Rise and Shine

by Anna Quindlen

  Meghan tends to conflate her childhood with my own. Four years is not much of a distance now that she is forty-seven and I am forty-three, but in childhood, four years is the difference between toddler and girl, middle school and high school, innocence and sex. Sometimes Meghan will say, “Do you remember when Mother wore that horrible lavender bouclé suit?” or “Do you remember when Father brought home the beagle puppy and then decided we weren’t dog people?” But I don’t. I have hazy memories of the big foyer and the little telephone alcove tucked behind a door beneath the stairs, of Mother’s dressing room with enormous roses on the wallpaper and a chair with cracked green leather in Father’s study. But sometimes I’m not sure if I’m remembering right or if those are scenes from some movie that imprinted itself inside me, a facsimile of our lost life. Sometimes Meghan will sniff the air like a pointer dog at a cocktail party or in a department store, and I know that she has scented someone wearing our mother’s perfume. The smell means nothing to me, not that one or cherry pipe tobacco or wet oilcloth or any of the other vaguely Englishy things with which our parents apparently tried to disguise themselves.

  Meghan had a big chunk of childhood in that world, in our old house, among those people. And then it was over as though an enormous blade had sliced through the front walk. On the other side were our aunt and uncle, who moved fifty miles southeast so the two of us could stay in the same town. They’d probably decided it would be best to uproot us as little as possible, but the smaller, shabbier place on the down side of Main Street and the palpable sympathy of virtually the entire town combined to suggest that this was a mistake. They should have taken us away instead of raising us in the long shadow of before. I didn’t feel it much, but Meghan did. She spent eight years waiting to leave. After her first year at Smith, she never lived there again.

  She didn’t really know Evan until college, despite the oft-evoked dunking. He went to the local boys’ school. It was the brother school of the one we attended, but there wasn’t much mixing until the students were older, and by then he’d graduated and moved on to Amherst. It was an old story; he went to a college party, she went to a college party, they were both surprised to see each other out of context. She was shaken by Smith, by the glut of smart girls who, like her, dreamed of being successful writers. He was bored by Amherst, which had begun to feel like a slightly more grown-up version of high school. They went to see a French art film projected on a blank wall of the Smith museum, and both thought it was pretentious and silly. There are stupider reasons for marriage, I suppose. And perhaps part of Meghan’s reason was that Evan was a last vestige of that past life, when we had parents, a sunporch, a patina of privilege.

  I just loved the guy. The day they married was one of the happiest days of my life.

  “Ev,” I cried, “what are you doing here? How did you get here? Do you want coffee? We have really horrible coffee.”

  “There’s a recommendation,” Evan said.

  “Sit. The leather chair is comfortable.” It was. One of the board members had redecorated her den, and we’d gotten all the old furniture. Why should a woman who has just lost her apartment in a fire and lost her kids because she lost her apartment have to sit in a straight chair?

  “I can’t believe you found this place,” I said.

  “The driver couldn’t believe this was where I wanted to go. He kept saying, ‘Mr. Grater, you got the wrong address there.’ ”

  “Black car?”

  “What else?”

  “Yeah. The driver’s either from the neighborhood or grew up in the neighborhood, or one just like it. Bet he locked the car the minute you got out.”

  The black car could be the official icon of New York, or at least the New York Evan and Meghan call home. It’s usually a Lincoln Town Car, apparently not unlike the car in which our parents died. New Yorkers with pretensions but middle-class means take one for airport trips or special occasions, an anniversary at the River Café or a black-tie event at the Waldorf. Up-and-comers get them to drive around with clients, or the company picks up the tab when they take one home late at night, when a prospectus or a brief has slopped over into the early morning hours. If you walk down Park Avenue in the Fifties at midnight, you’ll see black cars bumper to bumper double-parked from the old Pan Am Building to Fifty-seventh Street, with the logos of some of the Fortune 500 richest companies on small signs in the windows.

  Then there are people like Meghan and Evan, who have black cars all the time. The most enduring memories of their work life will be sitting in the back of a spotless Town Car, reading the Times and trying to drink coffee from a sip cup without getting stains on their suits when the driver hits a pothole. A car picks Evan up every morning, returns if lunch is in midtown, takes him to the restaurant or the hotel for dinner or (rarely) to the apartment for an evening in. Elsewhere in the country teenagers are taking photographs of the limo that picks them up for the prom, but in New York there are children who take one to school every morning. A lot of them. In fact, Meghan chose Leo’s school in part because it had the fewest black cars double-parked in front on the morning they went for their family interview.

  Before Leo went away to boarding school, a black car would take him to Randalls Island for soccer and softball games. From the Triborough Bridge during the early rush, you can see a strange sight in the spring and fall: fields full of the bright blues and greens and yellows of school sports uniforms, with a phalanx of black cars on the verge, the spectators in dark suits moving back and forth from field to car as they watch, cheer, cry encouragement, then hasten to the backseat when a cell phone chirps. Once I was at one of Leo’s games and a dad emerged from the back of a black car with a big grin and high-fived Evan. “I just made seventeen million dollars between innings,” he said.

  “Way to go,” Evan said.

  There had been no black car outside when I came in, slogging up the hill from the 149th Street subway station in a bitter wind that carried bits of greasy paper and some strange carbonized city dust with it. I would have noticed. I would have assumed it was Meghan, straight from the studio. She and Evan had once gotten into each other’s black cars by mistake when he had an early morning flight. They had talked about it at dinner parties for months after.

  “Luis drove me,” said Evan. “He’s a good guy. He’s the guy who drove us to and from the Waldorf the other night. He’s just never driven me to the Bronx.”

  “Yeah, but he knew the neighborhood, right? I’ll tell you where he is right now.” I was moving toward the door, which required only half a step since my office is the size of what they call the maid’s room in a big New York apartment, which is big enough for a twin bed, a cheesy dresser, and the maid. “He’s around the corner getting a Cubano sandwich and a good cup of coffee, the kind you can stand your spoon up in. It’s what I have for lunch at least once a week.” I closed the door and sat in my desk chair. “And that’s the end of the chitchat. What the hell is going on?”

  “What?”

  “You. Here.”

  “You know.”

  “I know the world of morning TV as we know it has blown sky-high, and that Meghan gave the most insincere apology I’ve seen since she told that guy who came to dinner at your house who kept calling her Maggie that she was sorry about the coffee spill. But I figured I’d talk to her about that, not you. No offense. If she ever calls me.”

  He searched my face, then slumped and looked at his hands. “So you haven’t talked to her?”

  “Not since Sunday. Saturday we ran. Saturday we all went to that deal at the Waldorf. Sunday she called me while she was prepping for Monday. Monday I had to go to court with one of our women who might lose her kids, so I missed the show. Monday night I find out all about it at a dinner at Kate and Sam’s, walk in cold and discover that my very own sister is the toast of New York, emphasis on toast. I couldn’t call her line because of the telephone switch-off at nine. I called your line and got no one. I called her office line and left a messa
ge. Several messages by now, I guess. And this morning I watched her give the finger to the network and the FCC. Tequila,” I hollered—we didn’t have an intercom because the place was so small we didn’t need one—“did my sister call yet?”

  “No, ma’am,” called Tequila, who didn’t like being hollered at.

  “So I figure she’s probably sitting and fuming, and when she cools down she will call and I will yell at her about not calling sooner. Sounds like a plan, right?”

  Evan took a deep breath and did something unnecessary with the knot of his tie. “So you haven’t talked to Meghan since Sunday afternoon.”

  “Honey, you’re scaring me. What’s the matter? What’s really going on here? This isn’t about some stupid television screwup.” I touched his bent shoulder. “She’s sick.”

  “No. God, no.”

  “You’re sick?”

  He shook his head. His lanky body was so accordioned in the chair that the point of his pink tie was touching the floor. He was going to be covered with dirt by the time he got back into that black car.

  “Jesus, Leo?”

  “He’s fine. He’s living for a few days on some family farm in the middle of the Spanish countryside. I talked to him briefly yesterday. I didn’t want to stay on long. He sounded busy, but good, really good, you know how he is. Just…happy. When that kid’s happy, he’s really happy. I didn’t tell him about the Greenstreet interview. I was thinking it might upset him, being so far away, and I didn’t want to do that. And afterwards I thought he’d just laugh. He’d just say, ‘That’s my mom,’ the way he always does.”

  “He’s always had her number. Boy, I miss him. Did Meghan get a chance to talk to him?”

  He looked up at me. “Meghan’s not at the apartment. She’s staying at Harriet’s place. Harriet is in Africa, I think. There are photographers and TV camera guys all over both entrances of our building.”

  “Well, that’s okay. Give me Harriet’s number. I’ll call her there.”

  “I don’t have the number there. I’m not living there. I’m living at that new Four Seasons downtown.”

  I’m slow. I’ve always been slow. Meghan says that when our aunt told us our parents were dead, I went into the kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets and finally came out with a box of Cheerios. “Like, what do you mean, dead?” I said. “Like, dead dead?” Probably at the time they thought it was shock. But the truth is that I’m a little slow on the uptake.

  “We decided on Sunday night to split,” he said, mumbling so that his words were barely intelligible.

  “You and Meghan?”

  “Well, me, really. I did, Bridge. I’m so sorry. It’s just—I don’t know, there’s really nothing there anymore. I mean, it’s not like a marriage. It’s not even like a friendship. I don’t come home and say, Hey, honey, I’m working on this big deal and I have this kid working on it with me and he’s good but he keeps making mistakes and, by the way, I ran into Ed Lawrence from college today, remember him, he works for the Justice Department now and he has a kid at Cornell. I don’t sit in front of the TV and watch the news with my wife and say, Man, that scumbag, I hope they fry him, or get up in the morning and read the papers and say, Hey, Meg, look, they’re closing down the overpass to the highway, that’s going to kill us when we leave for Connecticut on Friday nights. Because we don’t go to Connecticut anymore, we’re way too busy, and when I’m having breakfast Meghan’s already gone and all I see is the coffee mug to prove she’s even been there and at night she’s sleeping with that eye mask on and the only time I see her at dinner we’re with some other couple at Le Bernardin or at a dinner party where she’s at one table and I’m at another and sometimes I just look at her and I think, That’s not my wife, that’s not that woman I used to swing in the hammock with or read to while she drove the car. When’s the last time she drove a car, Bridge? I look at her at some dinner party with people I don’t like in an apartment that looks like every other apartment in New York, and I think, Damn, that’s Meghan Fitzmaurice.”

  This was the longest comment on anything Evan had made since he gave the Class Day speech at Amherst. It was followed by silence, or what passes for silence in a neighborhood in which at least one car alarm is always going off.

  “That’s why she clobbered Ben Greenstreet Monday morning,” I said softly.

  “Yeah. I mean, I think she would have clobbered him anyhow. But that’s why she clobbered him in the particular way she did.”

  Outside I could hear some woman yelling, the way women have yelled since time began, “You get your ass in here. Now! Don’t make me come over there!” Oddly enough, it didn’t really fill the silence.

  “You’ve been married twenty-two years,” I said.

  He nodded again. “I want a normal life,” he said.

  “I am coming out there,” yelled the voice from the back.

  “Don’t you dare say that to me,” I said. And suddenly I understood what that poor schlub Greenstreet had faced. The anger started at my feet and moved up like a pitcher filling. Maybe this was what a hot flash would be like. I’d know soon enough.

  “Don’t you dare say that to me. Normal life? Jesus Christ, don’t you dare. I love you, Ev, but she’s my sister and you knew what she was and what she was like when you first met her. If you didn’t want that, the time to back out was twenty-two years ago, not now. Not with a life and a history and a kid, for Christ’s sake. What about Leo?” What about me, I almost said.

  “Leo’s at college. We see him five times a year. When he wasn’t there it made it even worse. We had nothing to talk about.”

  “Oh, what is this, empty-nest syndrome? Am I going to read about this in the Times next week, the empty-nest syndrome for guys? All the more reason to stick around. This is chapter two. Or three. Or whatever.”

  “You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “Oh, please.” Then I stopped. I’m not that slow. “Oh, wait.” The heat my anger was radiating had become so strong that I felt a trickle of sweat run down my side beneath my sweater. “Who is she, Ev?”

  “Oh, don’t start that. That’s all Meghan could say. I just told you, it’s the pace of it, like we’re on some hamster wheel, like none of it’s real. There’s no there there, Bridge. We’re never alone. We’re never relaxed. Leo’s gone. This is more of a conversation, this one I’m having with you, than I’ve had with Meghan in years. It’s not even because of what Meghan does, although God knows that’s hard to live with—Hey, Ev, saw the wife with the pope today. Hey, Ev, wanna grab some dinner, see Meghan’s in Bangladesh—but half of those guys live this way, too. They don’t even know their wives. They talk about the kids or they don’t talk at all. I just don’t want to do it anymore.”

  I leaned in close so our heads were almost touching. “Who is she?” I whispered. It was quiet out in the front room. Tequila was listening so hard it was practically aerobic.

  “I feel like it’s the invasion of the body snatchers, like one night while we were asleep these people took over our lives, this woman who never sleeps, who can’t go to the corner without someone taking her picture, who hasn’t been inside a grocery store in years. And then there’s me, some sort of work automaton, who has the best skis and the best bike and the best tennis racket and gets to use each of them maybe once a year because I’m either at the office or I’m on a plane or I’m at some damn business dinner or I’m in the health club at the Four Seasons, and half the time I can’t remember which Four Seasons I’m in, Prague looks the same as Dallas, as much as I see of either one. And like a year ago we were in a car on the way to some screening or something and I said, Let’s just stop this. Let’s just kick back and enjoy the rest of our lives. We’ve got the money. Let’s take the time. You know what she said to me? She said, Buy yourself a red Porsche.”

  It sounded like Meghan.

  “Who is she?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know why I thought you’d get it. I thought maybe you cou
ld convince her that this isn’t about that.”

  “Ev,” I said in a whisper. “It’s always about that. When one of the women here comes in and says her man broke the TV and then left, he’s gone to some other woman. When one of your partners leaves his wife, he’s found another one just waiting to happen. When Ben Greenstreet split, it was for someone else. That’s what guys do.”

  “And I always thought Meghan was the cynic and you were the idealist.”

  “You know and I know that Meghan is about as cynical as a baby. It’s the conventional wisdom that says otherwise. And you’re supposed to know a whole helluva lot more than conventional wisdom about Meghan.”

  “It’s just too hard,” he said.

  “Try harder.”

  “I can’t.” He stood up. His pale pink shirt was dark from perspiration. Betrayal is aerobic, too. “She’s going to really need you, Bridget. I know you think it’s the other way around. But you’re the only person who keeps her sane. And normal. Or relatively normal.”

  “If it’s someone we know, I will kill you, Evan. I swear to God I will kill you with a steak knife.”

  “I just came here to see if we can stay friends. That’s why I came in person. We’ve been family for so long.”

  “You’re the one who seems to have forgotten that.”

  “I just don’t want you to hate me.”

  “I can’t promise that, Evan. I can’t. I can’t even talk to you anymore. Just give me Harriet’s number so I can call my sister and talk to her.”

  “I don’t have it,” he said. “I’ll have my secretary try to find it and give it to you.” And then he was gone. For a moment I wanted to follow and watch him get in the car. I felt as though I would never see him again. But of course I would: across the aisle at Leo’s graduation from Amherst, in a crowded living room when we met the family of the girl Leo would someday marry. Somehow the thought was much worse than never seeing him again. It would have been better that he disappear than that he become a vaguely familiar face.