörn.
I look at my child for the first time in God knows how many minutes. She squirms in the carrier, arms and legs flailing like a flipped beetle. Her face is nearly the same color as the deep-pink bonnet atop her head. Her navy eyes are squeezed tight from the force of her howling. How long has she been awake? How long has she been squealing like this, with me zeroed in on her father, everything around me blurring into slow-motion light?
My surroundings sharpen as I picture myself from this stranger’s perspective. I’ve been standing on the edge of the sidewalk beside a busy street, seemingly staring at nothing while my baby screams. This woman fears I suffer from postpartum depression. People are wary of new moms in Manhattan. They know we’re all shut away in small apartments made tinier by ubiquitous baby gear, our walls closing in while our husbands continue working late as though no one waits at home.
I’d been waiting tonight. But the evening was so warm and the sunset, poisoned with air pollution, such a pretty shade of salmon. Why not go for a walk? And then, as my child continued to sleep against my chest, why not head uptown twelve more blocks to Jake’s office? Why not pass that restaurant we went to last Thursday with the delicious grilled octopus and see about grabbing a table in the backyard garden?
Ignorance is bliss. If only I’d stayed home.
I sway side to side, failing to soothe my child or convince this woman that I don’t intend to step into oncoming traffic. “I have two kids, myself,” the stranger volunteers. “Boys. Six and Eight. Such a handful.” She smiles wryly, inviting me to vent, and introduces herself.
The name doesn’t register. With all the thoughts running through my brain, I can barely recall my own. Her expression tenses as she waits for my response. “Um. Beth.” I force an I’m okay smile. The effort squeezes more tears from my eyes.
“And what about this little one?”
I smile harder. “Victoria.”
“Beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”
My baby’s complexion reddens into an overripe tomato. Her toothless mouth opens wider. Motion is poor medicine for hunger. I pull down the scoop neck of my tank so that her cheek may rest on my bare skin. Instinctively, she roots for my breasts, both of which sense her presence and swell with a searing rush of fluid. The woman watches all this. Her expression relaxes into something more friendly.
“Victoria is for victorious,” I explain. “We had trouble conceiving. She’s our . . .” My voice catches. Will there be an “our” after tonight? Not if I confront Jake like this: him, enjoying appetizers with his lover, and me, makeup a mess, shouting about broken promises while an infant howls in my arms. I will be the shrew, overwhelmed by the baby at my bosom, uninterested in sex, dressed for a spin class that hasn’t happened in months. This other woman, meanwhile, will remain the sexy thing in a body-sucking sheath.
The stranger’s smile has faded as she’s waited for me to finish my thought. I cough. “Vicky’s my little miracle.”
That sells it. She gives my upper arm a supportive we girls got to stick together pat and continues down the street. Victoria starts fussing again. I pull a nipple beyond my top’s neckline, and she latches immediately. I twist my head as I nurse, spying on the happy couple, trying to remain in the shadows and simultaneously project my pain through the restaurant’s window. I want Jake to sense me without seeing me, just as I can feel him when he enters a room, recognize his presence by his scent, the length of his stride, the shape of his head as he approaches a restaurant with his hand spread on the small of a stranger’s back.
After an eternity, Victoria releases my nipple, exposing my breast to the warm air. I adjust my shirt, and she settles against my sternum. Her lids lower. A satiated smile curls the sides of her mouth. Love, painful as a contraction, rips through my chest as I marvel at her chubby cheeks and double chin—the bond between Jake and I made flesh. Our victory.
Again, I turn my full attention to the restaurant. The waiter stands beside their table, a black leather folder in his outstretched hand. They’ve split an appetizer rather than shared a meal. Perhaps my staring has served a purpose. My husband realizes his mistake. He’s calling this whole thing off. His biggest indiscretion will prove to be a misplaced hand and inappropriate whispering.
I retreat from the curb in anticipation of his solo exit. Jake passes cash to the waiter and then offers his hand to the woman, helping her stand from the bistro chair. I count the seconds until he releases her fingers. One. Two. Three Mississippi. She matches his stride out the restaurant, hip brushing his side.
There’s laughter as the door opens. Hers. He’s amusing her. It’s been months since he’s made an effort to do the same with me. They walk up the street. I follow on the other side, weaving around the downtown tourists with my head tilted to the sidewalk. Vicky’s socked feet strike my stomach. My walk is too bouncy. I could wake her.
As I slow my stride, an illegally parked Ford Taurus flashes welcome on the opposite corner. A door opens. The officer slides into the driver’s seat.
Come on, Jake. Say good night. Say good-bye.
He glances behind him, sensing me at last, perhaps.
Say good night. Say good-bye.
My husband walks around to the passenger’s side. I look away, fearful that he’ll see me. When I look up, Jake is no longer on the road. A blue police light flashes on the Ford’s dashboard as it speeds off in the opposite direction.
An internal voice tries to calm me. Maybe everything I have seen has an explanation. They are coworkers, of sorts. They were talking shop, had too much to drink. Maybe they’re flirting, not fucking. Maybe they’re headed back to the office.
Maybe I already know the truth.
I turn around, sniffling and swollen, imagining my husband’s thick hands cupping this woman’s sides, his fingertips brushing back her dark hair, his voice telling her she’s beautiful, exciting, enticing—so much more so than boring Beth, his overtired wife.
The traffic light turns. Cars race to beat the next red signal. Their headlights form halos in the darkening sky. For the briefest moment, I consider stepping off the curb.
LIZA
I stare at the white screen, hands arched above the keyboard, a pianist waiting for a cue. Voices crescendo from Eighty-Sixth Street through the open window above my desk. Horns blare, traffic jammed on the FDR Drive. The target length for a romantic suspense story is eighty thousand words. To make my deadline, I must write 50 percent more than my daily average.
I’ve gotten as far as chapter two and a carriage return. Beth, my protagonist, has happened upon her cheating husband. A mild nausea gnaws at my gut as I consider how I’d handle her predicament in my life. Given my nonconfrontational personality, I’d probably try ignoring the affair at first and keep playing the happy wife, hoping that my husband would soon outgrow his “midlife crisis.” Eventually, though, my lack of acting skills would show. I’d become sad and withdrawn each time David came home late, until he stopped wanting to come home at all.
Ultimately, he’d leave for good, and I’d be left huddled beneath unwashed covers, unable to drag myself to the shower. I’d probably pity-eat to the point where my clothes wouldn’t fit. Friends—Christine, mostly—would demand that I “get back out there,” dragging me to “hot spots” in the city sure to nuke whatever dignity I’d managed to maintain during the divorce. I recall a makeover intervention that she’d staged when we were fifteen. She’d insisted we slather on eye shadow and sneak into some seaside dive sure to make me forget about my dad. “We need to toast to his departure, not get depressed about it,” she’d said. “Let’s make the tourists serve us for a change!” I’d ended up puking behind a dumpster while Chris held my hair. Not the night that she’d envisioned.
A shudder crawls from one shoulder to the other as the bittersweet memory is replaced with the bilious image of me back at the meat market, flaunting my depression weight gain before men my age who are too busy salivating at twenty-year-olds to notice. Meanwhile, David—the man upon whom I’d bestowed my own twenties—would be busy making beautiful babies with his surely fertile husband-stealing bimbo.
I shake the sickening thought from my head and breathe deeply. David is not cheating on me. He’s stressed about his missing friend. That’s all.
I drum my fingers on the black keys, not hard enough to type anything. What will be my opening line this time? For a suspense writer, even one who fills her pages with licentious liaisons, the first sentence of every chapter is like an AA meeting. It demands the immediate confession of a problem by a specific someone. My name is Liza, and I’m a . . . I obviously know Beth’s issue, though I don’t yet know how to solve it. We’ll figure it out together, two friends fumbling toward a solution. My main characters are more extensions of my social circle than figments of my imagination. Each is fleshed out with characteristics of myself or my loved ones, endowed with unwritten pasts stitched together from my own experiences and the secrets of those closest to me. These embezzled backstories dictate my characters’ actions as much as my own personal history decides my emotional responses. I don’t invent my characters. I steal them from my surroundings. To be a writer is to be a life thief. Every day, I rob myself blind.
A door slams. I look behind me into the short hallway leading past the bathroom, trying to discern whether the bang was in my apartment or the neighboring unit. Footsteps answer my question. I check the time as I log off. Ten o’clock. Dinner has been staling on the stove for the past forty minutes.
I exit the bedroom and peer around the wall into the living/dining room, spying on my spouse. I do this often now, watching him from a distance, trying to ascertain his mood before engaging. Since Nick’s disappearance, he’s toggled between stages one through three of grief: tearful shock, frantic denial, and raging anger. I never know whether I should settle down for a silent night of him staring into space or brace myself for an endless rant against the inept police who still can’t figure out how his friend and law partner “fell off the motherfucking map.”
David stands in the dining area. His suit jacket hangs from one of four chairs surrounding a round glass table. It looks slept in. My husband came of age in the midnineties, when men were waxing philosophical about shampoo. He prides himself on his bespoke suits, and his vanity is filled with retinoid creams. The state of his blazer is a very bad sign.
He gazes out the French doors leading onto our Juliet balcony, hands shoved in the pockets of his pinstriped pants. The traffic noise is louder in the living area. One of the doors must be cracked. Though the apartment lacks central air, we never open them wide. A squat, seventy-five-year-old railing is the only thing preventing our potted Ficus from falling eight stories to the street below.
“Hey, you.” I drape my arms over his shoulders and punctuate my statement with a peck below his ear. He pats my hand against his chest before pulling away. There are no words.
As much as I’d like to fault Nick’s disappearance for his silence, our conversations have been dwindling for the past six months. It started, I think, with a case: a ten-million-dollar wrongful death suit against the state of New York, filed on behalf of the heartbroken mother of a high school senior who committed suicide after four years of merciless bullying. Nick had always been a strict constructionist with regard to attorney/client privilege, but the publicity surrounding the case had made David follow suit for the first time. Overnight, every question about David’s day became a threatened violation of his professional ethics. Now I don’t ask.
A dozen years together has eliminated any pressure to cough up a few sentences for politeness’ sake. Our relationship has discarded formalities like my spouse’s scalp has shed hair. All that’s left of David’s once Richard Gere–worthy mane are buzzed salt-and-pepper sides and a receding widow’s peak. He overcompensates with a permanent five-o’clock shadow, which I find sexy, albeit sandpapery.
His shoulders rise with each breath. I monitor their tempo, wait for the rhythm to pause. “You hungry?”
He grunts something affirmative. I walk through to the kitchen and turn on the gas burner beneath my room temperature pasta dish. “How are you?”
He responds, though not loud enough for me to make out the words. I think he’s said, “Oh, you know.”
I grab two plates from the cupboard and a pronged spoon, which I use to dish out some of my reheated concoction. While David keeps mulling over the view, I shut off the range, grab utensils, and balance the plates on my forearm like a diner waitress. I slide his dinner in front of the seat draped with his wrinkled suit jacket and set my place beside him. His briefcase claims my chair. As I move it to the floor, I spy a stack of papers slipped into the back pocket. They’re stuffed vertically into the flap so that half of an enlarged photo sticks out.
Have You Seen This Man?
David has used Nick’s headshot from the firm’s website. The image doesn’t do justice to the dead. Nick was handsome, though not in a generic, Hollywood way. He had wavy black hair that he wore to the nape of his neck and a Roman nose made more prominent by his narrow face. Deep-set eyes. Thin lips. Static images emphasize the angularity of his features. To appreciate Nick’s beauty, one had to see him in action: smiling, frowning, posing. He had a roguish quality, a swaggering confidence that he possessed despite, or maybe because of, his small stature. Nick couldn’t have been taller than five foot six; I towered over him at five foot nine. But like an actor, he commanded a room with his presence and orator’s voice, delivered with a Mississippi twang and a side of biting wit. Friends of mine who didn’t find him attractive on first sight would be falling all over him by the end of a night.
I put David’s briefcase on the floor by his jacket and ask if he’d like wine, mostly to draw his attention to the table. He mumbles, “No thanks,” and pulls back the chair. As soon as he sits, he begins shoveling pasta into his mouth, the first stage of ignoring me. I interrupt his eating before his eyes glaze over. “I have an appointment tomorrow.”
David’s chewing slows. I decide to interpret his deliberate mastication as a flicker of interest.
“Dr. Frankel will check on the cysts and the scarring. Last week she told me that the synthetic hormones seem to be helping other women in the trial . . .”
David shoves another forkful in his mouth.
“I want to ask her about the migraines too. I know I’ve had them before, and it’s common for them to get worse with the hormones, but they’ve been really increasing in frequency . . .”
Though I’m not hungry, I take a bite of penne for fellowship and wait for David to speak. Maybe I shouldn’t expect it, but I’d like a little empathy, perhaps an apologetic sorry that the drugs have me in a state of constant hangover. David meets my gaze and stabs at his pasta.
I put down my utensil and rub my temples for emphasis. “Aspirin always worked for me. Now it doesn’t even help most of the time.”
“Then stop with the drugs.” He points at my left forearm with his fork, indicating the implant.
<
br /> Though most people wouldn’t notice, a trained eye would see six raised lines, each about an inch long, spaced equally apart like a flesh-colored bar code or scarred brand. Beneath each track mark is a needle filled with one month of fertility hormones. Two are already spent.
“No one is making you take them,” David continues.
Tears, on a hair trigger since the new hormones, flood my vision. I flutter my lashes at the ceiling. David considers crying a female form of manipulation.
He shrugs. “I was ready to call it after the Clomid failed. But then you wanted this experimental thing . . .”
My pulse throbs in my temples and my teeth. The doctor’s visit should have been a safe discussion, even a welcome one. David, after all, had encouraged me to take the fertility hormones after a year of single-line pregnancy tests and the endometriosis diagnosis. He’d known how desperately I wanted to have our baby, to raise a little person derived from our union, endowed, perhaps, with my creativity and his dark hair or blessed with his studiousness and my bone structure. And he’d wanted our baby too. He’d often mused about watching our genes flourish under a progressive parenting style, so unlike the authoritarian structure with which he’d been raised. How could he give up on our child? Over pasta?
My legs are trembling. Adrenaline urges me to run, to escape to the bathroom, where I can turn on the shower and dissolve into a sobbing mess. I place my palms flat on the glass table and breathe. I will not flee. I will not lose control. David doesn’t mean it. This is Nick’s fault. Stress from his partner’s disappearance has overwhelmed him to the point of—temporary—surrender.
“Honey, I know your friend is gone and—”
“Missing.”
“And I know it’s not the best time to do this. But each day that I age decreases our chances of conception. I’m doing what I can, and I need you to do your part too. We need to make time for—”
