She told him exactly how it happened because he asked her to. Every detail, a dagger.
The phone rings now, sparing Tate from going further down the rabbit hole. The landline. This means one thing: it’s his mother.
“Hello?” Tate says, finding a pair of pajama pants on the floor.
“Morning,” she says. She calls every morning at this hour. He suspects it’s because she’s worried about him, wants to make sure he is awake and okay.
“Morning, Mom,” he says.
“What’s on tap today?”
“More of the same. I’ll take some photos.”
He doesn’t mention shopping with Smith. His mother wouldn’t approve. She’s still holding out hope that he and Olivia will mend things.
“Do you think you should maybe find work, honey? To keep busy? I don’t like the idea of you having all of this time on your hands.”
“I’m pursuing photography, Mom. I consider it work.”
The word grates. Pursuing. What the fuck does this even mean? It means showing up at B&H Photo and buying thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras and lenses, most of which still sits in boxes and bags in the other room. His first camera, a Polaroid and an eleventh-birthday gift from his parents, sits on his bedside table.
“How was yesterday?” she asks.
“Like the days before it, Mom.”
“Did you get my package?” she asks. She sends “care packages” every few weeks.
Her question jars his memory and he recalls the white package by the door downstairs, his name bold on the front. He brought it up but didn’t open it.
“You can stop sending me underwear. I’m a grown man, Mom.”
“Nonsense. You’re more of a boy than ever. Just because you have money in the bank doesn’t mean you’re taking any better care of yourself. I bet you’re still living out of a suitcase. I bet there is no food in your fridge. I bet you haven’t done laundry in eons.”
She knows him. She knows him well. And he bristles under the weight of this knowing.
He walks slowly toward the door, adjusts himself, feels that the cotton of his boxer-briefs is stiff. Shame fills him, but why the fuck should it? Tate stares at the mountain of laundry in the corner of the room.
“Why don’t you let me come for Thanksgiving? I will spend a few days getting you settled and we can catch up. I want to lay eyes on you, son. And that fancy new place of yours.”
“You and Dad are leaving for the cruise tomorrow. It’s too late to cancel. And besides, you’ve been looking forward to it all year. You deserve it. Next year, Emily and Todd will be back from London and the baby will be here and we will all be together. This is your off year. And I need to try to do a thing or two on my own,” Tate says. “Don’t worry about me, Mom.”
It’s a foolish thing to say because he knows she worries, that she has always worried, that she’s probably more worried now than ever. Just a year ago, his life was—seemed—settled. His company had been acquired and the money was due to come in, and he told his mother they’d probably have kids soon because this is what he hoped for. His mother was desperate for grandchildren. And it made him happy to make her so hopeful, her and his dad both. They were nothing but good parents, contented individuals who had an uncomplicated view of the world, a world that has been very good to them, giving them a son and a daughter both, hardworking kids who never caused much trouble. His sister, Emily, two years younger, lives in London with her husband. She is four months pregnant with their first child.
Olivia always loved Tate’s mother, how she was always calling, always visiting, always sending packages. She said that when she became a mom, she wanted to be like Tate’s mother. Her mother was okay but selfish, and she preferred Mrs. Pennington.
“Okay, but I just want you to be happy again, Tate,” she says. She’s been saying this at the end of every phone call.
“I know, Mom. And I will be.”
It’s what she deserves to hear. In truth, the words have him thinking. He was happy before, at least he thought he was, but maybe he took it for granted. He never came home from work at the start-up and said, I am a happy guy. He and Olivia never curled up in bed, kissed each other good night and said, We’re so happy, aren’t we? It doesn’t seem like happiness is something you really talk about or think consciously about until it is threatened, slipping.
What would it take to be happy again? Tate’s not so sure. He’s bought this apartment. That’s a step. A place of his own. A place he can transform as he likes. He can have lots of furniture or none at all. He can leave his dirty socks on the floor because there’s no one to bug him. He can fill his fridge with alcohol and sausage. He can do whatever the fuck he wants. It is all up to him. But the thing that surprises him most, and maybe it shouldn’t, is that the money doesn’t seem to be making him happy. He became rich overnight and he figured this would cheer him up, but what were the fucking chances this would happen at the exact time that he lost his marriage? His hope is that it will just take some time to settle into this new normal, this life with funds and without Olivia, to embrace this Life 2.0, but even the thought of his new freedom is disconcerting. Olivia ran a tight ship. She had her ways of doing things and her ways organically became his. It took a while, but he learned to turn the water off as he was brushing his teeth, how to fold the towels the way she liked, how she liked her coffee.
He’s stopped waiting for her to call, to write, to appear at the door of this apartment she doesn’t even know about, to start gliding around tidying things up, mock-chastising him for his messes, for his temporary slip back into bachelorhood. And it hits him, finally, and hard: this isn’t temporary.
After he hangs up with his mom, the day stretches before him. He will meet Smith in the afternoon at a tiny suit shop not far from here. Until then he will take his camera out and walk the streets in search of interesting people. He’s gotten pretty good at approaching strangers and sneaking a shot or even sometimes asking them if he can take their photograph. It surprises him how many people are game; sure, some people say no and turn away, but many are willing to offer themselves, who they are, who they are striving to be, why they are here in this city that is so wonderful and so hard.
Tate pulls on a fresh pair of underwear and yesterday’s jeans, which were still on the floor, then carries the beer bottles into his small kitchen. He places the bottles on the counter but then picks the full one back up, studies it. He sees lipstick. Takes a sip.
The living room is still dark, the shades drawn tight. Tate flips on the light and walks toward the mess. The shreds. The picture is gone, decomposed, in remnant bits, but he can still see it in his mind. There she is. Olivia. Looking back at him over her shoulder. It is their wedding day. They are in San Francisco at her parents’ yacht club. They are in the suite where they got ready and would spend their first night as husband and wife. She said she didn’t want to see him before the ceremony, that it was bad luck, but Tate convinced her that he needed to see her before everyone else saw her, that he wanted to take her picture while she was just his, that he needed a few moments alone with her, in that room. Without family, without makeup and hair people, without the hired photographer and video guy, without the world. And Olivia acquiesced. Humored him, and they had their time. She wore a big white dress. She wore her dark hair pinned back, swept off her face. He snapped the shot and it became his favorite.
He framed the photo and hung it up in their hallway. She hated it. Pointed out all the things that were wrong with it. One eye was smaller than the other, her nose looked big, she thought she had a double chin. But he didn’t see these things. Even after she pointed them out, he didn’t see them. He just saw a gorgeous, happy girl.
But was she ever happy? Was she even happy on that day? She was stressed, anxious about being the center of attention, eager for the whole thing to be over. There was fear in her chocolate eyes, in the shaky half smile she wore on her face. She was nervous. She was scared of something.
It’s just you and me, Liv, he said to her, trying to calm her down. Did she know even then that it wouldn’t work? That things would fall apart the way they did? That one day he would cry like a baby and cling to her, hold on for dear life?
He studies the shreds. Considers taping them back together but sweeps them up and floats them into the trash.
He sees the package by the door, walks toward it. He really doesn’t need more underwear, but he knows his mom needs to send them. He feels a punch when he sees the return address. It’s not from his mother. His stomach knots. Her lawyer. The papers. They’re finally here.
He sits to open it. Two sets of paper, flagged for him to sign.
Part of him wants to grab a pen and just fucking do it. Be done. But, thankfully, he decides to read.
Mr. Pennington,
My client is eager to settle this matter as I know you are too. As we have heretofore agreed upon, pursuant to California law, my client is entitled to half of the community property, including, but not limited to, the proceeds of your sale of your company PhotoPoet Inc. in the fall of 2012. You built the company during your marriage to my client and she supported you and, more importantly, contributed her legal expertise and services during its establishment, and as such the company is considered marital property and should be divided as such. It should be noted that my client is additionally seeking 50% of the value of the stock options in Twitter (“Parent Company”) that are at the present moment unvested. The valuation of said options will be calculated by a mutually arrived-upon method.
My client informs me that you wish to settle this matter quickly and that this stock option amendment to the agreement shouldn’t unduly stall our progress on this matter.
Sincerely,
RONALD BERMAN
Attorney at Law
What the fuck? He checks his e-mail to see if there’s anything from his lawyer about this but gets distracted when he sees the e-mail from Olivia. From late last night. Right about the time there was another girl in his bed.
He feels his pulse quicken as he clicks to read.
10:49AM
“You have every right to despise me.”
To: Pennington, Tate
From: Farnsworth, Olivia
Time: 2:36 a.m. EST
Subject: Thanksgiving
T,
Thanksgiving is Thursday. I’m going to my parents’, but you won’t be there and this isn’t right. I’m having all of these doubts. I’m worried I made a big mistake. I think I was going through something. 13 years. Are we really just throwing that away?
Remember our good times? They weren’t just good, were they? They were magical. I keep thinking about the night we met. At that silly corporate recruiting event at Union League? How we started talking about how scared we were to graduate?
And the day you proposed. How the world had suddenly stopped, how we were cuddled up on the couch, glued to the television, scared out of our minds. I remember the moment you turned to me and you had this fear in your eyes, but there was hope there too. And you walked into the kitchen and came back and got down on your knee and said that suddenly everything was clear, that life was short, and we, Tate, were what mattered. We. I loved that it was your mother’s ring, that there was suddenly all of this history there on my finger. I am so glad you wouldn’t let me give it back because the truth is, I don’t want to let go of it.
Every time something happens now, little or big, I think to pick up the phone and call you and I know that I can’t do this anymore, that I’ve lost this privilege. And so they are building up in me, all of these things. I loved how we were always able to talk about anything . . . everything. Like when we talked for hours about whether each of us was more like our mother or our father? Or that conversation we had about the afterlife and ghosts? Or remember that time we got in a fight about the meaning of that Whitman poem you love?
Your mom tells me you’re pursuing photography and this makes me happy because I know you’ve always loved it. I apologize that I never took it seriously, this passion of yours. I think I was envious that you felt so deeply about something. The only thing I’ve felt so deeply about is you. I hope that you are finally leading the life that you wanted to, but I’m heartbroken that it doesn’t include me.
You have every right to despise me. You have every right to delete this e-mail without reading it. I know I told you I wouldn’t contact you for a while, but it’s been a while and I miss you, Tate. I am also writing because I’ll be in New York in two weeks for work. And I would love nothing more than to have dinner with you. I want to see your eyes and your smile and tell you something that I’ve been unable to say for some reason I’m still trying to understand.
I’m sorry.
These words are empty nothings, black smudges on a white screen, but I’m hoping that if I see you in person, there will be some life in them. Because I mean it, Tate. I’ve messed up in ways I know will haunt me. I know you are busy moving on and you should be doing just that, but please tell me you’ll see me.
I saw this great quote the other day from Norman Cousins. He said: “Life is an adventure in forgiveness.” I believe this.
You might have gotten something by now from my lawyer. Look, Tate, my lawyer insisted on this amendment thing, that I should get part of the stock because I was your wife and because I reviewed your contracts and business plan, and I told him to hold off, that I’m having doubts, but he sent it anyway. I hope we can talk about all of this?
Happy Thanksgiving, T.
Googolplex,
Olivia
Fuck her.
Fuck her.
She runs around under his nose with this other prick, serves him up months of radio silence and now this sentimental saccharine manipulative shit?
They always signed their e-mails this way, with the world’s second-largest number with a name, a one followed by a googol of zeros. He wonders now why they didn’t use the largest number instead. What was it called? Googolplexian? He can’t recall, but he does remember every single thing she mentioned in the e-mail. The memories are cruel and endless.
As if it were yesterday, he can picture them standing together in their dark suits at a Goldman Sachs recruiting event. Twenty-one and clueless, she smiled at him, picked a dot of lint from the lapel of his suit. This was something his mother was always doing, grooming him, taking care of him.
She was from the Bay Area. This made sense; she had this breezy California coolness to her upon first impression, a bohemian, mellow charm. She was easy to talk to, artful in her self-deprecation about the predictable narrowness of her future plans. She’d recently taken the LSAT and done quite well. She was in the process of applying to handful of law schools—Columbia, Yale, Stanford—but her sights were set on New York. She wanted to spend a few years there before heading home.
She was also looking into banking and consulting. Covering her bases.
I’m boring, she whispered.
Me too, Tate whispered back even though he did not feel this to be true. He told her he was considering a career in finance because he needed a good paycheck, because he was toying with the idea of taking over his father’s insurance business in St. Louis. But later that first night, he also told her that if he could be anything in the world, if money were no object, he would become a photographer. Back in his dorm, he showed her some of his pictures.
When Tate’s father had a mild heart attack two weeks before graduation, Olivia insisted on flying home with him to St. Louis. She held his hand at the hospital, made his mother cups of tea. It was then, at some point during those blurry few days, that Tate decided he would one day marry this girl. Before flying back to school to graduate and pack up his dorm, Tate asked his mother for her ring. She cried when he asked, and smiled.
She is a very nice girl, his mother said.
He held on to the ring and proposed on September 12, 2001, almost exactly a year after they got together. They huddled in bed watching the news c
overage. She finished school, sat for the California bar. They traveled to Asia for her bar trip and then he quit his job and they moved to San Francisco, got married in a small ceremony by the water. She began work at the law firm and he got a job at a photo software startup. In 2010, he and his buddy from Yale started developing their app. When the company was acquired last year, he found himself holding a check for millions of dollars. This all happened after everything began to unravel with Olivia, and at the time, he hoped the news and the money would patch them back together somehow. Olivia’s reaction was not what he expected and oddly, it made him respect her more. She said she was proud of him, that he deserved all the success in the world, but that the money didn’t change the way she felt about him, and them. They were over, she insisted.
I am not happy. I have not been happy. I want to be happy, she said that day, on the couch. She couldn’t even look at him when she uttered this trio of sentences, these sentences that fell from her with a haunting, lifeless formality as if she were a child who’d memorized lines from a script. It struck him even then how slowly she spoke, enunciating each word, how she eschewed contractions.
I am not happy. I have not been happy. I want to be happy.
The words still mock him. They repeat on a loop in his head.
They are his words too now.
They sat at the dining table, an heirloom from her grandmother she’d take with her, and had a civilized chat. They agreed that they wanted to settle things quickly and amicably, that there was no reason for things to get nasty. They had each come into the union with not much of anything, just high hopes and the promise delivered by a fine education. They didn’t own a house. Their possessions were commingled, but this wouldn’t be hard to undo. It surprised him, and pleased him, that Olivia made almost no mention of the funds he now had. Naively, it didn’t occur to him that she’d retain a high-wattage attorney who’d put it in her head to get her hands on as much as she could. It should have.
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