by Kate Ledger
“She’ll love it,” Julie said.
“Really?” he replied with genuine hope. He was not ashamed of the reason he’d hired Julie, which came clear to him just then. Julie McKinley, who looked like a child only vaguely older than his own daughter and whose unsophisticated aspirations reminded him of himself. What he needed, what he longed for, were only a few words of sincere encouragement. Some reason to continue hoping. It was impossible to explain that, no matter what he did, he was no longer capable of impressing his wife, or engaging her, or altering her chilliness toward him. He wished he could go back in time. Back to—when? He barely remembered what it was like to live without her disdain. For so many years, he’d been striving, every action aimed to make amends, and nothing he did was ever quite right. Yet he was eager to believe Julie. He looked at the three pregnant-bellied wine barrels with their expertly crafted staves from some unpronounceable town in central France, awed by the care that had gone into their creation.
“Oh,” sighed Julie, her eyes wide, one hand pressed to her chest as she took in that he was doing it all for the love of his wife. She was a romantic, this hungry, hungry girl, that was why he’d hired her. The gesture with her thin, dramatic leaflike hand said yes, there was still time to live a different life than the one he was living. He turned from the handmade casks. His heart rose against his ribs; he could almost feel the blood cresting his aorta. “Oh,” she said again, and he looked at her as she sighed, “Who wouldn’t?”
And then, not knowing what he was intending or why he was doing it, he reached for her wrist, the one not making the approving gesture. It was happiness that propelled him, simple as that. His fingers encircled the narrow radiocarpal joint, bony as a door hinge, and she went still under his touch. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t pull away. Surprising even himself, he leaned over and kissed her.
PART TWO
Emily wasn’t aware of him until she had stumbled against his body. She was preoccupied by the shortcomings of her purse. Emerging from the tawny-stoned Bethesda office building with her head down, she groped inside her bag for a pair of sunglasses and a slender down, she groped inside her bag for a pair of sunglasses and a slender oval ring of keys. Later she would think it was unlike her to walk that way, unpoised and unprepared. She’d been reared on excellent posture, chin lifted, shoulders set, like a person geared up for a fight. It had been her father’s mantra: You can’t take advantage of opportunities if you don’t see them walking toward you.
She had paused, one shoulder propping open the tinted glass doors, feeling for the glasses and thinking that if the traffic went smoothly, she might still make it to the gym when she got home. Outside, the sun was low-slung, and even the parking meters shone with a bourbon glow. The evening security guard, a man named Elmer or Albert, she hadn’t heard it clearly the first time and it was no longer appropriate to ask, hollered a genial “g’night.” He gave an exuberant wave, and she looked back and nodded politely in his direction, and wondered, as she did every evening, at the persistence of his good nature. Some people were rosy to the bone. It was a confounding purse, the size of a Sunday Times, slightly triangulated. The exterior was a buttery blue-black leather, with an overhanging flap. Its edges were banded with horsehair piping. Over her shoulder, the flat, smart strap widened like a man’s tie and then, descending, narrowed again with architectural flair. Two years earlier, it had been a forty-fifth birthday present from Simon, straight from the private collection of the Parisian designer Marac. Some grateful patient had worked with the designer during New York Fashion Week, getting first dibs to bid on the most prized items, and Simon had finagled a deal.
Several times she’d been stopped on the street as women complimented the geometric detail, the imaginative lines. These were women who understood fine accessories. Marac knew what he was doing. For all its good looks, though, it wasn’t functional. An interior wall divided the main space into four unreasonable and almost useless compartments. If she sought her keys, or sunglasses, she had to scrabble like a mole past a vertical pile of personal items, which slid and shifted so that she was perpetually digging blind.
Still peering after her hand, which had been swallowed by the bag, she stepped past the glass door onto the crimson sidewalk and slammed right into the shoulder of a man. Her face smacked against his bicep and underarm, jarring her chin. Her nose pressed into his rayon shirt. A leisure shirt, she thought at once, and not well-ironed. Not the type of shirt worn by the men she took meetings with. Soft material and the kind of khaki that she’d always considered a bland, unassertive color. The strap of her purse slipped off her shoulder, and the bag landed like a body against the cement.
“Whoa there,” the man said, grabbing her upper arm as if to steady her. “Y’okay?”
She shook off the stun of the collision, one hand touching her jaw. She was appalled to have smelled him, an intimate mixture of a piney deodorant and a warm body smell like graham cracker. “Excuse me,” she said without hiding her annoyance, extricating her arm. In his opposite hand, he held a white shopping bag, she noticed as she bent down for her purse. The overhanging flap of Marac’s design mercifully had kept the contents from scattering. She lifted the strap to her shoulder and inspected the underside of the bag. Tiny scrapes, like short claw marks, marred the leather.
“Sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. So the purse was ruined. Not ruined exactly, but would require attention, some kind of maintenance. Simon would insist on having it repaired because he was so proud of having given her a gift that fit her taste and because it had cost so much money in the first place.
The man placed his hand on her upper arm again, just above her elbow.
“Emily?”
The heat that rose up her neck touched both sides of her face. Only one person in her life had ever said her name quite that way, lingering on the “m,” or tripping on it, drawing the “e” out too long with too much air, too much emphasis, too much space in the throat. As if her name were “Hemily.” Every cell in her body seemed to hold its breath, waiting—trembling, even—and in a moment, she thought, she’d see she’d been wrong, but what a funny mistake to have made. After all these years. But even before she lifted her eyes, she knew she was not mistaken.
“William Garth,” she pronounced, sounding more than she meant to like a prim, old schoolteacher.
“Wow. You look—wow.” His head shook, incredulous.
His face was thinner than she remembered, the cheekbones more pronounced. He’d shaved his head to combat a receding hairline, and the stubble across his scalp shone with silver. The slimmed angles of his face made his mouth look larger, but the lips were the same, lush, slightly turned up at the corners. There was the thumb-sized scar, a waxy-looking patch on the left side of his jawbone where a beard would never grow. It was the result of a childhood dog bite—she remembered that story at once. He was a man who had never liked dogs. His eyes, even with the creases at the outer corners, were exactly the same. Nobody, not even her husband, had ever looked at her with such—what was it?—admiration? bemusement?—even when she was on her worst behavior. She would have recognized those eyes anywhere.
“I know, I know.” Grinning, he mussed a hand over his balded scalp. “I woke up one morning with a few gray hairs and a couple of wrinkles. How’d it happen? I’ve no clue.”
She’d wondered about him over the years, though not often. He’d sauntered into her consciousness at the oddest times, like when she took a knife to the fat bottom of a tapered candle, paring it to fit in a socket of the Tiffany candlesticks. Always then, so strange, standing over the trash as the wax bits shot off the base, she’d think of Will and his Swiss Army knife, the magicianlike way he handled tools. It wasn’t often that she and Simon needed candles, but if she trimmed them, there was Will in her thoughts. She wasn’t prepared for this encounter on the street. If she’d been looking where she was going, if she’d seen him walking toward her, she’d have made a
n effort not to run into him. She would have liked to plan what she would say, how she would act. Things had ended so awkwardly, so many years before.
“That bad, huh?” He was smiling.
“I—” she stammered. “I’m in shock.”
“You look the same,” he said earnestly. And there was that look in his eyes again. “Really, the same.”
“That’s a lie,” she countered with a laugh, “but I’ll take it.”
“Really,” he persuaded, “wonderful.”
The signs of aging in his face pleased her. The intentionally shaved head seemed particularly touching. (Simon, with his full jaw and leonine forehead, seemed to defy the tugging and wrangling of time. His face continued to look like sanded wood; his hairline hadn’t even thinned. His mother’s side of the family had never wrinkled, even those relatives who’d lived into their eighties. “Genetic good fortune,” he boasted.) She was surprised to feel her heart pounding. She coughed and tugged at the lapel of her suit jacket, straightening herself and composing a smile for him. “I’m on my way home.”
“It’s late.” He sounded impressed.
“I’m a senior partner of Frith International,” she said, amazed by what had come out of her mouth. She added, because the Will she had known had never heard of anything, “We’re one of the three most influential public relations firms in the country.” She realized she wanted him to know something: She had more confidence, more wherewithal, than when they’d known each other. She’d been so fragile and timid back then, so scared of everything and wistful for the right things to happen. But she’d hit her stride. She’d made a name for herself as one of the best in the business, specializing as a professional troubleshooter. She’d saved countless companies billions of dollars as she managed their missteps and resurrected their reputations.
“So?” she asked, lifting her chin. “Are you still—?” With her index fingers at either side of her face, she mimed a camera, punctuating with clicks of her tongue. She didn’t intend to sound condescending, but when he cleared his throat she suspected she might have. What had taken hold of her? She was not acting like herself.
“As much as I can,” he answered, with a nod. “I got into some other stuff, too. I’m in town for a conference. Otherwise, I’m in Philly. Was. In Philly. I mean, I’m still in Philly.” Then he blurted, “I’m staying at a hotel.”
“Here?” She pictured the Radisson, a small room with gold-tasseled curtains and a television set.
“Well, yes, a hotel here. Near Dupont Circle. But also in Philly. It’s a long story.” She waited, but he didn’t offer it, just a small smile. Did he look sad? His eyes had that tender look again. He was six years older than she was—he’d been almost thirty when they’d met, and could it be? Already past fifty—and what she remembered most vividly was the way he once made her feel like he was the young one and she was the grown-up. “How’s your father?” he asked finally.
She adjusted the bag on her shoulder as her father’s face appeared in her mind. “Passed away. Nine, no, let’s see, ten years ago now.” Will looked like he was waiting for more, so she added, “Heart attack.”
“Sorry to hear it. I liked him.”
Emily laughed out loud. And she surprised herself again, saying bluntly, “He didn’t like you.”
Will looked down, still smiling, and shifted his feet. She was abusing him. Hadn’t seen him in almost a lifetime, and she was rude. She didn’t mean to be! Well, served him right. He shouldn’t have surprised her like this on the street. A little warning and she would have been more collected, and kinder.
“I guess he had his reasons,” Will said.
“Well, all of that’s done now.”
“Yes.”
“Well.”
He cleared his throat again, still smiling. And there was still that look in his eyes. Yes, all of that was done, but at one point she’d been unable to imagine that she’d end up with anyone other than Will, the way he’d adored her, the way she’d loved his attention. Worshipful attention, like a fairy tale. But he’d been so frustrating, too. Unabashedly eager, and silly, really. He was from a small mining town in Pennsylvania. He didn’t know that Firenze was Florence or that Gone With the Wind had been a book first. He pronounced words terribly, ek-cetera and nuk-u-lar. When she’d met him, he’d never heard of sushi. In an otherwise pleasant conversation, there’d be a lull, a missed beat, and his ignorance would be revealed. He’d simply weather the moment with a smile and then his eyes would widen at what he didn’t know, and he’d laugh at himself, and even repeat the story later in front of someone else—“I didn’t know it was a book, did you?” Back then, you always had to feel sorry for him, and a little bit embarrassed, though it occurred to her years later—possibly as she was paring the bottom of a candle—that maybe she should have marveled at his utter inability to be pretentious. At the time, she’d felt piercingly aware of all their differences.
“It’s funny, you know,” Will said, “I didn’t get your father, I mean, really get him, until about two years ago. My daughter, the younger one, just turned nineteen, but two years ago there was this guy hanging around, wanting her, I guess, and all I could think of for seven months or whatever was how he wasn’t good enough for her and how much I wanted to wring his neck.” He laughed as he dramatized, with the hand that wasn’t holding the white shopping bag, a single-handed strangulation.
Will had two daughters? She tried to picture them: fresh-faced young women with those full lips, those wide-eyed laughs. They would have his ease, that twinkling way of walking through the world. Maybe they would have all kinds of earthy politics and practices, like veganism and meditation. She glanced at his hand; no ring. But men didn’t always wear rings. She was struck by the familiarity of his fingers, which were long and slender. Once, at a party, he’d done a coy peeling trick with an orange and his Swiss Army knife, twisting and carving so that when he finally unveiled the fruit, he’d crafted an orange gingerbread-shaped man with the peel. The stem of the orange, extracted from the center of the sections, protruded just where the gingerbread man’s penis ought to be. The huddle of admirers laughed, but she found the trick crass and childish. The attention he got embarrassed her, and she refused the slice of orange that was handed to her. Could he have turned out to be a good father? she wondered. All those facts about the world he didn’t know. Simon had always amazed her with his stores of knowledge. If you ate an apple, he could tell you growing techniques in New Zealand, and which kinds made the best pies, and that minute traces of cyanide existed in the seeds. His confidence in his own opinion thrilled and amazed her. And she wasn’t the only one. People told her constantly: Your husband is a brilliant man. Your husband saved my father’s life. When Simon entered a room, people turned, their eyes following him expectantly.
“You didn’t like the boyfriend?”
“I just acted like—a father,” he explained, shrugging, smiling at himself. “You think you know love, and then you have children and it’s an entirely different thing. There should be other words you can use, an entirely different vocabulary, for the things you feel for your kids. You got any?”
“A daughter,” she said. She had one child. No need to explain about Caleb or to describe what they’d been through. You didn’t dish up such details to a person who was ostensibly a stranger, even though, once upon a time, he was the one person who might have known her better than she’d known herself. And she, who was masterful about how details were meted for public consumption, knew what not to say. She suddenly remembered an expression he’d once used, from his German grandmother, for when you started a conversation and then were obligated to finish it. “You cackled,” he would say, “now lay the egg.” Anyway, he was asking her about the present. So, yes, one child. He shouldn’t have surprised her on the street. It was rude of him. It was an ambush. She wouldn’t mention, either, that the one daughter was supposed to be at camp for the summer, but instead was home, skulking around the house like a sto
rm cloud that had seeped inside. A mass that brewed and billowed and hated her mother. “She’s thirteen,” she added.
“Ah, thirteen,” he said. “That’s a great age.”
“Great age,” she echoed, prattling despite herself. “She was an honor student this past year. Both semesters. She won a prize for a study of butterfly migration.”
“And you’re married?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Happily?” Really, it was just like him, she thought, to ask questions as though some filter in his brain had gone missing. A person was prodded for a testimonial, right up front. “Wait,” he said, before she’d even mustered a response, “I know. That’s not a thing a person answers in the street. That’s a real question. Listen, I know you’re heading home, and you’ve probably had a really long day. Can I persuade you to stop for a moment, just for tea or something? Just to catch up?”
“Catch up on the last twenty-four years in the next twenty minutes?”
“Well,” he acknowledged, and there was that smile again, “whatever’s possible. Promise I won’t keep you. I have to get back to the conference anyway.”
She tried to imagine “tea” with him, an awkward question-and-answer session with grating clanks of china (“tea,” when anyone else would suggest getting together for coffee). What would she say, “I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I became a partner in the company,” because she didn’t owe him any explanation? Or, “It wasn’t what I imagined when I was young, but I found out that it’s the thing I’m good at,” which, at least, was honest. Undoubtedly, he’d be disappointed in the way she’d turned out. Back then, he’d been so disinterested in the real world. All he cared about, it seemed, was some vague notion about art. What he felt. What she felt. What people felt, as if you could know. The words “building equity” used to make him roll his eyes and guffaw. If anybody mentioned “financial security,” his face adopted that dumb smile, and he shrugged. When she’d known him, he’d had no plans. He wanted to photograph, but he didn’t have goals, like going full-time with a magazine or winning awards or having shows in galleries. He was simply interested in doing what he was doing, the hell with a list of ambitions. Back then, she thought him impractical, deluded and immature. What words would he have now for her silver Sebring convertible, with the vanity license plates that Simon had bought for her reading “NTCIP8”? (“Don’t you get it? Anticipate!” Simon had crowed when the plates arrived in the mail and she’d stared at them with her brow furrowed. “Applies to your work, and to the driver behind you on the road!”) She knew she wasn’t defined by a vanity plate, but there it was, with its truncated warning, coming and going.