Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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A stuffed bear and several blankets were gathered, the baby placed inside his jacket, all with great efficiency. Ana offered a Tupperware container of leftovers, which Sarah at first resisted, and then slipped into the bottom of the stroller.
At the foot of Ana and James’s walk, a group of young people appeared out of the darkness, the girls with bare legs and metallic purses. Cell phones bulged from the boys’ hip pockets. Their loud directionless voices crisscrossed one another.
The two couples watched them from the porch.
“It’s nice that there are still students around here,” said Sarah.
“Except they don’t know when to take out the garbage,” said Ana.
“And they play their shit music all night,” said James.
“If it was better music, would you mind?” asked Marcus, laughing.
“It doesn’t even have words,” said James.
“Jazz doesn’t have words,” said Ana.
Marcus lifted the stroller with Finn tucked inside, moving down the path toward the sidewalk. Sarah followed him. The students remained, their talking elevated to yelling. They did not move to make way.
“Right on!” shouted a boy into his phone. It was a signal to go; plans had been made. They passed through Sarah and Marcus and the baby like ghosts walking through walls.
Marcus put his hands up to his shoulders, palms out, and shrugged.
Sarah and Marcus waved as they walked away, pushing the stroller, calling thank-yous behind them as Ana and James stood on the porch, James’s arm protectively around his wife, wondering if anyone else had noticed that Ana had never once held the baby.
September
ANA STARED OUT the window at another tower just like hers. She looked at her watch: Finn would be at daycare, still. But James would be picking him up soon, and they would leave together, hand in hand, she was certain. She let that feeling push itself across her chest.
For a while, there had been a blond woman about Ana’s age in the office across the way. One day they were wearing the same navy polka-dotted blouse—an unusual blouse, expensive—and Ana laughed at the mirror image. The next time it happened, Ana spontaneously waved at the woman, gesturing to their matching shirts. But the woman didn’t respond, kept typing, her head bowed in a willful manner. When Ana returned from the bathroom, the woman had drawn her blinds. Embarrassed, Ana did the same.
Now the office was occupied by a man who sat with his back to the window, his curly hair somehow childlike over the collar of his shirt. That choice, to turn one’s back to the window, seemed obscene to Ana.
“Ana?”
She started, spinning her chair toward the door.
“Having a moment to yourself?” asked Christian. Everything he said came off like he wasn’t so much talking to her as gathering information for a dossier he was preparing about her faults.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“An opinion,” he said. “We need it fast, but I don’t think it’s complicated.”
Ana wanted to say: Now, why would I do that for you? Instead, she said: “I’m quite busy right now.”
“Looks like it,” said Christian with a barking laugh. He behaved like a businessman from a movie, without one sincere gesture in his repertoire.
But, in fact, he had found her with an open space in her schedule, now that the servers trial had begun. She had been wondering what would come next. The impermanence was what she loved about being a research lawyer: the presentation of a problem, its resolution, and then a new problem. Litigation hadn’t worked for her—all that noise and bluster—but up here, on the fifteenth floor, her inwardness was a virtue. She billed high and long; her bonuses arrived twice a year. But that wasn’t why she loved it: She was vicious in her determination to make the law understood. She hacked problems into tiny pieces and spent hours on the computer, trawling databases until she had solved each question, wrapped it in understanding from every direction. Then she presented the finished product, the opinion, to the lawyers, who crowed and hollered. She was a costumier, arming them for battle.
But she preferred not to work with Christian. His officiousness, his white teeth. There were other research lawyers he could use, but he always came to her.
“What is it?”
“Biotech. That old chestnut …” He adopted the booming voice of a news anchor. “Should higher life-forms be patentable?” She knew the law, had mined it several times for several different cases: Humans couldn’t be patented, but seeds could.
“For Emcor?”
“They’re suing that farmer.”
Ana had anticipated this. It had been in the news that Emcor, one of the firm’s multimillion-dollar clients, had been knocking on the doors of farmers when their trademarked seeds, genetically modified to perfection, began to turn into crops on the fields of farmers who hadn’t bought them. The farmers said they didn’t know how it happened, blaming the wind. Intellectual property theft, the Emcor representatives called it. Ana pictured men in suits handing subpoenas over white picket fences to men in overalls.
“Soybeans,” she said.
“Right. Those naughty farmers are infringing.”
She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
“Really, Ana,” he said, leaning in. “I need your wisdom. I’m in over my head, I think.” He said it like it could never be true.
Ruth appeared in the doorway, looking tidier today, her hair pulled back, her skin clear. Ruth the Temp, but could she still be temporary? She had become a fixture, a shadow of slouch in the halls.
“Sorryinterrupt …”
“Leave the file,” Ana said, and Christian gushed his thanks, blew her a kiss on his way out.
“What can I do for you, Ruth?” asked Ana.
Ruth sat down, pulling her skirt over her knees.
“I just wanted to see if, you know, you’d had a chance to talk to your husband.” Ana cocked her head, blank. “Do you remember? When you said that about me maybe talking to him?”
Ana winced. The invitation. For a year, the girl had been silently waiting for Ana to set her up with James, to discuss her career path.
“I’m so sorry,” Ana said. “James isn’t even working in TV these days.”
Ruth’s mouth closed, and her face, which seemed as if it could fall no further, did so, reddening.
“We’ve had an intense few days,” said Ana. Then she tried it on, saying it out loud for the first time, slowly: “A friend of ours died, and we’re looking after his little boy.” Where was Sarah in this version? She couldn’t bring herself to say it; the mawkishness was overkill, the story unconvincing.
“What do you mean?”
It was not a response Ana had expected.
“Just what I said. So I’m unusually tired.”
Ruth nodded. “My sister has two kids.” Ana saw a flash of silver in mouth: a stud through her tongue. “Someone’s always puking or throwing a shitfit or something.…”
Ana tried to picture Ruth at a job interview. No one in here possessed a sense of humor, so what was it that got her hired?
“Mmm,” said Ana. Ruth rose, mumbling, and something in that incomprehensible sound prompted Ana to say: “I’ll talk to him, though. Maybe next month you can come by. When we’re more settled.”
Ruth nodded, walked out, leaving Ana to her window. Then suddenly she reappeared: “I could, like, babysit for you or something if you needed it. You know, if you need any help or anything.”
Ana smiled, surprised.
“Thanks, Ruth,” she said. “That’s very sweet.”
Ana watched Ruth shuffle out into the hum of the office and wait for two people to pass. When there was enough space between them and her, she trailed behind like a footman, head bowed.
Ana remembered that she and Ruth had almost entered each other’s lives once. Though it had occurred nearly a year ago, she could recall it vividly because it was one of those times when she and James had been clawing toward parenthood.
She had walked a long time that day, looking for a place to eat, past the smoky glass of Ki, glancing at its leather banquettes and ceiling of long, narrow lamps dangling like shining knives. She had recognized a group of associates, with Christian at the center. Usually they waited until after work. But she sensed in these younger ones a retro dream, a wish to return to the three-martini lunches and sharp suits of the old days. The corporate credit card that Ana kept tucked behind her driver’s license, unused, was at the front of their wallets, ready for the draw.
She had gone farther than usual, away from Bay Street, rejecting the subterranean food courts, past the high-end sushi restaurant where the counter was surrounded by a river, and the sashimi rode past in a little boat, and you could reach out your hand and pluck whatever you wanted.
Off King Street, on a quieter one-way street crowded with delivery vans and bicycle couriers, a man approached. Noting his tank top, Ana thought: Is it that warm out today? But then she saw that he was muttering to himself, his face covered in deep, bloody acne, his fingernails running up and down his arm like he was doing scales. She tried to decide which way to go, and bobbed and weaved. He mirrored her and then stopped abruptly, face-to-face, smelling like urine. He shot her a fuck-you look.
Ana pulled her coat tight around her and walked away quickly. She felt the man’s eyes on her back, watching her like she was a celebrity. She turned into the next restaurant she saw, a sushi place with a ring of half-dead Christmas lights around the window. As soon as she set foot inside, she knew it was a bad idea. The room was almost empty; only a couple of teenagers, possibly cutting school (undiscriminating diners; cheap), sat together in the window. A smell overwhelmed her, something chemical, treacherous. A waitress swarmed her with unidentifiable Asian chatter, ushered her to a table with a hand on Ana’s back. Ana found herself seated in a booth, looking at a greasy menu, a dollop of something red crusted to the center of the photograph of a Hockey Sushi Box.
Ana tried to relax. She liked her lunch hour, waited for its arrival, mourned its conclusion. Most people in her office didn’t take lunch. They ate out of Styrofoam boxes at their desks. But Ana went out a few days a week, speaking to no one, reveling in her anonymity. Often she would stop at the kitchen store or the storage store and peruse the towers of large plastic containers. She sometimes bought something small, the Portofino Office Storage Box in olive, with the faux-leather grained top. She had a stack of these boxes in different sizes and colors—chocolate, cranberry, pastel floral—in a wedding cake shape on a shelf next to her desk at work. Sometimes, while on the phone with other lawyers, she surprised herself by noticing that as she talked, she was stroking the boxes, so beautiful she couldn’t bear to put anything inside them.
In the restaurant, she had pulled out an old issue of The New Yorker that Sarah had dug out for her. She was halfway through a story on Raymond Carver and his editor that Sarah had insisted she read, saying, “Oh, Ana, you would love this.” But as she read about Carver, too drunk to notice his editor thieving his words, she couldn’t fathom why Sarah had recommended it. She often seemed to hold an image of Ana that was entirely foreign to Ana’s own conception of herself. Sarah had told Ana when they first met that she thought Ana looked like a figure skater. Even James had no idea what this meant.
But Ana couldn’t concentrate on the story. She had been pulled back to the meeting of the previous evening, and the blond, quivering woman in the Chinese slippers who had told them she would “set things in motion.” Uncharacteristically, James had arranged the meeting, calling people who knew people for recommendations and booking the appointment. Ana rushed to be on time after a long meeting and met him outside the agency doors. She was still red-faced from her sprint when she learned that, yes, they were good candidates for international adoption. The white woman in the Chinese slippers told them this while sitting beneath a giant oil painting of the Great Wall of China. Now they had to find a social worker who would come by the house and interview them. Several meetings for several thousand dollars. And then, if they passed, it was back to the agency, and a series of courses on cultural sensitivity, and several thousand more dollars. And then their names at the bottom of a long scroll that could take years to wash up on the shores of China.
Ana drank tea and ate her flavorless sushi, prying apart the upcoming invasion. “It’s bullshit,” James had said. “But we have to do it.” He was determined, and with James, that was significant. Still, it was Ana who had spent the years before being opened and scraped. Now she would have to do it again, but in her own house.
Ana had paid her bill and stepped outside.
As soon as she reentered the human stream on King Street, Ana recognized Ruth. She was smoking, walking slowly, her cardigan buttoned properly. If Ana walked as slowly as this girl, it would look like she was stalking her. She wanted to cross the street, to ignore her, to make her vanish, but it seemed impossible not to be found out. She walked at her normal pace and was quickly next to her. She said: “Hello, Ruth.”
“Oh!” said Ruth, putting her cigarette behind her back, as if her mother had snuck up behind her at school.
“Did you have lunch out?”
Ruth shook her head. “I can’t really afford it. I just went for a smoke.”
Ana recognized the phrasing as something rural and coarse. She sounded like Ana’s distant cousins, who said things like: “I’m going to the can.”
“It is a nice day,” said Ana. “How are you doing anyway? How do you find it in the office?” Ana had a flash of altruism, pictured herself as the kind of lawyer who might take the girl in, mentor her. She had been to a few of these events in the past, wearing a pink ribbon for charity and walking a few miles with other women lawyers. Everyone’s legs looked pale in their shorts, and they all seemed embarrassed. Ana had not been able to stop herself from beginning to jog, slowly at first, and then running. The walking women were far behind when Ana finished the course before anyone else and left quickly.
Another time, at a luncheon called “Women Lawyers: A Dialogue About Transformative Leadership,” she had sat at a table with a group of married associates, mother lawyers she had rarely seen on the fifteenth floor. They exchanged numbers about outsourcing: who delivers dry cleaning, emergency nanny agencies, car services that drive children to music lessons. At one point, one of them looked up from typing into her phone and said: “Okay, who do I hire to screw my husband?” Everybody laughed.
One statistic lodged in Ana’s head from that afternoon: For every ten male lawyers at her firm, there was one-half a woman. Ana pictured that half-woman lawyer, sliming along the hallway on her stumpy torso.
On the street, Ana had asked again: “How’s work?”
The girl looked straight ahead, put her cigarette between her lips a little defiantly. “I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s not really what I want to do. I guess I’m not supposed to admit that to the boss.”
“I’m not the boss,” said Ana, so quickly that they both knew it to be false. “So what do you want to do, then?”
“I want to make movies. Maybe documentaries. About bands, maybe.” Before she even finished the statement, her defiance drained away, as if this were the most unrealistic dream a person could hold. Her voice turned into a mumble. “I don’t know.”
It struck Ana as unlikely that this limp girl had some affinity for rhythm in her, that she liked back rooms, electric guitars. Maybe she was one of those girls who gets used. Maybe she stood at the front of the crowd and stared upward, inserted herself backstage, became a joke between a drummer and a bassist the next morning.
“My husband makes documentaries,” said Ana. “For TV.”
“Really?” Ruth looked at Ana sideways. Ana felt something: They didn’t like each other. Ana tried to pull the girl back from the brink of this mutual realization, to distract her with kindness.
“He works in public television. You should come over some night to meet him. Maybe he could help you out.” Why had she said this? The thought of Ruth, in Ana’s house in her mis-buttoned sweater, mumbling at James’s feet. This was the type of girl who would love James, and James would be kind to her, would perform for her, tap dancing through his latest thought. It would be both excruciating and sweet, a combination that exhausted Ana.
She could not imagine this evening happening and knew they had entered a conversation that had no conclusion. Ruth would be checking in with her again and again, for months to come.
Inside the building, outside the door to her office, Ana did it first: “I’ll throw some dates at James and get back to you.”
Ruth looked up at her, and something surprising happened: Her face thawed. The blandness, the boredom, slid away. She was smiling, a huge, unyielding smile that revealed a heap of crooked teeth. The teeth made Ana remember the child’s game with the hands piling up, each person pulling the one from the bottom, slapping it down on the other.
The door to Sarah and Marcus’s house opened quickly, lightly, which surprised Ana. She had expected the creaking of Al Capone’s vaults to match her sense of invasion. She drew the scattering of mail and flyers to her body.
Straightening, a grim old-lady smell washed over her, spiked by something sour, foul. Ana put down her briefcase and an empty suitcase on wheels. She made two tidy stacks of mail—urgent and not—and took off her heels. She moved quickly, glancing at the clutter of toys in the living room, the clothes and shoes strewn. That giant bag of cat food was still there, resting against the wall, though the cat was living next door now. Ana barely remembered the cat: black, maybe, and fat. Looking at the cat food, she regretted that she had never bothered to learn its name. She would take the bag to the neighbor later.
The kitchen was Pompeii: plates of half-eaten food, a booster chair covered in Cheerios and chunks of browned banana. She tracked down the smell to old milk gone solid in a blue plastic cup covered in cartoon bees, sitting on a counter.
Ana was filled by a rush of conquering energy. She marched into Sarah and Marcus’s room, pulling open drawers until she found jeans, a T-shirt, both too big, but clean and folded tidily, which surprised her. Ana placed her skirt and blouse on hangers that she put over the doorknob, careful not to let her clothes touch the ground, which was covered in a thin layer of dust. Gray balls of fluff made space for her as Ana moved around the room in Sarah’s clothes.
She rolled on a pair of Marcus’s sweat socks. In this uniform, she set to it, opening windows, gathering dirty laundry, and tossing toys into wicker baskets.
And she worked, yellow gloves filling garbage bags, scrubbing soldered food from plates, keeping the kitchen sink filled to the rim with soapy bubbles. Draining the fat swirls and food chunks and refilling, over and over.
After a couple of hours, Ana noticed the silence, the noise of her breathing. She hit Play on the stereo (and dusted it, too). A familiar CD, a lament; spare guitar, the kind of music James used to play for Ana, tears in his eyes: “Hear this part? It really starts here.…”
The music carried up to Finn’s little room, which was like wandering into Sarah’s force field, like hearing her calling: This is how much I love him. The white curtains were covered with tiny embroidered trains. Red bunnies repeated on his bedspread, and the throw rug was a scurry of cuddly bugs. All these crowds of miniatures, thought Ana, stripping the bed, throwing scattered toys into a toy box. She should take some toys home, too.
She looked through a stack of books: Tell the Time with Pooh, Olivia Saves the Circus, Scaredy Squirrel. Which ones were right for Finn? Which were his favorites? All the information was locked away, irretrievable. Most of Finn’s preferences resided elsewhere, with his parents, in the shadow world.
She pulled open Finn’s dresser drawers. The underwear was folded into little boxes; Ana felt strange packing the suitcase, wondering how it would look if she somehow got caught—pulled over by a police officer for speeding and revealed as a grown woman with a suitcase of boys’ underwear. She buried the pairs (Curious George; dinosaurs) under sweaters and socks. Then suddenly, she thought: Does Finn wear underwear? If so, why were they using diapers? She would have to ask James.
Ana looked around for a stuffed animal, anything she might remember Finn loving, but there were only block puzzles and flashlights, nothing huggable. As she turned out the light, Ana thought: I’ll buy him a teddy bear, something that James will approve of.
She continued.
In the basement, Ana moved the laundry to the dryer, stepping over the detritus that ends up in basements, the remnants of Finn’s babyhood: pieces of a crib, a high chair. Skates. Did Marcus play hockey? He’d never mentioned it.
When Ana emerged from the basement, darkness had pulled up to the windows. She went to the empty fridge that she had already wiped clean and pulled out its one occupant, a half-drunk bottle of vodka. She poured a glass and drank it whole, a snake with a mouse, then turned up the music to hear it above the vacuum.
She remembered sitting in this living room with Sarah and Finn on several weekend afternoons in the wake of James’s firing.
When it happened, she realized that she had been waiting for it. She was prepared always for the great bad thing, and when she reached the porch that evening, James’s box of books on the porch confirmed exactly what had happened. Her heartbeat doubled. She assumed a neutral face.
She had opened the door and hung up her coat, and James’s, which lay in a heap in the foyer. James was in the kitchen, but he wasn’t cooking. He was drinking a beer, leaning on the island like he’d been looking for a place to rest. Ana laid the groceries on the counter.
“I got fired,” he said. Then: “You might want to sit down.”
“There’s more?”
“What?”
“Why do you want me to sit down?”
James stared at her.
“Because I got fired. I thought you might want to brace yourself.”
“Oh. But you told me first and then you told me to sit down.”
James had drunk the beer from the bottle. Ana saw that she was making him furious, and she began to move around the kitchen quickly, trying to piece together a strategy. But there was still this twister touching down in her stomach. As if looking in from the window, she saw the two of them with all their sensible choices, and all of it vanishing like an invisible man in a movie, top to bottom, just fading out. A rush of noise erupted in her skull. She concentrated, braced herself to do the right thing.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and went to James, putting her arms around his body. He smelled her neck. He moved a hand down around her waist, grabbing for her ass, rubbing his groin against her. She broke away.
“You need to eat,” she said, rooting in the fridge. Then she returned, ruffled his hair, and retreated again to look through cupboards.
Over her shoulder, she asked: “What happened? Was it Sly?”
James told her the details, sitting on a barstool while she lined up vegetables, began chopping onions and leeks into her glass bowls. She said: “What an asshole,” and “Did you talk to HR about severance?” and “We can file for wrongful dismissal”—all the things James wanted her to say, each comment another application of balm until the wound was fairly covered, and James a little drunk.
“We should put the adoption thing on hold,” said Ana, tossing the salad. She thought James would fight her, but he didn’t say anything, his head down.
The two of them sat in front of their pasta at last, neither of them eating. Ana wondered if her husband was also feeling that they had lost their grasp. Something had been severed and set adrift; Ana was left feeling arid. But she suspected James’s sensation of loss, radiating off his curved back as he picked at his food, was something entirely different, bound to a manhood she could scarcely bring herself to imagine.
In Sarah’s living room, weeks later, Ana had told her friend: “James has a beard.”
“Is it sexy?” asked Sarah. Ana had never considered this possibility, as the beard was so clearly linked to his firing, to the strange new arrangement in their house. It was the opposite of sexy. It was impotent.
“No. He looks like a fisherman.”
“Fishermen can be sexy.”
Ana shook her head from side to side and raised her eyebrows, as if considering this possibility.
Finn was sitting with his legs out in front of him, staring up at the TV, where a cartoon someone named Peep and a cartoon someone named Chirp were running through a stream. Finn had a large red ball in his lap, ignored.
Sarah sipped her coffee. She was barefoot, like Finn, both of them optimistic of the spring. Ana wore tall, slim boots over her jeans. In Sarah’s house, she never felt the need to take off her shoes.
“Did Marcus ever have a beard?” asked Ana.
“Oh, God, yeah. He went through a whole proletarian thing in his mid-twenties. He was breaking from his parents for good. Bought a van and went west, worked in a national park.”
“You’re kidding.” Ana couldn’t see this, picturing Marcus in his plain black sweaters and wire-framed glasses that made her think of German architects. “Where were you during that time?”
Sarah stretched one arm over her head, groaned a little. “Probably backpacking, or screwing around or something. We weren’t so serious then,” she said. “Really, it was only a summer, when I think about it. I guess he hasn’t had too many beards, actually.”
The credits of the television show moved across the screen.
“Mommy, more TV. TV on,” said Finn, not taking his eyes from the screen.
“Sure, tomorrow,” said Sarah. “Can you press the Off button now?”
Finn stood up and pressed the button.
“Good job, Finny! Good job!” said Sarah, clapping. His jeans had little loops on the side, like he might be doing carpentry later. They were about an inch too short.
“I can’t seem to get the sizes right,” said Sarah as Ana glanced at the pants. She opened her arms for her son to run into. “Everything he owns is either way too big or way too small.” The boy took a kiss on the head, then disentangled himself and ran toward a pile of blocks in the center of the room, beginning to stack only the blue ones. Ana wondered if Finn learned these things at daycare—stacking and sorting. She couldn’t imagine him at daycare three mornings a week, away from Sarah, though apparently he went. She had never seen them apart.
“Did you notice how I didn’t say n-o to him when he asked about the TV?” said Sarah in a low voice. Ana nodded. “I’ve been reading up. You say: Yes, later, or yes, tomorrow, instead of n-o-t now. It’s a tactic. It confuses them, offsets the meltdown.”
Ana felt a little sorry for Finn, unwitting citizen of a country of deferred pleasure. The block tower teetered.
“I think James might be depressed,” said Ana. “He reminds me of my mother these days.”
“What, is he drinking?”
“No, it’s something else. He’s just not”—Ana struggled—“alive to the world like he used to be. Does that make sense? James has never had any bad luck.”
“Do you think it’s only bad luck?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but James has a kind of … certainty that might be hard to work with,” said Sarah carefully. “You know what I mean. I mean, we love James because we know him, but I wonder, in a workplace, if that could be …”
Ana felt a touch defensive on James’s behalf, but she knew that Sarah was right, and the certainty she referred to was, in fact, arrogance. James had left the university when he became a hot young pundit, in high demand after a seminar he designed on the decline of masculinity made him an expert on men. He had a national newspaper column and a radio show by thirty, and then ten years on TV, hosting this and that, called upon to air his views on any subject. James always had an opinion: the return of debauchery, the need for a new waterfront, why hockey matters. Somewhere in there was the book about cultural identity. Oh, James had been so proud at that book launch, but there had only been two trays of cheese. The lack of cheese was the first sign that, as an author, James had arrived late to the party. Store shelves were already heaving with books on cultural identity. No one bought James’s. He went back to television, a little stiffer, a little meaner.
“I worry about him,” said Ana, but the reason went unsaid because, suddenly, Finn burst into tears. Sarah was on him instantly. Ana watched: Sarah identified the problem—the collapsed tower—and talked to him quietly through his screams, asking him questions: “What can you do to make this better? You don’t like it when things you build break, do you?”
