The Comedown

  “I was working late,” he said. “I needed to rearrange some personnel. May I sit?”

  She nodded, scooting back, and he sat, shifted his hands out of his pockets, sighed with exhaustion. She followed his eyes to the butterfly still hanging from the ceiling.

  “Glad to see you never got tired of Grandma Mimi’s butterfly.”

  “It’s like my best friend.”

  He laughed and rubbed his upper lip with his index finger, a thoughtful and good-natured tic that still pleased her as reliably as it had his constituents. He had a gentle face, the recessed eyes, long, blunt nose, and aquiline cheekbones of Richard Gere.

  “Joss-Sauce,” he said, and wrapped his arm around her. “How are you, kiddo?”

  “I’m good.” She traced a patchwork tessellation on her bed quilt. “You haven’t called me kiddo since before high school.”

  His eyes got large. She thought he might be lost in some fit of existential panic, and then she realized it was a joke. “Are you really that old?”

  “Daaad,” she mewled.

  “Really, are you not in high school anymore?” He checked his watch. “I didn’t get that memo. Did a memo even go out?”

  “No memos went out, Dad.”

  “I think memos should go out daily, and I think I should get a carbon copy of every single one!”

  “Dad, you’re gonna wake up Mom.”

  “No I’m not—she sleeps like a stone.”

  Jocelyn giggled.

  “Okay, well, I just wanted to check on you,” he said. “Your door’s open and everything. I was in the neighborhood, et cetera.”

  “Thanks for checking on me.”

  He leaned in close to her. “Nothing bad storms this castle, okay? I promise you that.” Then he kissed her on the forehead, stood up, and left.

  It wasn’t until long after she’d broken up with Steve, after she’d met and fallen for Leland, after she’d graduated college and married him and taken the position at Lefébvre, that she put together what her father meant by nothing bad storming the castle. She was three years out of college, three years into her job at Lefébvre, and had been in New York to meet with a client. Leland had flown in to spend the weekend with her. They had gone to a St. Josephine reunion on the Upper East Side, which had been in a velvet-lined gastropub overlooking Central Park, swarming with exfoliated women and their rakish Allenton husbands. She was unbothered by them because she was with a husband who fit her to jigsaw perfection, who saw the best in her and in whom she saw the best as well, who had ascended to the same heights the Allenton men had achieved but without their privilege. She loved him and felt she would always love him. She thought his presence would be enough to deflect whatever strangeness occurred that night, but she was wrong.

  Late into the party, when everyone was the kind of civil drunk that was enough to get them dancing, Jocelyn and Sandy sat at the near-empty bar drinking Cuba Libres, a drink Jocelyn thought nobody ordered anymore. Sandy’s hips had gotten wider over time, and gravity was already starting to have its way with her face and chest. But she seemed to be the same person she’d always been, still happy to rest her soft chin on Jocelyn’s shoulder and say something like “Tell me everything and spare no detail!”

  “So I know you don’t live around here,” she said, smiling sloppily into her drink, “but you’ll be happy to know Corey’s family’s finally gone belly-up. His mom used to be Page Six and now it’s all over for them.”

  Jocelyn hadn’t allowed herself to think the name in so long that she heard it as a strange combination of clicks and hisses. She asked Sandy to repeat herself.

  “You don’t remember Corey Louis? The kid from your graduation party? When we snuck over to Allenton?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Sandy’s face softened in pity, which embarrassed Jocelyn to the point of breathlessness. “I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up. I just thought you’d be happy.”

  Jocelyn wanted to venture a why, but she didn’t. The realization lodged in her throat with the frightening weight of a foreign bolas, dimmed her vision.

  “His dad contracted with Woodward Foods,” Sandy said. “You didn’t know?”

  Jocelyn took a long swig of her drink. When she finished, Sandy had apparently remembered that the mood was supposed to be celebratory. “Ugh, sorry, I’m drunk. I’m so drunk! I’m just surprised, is all.” Her eyes narrowed mischievously. “After what he did to you, though—they’re all wearing the mark of Cain.”

  Jocelyn steeled herself. “Tell me what happened.”

  Sandy leaned forward, chin in hand. “The Louis firm’s bankrupt. There was a divorce. The dad’s out of work and Corey can’t get hired. He might be on the sex offender registry; I could check if you want me to.”

  Jocelyn drained her Cuba Libre. “No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

  When they got back to Chicago, she put in a special request with her team lead at Lefébvre to be taken off the New York account for at least six months. She had already proven her talent to be leveragable, and her clients fell in line without resistance. She busied herself with the firm, Leland’s emotional needs, and biweekly phone calls back home. She volunteered at an after-school program in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood and went to awareness-raising meetings about child trafficking in the Midwest. Sometimes she did want a child, but Leland didn’t, and neither did the tough little knot in her head.

  In May of 1999, they flew to Florida for Leland Sr.’s funeral, which Leland said he wanted to attend out of “cosmic justice for the wronged.” The hated Diedre had organized it cheaply. This was Jocelyn’s first time seeing Lee—disheveled, disoriented little Lee, less a criminal in the making than a character out of a Dickens novel—and his inexplicably striking mother. They stood across Leland Sr.’s casket from them, Leland scowling, his arms crossed and Jocelyn’s arm looped through one of his elbows. Next to her stood a tall black man, arms crossed as well, glasses tortoiseshell, eyes downcast respectfully. To look at the rabbi would be to risk looking at the black man, and to look at the casket might be construed as some gesture of respect for the deceased, which would upset her husband. Looking at Lee and his mother was out of the question entirely, and Lee’s translucent child-skin plus the pair’s mucusy sobs added up to something too pathetic, anyway. She looked at her feet.

  The last prayer was said and the casket lowered. The assembled dispersed, Leland falling into aggressive lockstep with Diedre, who buried her face in her hands at his approach. Lee clung to the bottom of her coat as Leland spoke to her. Jocelyn could hear her husband barking “lawsuit” in a wolfish tone she had never heard before and didn’t care to hear again. Diedre started walking faster, but Leland kept pace—eventually the three of them were a distance away, far out of Jocelyn’s earshot.

  Jocelyn had walked slowly through the swampy heat, sponging at her moist forearms with her palms. She found herself wondering how many months on average it took the coffins to sink through the marsh loam and float out into the Atlantic. That had to be something that had really happened, one of those old wives’ tales that started out as the truth. She imagined a herd of Floridian coffins headed for Cuba, one of them popping open en route. There were footsteps behind her.

  Up ahead, leaning against the trunk of the old Saab they’d rented, Leland shouted, “I’m going to follow Diedre home, hon!”

  Diedre ran ahead of him to her car, Lee clumsily kicking up gravel as he trailed her. Jocelyn felt a bloom of warmth in her lower stomach and realized it was embarrassment about her husband.

  “Okay,” she called back.

  “What?”

  “Okay! Go ahead!”

  “Let me drive you somewhere so we can call a cab for you!”

  An entire shouted conversation. She rubbed her temples. The footsteps behind her stopped. The black man was standing over her right shoulder. “I’ll drive her,” he said.

  She saw Leland squint up at the man, vision obviously hampered by
the damp, oily sun that she suspected had already begun to redden the back of her neck. There was a moment of recognition, she could tell, then a visible shift in Leland’s mood: he cocked his head, then hung it apologetically.

  “Is that okay with you?” he called to the man.

  The man shrugged, tossing up his hands as if to demonstrate that he was weaponless. “It’s not a problem, honestly.”

  Diedre peeled out, Lee’s somber little face pressed to the passenger-side window. Leland watched them go, then jumped over to the driver’s side of the car and began fiddling with the door. “Okay—that sounds fine, I guess. Babe, just call me when you get to the hotel!”

  “I will,” she said, though he couldn’t have heard.

  “I trust you!” he shouted, and slammed shut the Saab door.

  The man was standing next to her now, arms folded. “Was that for you? Or for me?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think it’s a very emotional time for him—he’s saying a lot of things he wouldn’t normally.”

  “Of course,” the man said.

  They stood facing each other now. The man extended one of his hands and she took it. It was damp, or hers was.

  “My name’s Caleb Marshall,” he said.

  “Jocelyn Woodward. I—um,” she stumbled. “I didn’t take his last name.”

  He nodded and gestured to a cluster of mangrove trees farther down the gravel pathway. “Shall we?”

  They walked to his rental, which was tiny, and got in. The seats were convection-hot, and Jocelyn could feel the backs of her thighs burning through her dress. She gave him the name of the hotel and the cross streets. He switched his glasses out for sunglasses and sat straight-backed, chin in hand, which struck her as strange until she realized he must be considering the route. When he finally shifted confidently into drive, she felt light-headed, as if she’d left one dream to enter another.

  “So he’s mad?” Caleb asked, looking not at her but the contents of his rearview mirror.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your husband’s mad about Leland Sr.?”

  She searched her lap, then the dashboard, as if for a misplaced pocketbook. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Caleb shrugged. “He doesn’t like his father.”

  This was a strange postmortem of a funeral. Maybe she should make that joke. But how would that make her look, making a joke right now? “They didn’t really get along, no.”

  “I can imagine. Our families were … entwined in certain ways.”

  “I’m—he never told me.”

  “Oh, please.” Caleb laughed a generous man’s laugh. “I don’t know if he even knew.”

  They drove in silence for a minute or two. She had the distinct impression that she was being deceived, but she didn’t know exactly how, or why. She recalled a ballet recital when she was six, standing behind the black velvet curtain at the rec center, the pathetic trickle that stained the tulle around her thighs. She felt like that now, remembering her mother’s anger when she never took the stage.

  “Why did you come?” she asked.

  Caleb nodded as though he had been anticipating the question. “Because Leland Sr. paid for my college,” he said. “And he left me some money for law school. Between him and scholarships, it’s been a free ride.”

  “He left you money?”

  “Cash, yeah. Unmarked bills. I had to deposit it very slowly, but I managed to pay everything off.”

  “Does Leland know?” But of course he didn’t. “I’m sorry—where did the money come from?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “My guess is drugs.”

  Caleb looked at her dead on, though of course he wasn’t really looking at her, there were sunglasses between them. He looked away, to his right, then back ahead. “Well, I respect him. He did what he could with what he had.”

  The conversation had become bewilderingly intimate. She wanted out. They passed a gas station, then another.

  “I’m not going to share my father’s profession with you if you don’t know about it already,” he said, and it sounded like a judgment.

  They drove on in an extended silence, the longest of her life. Who the fuck was this guy? Did Leland know him? He must, from Cleveland. She thought of her mother’s tight lips, her folded hands.

  She realized now that her dress was too hot, black wool. He was wearing a well-tailored suit with a turtleneck; he must’ve been boiling, too.

  “My father was Reggie Marshall,” he said. “A friend—so I’m told—of your late father-in-law.”

  The name was unfamiliar; maybe she would’ve heard it if she’d been paying better attention to Leland’s family saga.

  “I’m really sorry about your father, whatever happened with him,” she said, “but I have no idea about any of this. I’m just here to support my husband. We’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  He nodded as if to music and seemed to back off. “I understand,” he said. “I understand completely.”

  The hotel parking lot came mercifully into sight.

  She told him he could drop her wherever he wanted. He stopped abruptly and started looking for something in his wallet. She waited for his permission to leave the car. He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote something on it, then gave it to her. It was his name and e-mail address: [email protected]. “Keep in touch,” he said. She took it from him, shivered from the car’s air conditioner, and nodded politely. She decided she would throw it away when she got back up to the room. She would tell Leland what happened and Leland would shake his head and say, “Everyone at that funeral was scum. Absolute scum. Don’t let any of them fool you.” Then he’d hug her and reassure her of her sanity. They’d make plans to move to a nicer neighborhood when they got back to Chicago. Leland would tell her that he couldn’t bear to bring a child into a world as ruined as this one, and she would tell him that his feelings were certainly justified, but maybe he should consider x, y, z. She would call her father. She would sit in boardrooms at Lefébvre and speak in French with other young professionals.

  But she didn’t throw out the piece of paper. She hid it in her purse for reasons unknown. When Leland got back to the room that evening, a trunkload of recovered goods in tow, they didn’t talk about Caleb Marshall at all. Instead Leland lay on his side on the bed and cried about himself and his mother, told her about the paintings and the jewelry and the yellow briefcase he’d recovered, the one he was scared to open, and why hadn’t Diedre opened it already? Jocelyn spooned him and kissed the back of his neck and promised that everything would only get better after this, that all people had at least some good in them and that there was no amount of emotional damage that couldn’t be undone. And as she said this she was imagining Caleb Marshall leaning across the divider between the driver and passenger seats, taking her face in his hands to kiss her.

  Since that night, she’d thought about Caleb more than she’d have liked to, followed his career online, sent him the occasional e-mail. She told herself she was doing this because of his strangeness, the things he claimed to know about her husband and his father. She was doing her job as a wife. In 2005, she saw that Caleb had graduated from Berkeley Law with high honors—his mother, a woman named Natasha, kept some kind of black-identities-in-academia blog and wrote a post about his graduation. At the bottom was a photo of her and Caleb on graduation day: he in a variation on the cap and gown (a gold-brimmed hat with a blue tassel, gray-looking felt stripes on his sleeves), and she in a striking red dress. He was hugging her and she was wide-eyed, mid-laugh, clearly euphoric. The caption read: “Uhuru! My beautiful son fulfills his destiny, 6/6/05.”

  She set up a Google alert for his name. She watched as he joined a firm in Cleveland—they made a small announcement on their website. Shaker Heights Pioneer Press: “Young Lawyer Fights Ludlow School Closing.” “Beachwood 2007 5K Run for Life, Finishers: Caleb E. Marshall.” Cleveland Plain Dealer, a picture of Caleb onstage in a ratty-looking school auditorium: “Lawy
er Tells Central Teenagers About Racial Profiling, School-to-Prison Pipeline.” When he got a Facebook, she considered friending him but didn’t, worried that he’d forgotten about her. He used no privacy settings, so his profile was visible to anyone. There he was with some girl, Meggie or Maggie (Jocelyn never bothered to read the tag) at a party. They had parties in Ohio? There he was at the gym, posing with someone he claimed was his personal trainer. Dancing—he was always tagged, he posted infrequently—at someone’s wedding, at a christening.

  The Internet was an incredible tool, she reminded herself repeatedly as the years wore on. Entering these new worlds de-stressed her. There were so many ways to use the Internet to de-stress: trolling through photos of Sandy’s recent vacation to the Cayman Islands (her husband had always been husky, was starting to look fat), photos of the second wedding of one of her NU a cappella sisters (Jocelyn hadn’t been invited, wasn’t insulted), photos of the Lefébvre CEO’s birthday party at which she’d developed a huge headache and had to drag Leland home early. But Caleb’s photos captivated in a way she hated and loved. He broke up with Meggie or Maggie, dated another girl, broke up with her, went mountain biking somewhere, and claimed to be enjoying “the single life.”

  She wasn’t friends with Lee, but she trolled his Facebook. His goofy grinning with a black-haired girl who could’ve been Italian, could’ve been Latina; his pretending to play the drums in someone’s garage; an old, awkward preadolescent shot of the side of his face likely taken by a mischievous peer, his cheeks still chubby. In early 2008 she had even written to offer him a paid position at Lefébvre, which she knew he’d never take and over which she knew Leland would explode if he did.

  A few weeks ago, just before Leland’s breakdown or episode or whatever it was, she had persuaded him to visit Lee at college on the way to a business meeting in Milwaukee. The deal was she would accompany him on the business trip and to his meeting—which she thought was weird but he claimed bolstered his confidence—and he would give repairing things with Lee a chance. She had told Leland it would be good for them both, good and healing for him especially. He’d agreed with a wild look in his eyes, and she was momentarily reminded of that night in college when he had burst into her dorm at four in the morning after almost forty-eight hours without sleep. He’d been raving, but it was during finals and their friends just called it seniorphrenia. He hadn’t acted like that since.