“I don’t even like Chinese,” Katie declared.
The three women collapsed on Liana’s couch, spreading the quilt over their legs, reveling in the familiarity and safety of their long friendship. Liana had a flashback to the first time Deb had seen the gleaming new white couch in her apartment. She had looked at it and remarked, “You obviously don’t have children.” As if on cue, little Max, then just over a year old and learning how to walk, made a beeline for the sofa, sticky hands reaching out in front of him, ready to leave a lasting impression. But Deb’s reflexes were quick back then, and she had scooped him up before any damage could be done.
The roommates gabbed as effortlessly as they had in graduate school, even though their circumstances had changed since their days in New Haven. Charlotte was now what she euphemistically called “between jobs.” After finishing her degree at the Yale Child Study Center, she had been a teacher when she met Howard, working in a pretty dicey neighborhood in the South Bronx and learning to reach students who had very little support at home. But after they got married, it just didn’t seem worth it to keep it up—Howard made a lot of money as a banker, and he didn’t really want her working.
“I know my life must look good from the outside,” Charlotte said unselfconsciously, “but it’s actually really hard not working. I’m anxious all the time. And the errands and stuff that I used to get done on the weekends—now I have all week to get them done. I find myself putting off things—like I could go to the dry cleaner and pick up Howard’s shirts on Tuesday, but I’ll save that to have something to do on Thursday. It’s kind of a disaster,” she said, crestfallen. But then Charlotte’s face lit up. “But all of that will change soon!” she announced.
“You have a new job?” Liana asked.
“What will you be doing, Charlie?” Katie said.
“Well, it is a new job, of sorts,” Charlotte said slowly, clearly enjoying the suspense. “I’m pregnant!” There was a moment during which all three of the women silently considered the announcement, trying to comprehend what this baby would mean for each of them and for their friendship. And then Katie and Liana shrieked simultaneously, boisterously but carefully wrapping their arms around Charlotte and baby girl-boy Simpson.
“Oh my God! I can’t believe it!” Liana said.
“That’s crazy!” Katie marveled.
“Well, is it really that surprising?” Charlotte said. “Am I missing something? We’ve been married for over two years, and I’ll be thirty in a few months. It just seemed like the reasonable thing to do, especially since I’m not working. I mean, doesn’t it seem like the right next step?” She looked beseechingly at her two best friends, a hormonal rush of emotion descending on her.
“Of course it is, sweetheart,” Katie responded. “It’s the most wonderful news. It just seems kind of like a far-off reality for your two bachelorette friends here.” She wrapped an arm around Liana’s waist in a show of solidarity. Liana pulled away slightly and almost told Katie to speak for herself—and then she remembered that while she was theoretically closer to marriage and children than Katie, she was still some distance away.
“Well, you guys aren’t upset, are you?” Charlotte asked, as if maybe she would call the whole thing off if they said they were.
“Of course not!” Liana said. “Big news just takes a little getting used to.”
“Since we’re having true confessions here . . .” Katie said, and Liana’s heart sank. How many more life-affirming announcements could she take when she was so bewildered about her own situation? But Katie was not to be outdone, even if her reveal was not quite as momentous as Charlotte’s.
“I think I met a man who’s up to the task,” Katie said. She had been the most financially successful of the three friends, and she viewed the dating scene as one long and, thus far, futile attempt to find the man who would be equal to her earning potential and unafraid of a relationship with a strong, smart, well-educated woman. Liana never had those worries—she and Jakob were very evenly matched, although they had chosen drastically different career paths.
“You just don’t understand,” Katie would always say to Liana when the travails of dating came up. “Most men out there want a ditzy woman with a big chest who wears tight clothes and spends all her time telling them how great they are.” According to Katie, there were not a lot of single, quality guys like Jakob. Liana knew it was true, although she figured Jakob probably wanted those things too sometimes.
“His name is Rob,” Katie continued, “and I met him at an equity research conference in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. He was married before, but he’s divorced now, and no kids, thank God.” When she saw the expression on Charlotte’s face, she added quickly, “I mean, it would be different if they were our kids, Charlie—I just don’t really want to start off with someone else’s kids.”
“Are you already talking about getting married and having kids?” Liana asked. She thought that the chow fun might not be as “fun” on the way up as it had been going down.
“My God, no, we haven’t talked about it—I mean, it’s only been a few weeks. And I think he got pretty burned the last time he tied the knot. I’m just saying, he’s the first guy in a long time that I could actually see myself with on a long-term basis,” she said reasonably.
“Well, I have some news too,” Liana announced, surprising herself as much as her friends. Seeing their faces immediately transformed with joy and anticipation, Liana quickly interjected, “No, no, it’s not what you think.” She hoisted herself up from the squishy couch with some difficulty and planted herself in front of her friends, throwing back her shoulders in an attempt to imbue herself with strength and purpose. “I’ve made a New Year’s resolution. I’m going to decide by my thirtieth birthday in May whether I will marry Jakob or we should both move on.”
Both women gasped in unison.
“Yes,” Liana said, not actually having made any such resolution or even known her own mind until she’d started speaking, “as my father used to say, ‘Fish or cut bait, Liana Cohen!’” She didn’t have the heart to tell delicate Charlotte that her father had used a more colorful expression—“Shit or get off the pot”—but the message was the same. And now that she had put it out there, it seemed like the only fair thing to do.
How long can I make Jakob wait for me?
After the girls left, Liana went down to the bodega on the corner to buy some Tums and diet ginger ale. Between the greasy Chinese food and the discussion, she felt more than a little queasy. As she crossed Amsterdam Avenue to get to the store, she saw someone who looked remarkably like her mother come out of the Jewish Community Center on the corner of Seventy-Sixth Street and hail a cab. When she got over her initial shock and determined it was indeed her mother, Liana leapt in front of the taxi, which was very slowly moving away from the curb, throwing herself on the hood so that the driver had to stop. He yelled through the front windshield, “What the fuck are you doing, crazy lady?” There was no good answer, so Liana simply slid down the front of the car as gracefully as she could and walked to the left passenger side door, opened it, and directed her mother out of the cab.
“Sorry about that,” Liana said to the driver. Without looking back, she led Phyllis across the street and up to her apartment. Her mother, neatly coifed and wearing a trim wool pantsuit in rose pink, didn’t say a word.
“What was that all about?” Liana demanded when they got upstairs. “You come into the city after mysteriously telling me you had ‘other plans’ so you couldn’t see me, and then you sneak out of the JCC across the street from my apartment without so much as a hello to your only child?” Liana was incensed, although she couldn’t have articulated why.
“Liana, I appreciate that show of filial devotion, although it was a bit extreme. I wasn’t trying to hide anything, but I didn’t know I had to report my every move to you,” her mother answered. “I’m an adult, you know—I have a life.”
“Well what was your adult life doi
ng at the JCC today, if I may be so bold as to ask?” Liana said, unable to give it up.
“I joined a seniors’ discussion group,” her mother said. “Today was the first meeting. We talk about current events, the Middle East, politics, Judaism in America—whatever topics are of interest to the group.”
“But you’re not even interested in current events and politics!” Liana exclaimed, feeling as if she had caught her mother in a lie.
“No, not particularly,” her mother readily admitted. “What I like is that the group attracts quality, intelligent, older Jewish men who are looking for like-minded mature women and not girls in their forties. Just today I met three or four men around my age I thought I might like to get to know. There was this one fellow in particular—Irv, I think was his name. He had the most well-kept fingernails—not manicured, just neat and clean. And he still wears his gold wedding band but on his right hand, although he said his wife had died more than ten years ago. ‘I’m ready to go on but not to let go of the love,’ he said. I thought that was very touching.”
Liana desperately wished she had not been distracted from her expedition for the Tums and ginger ale—she was surely going to need them now.
“You’re trying to meet men, Mom?” she said weakly.
“Well, would that be so bad? I’ve been a widow for three years; I don’t think your father is coming back. And I’m a young seventy. Would you want me to be alone for the next ten, fifteen, twenty years?”
“Of course not. I don’t want you to be lonely.” Liana tasted the salt in her mouth before she realized she was crying. “I just miss him.” They sat on the couch, and her mother held her in her arms, stroking her head in the same soothing way she had when her first boyfriend had broken up with her in the eighth grade and Liana thought the world had ended.
“I miss him too, sweetheart. I always thought we’d grow old together. But that wasn’t meant to be.”
She looked at her mother, really looked at her, for the first time in months. Her mom and Charlotte and Katie—the important women in her life—had all come to the same realization. It was time to move on.
Maybe it’s time for me too.
CHAPTER 15
After the holidays, Deb had taken a turn for the worse. New tumors had appeared in unexpected places, and the chemo was barely keeping them at bay. Still, she remained positive, mostly for Max’s sake, and she pushed herself to come into the office on occasion. She wasn’t really doing any work to speak of, but her cameo appearances allowed Gerry to keep her on the health insurance plan, and Deb’s visits to the office gave her a destination to break up the week between doctors’ appointments.
“Hey, so glad you’re here!” Liana said as she walked into the office and saw steam rising from a cup of coffee on Deb’s desk. Still in her usual morning fog, she hadn’t registered that the body in the chair was not Deb’s now waiflike figure but a rather dough-boyish young man with round gold-rimmed glasses and a mop top of chestnut waves.
“Hi,” he said cheerily, assuming that Liana’s nice greeting had been meant for him.
Liana jumped back, spilling her small-tall coffee down the front of her white sweater. “Damn, that’s hot!” she yelled, wiping uselessly at her chest with the Starbucks napkins. Later, she’d reflect on the poor impression she had made on Bobby; for now, she was just confused and upset. “Where’s Deb?” she demanded.
“I’m sorry—I don’t think I’ve met Deb yet,” he said, smiling affably.
“Okay. Don’t move,” she ordered, although she wasn’t sure why.
Liana raced down the hall to Gerry’s office, where she found him with his feet up on his desk, placidly reading The New York Times. She began to breathe again, knowing that no one besides Gerry would be as upset as she if something had happened to Deb.
“Who is that man sitting at Deb’s desk?” Liana hissed, teeth clenched. Gerry slowly folded his paper and put it down on the desk. He loved nothing better than knowing news before someone else did, even bad news—or maybe especially bad news.
“I tried to figure out another solution, but I just couldn’t,” he began. “Deb is here so rarely these days, and Bobby, the new hire, needed a desk. I thought it’d be a good idea for him to sit with you, an experienced attorney, so you could show him the ropes.”
What the hell is going on here? Has Gerry lost his mind?
Six months ago, Liana was persona non grata—the attorney without a heart, infecting the rest of the office with her negativity. Had she executed her ersatz transformation into model public defender so successfully that the Boss believed she was now emotionally committed to the cause, and would trust her with an impressionable neophyte? Or had Gerry sensed that Liana’s commitment to Shea, even with its questionable genesis, had given her a genuine renewed enthusiasm for her job?
Liana had the sinking feeling that Bobby might be a spy, but she was too concerned about Deb to worry about that. “So where’s Deb going to sit when she comes in?”
“There’s a free desk in the room at the end of the hallway, where the mail room guys hang out when they’re slow,” Gerry said. Other attorneys would find that insulting, but she knew that Deb shared her view on this one. The “mail room guys”—Carlos and Sam and Piotr—were the nicest, most down-to-earth people in the office, and they adored Deb. She’d be just fine.
Having resigned herself to her new rooming situation, Liana was on her best behavior with Bobby over the next couple of weeks, dispensing advice and wisdom and filling him in on the office gossip on a need-to-know basis. She liked him well enough, although she noted that he had become a bit too buddy-buddy with Gerry. She toed the party line on all the rules and expectations, keeping to herself the indiscretions she had committed with regard to Danny Shea, both real and imagined.
And she threw herself behind her new client, Martin Johnson, a psychotic forty-something-year-old man convicted of murder, who had killed his aunt by throwing a Molotov cocktail at her, believing she was the phoenix who would rise from the ashes. Liana planned to base a large part of her pitch to the appellate court for a reversal on the journal Johnson kept—page after page of the incoherent ramblings of a madman, a person, she would argue, who couldn’t have formed the intent to kill anyone. She was glad to find that her interest in Johnson was purely clinical and lawyerly—her personal attachment to Shea, however bizarre, would be the exception, not the rule.
One afternoon in the middle of January, Deb poked her head into Liana and Bobby’s office. “Want to grab a slice?” she asked Liana, making sure to exclude Bobby.
“Sure,” Liana answered, happy that Deb had an appetite for something—lately it looked like she had stopped eating altogether, or maybe she just couldn’t hold much down. Something about Deb’s tone of voice tipped Liana off that the lunch might be unpleasant, but she wasn’t sure why. After a couple of bites and a few minutes of general office chitchat, Deb got down to business.
“You haven’t been a very good friend lately, Liana,” she said. Deb did not mince words.
“Excuse me?” Liana said, baffled.
“I’ve hardly seen you at all. When I’m here—which is seldom enough to impose on your busy schedule—you barely stop into my ‘office,’ such as it is, to say hello. You sit there with that new guy, like I’m already dead.” There was no show of emotion, just a recitation of the facts as Deb saw them. And it was devastating.
If Deb had reached over and slapped Liana in the face, she would not have felt worse or more directly rebuked. Liana tried some feeble excuses, but they sounded lame even to her own ears. Unlike the petty slights that Deb had manufactured to keep Liana on her toes and to stir the pot before she got sick, Liana recognized that this time she had really screwed up. She was grateful that Deb had thrown down the gauntlet and given her the opportunity to repent. “I’ll do better,” she said, and she meant it.
As January dragged on, Deb put Liana to the test. Twice she commandeered Liana to accompany her to chemotherap
y sessions at Sloan Kettering, the two women pretending to watch The View as the drugs dripped slowly into Deb’s arm. Liana was thankful to be allowed to keep Deb company at such an intimate moment but still tormented by the very presence of the needle—an irrational, but nonetheless real, phobia. Another afternoon, Deb asked Liana to babysit for Max for a couple of hours while she napped. Liana didn’t mind the children’s television programming—she actually enjoyed Clifford the Big Red Dog and Barney—but Max was still in diapers, and she almost telephoned Charlotte to come over and get in a little practice. On the days that Deb made it into the office, Liana made a point of getting sandwiches for them to share for lunch and swinging by the room where Deb sat, surrounded by her loyal mailroom bodyguards, several times during the day to check on her. If at first Liana’s attentions felt forced, both to Deb and to herself, eventually she won back Deb’s trust. By the end of the month, Liana had redeemed herself, but it was also becoming clearer by the day that Deb was fading.
The first week in February, Deb turned thirty-three years old. Liana telephoned her from the office to wish her a happy birthday.
“I made it to the same age as Jesus,” Deb said to Liana.
Purposefully ignoring Deb’s use of the past tense, Liana responded, “And you should live until a hundred and twenty,” invoking the traditional Jewish blessing for a long life. Liana continued, “Anyway, Deb, you’re Jewish. Is Jesus meaningful to you for some reason?”
“Well, duh . . . Jesus was Jewish too, silly. But, no, that’s pretty much where the similarities end, unless you count the fact that I like to eat olives and wear cool sandals. Listen, Steven is making me a little birthday brunch tomorrow, just my closest friends. Will you come?”
Unreasonable Doubts Page 17
