Thirteen years later, the secrets of the world still danced their elusive ballet. The magic circle did not exist. Jared sidled up to Erica and handed her a baggie. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “Jamaican.”
Erica looked at it quickly and then stuck it in her diaper bag. “How much do I owe you?” she asked.
“Oh, for you, nothing,” Jared mumbled.
“That’s not fair,” Erica said, handing over forty dollars. She had no idea what an ounce of dope cost these days.
“Uh, thanks,” Jared said. “See you around.”
: : :
Late that evening, Erica put away laundry while Ethan undressed and shaved. She asked him if he’d read the Grant Fishel article in the Times.
“Yep,” he said, drying his chin off with a towel. “It was very superficial.”
“What do you mean?” Erica asked.
“My work is more global in nature.” Ethan wrapped himself in the cushy cotton bathrobe he’d stolen from a Hyatt Hotel on one of his business trips.
“Global?” Erica shoved his underwear into a drawer.
“I’m isolating the essential elements of exchange in capital markets and converting them into universal guidelines. Investment banks have traditionally been reactive. If Grant Fishel uses my systems, they can be proactive—you understand what I mean?”
Erica didn’t really, but “proactive” had a positive sound to it.
Ethan placed his hands over hers and gripped them tight. His eyes looked close and far away at the same time. He turned off the lights.
“Tuck me into bed,” he said.
: : :
Erica extracted her arm from under Ethan’s chest and rolled to the far end of her pillow where she could breathe. She got out of bed and breathed even easier. She padded down the hall past the bedrooms where her family slept and walked downstairs to the basement laundry room, where she’d hidden her baggie of dope in a plastic blue case originally intended for crayons.
She liked getting high. She liked the way the ordinary became slightly different, the colors slightly heightened, the sounds a deeper vibration. She lay on the playroom carpet, savoring the sensation of the altered room.
But what she liked best, she realized a few days later, was the illicit thrill of pulling the dope from its hiding place and smoking it late at night, in a stolen secret moment all her own. She liked that first second, when the blood rushed to her head and her limbs got all light and tingly. Illicitness is cheap when you you’re fifteen. For Erica it was a rare commodity. She carried that little kernel of a thrill around all day long.
CHAPTER NINE
Ari, the Israeli fitness instructor who thought he was God’s gift to women, strutted around aerobics class with his T-shirt riding up his six-pack abs. Erica’s heart raced after forty-five minutes of step. She paced back and forth, letting her pounding heart settle down before doing a hundred sit-ups. All this effort and her belly still bulged out of the top of her tights. In the first row, Justine Baum, wearing a Victoria’s Secret underwear set instead of a leotard, applied lipstick midstretch.
“I’m going to quit this class,” Lisa said as they put away their steps. “I swear, half the girls in it are professional models. I don’t have time to deal with the damage to my self-esteem anymore. Speak of the devil—”
Justine, who had worked as a model before marrying a back surgeon and giving birth to two children, and with whom Erica had never exchanged so much as a full sentence in her whole life, inserted herself between them.
“Hey, Erica! Your husband, Ethan, works for Grant Fishel, right? I read the article in the Times.” She shook her sleek auburn hair out of its ponytail.
“Yep, he’s quoted in there,” Erica said, fluffing her depressingly limp hair. Maybe she needed one of those extra-volume shampoos.
“Does Ethan know Stephan Langston?” Justine pulled a pair of leather pants over her bikini-cut panties.
“He works on Ethan’s floor,” Erica said. I met him at a party. I met Don Johnson there too.”
“You didn’t! Wow! I never would have thought it!” Justine reached in her Louis Vuitton bag for a leather appointment book. “We should set up a playdate for Dylan and my Andrew,” she said. “How about next Tuesday?”
“Erica, let’s get going.” Lisa picked up both gym bags and shifted on her feet.
“I’ll call and confirm,” Justine said.
: : :
Justine, true to her word, called and confirmed, and Erica dropped a reluctant Dylan off at her house in West Meadow Estates on Tuesday. Ethan was off in the Florida office on one of his business trips, which were becoming increasingly frequent.
“Again?” Erica had asked him as he threw a bunch of shirts she’d just picked up from the dry cleaners into an open suitcase, plastic and all. “You’ve been spending so much time there you’re going to develop a Southern accent.”
“I’m setting up my systems in the Boca Raton office,” he said. “But, hey, something for you to look forward to: get a babysitter for Friday night. I’ll be home in time for us to go to a party this trader I know, Josh, is having. He lives in Tribeca. You’ll like him.”
Between dropping the twins off at Kindermusic and Dylan’s planned pickup time from Justine’s, Erica managed to nail down Mrs. Lutock for Friday night as well as swing by her mom’s real estate office to drop off a sweater she’d borrowed.
“I wonder if Debbie’s gotten the results of her blood tests,” Mom said, scratching the back of her neck. She enjoyed alluding in a serious tone to information she suspected Erica wasn’t privy to.
“About those bruises on her arms and legs? She’s blaming them on some mysterious blood disease.”
Mom erupted in a short, nervous laugh. “Oh, I don’t know, honey. Medicine is a foreign language to me. If only she didn’t have to stand on her feet all day. I wish she could afford to quit her job and stay home, like you.”
“I’m on my feet all day,” Erica noted. “Often nighttime too.”
“Well, you know what I mean,” Mom said, checking her appointment book. “I have to run. An open house over on Clavier. But let me know if you need something special to wear for Friday. We seem to wear the same size these days.”
Great, she fit into the same clothes as her sixty-year-old mother. Debbie must wear a size 6. Erica sat in the car thinking of blood and feeling slightly sick, which was odd, because blood never used to bother her in the slightest. In her one year as a nurse in Boston, she’d drawn plenty of blood.
If she still worked as a nurse, would that qualify in her mother’s eyes as standing on her feet all day? At the time, her parents were disappointed by her career choice. If Debbie was the artistic one, then Erica, by default, needed to be the academic one, but she’d failed to fulfill her potential. In school she had quivered with a restlessness that made it impossible to concentrate on the causes of the War of 1812, or when a train traveling 120 miles an hour would crash into another train traveling eighty miles an hour in the opposite direction, or for that matter, any knowledge confined to pen and paper. She drummed her hands against the desk or passed notes to her friends, watching the big clock at the front of the room ticking away her life.
So, second-tier college instead of Ivy League; so, nursing instead of premed. And the irony was, at BU she concentrated, because she saw a light at the end of the tunnel. As a nurse she could immerse herself in a real world that demanded competence and split-second action. She drank tons of coffee and stayed up all night to make up for party weekends; sealed herself in her room through the endless snowy winters, struggling through organic chemistry and biophysics and calculus; passed them all with flying colors; and landed a job at Brigham starting the first day after graduation.
She started in the emergency room, drawing blood, mostly. She was good at it: finding the sturdy vein popping up out of the forearm, ja
bbing the needle in quickly, pulling her wrist back, watching the red blood fill the syringe, withdrawing the needle, applying pressure and a bandage, all the while distracting her patient with a calm hand and conversation. In the emergency room, there was never any slack time. You never knew what the next minute would bring. Even during stretches of quiet, she remained on alert, awaiting the next all-absorbing crisis.
Then, perhaps impressed by her skill, the powers that be transferred her to the cancer ward. That was a different kettle of fish. Time moved excruciatingly slow there for her, but it was running out for most of her patients. She coaxed protein shakes down the throats of emaciated men dying of lung cancer. She attached tubes to orifices, changed unpleasant messes, stood pointlessly by as bad news was delivered. One day a woman in her twenties, her body ravaged by breast cancer that had spread to the brain, asked for a pen and paper. Erica gave it to her, and in a few minutes she handed it back. In shaky script, she’d written one word: “why?”
Why indeed? In this nightmare world, Erica’s only purpose was to serve as an efficient and kind voyeur of tragedy. This was not the kind of purposeful action she’d anticipated. She was already pregnant with Dylan then, and she quit her job. They were moving to New York soon anyway. She thought she might apply for a job on Long Island, back in the emergency room, but when Dylan was born, he filled up her whole world in the most solid way she had ever known. For a magical period, she did not watch time tick by; she simply lived within it. Then came, in short order, Jesse and Jake, and Sophia, and a series of promotions for Ethan at Grant Fishel that precluded any ambition of hers to work for pay.
She retrieved Dylan from Justine’s. Justine gave her a tour of her five-bedroom colonial, complete with fifty-inch projection television, suites for both her kids, and a West Indian housekeeper busily erasing mess.
Back home, Erica sank into a chair, blurry-headed, and absorbed the wealth of her own kitchen: her cherrywood cabinets, hand-built by Amish craftsmen; her Italian tile backsplash hand-painted with sunflowers; the sturdy wooden Brio set scattered carelessly on the floor. Their shiny surfaces, so deceiving, shattered into component atoms. All this abundance merely camouflaged danger bubbling up from a rent in the earth. There wasn’t any point in sharing such perceptions, which came upon her increasingly often, with anyone. Lisa would tell her to buy a new dress. Mom would nag her again about losing weight and hiring a housekeeper. Debbie would advise her to call the doctor. Ethan would tell her to get a grip, and he was never home anyway. Maybe Jared would understand, but he was only a kid.
Ethan liked home-cooked meat, grains, vegetables, and salad to be waiting for him when he came home for dinner; the consequences of growing up with a mother who ground her own wheat berries. But with him in Florida the whole workweek, she didn’t need to exert such effort. She splashed water on her face in a partially successful attempt to clear her head, put a tray of fish sticks in the oven, julienned a few carrot sticks, and heated up a can of baked beans.
After dinner and bath time, with Dylan closeted in his room working on his Lego robot, Erica read about Horton the Elephant to the twins while nursing Sophia. They all fell asleep together on the boys’ double mattress. Erica woke up an hour or so later in a tangle, Jesse’s feet at her shoulders, Jake’s head on her foot, Sophia nestled against her chest, Dr. Seuss hard under her right arm. Her foot tingled where Jake lay on it. Slowly, she disengaged herself and edged toward a vertical direction, clutching the baby. She padded down the hallway, placed Sophia in her crib, and then sat on her new bedroom rug staring up at the skylight. The moon was full and sat smack in the middle of the glass, making her new rug shine beautifully, thick and slightly yellowed, like heavy cream. It was woven from the hair of rare North African goats, imported from Morocco by a real estate friend of her mother’s whose cousin owned an exclusive carpet store in Long Island City. With Ethan in Florida, she could perform her dope-smoking ritual here on the clean soft carpet rather than in the basement. And that was what it was rapidly becoming, she realized regretfully: a ritual, like Dylan’s tennis lessons and her aerobics class.
Later, stoned, she started obsessing about blood again. She saw blood dripping down Jared’s shirt and Ron’s eyes all bloodshot. She saw Debbie wiping down her glass coffee table, spraying Windex on bloodstains that wouldn’t come clean. She saw blood on the floor of the emergency room and blood spurting from a punctured arm and red veins bulging in a dying patient’s withered neck. She was scared to stand up, and she couldn’t make the blood go away, so she closed her eyes and fell asleep on the carpet, waking up only when Sophia’s hungry cries came over the baby monitor. Her body felt numb and heavy. She picked up Sophia, and they settled down in their corduroy chair.
CHAPTER TEN
Erica bought a new outfit at a boutique in Huntington for Josh Hendrie’s party, still size 12, two sizes bigger than before Sophia. It was a burgundy washed-silk item with shoulder pads, a dropped waist, and a short skirt, accessorized by retro-patterned nylons and three-inch strappy heels.
Friday afternoon she ran her hands along the silk, sucking in her stomach. She still looked three months pregnant. As she trotted gingerly down the stairs in her new heels, Sophia in her arms, her mother burst in the door.
“That’s a pretty dress, Rikki, but isn’t it a bit short?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Erica smoothed the silk over her belly bulge, wishing she could sand it flat.
“I don’t know—it seems perhaps you should wear something more matronly, but what business is it of mine?” Her mother smiled brightly. “I’m in a rush, but I had to bring by the most adorable baby outfit from Julia Olsen. You know the Olsens. I sold them that colonial in Manhasset?”
“Thanks, Mom. It’s real cute.” Erica dangled the tiny velvet pantsuit with her spare finger as she nudged aside a pile of mail on the kitchen counter and mixed up rice cereal and defrosted breast milk for Mrs. Lutock to give Sophia.
“You know what I’ve been thinking, honey,” said her mother, wincing at the clutter. “Isabella once a week isn’t enough help. Not with all you have to do. You need a live-in housekeeper who could work here all the time. All the girls have been talking about a wonderful agency, right here in West Meadow. Housemates.”
“Whatever.” She opened two cans of Spaghetti-Os, poured them into a saucepan, and set it by the stove with a note for Mrs. Lutock to heat it up.
Shaking her head, Mom scraped a few toast crumbs off the kitchen table, set down a business card for Housemates, and dashed out the door.
: : :
Erica caught the 5:35 out of Mineola. A minor surge of excitement rippled through her regarding the party. Even if it proved disappointing, at least no one would be discussing Jared’s wheat-induced diarrhea. She sat on her cracked leather seat, alternating between watching industrial nothingness drift by through grimy windows and leafing through a Newsday someone had left behind, catching up on all the news she’d missed. An unsolved murder in Texas. A hurricane in Bangladesh. Genocide in Africa. A weekend section reviewing all the movies she hadn’t seen and plays she hadn’t heard of. Everywhere, events were spiraling out of control.
When she finally arrived downtown, it was past rush hour and the emptied-out streets of the financial district looked shadowy and canyon-like. The rectangle of buildings at the end of the street framed a strip of orange, the last remnant of the setting sun. The early-evening air felt cool and humid, and a mingled effusion of odors emanated from restaurants and bus tailpipes. It seemed like a movie set: the action was about to begin. She met Ethan in Grant Fishel’s lobby.
They walked hand in hand through the cool dark streets. “You look really pretty tonight,” Ethan said. “It’s so nice to be alone for a change.”
“Yeah,” Erica agreed. “This was a crazy week. Justine Baum invited Dylan over for a playdate. Would you believe she reads the New York Times? She read the article about Grant Fish
el.”
“Who’s Justine Baum?”
“That woman in my aerobics class who wears underwear instead of a leotard. I thought I told you about her.”
“Perhaps. I don’t remember.” Ethan stuck his other hand in his slacks pocket, pulling out one of his noxious clove cigarettes.
“And apparently Debbie took a bunch of blood tests to find out why she’s getting all those bruises. You know, she keeps claiming it’s a disease, but I don’t buy it. I think maybe Ron’s beating her, and she’s covering it up. Battered wives do that, you know.”
“I think you’re overreacting. Just because he’s a boring, meat-throwing jerk doesn’t make him a wife beater. Listen, no offense, but do we have to talk about your sister and her family every time we have a conversation?” Loose Life Savers and used Kleenex tumbled out of Ethan’s linen pocket, joining moldy leaves in the gutter.
“I’m sorry.” Erica tightened her grip around his hand. “I don’t mean to obsess.”
“You know why they don’t have any windows in the New York office? For the same reason they don’t have windows in a gambling casino. They don’t want workers distracted by the weather outside. Or maybe they don’t want them jumping out the windows.”
“That clove smell is gross,” Erica said.
“Sorry.” Ethan stubbed out the cigarette and added it to the gutter mess. “I should quit these things. I don’t smoke them in Florida, you know. The Florida office has windows.”
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