I see your trick, he says.
I’m sorry? I say.
I’ve just showered from my run and I’m wearing a loose summer dress and a cardigan and flip-flops. I have a small tote bag filled with books.
What trick, I say.
You came here yesterday, he says. These bathrooms are for customers. You’re not.
I’m sorry, I say, embarrassed, but also angry; also, the way he looks at and talks to me, I want to run back home and go to bed.
You can use it, he says. But don’t come back.
I use his bathroom and wash my hands with the delicious-smelling soap and on the way out I don’t look at him. I take the train back to Brooklyn and wait in a poorly air-conditioned coffee shop until the next yoga class. I get there early and lie a long time quietly on the mat.
* * *
I meet a friend who is a member at the Whitney to see a preview of a show that I can’t see alone because they don’t take my university IDs. I’ve read about this artist, and though I’ve never seen his work in person, I’ve thought about him, about what I read about his life and work, his death, for years. The first exhibit, once my friend has shown the man at the entrance proof that he’s a member, is pictures, photographs in black and white of people in different parts of New York City, wearing a mask of Rimbaud’s face over their own. The artist wanted to be a writer, says one of the captions. He had in common with Rimbaud his queerness, an impulse toward activism, a belief in the power and the strangeness of words when they are twisted and reconfigured to new ends.
I think of all the ways that books have failed me, all the ways they’re less than what I thought, but it’s still the language that I like the best in the show. I find the colors of the paintings almost painfully off-putting; the attempts at beauty, large flowers on blue-and-green canvas, I find grotesque. But the language that he uses, its anger and its sharpness. There’s an empty room with a large window that’s been covered with a screen to keep most of the light out and one can sit inside the room and listen to this artist speak the angry words he’s written on some of the work. He died of AIDS at thirty-seven. He lost so many of his friends. There’s a fury to not just the words but the way he says them, unapologetic. I imagine, as I listen, there was spittle on his face when he was done.
* * *
That night, in bed, after we have FaceTimed with the children, after they’ve told us about swimming and about searching through the woods for moose; after we have gone to the cheap restaurant close to our house and had a bourbon each; after we came home and he sat down on the chair beneath our bed in our room to watch soccer and I saw him, and walked toward him, climbed on top of him, wearing a short cotton summer dress, and we had sex; after my husband’s gone to sleep; after I sit up and scroll through Sasha’s still unpopulated Instagram; my phone rings and it’s Kayla’s name across the screen.
Hello? I say.
Hi, she says, her voice flat. You busy?
It’s 1:00 in the morning.
Not really? I say.
My husband sits up, mouthing to ask if it’s the children. I shake my head and climb slowly out of bed.
You okay? I say.
Can you come here? she says. There’s been a thing.
What kind of thing, Kayla? I say.
She lives in the Bronx, which is an hour at least from our house on the subway. We don’t have a car. I can’t fathom what a cab would cost.
I’m at the police station, she says. I need someone. She starts to cry and I reach into my closet to find jeans and a bra and T-shirt.
Tell me the address.
I tell my husband where I’m going but he’s bleary, still half-sleeping. I kiss him, make sure his phone is attached to the charger, that I have an extra charger in my bag.
Keep me posted, he says, as I walk out the door.
The trains are running better than expected and I’m at the station before I told her I would be there. It’s quiet, only one cop at the desk when I come in, and she motions me back.
Can I help you? asks a guy at another desk once I’ve entered.
I tell him Kayla’s name.
He looks at me, wary. You’re not her mother, he says.
I’m … I’m her teacher, I say.
She needs a legal guardian to come get her.
What happened? I say. Is she okay?
She needs a guardian, he says. You have some sort of proof that you have a legal right to her?
I don’t, I say. I don’t have any rights to her.
She comes out then and I go to her and hug her. Her lip is swollen. There’s a bite mark on her chest.
Honey, I say.
She’s not crying, hardly breathing.
Honey, I say again. Are you okay?
She was in an altercation with a man we now have in custody.
You didn’t take her to a doctor?
She refused medical assistance, the man says.
Kayla, I say.
I’m fine, she finally says down to her feet.
Can I take her? I say. Why would you keep her?
If she wants to charge him with assault she has to stay.
Do you? I say. Honey? What do you want to do?
Kayla nods. To stay.
She needs a guardian, the man says. You’re not a guardian.
I look at Kayla.
Where’s your mom? I say.
She hands me her phone and I see she has eleven missed calls from her mother, texts from her also.
You didn’t call her? I say.
Kayla shakes her head.
I take the phone into the front room of the precinct and I call her.
Kay? her mom says. Baby? You okay?
Miz Kane? I say.
I tell her who I am.
Why do you have her phone? she says. Where’s my baby?
Miz Kane, I say, I’m at the police precinct. I give her the address. Kayla got into a fight with someone, I say. I think. Can you come down?
Why— then stops. She says: I’m on my way.
She’s there within minutes, ten or twenty, head-wrapped, frantic, in jeans and T-shirt.
She runs past the front desk, straight to Kayla. She doesn’t look at anyone but her.
My baby, she says. She holds her a long time, her arms around her, then straight, and she looks at her, hands on her cheeks and her face close.
She talks to the cops and they tell her what has happened. She looks at Kayla, sharper this time. Jesus Christ, she says. Are you okay?
They hand her paperwork to sign and she signs it and she whispers to her daughter. Kayla nods, not looking at her or anywhere but down, and quiet. The cop leads Kayla, by herself, to another room.
Don’t say anything until I’m there, her mother calls to her. You’re okay, she says. I’ll be right there.
She goes to her one more time and holds her face and whispers to her. She pulls her to her then she walks toward me.
I reach out my hand and say my name.
Kayla’s mom looks at my hand and holds, then drops it. She tells me her name. Come here, she says.
I look past her, trying to get a glimpse of Kayla.
She’ll be okay, says her mother.
She leads me further from the other cop, in front of a desk that’s empty.
You have kids? she says.
I nod.
That’s good, she says.
I nod again.
You want someone else trying to raise your kids?
I shake my head.
That’s good too, she says.
I nod at her, not wanting to have to hear her ask me to no longer talk to Kayla. I want to still be able to talk to Kayla, but I know I won’t if her mother says I can’t.
Take care of yourself, she says.
I will, I tell her. I try to.
Take care of your kids, she says. The “your” is slightly firmer, louder, than the other words.
I nod one more time.
She looks at me long and walks back to wh
ere her daughter is.
* * *
At yoga, there’s a teacher I’ve never had before. She’s more solid than the other women, short and stocky. She wears a thin red T-shirt with white writing that pulls at her breasts and bunches overtop her ass. She has curly, light-red hair held back and wide, round legs.
This is a multilevel Vinyasa flow, she says, which means some of your neighbors might be making modifications, so please keep your eyes off your neighbors and just follow what I say.
She keeps saying this throughout the class, a little scolding. I always get behind and have to watch the women in front of me or behind me and I get nervous, hoping that she doesn’t see me as I look.
Please take your eyes off of your neighbors, she says again, as we sit in a squat, and I think I’ll never take a class with her again.
Except there is a rhythm to the class and I get inside it. We move more quickly than I’m used to and I think I’ll fall or the woman behind me, whom I’ve seen before and who can do the headstand, will fall over laughing at the fact that I can’t even touch my toes.
I sweat more than I usually do at yoga, and my back straightens and it lengthens and my stomach pulls back further to my spine and I look straight ahead.
* * *
Every day or two I get a text from Sasha, pictures of the baby. I touch my phone’s screen and smile at her. I don’t know how to tell her what I think, how much I hope for her and her baby, how much I wish I could be there with both of them. I send back pictures of our girls instead.
We’re friends now, I think. It’s different. I think maybe this time, as we try to love each other, maybe it will be more careful and less dire.
* * *
I get an email from Melissa. Just wanted to check in to say I’ve been cleared, she writes, of whatever this whole thing was about. I wanted to thank you, she says. She suggests we meet for dinner and I agree too quickly.
I’d love to, I say. Tell me when and where.
How are you? says Melissa. I see her outside. She’s very thin, no longer pretty, but the structure of her face serves as a sort of palimpsest for all the ways it must have been pretty, must have been a force.
We hug although I’ve never hugged her. I brush my arm accidentally along her abdomen.
I don’t think the food is very good here, she says. She picked the restaurant. It’s close to my apartment, she says. And the drinks are strong.
I smile, not sure if I’m meant to laugh.
The host leads us to a table in a dark corner of the room. She gets a gin martini and I am grateful and I get the same and she smiles at me, showing teeth.
You’ve been good? she says.
She never asks about my children and I’ve always liked this about her. She has no children. I have heard, though she’s not said this to me, that she dislikes them.
I’m so glad, I say, that all of this is settled.
Our drinks come and she sips hers.
She says my name. You have no idea, she says.
I don’t know if you want to talk about it.
It’s fine, she says. It’s over now.
What happened? I say. What did any of this have to do with you?
David is a friend of mine, she says.
David is the man about whom the students had been talking, the man of whom I reported uncertain allegations but who now has apparently been cleared.
There are certain people, she says, who have been out to get him. Not least because he is allied with me.
She’s a fiction writer. I’ve read only one of her books, and in it a woman sleeps with her sixty-five-year-old professor/mentor. She’s a gorgeous writer. The book spends a good amount of time unpacking all the various ways and places they have sex. There are paragraphs describing New York, at night and early in the morning, the park, along the water, that I can still picture sometimes in my head.
There’s something happening right now, she says, a certain type of victimhood, she says.
Our food comes.
I sip my drink and she sips hers.
It’s been weaponized, she says. Anyway, she says, noticing that there’s food before her.
What happened, though? I say. What’s happening with David?
He was dating a student, she says.
But he’s married, I want to say, and then feel strange and dumb but also angry. He’s married. He has little kids.
There are all these new provincial rules because the institution is afraid, she says.
She eats her sandwich in small bites and chews it slowly.
I have a cheeseburger that I’ve yet to touch.
One of these hypersensitive girls thought it was not appropriate, she says.
She, this girl, she says, not his girlfriend—she asked to be removed from his class. I told her I saw no reason for this, she says.
She sips her drink and I press my hands against the hard wood of the table.
So she told on me, she says.
I pick up my burger and I bite.
It’s still not clear to me, though, she says, why they looped you in.
I chew and neither of us speaks for too long for it not to be on purpose.
Yeah, I say. Who knows?
* * *
When I get home, my husband is in bed. Left out on the counter, meant for me to see it, is a letter telling us the owners of the building are converting it to condos. They’ve given us the option to purchase our apartment or to leave within the month.
* * *
I call the rich woman the next morning.
Could we get coffee? I say to her.
I have news, she says.
We’ve waited too long and she’s pregnant. They did one round of IVF with other donor sperm she doesn’t explain and it worked.
I hold briefly onto my stomach.
It’s still early, she says.
Of course, I say. Good luck.
Were you— she starts.
Just seeing how you were.
* * *
My husband’s parents keep a small farm in Maine and have very little money, but they have gotten us a rental car. We’re meant to drive up to Maine to get our girls and spend the next week with them and my husband’s parents. We stop in Boston to see my friend Leah, who has brand-new twins and a new house; they live up high on a hill, across the street from a small natural preserve with lots of large, dark trees in the back. They have a dog they’ve had since the year that they got married and she’s huge now, an English bulldog, and she has bad hips and is sometimes incontinent and has to be lifted in and out of the house every hour so she doesn’t pee or shit on the floor too much.
We have nothing in common, Leah and I. We met our third year of college, before we were formed enough to know who we might one day be. We like each other. We’ve liked each other for long enough that it feels worth it to keep being friends.
* * *
I hug her and I grab a baby from her arms when we get there. I dip my face into the top of his head and breathe him in; he squirms and is warm on my chest and I breathe out long after a week without our children. Most of the time when she’s not up and moving through the house and doing something—cleaning, cooking—Leah has a baby latched on one of her breasts.
The first day and a half is all catching up and small talk. Leah’s husband is extraordinarily calm and kind and my husband helps him install IKEA shelves that they bought months ago for the babies’ room. They ask us about the girls and about New York, and when I say I quit the high school job Leah and her husband get quiet and look at each other.
What’s the plan, then? Leah says, trying to stay neutral.
I’m not sure, I say. I have four jobs for the fall, I say.
I’ve got some things lined up, my husband says.
I want to tell her we will at least be able to care for our kids but I don’t know that.
We might be without a place to live in two weeks, I don’t say.
Leah puts the twins to bed and we open a thir
d bottle of wine and sit outside looking at the trees until we all begin to fall asleep and Leah says, We should go inside, and we go into our separate rooms.
* * *
My husband falls asleep as soon as we get under the covers. I read for a while. I scroll through my own Instagram account, all the pictures and the videos of our daughters, years of them: babies, bigger, laughing, crawling, the last summer we were up in Maine. I go briefly to Sasha’s, where there is nothing new except a single picture of the baby, red-faced, big-eyed, hairless. I like it, then plug in my phone and try to fall asleep.
* * *
I’m not sure if I’ve slept at all, but I hear one of the babies crying and I come out of the guest room. I feel my left breast begin to leak. Leah is there already. They’ve set up a small bed in the room where the babies sleep and she still stays there every night. I stand in the doorway as she goes to the crying baby. The other wakes as well and I ask if Leah wants me to get her. She nods and I scoop her up, pressing her against my chest and rocking back and forth and shushing.
Leah sits in the large stuffed rocking chair her husband’s parents bought them when she was in her third trimester and they were finally not afraid to receive gifts. She unbuttons her nightshirt and places the baby to her breast. The girl I hold has settled, and I offer her my finger to gnaw until she falls back asleep in my arms.
How’s it going? I say.
Leah laughs and shakes her head, still staring at the nursing baby. They’re tiny; I’m sitting now and the girl feels weightless, still smaller than our girls were when they were born.
Dude, she says.
I laugh and watch her watch him: his bright-red feet, his hand held tight around her thumb.
You okay? I say.
Sort of.
The baby I hold squirms again and chirps and her cheek is hot against my chest. I offer her my knuckle, which she gnaws on, and she settles down again.
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