by Jonathan Dee
She put her end of the stroller gently on the floor and turned and walked away as fast as she could. Jonas and April were standing by the nearest turnstile with that look of infinite sarcastic indulgence kids always wore when they had to wait for you. Cynthia panicked for a moment, thinking that they would surely ask her what all that was about and knowing she was still too rattled to make up an answer; but they didn’t say a word, they couldn’t have cared less. They turned and ran their MetroCards through the slot and walked ahead of her down the steps to the express track.
Cynthia was neither offended nor flattered, really-mostly she just thought it was hilarious. She couldn’t wait to tell Adam about it. It did bother her a little bit to think that this kind of unsanctioned activity went on without her, that she was not a part of it, even though she had no desire to be part of it-married strangers hooking up in earshot of their kids. Who knew? Maybe this sort of decadence went on all the time. There was a time when she might have at least led the guy on a little bit just to shock herself, when anything that new to her would have presented itself in the form of a hypothetical dare.
“Earth to Mom,” Jonas said. A train was already there at the express platform, its doors just sliding open, and the kids had quickened their steps to catch it. She ushered them along in front of her, where she could see them; when the doors opened, they stepped inside, and then a voice from on board the train roared, “Hold the door!” She heard a ticking sound; it was the cane of a blind man, white-haired, wearing an old blue blazer, a baseball cap, and enormous wraparound sunglasses. He seemed angry about something, or at someone. “Hold the door!” he yelled again, though someone, not Cynthia, was already holding it. His cane swung incautiously at about ankle level, swatting the base of the seats, the pole at the center of the car, the door frame, and people’s legs. She couldn’t tell whether he was actually orienting himself this way or just panicking. She took another step back, to avoid the cane’s arc-not because she feared it would hurt, but because she didn’t want to send the man any kind of false information-and then it happened: the doors closed with their two-note chime, and she was on the platform and they were on the train, and as it pulled out she saw the look of terror on Jonas’s face, though he might well have been terrified mostly of her, banging her hands on the glass and screaming Wait.
Even before she’d reached the end of the platform the train was moving too fast for her, and there she was, watching the train lights shrinking away from her down the tunnel. She couldn’t turn away from it. She could feel that the strangers behind her had stopped moving too: nothing was moving anymore but that train. “You got kids on that train?” a voice said behind her, a young voice, a man’s voice. Misfortune made everyone familiar with you. “How old are they?”
Cynthia turned around and tried to answer but could not. She could actually see a black circle forming at the edges of her own vision.
“Go to the booth and ask for a transit cop,” the young man said-he was wearing a huge Knicks jersey. “You go,” someone else said to him contemptuously. “You’re going to send this woman up the stairs? You can’t see she’s about to pass out as it is?” Over their heads she heard a gathering roar, and she thought at first she was fainting but it was a real roar, there was another express train pulling in beside them. Two people were holding her gently by the elbows. The children had disappeared into a tunnel: it didn’t seem real. “What’s your name?” an older woman’s voice said.
Cynthia got on the first car of the train and groped her way to the locked front door that faced forward into the darkness. She understood it was a stupid idea but the logic of the situation was all dream logic now and she didn’t feel there was anything to discuss. The children’s fear filled every cell of her. She had to go find them. She had to put her face flat against the glass in order to see past her own reflection, even though there was nothing to see for a long time but the track and the steelwork that held open the tunnel and the ghostly local stations they sped through without stopping. Finally she felt the train slowing down beneath her feet and the lights of the platform at 59th Street floated toward her. She burst out onto the platform and only then did it occur to her that there was no real reason to think that the kids had gotten off here at all, maybe they were still crying on the train as it continued on its long loop beneath the city, but then she saw a cop farther down the platform and the cop had his hands on two children’s shoulders and the two children were April and Jonas.
“You’re here?” the cop said, not very sympathetically. “I just radioed 86th Street to look for you there. That wasn’t real smart, getting on another train.” The kids were staring at her with the blank expression of kids overhearing their parents fight. Even an hour later Cynthia couldn’t remember much about how she got them back up the stairs and into the bright street and into a cab and back home, but she didn’t recall any of them saying a word the entire way.
She made Adam sleep in the kids’ room that night, so they could both stay in the big bed with her. The next day she kept them both home from school. Adam was a little surprised but put it down to erring on the side of caution: they were quieter than usual, it was true, but it was hard to tell-even for April and Jonas themselves-how much of their anxiety was still their own and how much of it came from being treated so solicitously, as if something terrible had happened to them. He told them both how proud of them he was for being so brave and for being smart enough to ask for help from a police officer, just like they should have. He said that anytime they wanted to talk about yesterday, he was there for them; but that was not Cynthia’s approach. She sat the kids down together and asked them what questions they had, about what had happened yesterday, and about why Mommy hadn’t gotten on the train with them, and when they came up with nothing, she took that as evidence of how traumatized they were, how quickly you had to act before what was in them buried itself so deeply you were never going to get it out again. She let them return to school the next day but was so worried for them that she sat them down to talk again as soon as they got home, just to compensate in case she’d made a mistake. That night April woke up sobbing from a nightmare. Ten minutes later both kids were sleeping beside their mother and Adam was curled up in Jonas’s short bed watching the shadows, awake but too tired to get up and turn the nightlight off.
By the weekend, they seemed to have gotten past it; they were a little less clingy, and that uncharacteristic wide-eyed silence in which Adam or Cynthia would sometimes come upon them diminished and then was gone. They went to the Radio City Christmas show and packed for the trip to Costa Rica and ate at 3 Guys and it all seemed behind them.
But Cynthia was unconvinced. Every night she postponed Adam’s sleep demanding to know what more he thought they should do about it. He tried his best to say all the properly sympathetic things; he was pretty sure that the suffering she ascribed to them was really her own, but the great thing about Cynthia was that no matter how stressed she might get, she always returned to her own center, somehow, if you had the patience to just let it happen. But when she told him Wednesday night that she had called Dalton to ask if they could recommend a psychiatrist who specialized in treating children with PTSD-and that not only was there such a person but she had already made an appointment with him-Adam started to wonder whether the whole thing was getting out of hand.
“In a few days,” he said soothingly, “we’ll all be sitting on the beach, and we’ll have a new perspective on everything. Them too.”
They were whispering because though the kids had been put to bed down the hall hours ago, you never knew.
“Not so much,” Cynthia said. “I called the resort tonight and canceled our reservation.”
He struggled up onto his elbows and stared at her.
“The plane tickets weren’t refundable. Sorry about that. But I told the kids and they’re fine with it. We’ll have Christmas at home for once. It won’t kill us. I just don’t feel like being in a strange place right now.”
> She started crying.
“But something has to change around here,” she said. “Something has to start getting better. You can’t just do nothing.”
“It will. Things are going great.” It was true, and yet even as he said it he could feel himself starting to panic. “Bonuses are this week, you know. It’s only going to get better for us.”
“I know it. But time doesn’t mean the same thing to you and me anymore, you know? You’re all like, in ten years we’ll have everything we want, and in the meantime I feel like I need binoculars just to be able to see to the end of the fucking day.”
“Look,” he said pleadingly, “I don’t blame you for being upset about what happened, but isn’t there another way of looking at it? I mean, April and Jonas knew what to do. They did exactly the right thing. In a way it should make you worry less. Plus, I don’t want to make light of it or anything, but it’s New York. You can’t protect them from everything.”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t live here, then,” she said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Maybe we should live somewhere else. Maybe we should be living a different kind of life. Who says it has to be this way? You think this is the best life we could be living? There’s so little space here. There’s so little room to move. It should feel safe but it just feels exposed. There’s got to be somewhere else for us to go.”
He was nervous about touching her all of a sudden. “I thought you said you wanted to stay here, though,” he said tentatively.
She shook her head, wiping her eyes. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “This is the only thing there is for me to be good at. And I suck at it. In fact I’m terrified I’m getting worse at it instead of better.”
“Cyn, it was one bad hour out of their lives. You seriously think, as good as our lives are, that that’s what they’re going to remember?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “You think you’re born knowing how to forget shit like that?”
Each December Sanford took them out to lunch one by one and gave them their bonus checks, along with a kind of performance review, known among the staff as the State of the Career Address, that helped explain the amount. The business itself was his whim, and while they all knew that it had been a profitable year, there was no expectation that the relative size of the bonuses reflected anything more precise than Sanford ’s own fondness for them.
They were good enough friends to joke about their fear. The whole operation was so mercurial that it wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility for one of them to be fired at his or her bonus lunch, or for all of them to be handed a severance check and told that Sanford had decided to shut the place down. Adam, whose lunch was scheduled for the Friday before Christmas, was on a roll. He’d put together the first round of financing for a generic-drug start-up that was poised to get huge in a way few people other than Adam had foreseen; and he’d set up a friendly takeover of Wisconsin Cryogenics, friendly enough to keep the volatile Guy from Milwaukee in teenagers and blow for the rest of his life. The hardest part about putting that together was getting Guy to keep his mouth shut about it, so the stock wouldn’t overreact and screw the deal.
Sanford took Adam to Bouley, where they split two bottles of wine before the boss produced a check in a glassine envelope. “Open it,” he said immodestly, as if there were a ring inside.
Adam opened it and saw it was for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was much more than he was expecting, or had received in previous years, and he’d heard enough to know that none of his colleagues had gotten anything close to it.
“This is between you and me,” Sanford said unnecessarily. In his old age he cried more easily. “This is not about the past year. This is about the future. I need to make sure you aren’t going anywhere. I need to be sure you know how you’re valued. I’m getting to the point where I need to think about the legacy that I leave in this world.”
Like a lot of his peers, Sanford maintained his social profile through lavish entertainments tied to charities; it wasn’t long after bonus season, when presumably they were all feeling flush, that his employees were dunned to buy tickets to that spring’s annual benefit for an organization close to his heart, the Boys and Girls Clubs of New York, to be held on the deck of the Intrepid, the decommissioned aircraft carrier that served as a floating naval museum at one of the Hudson River piers. A thousand dollars a head. For those who worked at Perini it was not an invitation there was any question of refusing. Adam bought a ticket for Cynthia as well. Normally he wouldn’t have forced her hand like that, but he needed to see a little of the old Cynthia, radiant at a party, for her sake but also for his own. She was so down these days, and though for the life of him he couldn’t see what there was to be down about, he was so used to being grounded by her that he had a real fear that, wherever she was drifting, he’d end up drifting right out there along with her. He couldn’t figure out what to try other than maybe to reenact an evening when she was happier.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but for that night, at least, it seemed to work. Cynthia was beaming as she shivered in a black dress in the hangarlike space below the deck of the ship, drinking some kind of themed martini, the center of attention among Adam’s colleagues from Perini, none of whom had sprung for the extra grand for a date. They took turns asking her to dance. He could see how smitten they were with her, with the idea of her, proof of life after marriage. Even when they got a little drunk and their gaze became a little more direct, it did not occur to him to feel jealous, because she deserved their attention. They ate rack of lamb. They saw Tiki Barber. Sanford and his wife came magnanimously by their table, everyone happily drunk.
“One of these things is not like the other,” Sanford said, smiling rakishly at Cynthia. “What are you doing at this table full of empty tuxedos?” He held out his hand to her, and when she held out hers, he kissed it. Victoria smiled into the middle distance.
“So nice to see you again, Barry,” Cynthia said.
“Please. The pleasure is all mine. You are the absolute jewel of this sorry gathering. Let me ask you something. Do you dance?”
“Not really.”
“Splendid. Son,” he said to Adam, “you don’t mind if I make off with your wife for a while, do you? Adam may not have told you this but I am a dance instructor par excellence. Among my many talents.” He held out his elbow; Cynthia, with a mock-frightened glance at her husband, put down her martini and glided off on Sanford ’s arm toward the dance floor. Victoria saw a friend a few tables away, or pretended to, and she waved and chirped and left the table without a word.
“Unbelievable,” Parker said, not without a little envy in his voice. “Fucking old goat. And with his wife right there too. Amazing what that guy gets away with.”
Parker’s bonus, Adam knew, was so insultingly small that he had skipped right over resentment and moved straight to terror. He emptied another martini, and beckoned to the waitress with the empty glass. “There’s no buzz,” he said to Adam, “like that good-cause buzz.”
“True dat,” Adam said. In fact, though, the drunker he got, the more restless and vaguely surly he began to feel, which was unusual for him. He could feel himself smiling, so he stopped. There was a bar up on deck as well, and he headed outside to visit it, just to get away from the table for a few minutes. On the stairs he turned and was able to pick out his boss and his wife on the crowded dance floor. It was a field of tuxedos but his eyes were drawn right to them. He watched Sanford turn her around and around in that small space; he said something that made her laugh. It made Adam nostalgic. All the energy and heedlessness and faith in herself that he had always adored had lost its outlet and so that faith had backed up, as it were, into the lives of the children. What was worst was that the life of maximized potential they had always believed in for themselves was still right there in front of them, closer than ever really, but she had stopped looking forward to it, she wouldn’t even lift he
r head to see it. When he told her about the bonus, she had mustered a polite smile and whistled, like, How nice for you. It was both thrilling and a little sad to see her out there dancing like her old self, drunk and luminous, because it took a crazy setting like this, a fantasy almost, to bring it out of her again. Maybe life needed to better resemble the fantasy. Not that there was some thousand-dollar gala to go to every night. But whatever it was that had to be done, it was his turn to bail her out; she’d bailed him out in more ways than he could count. He couldn’t picture what he might have become without her.
He knew his boss well enough to have no doubt that seducing Cynthia was the one and only thing on his mind right now. It didn’t bother him. Not just because he knew it would never happen: it was right, somehow, that that was what Sanford should try to do, regardless of the fact that his wife was standing right there, or his love for Adam, or the presence of hundreds of onlookers. That was the point of a life like Sanford ’s. You pursued what you wanted.
Up on the deck there was some kind of disturbance in the line for drinks: a frat-boy type in front of Adam was complaining to his friends that the kid at the front of the line, who looked about nineteen years old, was chatting up the bartender. “Mack on your own time, Junior,” he said. “Some of us are thirsty here.”
The kid turned around. He had a huge nose, one of those noses that starts practically on the forehead, but on him it looked sort of Roman and oddly handsome. “Take it easy there, Bluto,” he said, and Adam’s eyes widened gleefully at the audacity of it. “She’s my sister.”
“What?” Bluto said.
“I’m not shitting you,” the kid said. “I think we’re twins.” Though he had his drink in hand, he turned back and started murmuring to the bartender again.
Another Wall Street tyke, Adam thought, another kid blowing his bonus money on a party where he thinks he’ll network with people who don’t even know he’s alive. The whole bonus thing got to him, actually, in a way it hadn’t before. He’d been given a big bonus this year. What did that even mean? Maybe he should buy himself a sailboat, or find more expensive hotels to stay in during the few weeks a year he was allowed to travel where he wanted instead of Charlotte or Omaha, or see if he could find an even more overpriced school to send his kids to? He felt like a sap. Everybody acted like the amount mattered, when what mattered was the notion of getting a bonus at all, of being outside that small circle wherein it was decided how much a man’s work was worth, how close you had come to some goal somebody else had set for you. Sanford could have given him two million and the principle would still be the same. Meanwhile time was going by, and the life around you started to calcify while the Barry Sanfords of the world paid you to wait to be told what would happen next.