Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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They left him like that, lining up lipstick next to ChapStick next to hair clips. James wondered lightly if Finn lifted his head or felt any kind of sadness when they shut the door, if the boy’s unease in any way echoed his. He pictured Marcus’s ashes in the basement and felt a panicky certainty that Finn needed more comfort. For a moment, he thought of turning to Ana and saying: “This is insane. We have to go back.” And pushing through the door to scoop up the boy and bury his face in his honey hair, feel his small cat paw hands around his neck. Ana would send Ethel home and lock the door behind her, keeping the three of them in and the cold October evening at bay.
He stopped walking.
“What is it?” asked Ana. She looked grave, as if anticipating exactly what he was thinking, but terrified to hear it said out loud. He won’t be able to leave him. His wife, bundled and moving slightly to keep warm, her hands in her leather gloves anxiously swinging by her side.
“Nothing,” he said. And then he lunged at her, grabbed her from the waist, and pulled her to his mouth, lips smashing.
“James …” She pulled away, ran her fingers through her hair.
“Let’s go in an alley and fuck.”
“Jesus.” He reached for her again, tried to get his hand through the buttons of her jacket, but there wasn’t enough space. “You’re going to rip it—” said Ana before he closed his mouth over hers.
“Let’s get ugly,” whispered James. “Let’s get a hotel room.” He was panting now, shaking her lightly from the shoulders.
Ana shoved him back. “James. It’s not like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. It’s not—We’re not—”
“Animals?” he said, and he let out a dog bark. Ana stared, and James felt all the lust draining from him as his wife frantically pushed down her short hair, which was perfect, entirely in place.
He breathed in the cold and made a declaration: “Let’s take a cab.”
Rick Saliman had spent thousands of dollars bonding his teeth, and the result, when he pulled back the curtains of his lips, was a strange erasure of the lines between each tooth. Something smooth and terrifying, resembling a long, narrow bar of soap, sat where his smile should have been.
“James,” he said, and gripped James’s hand like they were jumping from a cliff together. This was Rick’s greeting: No hello, just the loud singular recitation of a name. On the strength of this fantastic memory, and three decades of practice, the Saliman name was second on the firm’s stationery, right after the dead McGruger.
“Rick,” said James. Ana swooped over the waitress walking by and grabbed a glass of white for her, red for James.
“She does everything for you, is that right, James? Even gets the drinks these days?”
Ana tried a laugh.
“Only the things that matter,” said James, raising his glass for emphasis.
Ana left his side, beckoned by a wave from Elspeth, who stood with two young associates, new hires. One was blond, breakably thin beneath feathery hair; she reminded Ana of Woodstock, Snoopy’s friend. The other was tall, taller even than Ana, and less pretty, but she exuded a kind of burned anger—her eyes narrowed when offered Ana’s hand.
“Jeanine is working with Steven’s group,” said Elspeth, and the tall one gave an exhausted sigh topped by a world-weary smile that Ana found falsely mature for her face.
The blond one gazed sleepily around the room as if looking for a place to nap.
Ana felt a pull in the back of her head, an interior whisper—How’s Finn? Who’s in my home?—and she wondered if it was like that for Elspeth all day every day. Elspeth had three children, boy-girl twins and a boy. Ana discovered these children only after the two women had worked together for a year, when she saw Elspeth waiting for a descending elevator at 9:30 in the morning, her eyes teary, her jacket on, clearly hovering in the shadows hoping to be unseen.
“What’s wrong?” asked Ana, who hadn’t sought out this moment but was merely on her way to the bathroom.
“My son’s sick,” said Elspeth.
Taken aback, Ana said: “You have a son?” And the son was sick, which could mean a cancer boy, bald in a ward somewhere being entertained by a volunteer clown. “Is he all right? What do you mean, sick?”
“Oh, he’ll be fine. But the school sent him home, and my day nanny is having day surgery, and of course Tom can’t take a morning off. I tried to get our night nanny to come early, but she sees our number on the phone and doesn’t pick up. And I have a conference call at eleven.…” And off she went in a gnarled, furious voice entirely unlike her calm, measured self at meetings. Ana stepped back a foot or so, overwhelmed by a mixture of sympathy and disgust. Ana had taken to heart the two tenets she learned early on from a female professor in law school: “Never cry, and always take credit.” And at the same time, Ana was mortified to recognize in front of her exactly the situation she, who considered herself a feminist (Right? Didn’t she? Had it really been that long?), knew was disastrous, unfair, a shivering, pathetic creature of inequality flushed out into the light.
She put her hand on Elspeth’s arm and offered a Kleenex from her pocket. She rode down in the elevator with her and put her in a cab. The look of sheer gratitude on Elspeth’s face when she glanced back through the glass filled Ana with self-loathing. Why was there so little altruism in her? She thought about those workplace surveys that get published in national magazines and newspapers once or twice a year: Is this a good place for women to work? In truth, the firm was not, but Ana liked the idea of working in a place that was and decided this was a moment in which to pretend otherwise.
Since that day, Elspeth had confided in Ana from time to time. Shutting Ana’s door behind her, she gingerly showed her photographs of the kids. Ana nodded and murmured, and Elspeth relaxed into it eventually, growing more familiar, bitching about this and that family matter, presenting Ana with a picture of a life that was torturous in many ways, all drop-offs and pickups and nanny extortions and infected mosquito bites and exorbitant hockey fees. But sometimes, once in a while, great pride over somebody’s triumph at school. A picture painted. A report of a surprise cuddle from the eldest late one night.
One time, she forwarded Ana a family photo from a weekend vacation to an amusement park. The kids tumbling off Elspeth’s lap in front of a fiendish cartoon mascot, and Tom, Elspeth’s husband, at the edge of the picture with half his body sliced away. This was the image Ana saw in her mind’s eye whenever Elspeth spoke of her family, whom Ana had never actually met.
No one else at work spoke of Elspeth’s outside life. She was sober and efficient, stayed until nine or ten at least two nights a week, took the bare minimum holidays, and moved up fast. And Ana would be next, everyone said, the next woman to make partner. Soon.
Ana heard the low laughing of the men growing more boisterous; drink three had been drunk, the volume was increasing. She grabbed a second glass of wine from the tray, dropping down her empty glass and taking a long, deep sip. Ana looked across at James, nodding as Rick gesticulated. These parties were one of the few places in the world where Ana saw James being deferential. She took this for love.
Ana recalled that Rick’s desk contained a photograph of two children, sunburned on a boat, but he hadn’t spoken of them in years, or not to Ana. Perhaps only Elspeth dared confide in the hollow crone. She thought of the word “childless,” spreading like a fungus across her, infecting everyone: She is less a child, so don’t dangle yours in front of her or she might snatch it away.
Ana was overcome with the sensation that she needed to speak. “Where are your kids tonight?” she asked Elspeth. The young women glanced about, surprised.
“Tom—my husband,” said Elspeth, for the benefit of the juniors. “He has them, of course. He would never come to one of these things.”
“One of your nannies is at my house,” said Ana, finishing her second glass of wine, feeling it rise to the top of her head.
Elspeth smiled. “That’s right. How strange.”
The blond one inquired politely of Ana: “How many children do you have?”
“Oh, none. I just borrowed one from a sick friend.” The three women shifted. Elspeth tried to intervene.
“Ana’s a godmother to a little boy whose mother is in the hospital. He’s staying with her.”
“Godmother? Oh, Elspeth. That makes it sound so profound. Fabulous. Can I start using that phrase?”
Ana knew that this bitchy streak was awakened only with alcohol, yet she replaced her empty wineglass with a full one as the young waitress walked by. She took another sip.
The blond one took a swallow of her drink, as if steeling herself for what she was dying to ask.
“So it’s possible, then, to have children and work here? I never hear anyone talk about that. The statistics about women lawyers …” Ana noticed a huge ring on her finger, an eyeball-sized diamond. She won’t be working in a year, thought Ana.
“Of course it’s possible. You don’t have to sacrifice every feminine experience to be successful,” said Elspeth in a hectoring voice. Ana dwelled on the word “feminine,” picturing her childless self mustachioed, wearing a hard hat. “I’m surprised someone from your generation would subscribe to such a retrograde notion.”
The blond woman colored pink.
“Well, Elspeth, I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true,” said Ana. “Suppression is a significant aspect of the working world. What do people say? ‘It’s business, it’s not personal.’ ”
The blond woman, buoyed by what she perceived as Ana’s defense of her, piped in: “I read in some magazine that if someone at work ever says that to you, like because you were crying or something? That what you should say is: ‘It might be business, but I’m a person, so it’s personal.’ ”
Ana took this in then laughed bitterly for a moment until halted by the girl’s crestfallen face. She had meant this anecdote seriously.
“I only have one piece of advice for your generation,” said Ana. The two women leaned in. “Get off Facebook. It will expose you.”
Ana excused herself, gliding through the room on rails, making stops here and there to shake hands, dole out praise, make mention of her most recent settlements and victories.
She was looking for James, because James was her way of differentiating herself from this. Even now, he remained her rock ‘n’ roll connection, some vestige of her childhood in the demimonde. Whenever she drank this much, she longed to believe she had just been dropped into her work, temporarily, like someone in a witness protection program. This part of the job was tolerated for the sake of the hours it allowed her in the office. If she could suffer through these nights (and she did, adored by all), then she could retreat tomorrow to the sprawling problems waiting to be clipped and contained on her computer.
He was in the shadows, back to her, arms moving, beer sloshing out of his glass. When he pulled back, he revealed Ruth, looking less wan than usual in a black dress of indeterminate taste. Her feet, however, were in thick-heeled laced booties that made Ana think of war nurses. But her face was ecstatic, flushed, her eyes alight, and James, when he turned to Ana, was panting as if he’d sprinted through a door, his forehead shiny, his hair on end.
“Ana!” he said, too loudly. He leaned in for a nuzzle.
“James was telling me about when he went to Liberia,” said Ruth, revealing the piled teeth. “I’m really into Afro beat.” Ana nodded. She had almost forgotten about James’s trips, how many years he’d spent traveling with a film crew and how he would return with stacks of photos and anecdotes and some unwearable beaded garment as a gift. What struck her about those trips was how similar they were, how every country suffered exactly the same poverty and the same corruption. Back and forth between those two poles, with James vacuuming stories from the inside of the countries, all that heartbreak residue to collect.
“You used to spend so much time on the road,” said Ana, reaching a hand out as a server walked by, plucking another glass of white wine.
“Do you guys want to go dancing?” asked Ruth. And if he were a cowboy, James would have taken off his hat, flung it in the air, and hooted: “Hell, yeah!” Ana considered the alternatives and nodded her assent.
The club was on a street between a Portuguese grocer—salted cod suspended in the window; a strange chemical soap smell as they walked past—and an auto garage. Ana rubbed her hands together to get warm while Ruth stood to the side, texting invisible friends about guest lists and entry.
James said: “We should call Ethel.”
“Should we?”
He dialed, his fingers growing colder. Ana couldn’t hear what he said, standing between two people on their cell phones in the nothing streetlight, watching the babies, babies going in and coming out, their unlined faces under knitted caps and curtains of long hair. This season, Ana noted, beards were back. Almost every guy entering had a grizzly backwoods coating. Was that where James had gotten the idea for his?
But around their eyes, only youth, flat and nervous and boyish, like they couldn’t believe they were out on a school night.
“Everything’s good,” James said, putting his phone in his pocket. Ana looked at him blankly.
“With Finn. Everything’s good.”
“Oh,” said Ana. “Good, good.”
“He went right to sleep,” said James, covering a little pull of disappointment over the fact that Finn didn’t require him at bedtime.
Inside the club, the band, too, was bearded, all except the female singer, who had bangs that covered half her face. There were so many of them, Ana felt like she was looking at a Dr. Seuss picture of alike creatures populating a village: This one has an accordion, this one has a saw, this one has a tuba. But when they turned it up, it sounded good, cacophonous, pure.
“It’s not a band, it’s a collective,” shouted James at Ana, delivering a new piece of information.
Ana laughed. “How Stalinesque!”
Ana sipped her beer, far from the band, near the bar, while James and Ruth attempted to talk over the noise, their heads tilted together, nearly touching at the top. They gave up and James separated, stood upright, and stared, fighting the impulse to go to the front, to climb up on stage. I could have done that, he thought. I could have been that! This exact thought was already snaking through the room, especially in and out of the heads of the few guys older than thirty. For the younger ones, there was no sense of regret yet; still a possibility, still a chance.
James bought two beers, knowing that the severance money was going to run out in six weeks and wondering what that would look like: Would he get an allowance from his wife? He shut up the thought, taking in the stink of old bar cloths and the deodorant of strangers. He saw his wife moving away from him, cut off from her by young men who looked like James used to look, and women in lipstick who seemed black in the dark.
“Do you want to smoke?” asked Ruth. James couldn’t see Ana, and he nodded, feeling bundled in bandages. He handed Ruth a beer.
He went outside with her, under the streetlamp. He lit a cigarette and offered her one. She raised an eyebrow, led him to an alleyway, and pulled a joint out of her wallet. James laughed at himself: “That kind of smoke,” he said. How long had it been since anyone had invited him to smoke pot?
He studied her face as she lit up: slight lantern jaw keeping her from prettiness, and a kind of a put-upon sadness that was unappealing. But she was sympathetic, too, because she was trying so hard. He took a long, deep drag, and another.
Nearby, a small crowd of people were doing the same thing, two guys and a girl. A pretty girl with black hair, smiling at him as she exhaled, lifted her fingers in a wave. Emma.
She walked with her hips forward. Her jacket was tight around her breasts and came out from her waist like a bell. As she moved, she was backed by the muffled sound of the band, frantic and ominous. (An organ? Did they bring out a goddamn organ, too?)
“My God. How weird is this.” She said it like it was a good weird. “I see you everywhere.”
Ruth, if James wasn’t mistaken, looked a little annoyed. Her hand was extended into space, waiting for James to take a drag.
“I don’t—this is Ruth.”
“I think I know you. Were you at Yoshi’s book launch?” asked Emma, peering at her.
Ruth shook her head no, suddenly a bumpkin, and the difference between the two women glared like a lantern in the darkness.
“Do you want—” Ruth thrust the joint at Emma, who plucked it from her fingers and inhaled.
“Where’s your wife?” Emma said, as if she knew Ana. She was bolder tonight, perhaps buoyed by the frisson from the club, the pot. She passed the joint to James, who was feeling the widening of his sensations but inhaled deeply anyway.
James gave Emma a backstory: A few hours earlier, she had come from her father’s place in an Edwardian in the north end of the city. There, in one of her two childhood homes, she had sat through a long meaty dinner, enduring a simpering lecture from her stepmother, whose face was so chemically altered that she resembled a bank robber with a stocking over her head. On her way out, she’d stolen a handful of Xanax from the master bathroom, chewing them up on the subway platform. So probably she was afloat right now, even higher than he was. James watched her burning electric, like a neon-colored cartoon character outlined in black ink.
James didn’t know how he got separated from Ruth. Later, he pictured her forlorn expression, her stubbed-out half-joint gingerly placed in her wallet for later, her trudge inside the club to the tune of a slow morbid song, the organ and the saw. He was certain that she had reentered the bar, searching the crowd for Ana, nowhere to be found.
But James hadn’t tried to find her. He stayed in the alley, crushed against the body of a woman eighteen years younger, the scent of gutter urine absorbed by his ankles. He pushed her to the wall, and it all came back to him, what to say, the slow constant patter—You’re so beautiful, you’re so, so, so—and his hand, and then his fingers, all this with her coat on but opened and the feel of her soft bra, black, he thought, but even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see much, just shadows. But he had mapped the body in his mind so often that he knew where to go, and found her wet beneath her clothing, moving until she shuddered in his hand. Then she had her hand on his buckle and he thought of his belly hanging over the edge of his jeans, but it wasn’t repulsive enough to stop her sliding down the wall, getting on her knees. He could no longer hear the music then—they were far away—just the white noise in his head, a string between the noise and the feeling of her warm mouth around him, her tongue and a slight nibble that he found both painfully self-conscious and unbearably good, so much so that James put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her mouth off him just in time, the wet mess remaining on his pants, far from her face looking up at him, the chewed lipstick on those thick lips. He looked upon the strangest grin, a smudge of destruction and shame and pride.
James backed away, the two of them returned to their own bodies, their hands doing snaps and buckles and putting themselves away as easily as they had served themselves up just a few minutes before.
James wanted to be heroic, to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to swear it off forever, but he said nothing, only felt the walls around him tilt and whirl ever so slightly. They walked back to the club together, but a half block before it, still in the shadows of the alley, Emma stopped.
“I’ve got to meet some people,” she said. James wondered if he should kiss her. Before he could decide, she reached into her pocket, and James felt a tingle of curiosity: What else did she have to offer? Was it not over? Then she pulled out her phone and ran her fingers over its face. She backed away, typing and waving.
The club was still full. James felt he had been away for days, but it had been less than a half hour from the air to the joint to the girl’s mouth around his cock.
Ana appeared beside him, carrying two plastic cups of beer. What surprised him was the calm he felt and how recognizable it was. He had almost forgotten, in his time with Ana, that he had always been a liar, that he had gone from bed to bed in one night on several occasions and looked women in the eye with ease. Just washing a few key body parts and carrying a toothbrush in his backpack had been enough to get him through university. He was good at this.
What he wouldn’t consider (until morning, oh, morning) was how refined Ana’s sense of him was. What did she know, or fear, about this part of James, that had been lying dormant for all those years?
“Were you smoking a joint with my subordinate?” Ana shouted over the music, smiling, passing him the beer. James relaxed. Her face was dancing with drunkenness. He had not seen her so loose in weeks, or longer. If he was honest with himself, that static between them had been crackling long before Finn arrived. James took the beer and drank it in one sip, washing away Emma’s taste. Then he grabbed his wife by the waist and kissed her. Those hipbones against him; her familiar mouth, welcoming, and a wave of loss smacked him, broke his grip on her. The band was louder than it had been, but sadder, too, filled with urgency.
“Careful,” she said, as he lurched apart from her, brushing the droplets of beer that had splashed on her wrist.
“What about Finn?” Ana asked suddenly.
“What about him?” shouted James.
“We should get home.”
Both of them drained the plastic cups. James made a gesture to throw his on the ground, but Ana intercepted, depositing them both in a recycling bin as they pushed through the crowd.
They were close enough to walk home, through city streets full of people shouting for no particular reason, into phones, at each other, at cabs roaring past.
“I need to go in here,” said James, under the glow of the 24-hour drugstore sign.
“Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m so tired,” said Ana, realizing how true that was, how she felt that her skin had separated from her flesh. Inside, the aisles were painfully bright, but quiet. Ana followed James silently.
“Here,” he said, pulling a small brown stuffed dog from a rack of animals. “What kid doesn’t want a dog?”
“That’s what we came in here for? It’s two in the morning.”
“We’re a block from home,” said James, paying in a great clattering shower of coins.
“Yes, but I’m tired,” said Ana, the drink thickening her voice. Back outside in the cloud of yelling youth, she added: “And where the hell did you go anyway? I was waiting for you. Your little girlfriend looked crushed that you left her.”
James gripped the dog tightly by the neck. “What girlfriend?”
“Ruth. Why, is there another one?” Ana laughed, and the arrogance of James’s question seemed to distract her from her irritation. She put an arm through James’s as they turned on to their block, toward the brothel house, where candlelight flickered in an upstairs window. As they got closer, Ana realized it wasn’t candlelight, but the blue flutter of a television set.
“It’s nice you got him that dog,” she said. “You’re a good doggy. A good daddy, I mean.” And she was laughing like a lunatic again when James unlocked the door of the house. There was Ethel sleeping on the living room couch, a magazine and a green throw blanket covering her body, and the quiet hum of a house in order singing along beneath his wife’s drunken laughter.
* * *
Ana felt the burn move down from her head to her fingers where she clutched the car door handle. She closed her eyes as if to keep every possible orifice sealed, afraid of what might escape.
“I’m sick,” she moaned.
“You’re just hungover,” said James.
“Ana sick?” asked Finn from the backseat. The high pitch of his voice felt like a letter opener inserted into Ana’s ear, cleanly slicing her head in two.
“No, I have a fever,” she said. James placed a hand on her forehead, which was slick, warm.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. Then, to Finn: “It’s when you don’t feel good because you drank too much.”
“Does he need to hear that?” asked Ana.
“Drink juice?” asked Finn.
“Grown-up juice. Ana’s sick today.” He beeped the horn. “Isn’t that what Michael Jackson called it, when he drugged those kids? Grown-up juice?”
Ana swallowed; steel wool taste.
“Jesus Juice!” said James. “Jesus Juice! Can you imagine? Bringing Jesus into that shit?”
They were in the very center of the highway, surrounded on all sides by cars, lane after lane of indistinguishable noise and speed. The scenery beyond the cars repeated: mall, massive concrete industrial building with a parking lot as big as the building, then another mall. There were no mountains, no sign of water. Any trees they passed were as trim and contained as if they had been unwrapped from cellophane yesterday. The highway continued like this, without a rise or a curve, on and on for almost an hour.
James had considered his actions, all through the night, his drunken sleep broken by waves of possibilities. What shape would he lend to this transgression? He composed a partial confession in his head, a general unburdening without detail: “Something happened last night. I stopped it before it went too far.” He couldn’t imagine Ana seeking more information. She was not a woman who needed to know. And how would it make him feel, what would it relieve him of, really, this rubbery admission? And then there was the possibility of silence, which was sitting with him this morning like a gray, furry egg in the pit of his stomach. In exactly the way of love songs, he found himself unable to look at his wife. He could not meet her eye.
Well, the truth, then: “A girl gave me a blow job last night.” What could Ana possibly say? In all the scenarios he played out in his head, she did what she did best—she left.
Right after James moved into Ana’s apartment, when she was amassing a wardrobe of blazers and carrying around a gigantic black leather Filofax, James had run into an old girlfriend in a bar. That night Ana had stayed home to get up early for work, but James was barely working then, teaching just one unpopular class, on Aristotle. The small, dark club had no chairs and a band, two guys, one on bass, one on guitar. It sounded awful, and drinking more didn’t alter that fact. Then Catherine appeared, oh Catherine with the baby bangs and the cigarette tongue, and the T-shirt spilling over with flesh right along the pink scoop neck. As a girlfriend, she had been dumb but untroubled, up for anything in bed. She was a type of girl that James was always meeting, with a clerical job in an art gallery and ideas the size of peas, which she reiterated up against the bar: “I’m doing these paintings about the body, uh, about how men were always painting the body but now, like, I’m a woman painting the body …” He had nodded and imagined peeling off her T-shirt, getting her to bend this way and that. A few more beers and she was running her hand along the inside of his thigh (Did she remember how that killed him, or was it a generic move, available to all? He decided not to be bothered either way.), and then they were upon each other in the bathroom. He was actually fucking in a bathroom stall! The thrill of fulfilling this cinematic objective lasted for about eighteen seconds, and then he began to question the initiator. Only an artist as bad as Catherine would fail to recognize this event for the creative cliché it was. And also, in fact, uncomfortable—she was a little tall for him—and when he glanced down and saw the cigarette butt floating in the yellow water of the toilet, James had to close his eyes to finish.
When he got home, Ana was asleep. James was wearing the paramedic shirt he always wore in those days. He buried it at the bottom of the laundry basket.
After a long, scrubbing shower, he emerged and stood naked above his new girlfriend asleep on the mattress, the first real bed he had bought in his adult life, after years on futons on floors. And she had helped him achieve this milestone. He took in the exposed brick walls of the loft and Ana’s briefcase leaning by the door, her red leather gloves across the top, the empty fingers flopping gently. He could feel in that moment that they had already begun their ascent, that they were unmoored and lifting toward adulthood, and she had chosen him to accompany her, he who would have stayed on the ground, in the filth, forever. She had chosen him, and he had rewarded her with this, the crassest kind of betrayal, one involving toilet paper and an unsigned band.
And so he woke her, and confessed every detail, and wept and wept, naked on the bed. Ana lay frozen, nodding from time to time. He told her he was filled with shame, that he had always been filled with shame, and that he needed her to remind him to be good. Ana lay there, expressionless, asking only one, unanswerable thing: “What do you mean?”
The sun broke through, and Ana rose for her shower. When she came out of the bathroom, she was already fully dressed and made up.
“If it matters to hear me say it, I would never do it again,” said James from under the duvet, as Ana gathered her keys, put on her jacket. She thought of her mother, of the weeping. She had no memory of her father leaving, just her mother flailing in his wake.
She turned to James.
“Okay,” she said.
Because it seemed appropriate, James nodded fiercely.
