The Real Liddy James

by Anne-Marie Casey

  “Do you have a minute?” said Sophia briskly, and as it was not really a question, Rose nodded and followed her into the spacious corner office, avoiding the large glass wall, as the vertiginous view made her feel nauseous.

  “Sit down,” said Sophia, and Rose did, wincing audibly as her recently injected right buttock met the chair.

  “They just sent me the cover of my new book. What do you think?”

  She pushed a glossy sheet of paper across the desk and Rose lifted her glasses from the chain around her neck and examined it. It was an unmistakably derivative dark gray cover with silver beads winding around the words Bad Boys in Books: From Lucifer to Christian Gray. Rose peered closer and saw that within each bead was a picture of a hero from a novel.

  “That’s Heathcliff? And Mr. Rochester?” she said, and Sophia nodded. “It’s brilliant, Sophia. How interesting. The development of an archetype . . . of course . . . Lucifer is by far the most interesting and romanticized character in Paradise Lost, the fallen angel, the devil who brings his own hell with him. And to go from there to Fifty Shades!”

  Sophia grinned happily. “Yes, well, I thought there might be some interest in a literary investigation of why sadism is quite so sexy to some women. Not to me, I hasten to add.”

  “Nor me,” said Rose quickly, sitting up straight, and in the process feeling the stab from her buttock again. She suppressed her whimper in case Sophia thought she had been spanked, but Sophia did not seem to have noticed.

  “I mean, dominant women often have to choose a man for . . . practical . . . reasons,” she said. (At this moment, Rose remembered seeing Sophia with her husband in Whole Foods. Her husband had been following her with the shopping cart, a baby in a papoose strapped across him, as Sophia instructed him to ensure the papayas were ripe.) “But the fantasy is always Rhett Butler, right?”

  “Mmm,” replied Rose noncommittally.

  “It’s not exactly groundbreaking,” Sophia continued. “But I’m on PBS tomorrow to discuss why type-A females enjoy submission, and that’ll be good for the department.”

  Sophia glanced out the window for a moment, and then moved seamlessly to a not entirely unrelated topic. “I read the interview with Peter’s ex”—Here we go, thought Rose—“she sounds terrifying. But we all know with her schedule she must be on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

  Now she glanced at the photo of her three small children pinned on a corkboard next to a printout of her Outlook Express calendar detailing a comprehensive program of after-school activities, revision schedules, and meal planning.

  “I don’t know why I said that. All of us with kids and a job are hovering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, right?”

  Rose was unsure how to respond to this, so she changed the subject. “Well done on the book. I’m sure it will do really well.”

  “Rose, you are without doubt one of the nicest women I have ever met.” Sophia stopped as there was a sudden awkward catch in her throat. “And one of the best teachers . . .”

  Rose looked away, as was her custom when complimented, and waited for Sophia to finish. She didn’t, and when Rose looked back there was an expression on Sophia’s face that Rose had never seen before.

  “This is a nightmare, so I’m going to say it quickly. You’ve met the new provost, haven’t you?”

  Rose nodded yes. He had seemed a charming, avuncular man who had made a great fuss of Peter at the champagne welcome reception.

  “He’s instructed the faculty promotions committee to make the process of renewing senior lectureships and off-ladder faculty more rigorous. Your contract is up at the end of next semester, Rose, and they are going to expect a publishing record.” She pulled open her desk and withdrew a tatty brown file with Rose’s name scribbled across the top. “You’ve been here twenty years, I know, and you have one of the consistently highest student ratings in the entire college, but tell me you’re working on something right now, because the last article you wrote was seven years ago. Why?”

  Because I got together with Peter, and he was writing his book, and then Matty came to live with us and the whirl of meals and homework and playdates began and I didn’t want him to go to camp every vacation and the next time I looked up five years had gone by and it’s always past ten o’clock by the time I’ve nagged him into bed at night and I’m too tired and it’s as much as I can do to keep up with the course work and in six months I could be dealing with something bigger than all of this put together and I don’t want to be like you, hovering on the edge of a nervous breakdown every day, or like Liddy with her fleet of staff and no personal life, and I’m happy with everything as it is . . . or was . . . or . . .

  Rose said nothing. Sophia reached over and patted her hand and Rose noticed that Sophia’s fingers were slender and elegant and she wore a beautiful ring of pewter and amber on her right forefinger.

  “This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to write a few thousand words of something before the end of the summer and I will pull every string I have to get it in print. I don’t want to lose you and I’m sure you don’t want to lose your job. Okay?”

  “Thank you,” said Rose, relieved finally to stand up.

  “You know what my father used to say to me. Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

  And with that Sophia started checking her e-mails and Rose walked to her own office, wondering as to which bastards Sophia was referring.

  Finally safe among her own things, Rose knew she must consider the numerous “ifs” and “buts” of her current situation but found it almost impossible to concentrate. Thinking it might be her disproportionate irritation at the loss of her heel, she took her boots off, stuffed them in the bottom of a cupboard, and put on the pair of unworn sneakers that still nestled beside the filing cabinet from the year she had foolishly attempted to take up cross training.

  This did not work. The strands of her thoughts ricocheted from subject to subject and knotted themselves around the unknown. Of course she should write the article for Sophia—drink Red Bull, stay up late—and keep her job, but what if the pregnancy actually went to term?

  Suddenly her heart leapt. She would have two children!

  She went over to her shelves and ran her hands along the spines of the books that had always been as close as friends to her. She greeted Little Women and Little House on the Prairie and thought how those stories had shaped her ideal of what a family could be: a group of loving, energetic kids, doting Marmee, and wise and reliable Pa. She felt euphoric. But she would be a forty-six-year-old new mother with a teenage stepson and a nearly sixty-year-old partner. It was time to get real. How could she keep working outside the home? Even thinking it made her feel exhausted.

  “You were looking for me, my love. What’s up?” Peter had come into the office without knocking. He looked pale and weak, as he always did after his classes, and Rose remembered with a jolt that he could hardly fix a door hinge in a brownstone in Carroll Gardens, let alone build a log cabin in Minnesota.

  “Sophia says my position won’t be renewed unless I publish something this year.”

  Peter flinched and Rose knew she had made a mistake. In her excitement, she had said the wrong thing first. He turned his back to her and stared out the tiny window at the staff parking lot.

  “I’ve been warning you about this for ages, Rose. For God’s sake, when I met you I told you to start writing something or you’d never get on tenure track. They need to make cuts and this place is full of young adjuncts who teach and publish. I don’t trust that awful woman, with her media-friendly theses straight out of popular fiction masquerading as scholarship. And neither should you.”

  “I do trust her, actually,” said Rose. “She says it’ll be all right if I deliver something in the summer, but—”

  “That’s good,” he said quickly. “And of course she’ll want to keep you.”

&nb
sp; “I hope so. Listen, there’s something else I have to tell you.”

  She smiled and took his hand. She linked her fingers through his.

  “We’re pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “I know,” she said, “it’s insane, isn’t it? I don’t even know how to feel about it. How do you feel about it?”

  “Surprised,” said Peter, before smiling, “but delighted,” and he stepped forward and took her in his arms. He said nothing more, however, and a tiny muscle in his cheek twitched as she pressed her face against his.

  Henry James would have written a sentence two pages in length describing how the reverberations of Peter’s physiognomy reflected his feelings about her announcement, but Rose was conscious only of his silence.

  Matty took the news of the impending arrival of another half-sibling like a man. He even agreed to be sworn to secrecy, but one month later, after positive blood and nuchal tests, he overheard Rose telling her brother on the phone and so let it slip to Liddy when she called him that night to check he had done his homework. Liddy’s immediate response was to be glad for Rose. She knew well what the desperate longing for a child felt like, and she welcomed the advent of a new life. But then came the irrational sob from deep within her of I will never be pregnant again, which she silenced first with vague annoyance that she was not considered important enough to have been part of the subterfuge, and next with specific annoyance at Peter. Liddy asked Matty to hand the phone over to his father, on the pretext of congratulations, and then asked Peter outright how long he and Rose had been trying for a baby.

  Although Peter wanted to tell her to mind her own business—entente between them had not recovered to anything like cordiale—he decided to tell her the truth, which was that the baby was a surprise (to others he said “a shock,” although never to anyone who might repeat it to Rose), and Liddy certainly was surprised. Afterward, Peter wished he had lied, told Liddy that in his advancing years he had become desperate to have another child, because he still wanted to hurt her if he could and he knew she would find that upsetting for reasons he had never told Rose. He would have been gratified to learn that, even with no lying, Liddy was hurt and upset, despite having no right to be.

  The following Wednesday, as had become the custom, Liddy arrived at Carroll Gardens with Cal for a “family” dinner. One evening, a couple of years before, Liddy had appeared at the door to pick Matty up so giddy with multitasking that Rose feared she would faint and so invited her in to share yesterday’s leftover meat loaf. This evolved into Rose cooking for all of them once a week, and the two women found they enjoyed it. Peter found reasons to schedule seminars, interdepartmental working groups, and additional office hours on Wednesday nights from then on.

  In fact, his absence allowed an ease to their interaction; there were no off-limit subjects, no phrases of Liddy’s that Rose felt put his teeth on edge (at the beginning whenever Liddy smiled Peter winced like he had been pinched), and while they could not allow themselves to be proper friends, something Liddy was extremely out of practice at anyway, they had found a way of coexisting that was genuinely good for the children. Liddy always made an ostentatious display of switching off her phone, the signal for quality time, and they would sit together chatting companionably at the kitchen table.

  This evening, as Liddy and Rose picked bits of skin off a chicken carcass, Cal dozed on some cushions clutching his threadbare cuddly kangaroo and Matty sat at the computer in the library researching his project on the Civil War. Because she was now nearly four months gone, Rose allowed Liddy to clean up, although it was clear that Liddy had only offered to be polite. It had been a long time since Liddy had wiped down a greasy sink, and Rose had to mask her irritation at the flicking of bleach wipes over the stainless steel by moving to the enormous couch and collapsing onto it.

  “Mom!” called Matty from the library, and although Rose started, it was Liddy, of course, who headed toward the pocket doors.

  “Did you know that seven and a half percent of the soldiers in the Civil War were Irish?”

  “I didn’t know the exact number,” said Liddy from the doorway, “but I did know that one-third of the soldiers in the Union Army were immigrants, more Germans than Irish, in fact, and one in ten . . . I think . . . were African Americans.”

  “I’ll check that,” he said, to Liddy’s approval, and she watched him admiringly as he typed quickly on the keyboard. She did not walk into the room, however. It was the one room in the house she still could not bear to go into.

  Every time Liddy walked through the front door, she marveled at how comfortable Rose seemed to be living among the evidence of Peter’s former life. Tonight, in the hallway, Liddy had tripped over the vintage Tony Hawk skateboard she had given Peter one Christmas; opened a drawer in the kitchen and found a couple of Post-it notes in her own handwriting; and now she was looking at a photograph of herself in the hospital with newborn Matty, still on a bookcase in a silver frame her secretary had given them as a wedding present.

  Liddy would have dumped all these things into the garbage.

  “How do you spell secession, Mom?” asked Matty.

  “One c, two s’s,” said Liddy, glancing over at Rose, who nodded. Then she came back to the kitchen, to discuss her plans for her second, potentially best-selling, book.

  “So this is the outline,” she was saying, gingerly scraping bits of potato out of the sink and peering into the drain as if unsure what might lie beneath. “It’s called How to Break Up without F**king Them Up: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Successful Co-Parenting. What do you think?” Liddy genuinely wanted to know. She intended to take advantage of Rose’s considerable editing skills.

  “Sounds good,” replied Rose carefully. “It’s memorable and witty.” And Peter’s gonna go CRAZY! she thought, but decided to keep quiet and listen as this promised to be a particularly fascinating conversation, especially if this book followed the format of the first and juxtaposed practical advice with personal experiences.

  “I’ve got all the headings for the chapters. The first one is ‘Family Is Still Family’—have dinner together once a week, like we do—”

  The expression on Rose’s face stopped her.

  “What?” Liddy’s right foot was tapping impatiently on the stone tiles.

  “That wouldn’t work for everyone,” Rose said, unconvinced.

  “Okay, I’ll put month, right? Family dinner once a month—”

  “As long as no one starts shouting . . .” said Rose firmly, turning to tuck a blanket around Cal. He stirred awake.

  “What did you do at school today?” she said.

  “We had a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. I dissected a frog.”

  “Gross!” came Matty’s voice from the other room.

  “I didn’t mind,” said Cal calmly. “I liked to see where all the bits went.”

  “Surgeon!” whispered Liddy happily. Then she scribbled a note on the page. “I’ve said meet at a restaurant.”

  Rose smiled. She leaned over and kissed Cal on the forehead and he wrapped his skinny arms around her neck. The touch of his soft skin reminded her of a dream she had once had in which Liddy was killed in a car crash and she and Peter had adopted Cal. When she had juddered awake, she had been aware only of a feeling of pure maternal love, and because Rose did do guilt, she had then been appalled by the workings of her subconscious.

  Meanwhile, Liddy had remembered something. “I went on a date last week.”

  This was not unusual. For the last two years, Liddy had gone on the occasional first date, but as they never progressed to a second, Rose had a suspicion Liddy only did it to keep up appearances.

  “That’s great, Liddy. Who is he?”

  “He bought the apartment below me last year. Lloyd Fosco. He’s an actor on television. Pretty successful, I think, judging from the financial statem
ent he gave the co-op. He’s big, and hairy, and a bit younger than me . . . but he is attractive.”

  This was unusual. Normally Liddy was set up by work colleagues. Meeting newly single people was a perk of their job.

  “What’s he in?” she asked. Rose had never heard of him, but that meant nothing. Peter did not believe in watching television, so her viewing opportunities were severely curtailed.

  “I can’t remember the name,” replied Liddy. “It’s some huge series set in a hospital. I really must catch up with it if we go out again. I can’t tell him I only watch PBS, the E! network, and Rachel Maddow.”

  “I love Rachel Maddow,” said Rose.

  “So do I,” said Liddy. “In fact, Rachel is my imaginary friend. Sometimes when she’s on, I close my eyes and I pretend she’s sitting in the chair beside me making me laugh.”

  Rose quickly returned to the subject of Lloyd Fosco and the date. “How did it go?”

  “Okay, I think. We had drinks and he wants to see me again. He’s booking dinner. He says he wants to talk.”

  “He wants to get to know you. That’s good,” said Rose. “Just be careful, because if it all goes wrong you can’t hide from him. He lives in the building.”

  “Oh, I’ve thought about that,” said Liddy seriously. “I persuaded the doorman to give me a key to the service elevator. Now . . . chapter two. Remember to enjoy the time you have with your kids, i.e., don’t waste it droning on about table manners or homework. Ask them questions. How was your day? What do you think about climate change?”

  Liddy continued in her positive pitching tone, while ineffectually lifting things in the kitchen and moving them from one place to another, which she called tidying.

  “Liddy. I think table manners and homework are quite important.”

  “Pfft . . .” said Liddy, the distinctive noise she made when questioned. “You know what I mean. No child wants to come through the door after a long day and be harangued about music practice. It’s dull and a surefire way to make them resent you. It goes for adults too. I honestly believe that at least half the divorces I do are because someone got bored.”