“Did you leave when you saw Sam in the car? Is that what happened? Did that make you fucking change your mind? That she brought Sam with her?”
“Charlie, you don’t understand. I didn’t see Sam—”
“I bet you don’t think you do, but you fucking owe me.” Charlie felt his voice rising. “She was married to me. She had a son. We were a family. Or didn’t that mean anything to you?”
Bill took a long swig of coffee. “I told you, we never talked about Sam.”
“What did you talk about, then? Quantum physics? Literature? Did you talk about her husband? Did you talk about me?” Charlie pushed his coffee out of the way so fiercely, some of it sloshed onto the table. He leaned toward Bill. “So you tell me. You tell me everything. How you fucked up my life. How you fucked up hers. How there’s a ten-year-old boy who misses his mom because of goddamned you. Because I really want to know. I came all the way out here and now you fucking tell me what you know.”
Bill spread one hand across his face. When he removed it, he looked like a different person to Charlie, like a person to whom something terrible had happened.
“It was an accident,” Bill said.
BILL DIDN’T KNOW how his life took a turn. He was on business on Boylston Street in Boston, paging his wife Ellen at the hospital because he missed her. “I’m kind of busy right now,” she said, her voice offhanded. She didn’t say she’d call him back or that she missed him, too. When he hung up, something was buzzing in his head.
He passed an art gallery. It was bright and inviting, and splashed full of sunlight. The paintings were big and colorful, but that wasn’t what stopped him. He looked up and there was this woman like an apparition, floating by him in a long filmy dress, looking at the paintings. Suddenly he began to want things he hadn’t wanted in a very long time.
He went inside and it smelled like cinnamon and honey and vanilla. He saw the woman more clearly and she was even more beautiful. Then she looked up at him, like an invitation, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go up to her. “Great paintings, aren’t they?” he said. “Should we buy everything up?”
She laughed. He had a wedding band, but she did, too. My wife doesn’t understand me, he thought, and then he laughed at himself, at the cliché.
“April,” she said.
“Bill.”
They walked around the small gallery. He stopped in front of a painting that was all skyscrapers tangled together, almost as if they were holding hands. He thrust his hands in his pockets. “I like this,” he said.
“Me, too.” She kept her eyes on the painting.
She told him that she lived on the Cape, that she’d come to Boston just to have a day to herself, popping on a train because it was faster than driving.
“Isn’t that kind of crazy?” he said, “Coming all this way just for a day?” and she gave him this sad, broken little half smile, and that was when he began to fall in love. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” he said quietly.
“You have no idea how much it helps just that you asked,” she said. “But I just want to feel good today. I don’t want to think about anything else but that.” She looked outside. “Want to walk with me?”
They walked outside, stopping to look at the windows of the shops. It was growing cooler, darker, and they both had to be going. She thrust out her hand for him to shake and he felt the heat rise up from her skin. “It was nice to meet you, Bill,” she said, and that sad little smile was gone. Her voice had music in it. “You made my day,” she said.
“Maybe we’ll meet again,” he said. “April.”
When he came home, everything seemed different. He felt unmoored. He wandered into a Thrift-T-Mart for Lifesavers, and when the girl rang him up—bored, with scraggly dishwater hair—he looked past her at the sky. “Boy, doesn’t a day like today make you wish you were on the Cape?” he blurted, and she yawned. “The Cape’s for tourists,” she said. “Jamaica, mon. That’s where I want to be.”
He walked past a man on a bench reading a book about modern art. “I come here the third Wednesday of every month,” April had said. The man noticed his stare and looked up. “You an art lover?” he said.
“A friend of mine is,” Bill said, and he thrilled at the word, friend, because it was and wasn’t the truth. “She goes to this one art gallery in Boston every month.”
“Lucky her,” the man said, and returned to his book.
He felt discombobulated. He went in to work and told his boss how well the Boston trip had gone. “I think it’s smart to have me there,” he said.
“I’m glad you’re taking the reins,” his boss said. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
At dinner, Ellen talked about vacation. She wanted to go to Paris or London.
“What about the Cape?” Bill said. “We could go for the whole month.” He glanced at her over his baked potato, his heart banging in his chest.
She chewed thoughtfully. “We could do that,” she said. “It might be nice.”
“It would be great,” he said.
It didn’t take long for Bill and April to have a routine. They didn’t set a time, but they began to meet at the gallery, and then headed over to a café nearby, staying longer and longer until the waitresses began to know them, to call them by name, to place their usual order in front of them before they’d even asked for it. And they began to know each other. She told him she was a volunteer at the community beach clean-up, that she worked at the Blue Cupcake bakery, which had won “Boston’s Best” three years in a row, and that sometimes she made special cupcakes for the kids with allergies, who always clamored for thirds. “Asthmatics,” she said.
He waved his hand and looked around the café. “I’m glad there are no kids here. It’d be too noisy. I couldn’t concentrate just on you.”
“Don’t you like kids?” she said, surprised.
“Sure I do,” he said. “In other people’s homes. Inside schools. At kids’ matinees.”
She rolled her cup in her hands. “People can change,” she said quietly. “Can’t they?”
He thought of Ellen, how crazy he had been about her. “Yes,” he said. “They can.”
We’re just friends, he told himself, but he never mentioned April’s name at home when Ellen asked him about his trip. Still, every time he came to Boston, he wore his best shirts. He began getting his hair cut at the most expensive place in Pittsburgh, and when the stylist asked if he wanted a manicure, he didn’t laugh the way he would have before. He held out his hands. “Make them look great,” he said
“You’re looking awfully spiffy,” Ellen said.
“I’m trying to get a promotion,” he said. “You know, you look more like the boss, he’s more apt to promote you.”
“Well, I like it,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder. “It’s very sexy.”
He leaned away from her, feeling woozy, as if he were in the wrong place. At night, for the first time in a long while, Ellen reached for him. He heard a rustling in the bed. He saw April’s face, April’s body. He felt April whispering to him, and Ellen held him tighter.
He cut his time at the Boston office shorter and shorter, which seemed to make the staff there as happy as it made him, because, really, all he did there was hover over everybody and make them uncomfortable.
“There’s a lot to take care of,” Bill told his boss. “It’s better if I go up more often.”
“Good man,” said his boss. “That’s what I like to hear. Someone right on the ball.”
April began to come up twice a month, and then, so did Bill. He breezed into the Boston office and talked to the key people. He looked at some mock-up ads, talked to some clients, and then he was out of there. “Call me on the cell if you need me,” he said, and then the whole day with April spread out before him and nothing else mattered. The few times the phone rang, he felt so happy that he said yes to whatever anyone from the office asked him. New mock-ups? Yes. A change in the tagline?
Absolutely.
Once, he came to the café and she was sitting there with her head in her hands. “Hello?” he called, and she looked up at him and started to cry. He didn’t ask her what was going on. Instead, he poured her tea, pulled his chair close to hers, and sat beside her. “Tea,” he urged. He took her hand and held it. He kissed her fingers. And then, when she rested her head on his shoulder, he let her cry as long as she needed to.
“I’m fine now,” she told him, smiling weakly, and he didn’t press. She’d tell him if she wanted to. He knew people had secrets and he respected that. Plus who was he to judge? “I just want you to know that whatever it is, I understand,” he murmured, and she gave him a look of pure gratitude.
“I think you might actually mean that,” she said quietly.
He and April got in the rental car and they drove for hours. He wasn’t sure where he was going, and after a while, he knew they were lost. He kept driving farther out, feeling more and more addled, as if clouds were drifting through his head, but instead of being annoyed, he felt wildly happy.
“Are we lost?” April said.
He pulled over to the side of the road and leaned across her to open the glove compartment, which was stuffed with maps. He dug a few out, and smoothed them across his lap. “Ah, here we go.”
He couldn’t make anything of the road lines and symbols. “Help,” he ordered and she slid over on the seat toward him, so close he could feel the heat from her body, the steady moving silk of her hair sliding against his cheek. “There we are,” she said, touching the map, “We’re not lost at all.” Her face was so close to his that all he had to do was turn and kiss it.
It was the simplest thing in the world to check into a hotel. It changed everything and both of them knew it. He checked them in as Terry and Celia Spring and then grinned at her. “And to think that kiss was an accident!” he said.
“There are no accidents,” April informed him
He was used to Ellen coming to bed in her T-shirt and panties, exhausted, reaching for him in the middle of the night. Ellen was gone by morning, already at the hospital. April slowly undid the buttons of her shirt and then she undid his. She lay beside him on the bed so they could look at each other, and when he touched her, he felt small shocks through his fingers. When he reached for the lights, April stayed his hand. “No, I want to see everything now,” she said. April whispered to him the whole time they were making love and he began whispering to her. Yes, I love that. Oh, there, that’s nice. Yes, do that. More, please. More.
I love that.
I love you.
They were never really finished with each other, not when they woke, not when they got up from the bed, slow and reluctant, dazed. They dressed and splashed cold water on their faces. They made their way to the car, and although Bill played the loudest music he could find on the radio, April leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. “Don’t wake me. I like this dream.”
“It’s not a dream.”
There were rules, of course. They never called each other or e-mailed, though he kept imagining calling her a thousand times a day just to hear her voice.
One day, he came into work and his boss, Buddy, called him in.
Buddy tapped one finger on the desk, as if he were pointing something out. “I’m puzzled, here, Bill,” he said quietly. “Maybe you can help me out a little.”
“Sure,” Bill said. “I’m your man.”
“Are you? Are you my man?”
“Excuse me?”
“You haven’t been at the Boston office in weeks.”
“Sure I have.” Bill shifted position.
Buddy shook his head. “If you had, you’d know about the brushfire I had to put out last week. About the disaster that started this week. You’d also be aware of the client who called me up screaming this morning and gave me an earful before he fired us.” Buddy stood up. “The Dining Delights account is gone, Bill.”
“What brushfire?” Bill’s skin was hot.
“That’s just what I’m talking about. You don’t even know, do you?” Buddy stood up. “This just isn’t going to work. I have to have people I can depend upon.”
Buddy didn’t want to listen to any of Bill’s explanations. He held up his hand. “Enough,” he said. They gave him three months severance and let him collect his things in a little brown box under security supervision, which was humiliating. He took everything, even the paperclips on his desk. He didn’t say good-bye to anyone, not because he didn’t have friends at his job, but because he didn’t want to see the sympathy in their faces.
He let the guard walk him out, all the while staring straight ahead.
As soon as he was home, he dumped the box in the trash. Then he called Ellen, but quickly hung up because how could he explain this to her? She’d want to know why they had fired him. She’d want to call their lawyer and get the facts and then what would he do? He wished for April’s number. How could he make a living? Maybe he could work out of his house. Maybe he could call in some favors.
Maybe he could set up business in Boston.
It was easy to keep being fired a secret from Ellen, because she never asked. While she was at work, he looked for work, or he took himself to the movies, sitting for hours watching whatever was playing. And then, that Wednesday, just as he always did, he packed his bag and went to Boston. “Have a productive time,” Ellen said.
“WHY, THAT’S JUST INSANE,” April told him when he told her he had been fired, and then she touched his hand.
“Why don’t we run away?” he said, surprising himself as soon as he said it.
Her face turned quiet and serious, and something felt like it was uncurling in his heart. “We could start new lives,” he said quietly. “We could leave it all behind us. Why shouldn’t we grab at happiness if we can?”
“What about your wife? What about my—husband?” Her voice was so soft he had to lean forward to hear her.
“Why shouldn’t we think that people might be happier without us? Ellen never says ‘I love you’ to me anymore. Does your husband?” He paused. “It isn’t often people get a second chance,” he finally said. “Don’t we deserve to be happy? And admit it, everyone will be happier without us. Better off.”
She looked past him. “My husband never says I love you,” she told him. “When I ask, he says ‘You know how I feel.’ ”
He reached for her. “I love you,” he told her. “I love you, I love you.”
“Tell me again,” she said, and she curled alongside him and for the first time that day, he felt a point of light, far off in the distance, like a star guiding him home.
They were in love. It was a fact of his life. He thought about it when he woke up and kissed his wife, and saw her like a postcard that had been sent him from another life. He thought about it when he walked into Oakland and wandered through the Carnegie Museum and he realized he wouldn’t be back here. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
They made plans. They couldn’t wait. They’d meet in New York and then fly to San Francisco together. They’d figure out what to do. They’d buy their tickets at the gate so that by the time they were discovered missing, well, they’d already be long gone. He hadn’t touched most of the accounts he and Ellen had, but he had taken half of the savings, enough to live on for a year if they were careful. He tried to imagine Ellen without him. She’d be the same she always was, working early and leaving late. Who knew, maybe she’d meet a doctor and fall in love again herself. He’d be happy in a one-room studio with April, but April kept insisting that they needed an extra room for guests. “Who needs guests when we have each other?” he said.
“We have to have a guest room,” she said, and she looked so suddenly panicked that he took her hands in his. “You want a guest room? You got a guest room,” he said.
“Good,” she said, and the tight way she was holding her shoulders loosened.
And then, two weeks before he was due to meet April, he got a call from an advertising
agency in Boston for a job. A man named Marc Ryser told him they were looking for a vice president of Thoroughbred, a boutique agency with some high-end clients. It was in Boston, but they had branches all over the place, in Pittsburgh and California, which gave him a surge of hope. He’d be crazy not to interview, but the only day he could get it was for the day he was to meet April. Well, it was early in the morning. He’d be done before ten, and then who knew? Maybe they could leave with a job waiting for him, the perfect segue to a new life.
The fog was beginning when he got to Boston. He had kissed Ellen in the morning, leaving the house after she did so she wouldn’t see the suitcase he was taking, the letter he was leaving for her, the cab that would take him to the airport. Thoroughbred was in the Prudential Building, on the twentieth floor. Bill looked around at the photos. The usual framed diplomas, white parchment against black wood. There, on the desk, a photo of Marc Ryser and his wife, a toothy brunette in a red dress, and a few kids and then in the back, a big colored photo of a bunch of kids in soccer uniforms, “The Blue Cupcake” in script across the jerseys. Bill leaned forward, his heart jumping. Synergy. He had read about the universe making connections for you, showing you that not only were there coincidences, but they had real meanings and importance. “That’s quite a photo,” Bill said.
“Soccer,” said Marc. “You got a kid who plays?”
Bill shook his head. “No kids.” He had heard that companies wanted you to have kids, wanted you to be a family man. He hoped it wasn’t the case here.
“Really? Kids are the future.”
Bill couldn’t take his eyes off the photo and when he looked up, he saw Marc eyeing him curiously. “Oh, I know someone who used to work at the Cupcake,” Bill said.
“Really?” Marc sat down at his desk. “Who?”
Bill heard the tick of the clock. For a minute he wasn’t sure what to do, and then he couldn’t help his smile. “April Nash,” he said. It was the first time he had ever said her name out loud to another person and he felt the sound of it thrum in the air.
Pictures of You Page 29