‘Hey. Come here.’ He chewed the pillow as he tried to speak, ready to pass out but awake enough to feel one last burst of lucidity, urgency. ‘I have to ask you something. Where do you live?’
‘Sunset Park.’
‘Sunset Park? Didn’t Paul Auster write a book about that neighbourhood? There’s a copy somewhere in my wife’s pile over there… find it, read it. I’ll bet you can’t afford anything in this city on your wage payments, even if you’re getting money for your art on the side…’
‘I’m doing fine.’
‘No, you’re not. Why else would you be hanging around now, acting like you don’t have anywhere better to go? If somebody did that after a job interview with me…well, I’d take it seriously. Because they obviously wanted to be there. You have a room here. If you want it. I’m worried for you. And…and I think you could do with the structure. Right?’
Maggie let this proposal wash over her, enjoying how far removed she was from Henry’s snap judgements, how little these conceptions of help had to do with her situation. Sunset Park wasn’t a bad neighbourhood. The weed-dealing, college-dropout counterpart to Ivy League Park Slope, perhaps, but no slum.
Over the last week she’d got so used to being at work, away from her open-plan studio, which she shared with two radical feminists and a pit bull, that she’d come to dread the time stuck there, confronting her lack of inspiration, or output. Having a gallery show had crippled her sensibilities. None of the ideas she stabbed at pitifully had sprung to life yet.
And she’d been doubly unproductive since that night she’d spent here at Henry’s. For somebody whose career must have involved fostering talent, he’d approached her with a surprising amount of negative energy. Not that she should have cared what he thought.
She cared more about what Beth thought. They’d been texting constantly, Beth flowing free with details of her ambitions—her application for an MFA at Columbia, going on to publish her poetry. Maggie had got used to the idea of people being impressed by her achievements as an artist and needing to casually measure themselves against her. But she feared the illusion would fall away quickly, once Beth discovered how few connections she really had. And that made Maggie want to work harder to keep up the illusion.
This man didn’t have the capacity to help her. Like so many longstanding Manhattanites, Henry assumed that anyone an hour’s subway ride away from Manhattan needed saving. She would have been more offended by his insistences if they weren’t so clumsy.
‘Yeah,’ Maggie said, more than a little amused. ‘Have you thought this through, Henry?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything more than renting you the spare room for a while,’ he said, rolling over, his eyes glassy, strangely incapable of looking at her. ‘You’re never getting an offer like this again. It’s not as if I make them every day.’
THE next week, Henry made his reluctant trip to visit Christine for Thanksgiving, seeing her first move with a slight concession that would, he hoped, develop into a stronger second play. She couldn’t be allowed to think she’d drawn a change of heart out of him—that she’d convinced him of his family’s importance—when in fact he’d made this decision out of kindness. Obviously him being there meant something to her; to him, the significance of this trip was more equivocal.
DC had never been his kind of city—a depressed swampland when he first visited thirty years ago, with speed dealers and gangsters two blocks down from the National Mall. Whereas Greenwich Village in the eighties had sparked a fantastical thrill, like living on the fringes of a television crime series, DC was and always had been too real. Or too fake, depending which end of town you happened to be in. His sister lived in the Northwest quadrant, historically an enclave of white wealth hunkering down in the hills, neatly separated from the rest of the city by Rock Creek.
Christine and Peter couldn’t meet him at Union Station, so he joined the queue for the taxi rank, which stretched the length of the concourse. The seat of the nation and they didn’t have enough cabs to go around. He already missed New York. Up ahead, the Capitol dome poked above the trees of Lower Senate Park, a clean fall sun tinting those last, clinging leaves cherry red.
A woman brushed past him, impatient, cap pulled down over her hair, arms locked with her partner—husband, boyfriend, intern-paramour, whatever—both of them strangely familiar.
As Henry stepped aside, he thought of himself and Martha, walking together through these same grand, arched doorways into an August soup of a day. Their first trip to DC, in 1989, right after their engagement. It had been her idea to take the train, so they could experience the newly rehabilitated Union Station firsthand. He saw them getting into a taxi, as he was about to now, hurrying along intently, as they always did. Sharing in their disdain for the slow-moving tourists and their children.
They’d gone to dinner with Christine and Peter at a steakhouse in Bethesda, the same place where they must have rewarded Peter’s congressional delegates after a string of supportive votes. Martha hadn’t met them before. Despite Henry’s fears, he felt they’d got on well. She went in with her usual appetite of competitive gusto, ordering the biggest porterhouse on the menu, indulging his sister’s desire to talk about her children and playfully criticising Peter’s abilities as a father, although she was clearly itching to change the subject.
Though Christine tended not to bring up work, Martha had seemed unable to help herself as the night went on, asking more questions of Christine than Henry felt necessary. Their talk centred around the ethics of defending an asbestos manufacturer against thousands of class-action plaintiffs, Christine arguing that the manufacturer couldn’t be held accountable for their suffering. The product it sold had, until recently, been fully legal—its dangers unknown. But surely Martha’s work had dubious legal implications too, Henry’s sister said. Didn’t channelling funds from Wall Street require a rather creative interpretation of the fund reporting legislation?
Martha kept her composure where another might have bristled. However the International Rescue Committee came by those funds, she said, and however it chose to disperse them, it was better than seeing them squandered by investment bankers and their dumbeddown hedonistic habits.
Both she and Christine had a duty to action their clients’ interests; questions of morality were thrown aside by a dispassionate system. When one was objectively guilty before the law as it stood, Martha said, the scales had to move out of their favour. The difference, as Henry interpreted it from his side of the dinner table (and he realised he could have got it wrong), was that Martha believed the broken system could be fixed.
With nothing to add, Henry was left to observe the women with Peter, whose work as a lobbyist must have presented him with similar challenges, Henry thought. But whereas Henry was hanging out for a gap in the conversation into which he could insert himself and stick up for his wife, it seemed Peter was perfectly content to sit back and listen. Or perhaps he wasn’t listening at all?
Not many women would have handled the in-laws so smoothly, even though Martha knew how little his sister’s approval mattered to him. Nice to have it all the same. Nice to think Christine might have been a touch envious of their relationship, however strongly she would deny it.
That was a long time ago. Now Henry would have to face Christine’s guestroom on his own. No more accompaniment than his old ‘go-bag’, which he’d once kept on standby at his office, ready for an emergency trip. He missed the urgency of adventure that bag used to promise.
The taxi took him across town to his sister’s house on Indian Lane. Everyone had a castle in this part of the district, each block of masonry scrubbed clean. Christine lived in one of those interchangeable grand stone mansions. Slate roofs and French windows. Hidden behind an obliging, well-trimmed hedge.
One of the twins let Henry in through the intercom, exchanging no words of recognition. He found the boys in the living room, dressed in tracksuit pants and ankle socks, both absorbed by their laptops. Busy wi
th those award-winning college papers, or on Facebook?
He got more of a greeting from the golden retriever, Custer, though after the dog had bounded up and sniffed Henry’s trousers he wasn’t sure what to do with him. Henry tried patting Custer’s head—the dog responded by turning his nose up and retreating to his bed.
Pictures had taken over the mantelpiece. His parents on their wedding day. Christine and Peter and the kids as told by some suburban hack of a family photographer, huddling around in a series of uncomfortable studio poses that couldn’t have helped his sister’s back pain. Monotonous white teeth and white shirts buttoned up hard to the neck, all catching the flash.
Henry was startled to see that Christine had added his portrait to the family collection. There he stood, in his own frame to match theirs—a nervous, smooth-skinned boy in his prep school tie, the print washed out due to sun exposure.
No sign of Martha anywhere.
Limp from the weight of revisiting a house where too many versions of himself resided, Henry couldn’t say much to his nephews. He said hello, got a gruff ‘Hey,’ from the one who’d inherited Henry’s big, watery grey eyes, and then he left them to it.
Little had changed in the guestroom. Either Christine or the maid must have tidied up the books, many of which used to be stacked on the carpet but were now neatly arranged on the shelves—an incongruous mix of military thrillers and political biographies. Peter’s job prevented them from displaying their affiliations: a concessional Hilary Clinton sat on the shelf right next to Sarah Palin in a crass attempt to fool nosy dinner guests.
Broken striations of sunlight fell through the lace curtain, onto a Queen Anne sofa. Martha had reclined there and read a book in the early morning, like Kiki de Montparnasse in a Man Ray nude, her bathrobe draped immodestly around the hips. The same sunbeam illuminated the crease of her breast. The best photo shoot wouldn’t do that scene justice the way his memory did.
Christine and Peter were home within an hour. Peter gave Henry a fraternal sort of handshake, overcompensating for whatever feeling they lacked for one another. He was a stubby man, vertical stripes on his shirt doing nothing to distract from his Buddha belly, his face one big, red blister from summers spent out on the golf course.
‘Henry, how the heck are you?’ he said. ‘You’re looking well. Been working out or what?’
‘I’m sorry we weren’t able to pick you up,’ Christine said, stepping in before Henry could think of an appropriate way to brag about his fitness regime without revealing how solitary it was. ‘Lunch with the Breyers in Georgetown, we ended up talking shop the entire time. So much for the holidays.’
‘Not a problem. The boys let me in.’
His nephews hadn’t moved, though they responded more enthusiastically to Christine’s greeting, snapping to attention when she asked what they wanted for dinner. Did they see anything in Henry? No interest, still, in the cool career and the cool clothes and the generally cool life he’d built for himself in New York City? Was he really so bland to them?
Determined to make a fuss, Christine brewed coffee and prepared plates of petit fours—the twins bothered her in the kitchen and ate them straight from the tin before running off to see their friends. She served Henry and Peter on the patio, presumably because it was a balmy day for the time of year.
Outside was quiet, which put Henry on edge. He missed the satisfying hum of traffic, the jackhammers and the whoops of sirens. Nothing out here but the rustle of wind and the sound of leaves skittering on the tiles. It suggested an invisible threat, reminding Henry too much of his childhood bike rides around the dead streets of Waltham. He’d passed so many houses on those rides, few of them showing signs of occupancy, and he’d often worried that they wouldn’t be any different were an apocalyptic event to hit.
This must have been why Christine liked it here. Hopeless in her sentimental attachments. The tomato plant and the herb garden were identical to their mother’s, which Christine had always helped her to tend.
‘Your plants are doing well,’ Henry said. ‘Though that’s a sad tomato vine.’
‘I shouldn’t have watered it so much. The fruit turned out bad, gave up in September. I hate it when that happens.’
‘Dear, we should really get Hernando to do it,’ Peter said, touching Christine’s wrist. ‘That’s what we pay him for.’
‘I’m amazed you have time for gardening,’ Henry said. ‘Caught up with your case in the Times. Sounds like I shouldn’t be buying stock in coal right now.’
‘I’m trying not to think about work right now. I’ve set this week aside—for the family. For you. I’m so glad you came down, kid.’
‘Suppose Mom isn’t joining us?’
‘No, Henry.’ She huffed out a laugh, certainly at his expense. ‘She isn’t joining anyone anywhere, unless you felt like driving her down.’
‘Right, right. Of course.’
Henry hadn’t seen much of his mother since she stopped recognising him. It seemed a fitting end to the relationship they’d had. It didn’t matter how much they loved each other. They had been close. Yes, they had. Too close. But either she hadn’t understood him or she’d done a terrific job of hiding it beneath a show of disappointment.
‘I should visit her again,’ he said, because it was what Christine wanted to hear.
‘You should. You were always her favourite. Remember when you cut the hair off Barbie and I pushed you down the stairs? I was the one who got locked in the closet.’
Henry had thought those petty rivalries might fall away with age. Instead they were exacerbated, his sister twisting the details to suit her agenda. He could see why she was such a good lawyer.
As a young boy, Henry had often suspected he was an alien who’d wandered into his parents’ life by accident, ignorant of their customs. His father, an air force tactical operations veteran, had never encountered anyone with Henry’s expressivity, his neediness, his emotional extremes. It wasn’t that he had no patience for it—he simply couldn’t fathom it, perhaps was even afraid of it. Which was why Henry didn’t blame the man for never giving his unusual behaviour the attention it demanded.
They mustn’t have known what to do with this child who was always skulking on the periphery of things, melancholy and dependent. His mother had found more sympathy for him, though her fear of putting a single step out of line meant he hadn’t gleaned much from her, either, about why he’d turned out so different to what they’d expected. Ignorance was their most reliable strategy, the one they turned to when Henry tried to get their attention with strange friends and stranger habits. He couldn’t breathe until he was far away from these people.
Christine was asking about work. He’d forgotten that he’d told her he was setting up as a consultant.
‘I’m enjoying not being stuck in an office,’ he lied. ‘Change of pace. Gives me time for other things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Nothing too specific. Reading books, swimming lengths. I’m… trying to write a memoir.’
Saying it felt like pulling shrapnel from his flesh, though the relief was temporary, and the pain that followed even more intense. He’d told nobody else about this project.
‘Oh,’ Christine said. ‘That’s nice. Was that Doctor Newman’s idea?’
‘Who, the shrink? No.’ The therapist had been her idea—recommended by a friend of a friend, who apparently considered herself cured. He wouldn’t have accepted the suggestion from anyone else, though the thought of prescription drugs had helped. ‘I just decided it was time to gather some thoughts together.’
‘You’d better not be giving any family secrets away,’ she said, with genuine concern.
‘I’m afraid you don’t feature. It’s about work. The parties, the gossip. Maybe a pinch of scandal, raise a few eyebrows. Never hurts.’
‘I see Michelle Darrow’s hired a new creative director. There was a big profile in Forbes the other day. Do you keep in touch with her?’
‘I�
��no.’
‘Sounds like an interesting project, Henry,’ Peter said. ‘I guess biography publishing is a competitive marketplace, right?’
No doubt there was a manuscript hidden away in Peter’s desk drawer, beneath a pile of rejection letters.
‘I’ve got stories to tell,’ Henry said. ‘Unique stories. People want to read them. In fact, I’m already negotiating the deal with Random House.’
‘Hey, if it’s keeping you busy, more power to you. Sounds like you’ve adapted well to retirement. Better than I would.’
Henry noted the intimation of pity. Peter and Christine had last seen him six months ago, for a rushed, sloppy little dinner in New York at a restaurant he shouldn’t have taken them to, one that the memory of Martha inhabited too forcefully. He’d been a pariah at the magazine by then, missing invitations to meetings, his corner office an oubliette where he wasted whole days.
In this surreal mirror world they’d drawn him into, he was supposed to have buried all that. Moved on.
‘Tell me what you want to do while you’re down here,’ Christine said. Then, to directly contradict the same offer, ‘We’re expected at dinner tonight with Melanie Jacobs, that environmental science professor at Georgetown who does advocacy work for Education Reform, and a bunch of other causes, too. You met her at my birthday party—couldn’t stop the two of you from talking. She’s the one who lost her husband a few years ago.’
‘I remember.’ He struggled to hide his displeasure. Of course Christine would spring this on him once he was cornered. ‘Yes, all right. Will the boys be joining us?’
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