“Brings you by, Rachel?”
She never knew how much Brian had told anyone about her condition. He’d said he didn’t mention it, but she figured he had to tell someone, if only after a few drinks. They had to wonder at some point why Rachel hadn’t been able to join them at this party or that, why she’d skipped out on the Fourth of July fireworks with everyone last year at the Esplanade, why they rarely saw her out at the bars. Someone as bright as Caleb would have realized at some point that the only time he saw Rachel was in controlled environments (usually the condo) with small groups. But did Caleb know she hadn’t driven a car in two years? Hadn’t taken the subway in almost as long prior to this past Saturday? Did he know she once froze in the food court of the Prudential Center Mall, that she’d had to sit, surrounded by well-meaning security personnel, short of breath and certain she’d pass out, until Brian arrived to take her home?
“I was shopping in the ’hood.” She gestured toward the square.
He looked at her empty hands.
“Couldn’t find a thing,” she said. “Turned into a browse day.” She squinted through the mist at the building behind him. “Thought I’d take a look at the competition for my husband’s attentions.”
He smiled. “Want to come up?”
“I’ll just pop into his office to . . .”
“He left something in his drawer that he . . .”
“So this is his command center. Mind if I just hang out here for a bit? You can close the door behind you.”
“Did you remodel?” she said.
“Nope.”
“Then there’s nothing I need to see. Just thought I’d stroll by before I headed home.”
He nodded as if it all made perfect sense. “Want to share a cab?”
“That’d be great.”
They walked back up Winthrop and crossed JFK. It was close to five and the traffic heading into Harvard Square had clotted. To catch a cab heading out of the square, their best chance was to walk a block to the Charles Hotel. But what had been a flat pewter sky just a minute before had turned swollen and black.
“That’s not good,” Caleb said.
“I wouldn’t think so, no.”
They came to the end of Winthrop and could see from there that the cab stand in front of the Charles was empty. The traffic snaking toward the river was as bad as, if not worse than, the traffic heading into the square.
The black above rumbled. A few miles to the west, a bolt of lightning split the sky.
“A drink?” Caleb said.
“Or two,” she said as the sky opened. “Jesus.”
The umbrellas were poor protection once the wind kicked in. The rain fell with weight and clatter, the drops exploding off the pavement as they ran back up Winthrop. It sliced in from the right and the left, the front and the back.
“Grendel’s or Shay’s?” Caleb said.
She could see Shay’s on the other side of JFK. Close, but still another fifty yards in the rain. And if traffic moved, they’d have to work their way to a crosswalk. Grendel’s, on the other hand, was just to their left.
“Grendel’s.”
“Good choice. We’re too old for Shay’s anyway.”
In the vestibule, they added their umbrellas to the dozen or so already leaning against the wall. They removed their coats and Caleb took off his Sox cap, which had soaked through. His brown hair was cut so tight to his scalp he freed it of moisture by swiping his palm across it. They found a place to hang their coats by the hostess stand and were led to a table. Grendel’s Den was a basement-level place and they ordered their first round as shoes of every variety ran past on the cobblestones outside. Soon the rain had grown so heavy no one ran past.
Grendel’s had been around so long that not only could Rachel recall being turned away from the door with a fake ID in the nineties, but her mother had recalled frequenting the place in the early seventies. It catered mostly to Harvard students and faculty. Out-of-towners tended to wander in only on summer days when management placed tables out front by the green.
The waitress brought a wine for Rachel and a bourbon for Caleb and left menus. Caleb used his napkin to blot his face and neck dry.
They both chuckled a few times without saying anything. It could be years before they saw rain like this again.
“How’s the baby?” she asked.
He beamed. “She’s magical. I mean, for the first ninety days, their eyes don’t really lock onto anything besides the breast and the mother’s face, so I was starting to feel left out. But on that ninety-first day? AB looked right at me and I was a goner.”
Caleb and Haya had named their six-month-old Annabelle but Caleb had been referring to her as AB since the second week of her life.
“Well”—Caleb raised his glass—“cheers.”
She met his glass with her own. “To dodging pneumonia.”
“We hope,” he said.
They drank.
“How’s Haya?”
“She’s good.” Caleb nodded. “Real good. Loves being a mom.”
“How’s her English coming?”
“She watches a ton of TV. It really helps. You can have a solid conversation with her now if you have a little patience. She’s very . . . deliberate about choosing her words.”
Caleb had returned from a trip to Japan with Haya. He spoke halting Japanese; she spoke barely any English. They were married within three months. Brian didn’t like it. Caleb wasn’t the settling-down type, he’d say. And what were they going to talk about over the dinner table?
Rachel had to admit that it colored her opinion of Caleb when he introduced her to the luminous, mostly mute, subservient woman with the kind of face and body that could launch a thousand wet dreams. What else had bound him to her, if not that and that alone? And was the master-servant vibe she got when she saw them together an outgrowth of some hidden he-man fantasy he’d always secretly pursued? Or was Rachel just being bitchy because it hadn’t escaped her notice that while Caleb had married a woman who didn’t speak English, his partner Brian had married a shut-in?
When she brought that up to Brian, he said, “It’s different with us.”
“How?”
“You’re not a shut-in.”
“I beg to differ.”
“You’re just going through a phase. You’ll rebound. But him? Having a kid? The fuck’s that all about? He is a kid.”
“Why’s it bother you so much?”
“It doesn’t bother me ‘so much,’” he said. “It’s just not the right time in his life.”
“How did they meet?” she said.
“You know the story. He went to Japan on a deal and came back with her. Didn’t come back with the deal, by the way. He got undercut by some—”
“But how does he just ‘come back’ with a Japanese citizen? I mean, there are immigration laws designed to keep people from just popping into our country and deciding to stay.”
“Not if she’s here on a legal visa and he marries her.”
“But it doesn’t strike you as odd? She meets him over there and just decides to chuck her life aside and join him in America, a country she’s never seen where people speak a language she doesn’t know?”
He gave it some thought. “You’ve got a point. What’s your theory then?”
“Internet-order bride?”
“Don’t they all come from the Philippines and Vietnam?”
“Not all.”
“Huh.” Brian said. “Internet-order bride. The more I think of it, I wouldn’t put it past him. We’re back to my point—Caleb’s not mature enough for marriage. So he picks someone he barely knows who can barely communicate.”
“Love’s love,” she said, throwing one of his own preferred bromides back at him.
He grimaced. “Love’s love until you toss kids into the mix. Then it becomes a business partnership with guaranteed economic instability.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t have a point, but she did wonder if he was talki
ng about himself in those moments, about his fears regarding the fragility of their own relationship and the potential calamity that could be wrought by bringing a child into it.
An icy thought slid through her before she could stop it: Oh, Brian, have I ever really known you?
Caleb was giving her a curious smile from the other side of the table, as if to ask, Where did you go?
Her phone vibrated on the table. Brian. She resisted the childish impulse to ignore it.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he said warmly. “Sorry about earlier. Friggin’ thing just died. Then I was worried I’d forgotten my adapters. But I did not, my wife. And here we are.”
She got out of the booth, moved a few feet away. “Here we are.”
“Where you at?”
“Grendel’s.”
“Where?”
“That college bar by your office.”
“I know it, I just can’t figure out how you turned up there.”
“I’m with Caleb.”
“Uh, okay. Help me out here. What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on. Why would something be going on? It’s raining like holy hell but otherwise just grabbing a drink with your partner.”
“Well, that’s great. What brought you over to Harvard Square?”
“A wild hair. It had been a while. I got an urge to visit some bookstores. I went with it. Where you staying this time? I forgot.”
“Covent Garden. You said it looked like a place Graham Greene would have liked.”
“When did I say that?”
“When I sent you a picture last time. No, two times ago.”
“Send me one now.” As soon as the words left her mouth, adrenaline flooded her blood as if poured from a bucket.
“What?”
“A picture.”
“It’s ten o’clock at night.”
“A selfie from the lobby then.”
“Hmm?”
“Just send me a picture of you.” Another sunburst of adrenaline exploded at the center of her. “I miss you.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll do that?”
“Yeah, sure.” A pause and then: “Everything okay?”
She laughed and it sounded shrill to her own ears. “Everything is fine. Perfectly fine. Why do you keep asking?”
“You just sound funny.”
“Tired, I guess,” she said. “All this rain.”
“So we’ll talk in the morning, then.”
“Sounds great.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
She hung up and went back to the booth. Caleb looked up as she sat, his thumb working his cell phone keypad as he gave her a smile. She was a little amazed at people who could do the talk-with-one-person-text-with-another trick. It was usually computer geeks and tech nerds like, well, Caleb.
“How’s he doing?”
“He sounded good. Tired but good. Do you ever go on any of these trips?”
Caleb shook his head and continued tapping away on his phone. “He’s the voice of the company. Him and his old man. He also has the business acumen. I just keep the trains running on time.”
“Are you demurring?”
“Hell, no.” After a few more distracted seconds, he pocketed his phone. He folded his hands on the table, looked at her to let her know she had his full attention again. “Without me and people like me in the here and now, that two-hundred-year-old lumber firm wouldn’t last six more months. Sometimes—not every day but sometimes—the speed of a transaction can save a couple, three million dollars. It’s that fluid out there.” He waved his fingers at the global “there.”
The waitress returned and they ordered another round.
Caleb opened the menu. “Do you mind if I eat? I walked in the office at ten this morning and didn’t get up from my desk again until I walked out at five.”
“Sure.”
“You?”
“I could eat.”
The waitress returned with their drinks and took their orders. As she left, Rachel noticed a man around the same age as Brian, forty or so, sitting with an older woman who gave off a stylish professorial air. She could have been sixty, yet it was a sexy-as-hell sixty. Normally Rachel would have studied her to see what about her gave off that impression so forcefully—was it her clothes, the way she sat, the cut of her hair, the intelligence in her face?—but instead Rachel focused on the man. He had sandy blond hair going gray over the ears and hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He drank a beer and sported a gold wedding band. He also wore exactly what her husband had worn this morning, sans the raincoat—blue jeans, white T-shirt, black pullover sweater with an upturned collar.
Was this what she’d missed being holed up so much of her time? It wasn’t like she didn’t get out, but she certainly didn’t get out much. Maybe she’d overlooked the prevalence of some styles. When had all men decided, for example, to stop shaving until every third or fourth day? When had half-fedoras and porkpie hats come back into style? Where did the brightly colored tennis shoe spring from? When was the moment all casual bicyclists decided they should dress in skintight spandex, replete with brand names all over the shirts and leggings, as if they required corporate sponsorship to pedal to Starbucks?
Back when Rachel had been in college, hadn’t every third boy worn a plaid shirt, V-neck tee, and ripped jeans? If she went to the hotel bars frequented by middle-aged Republican salesmen right now, how many would be dressed in light blue oxford shirts and tan pants? So, by that metric, wasn’t it entirely possible that the combination of dark pullover, white T-shirt, and blue jeans—which had probably never gone fully in or out of style, basic as it was—could be worn by three men in Boston-Cambridge on the same day? If she walked through a mall right now, she’d probably see it on a couple more, not to mention on the mannequins fronting the J. Crew and Vince stores.
Their food arrived. Caleb made short work of his burger, and she devoured her salad. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.
When they’d both cleaned their plates, they sat in the warmth of the low lights and gathering dusk. The rain had let up and a steady stream of footsteps returned to the cobblestones just above their heads as people ventured back out into the evening.
His smile wrapped around his bourbon as he raised the glass to his lips.
She could feel the wine when she smiled back.
They’d shared a moment—no more than that—when she’d first been dating Brian. In a pantry at the apartment of a friend of Brian’s in the Fenway. Rachel had gone into the pantry for olives, Caleb had been coming out with Stoned Wheat Thins, if she remembered correctly, and they’d paused as their bodies passed. Their eyes met and neither dropped their gaze. Then it became something of a challenge—who literally would blink first?
“Hi,” she’d said.
“Hi.” The word stumbled out of the back of his throat.
Vasoconstriction, she remembered thinking. The process by which skin capillaries constrict in order to elevate core body temperature. Corresponding increase in respiratory rate and heartbeat. A flush to the skin.
She’d leaned toward him at the same moment he’d leaned toward her and their heads touched, her breasts pressed against his chest, the edge of his right hand brushed the edge of her left on its way to her hip. Of all the places their bodies met in that second or two, it was most intimate when his hand grazed hers. When that hand found her hip, she turned away and sidestepped deeper into the pantry. He let out a small sound—some hybrid hiccup-laugh of amazement and exasperation and embarrassment—and was gone from the pantry in the time it took for her to look back.
Vasodilation: When the core body temperature is too high, blood vessels below the skin dilate so heat can escape the body and core temperature can be restored.
It took her almost five minutes to figure out where the fucking olives were.
She sipped her wine and Caleb sipped his bourbon and the bar filled up around them. Soon th
ey couldn’t see the door. In the past, that could have easily shot bolts of anxiety into her bloodstream, but tonight it only made things seem warmer, more intimate.
“How’s Brian been handling all this rain?” Caleb asked.
“You know him—positive mental attitude. He’s the only person in the city who hasn’t bitched about it yet.”
Caleb shook his head. “Same at the office. We’re all drowning, he’s like, ‘It creates a mood.’”
She finished the sentence with him. “He says the same thing at home. I’m like, ‘What mood? Abject depression?’ He says, ‘No. It’s fun. It’s sexy.’ I said, ‘Honey, it was fun and sexy on day one, and that was ten days ago.’”
Caleb chuckled into his glass, took a drink. “Man would find a silver lining in a concentration camp. ‘You don’t see barbed wire of that quality in other death camps. Plus the showerheads are top-notch.’”
Rachel drank some more wine. “It’s awesome.”
“It is awesome.”
“But it can be exhausting.”
“Wipe you the fuck out. I never met someone who needs positivity like that guy. And it’s weird ’cause it’s not like Hallmark positivity, it’s just a can-do thing. You know?”
“Oh, I know. Do I ever know.” She smiled at the thought of her husband. Couldn’t stand movies with bummer endings, books where the hero lost, songs about alienation.
“I get it,” he’d said to her once. “I read Sartre in college, I had friends who dragged me to a Nine Inch Nails concert. The world’s a pointless, chaotic mess where nothing means nothing. I do understand. I just choose not to engage that philosophy because it doesn’t help me.”
Brian, she’d long ago realized with both admiration and irritation, didn’t do depressing. He didn’t do hopeless or bleak chic or whining. Brian did objectives and strategies and remedies. Brian did hope.
Once, during an irritable mood, when Brian said, “Anything’s possible,” she said, “No, Brian, it’s not. Curing world hunger is not possible, flapping our arms to take flight is not possible.”
A small, strange fire grew in his eyes. “No one’s got long game anymore. Everyone wants it now.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“That if you believe, really believe, and if your strategy is sound, and if you’re willing to leave everything you’ve got on the field of battle to win the day”—he held his arms wide—“you can do anything.”
Since We Fell Page 16