“Look, I’m back on the clock now,” she said, “and I’ll be with them continuously till we’re back at home. You concentrate on getting ready for your speech.”
“Thanks,” I said, although it was a total simplification that I only had to get ready for my speech. I had to run my corporation while also getting ready for my speech. She touched me lightly on the shoulder and I leaned in, almost as if I were asking her to forgive me, or maybe hug me again (she’s a very skilled hugger). She must have just put on her perfume, because it rose from her very fresh, with a parsleyish topnote that I didn’t usually smell. I felt that she felt sorry for me. This belief was something I took out occasionally and examined, this sense that despite all I had she did not envy me. I didn’t want to be envied, it would have made me uncomfortable; part of Melissa’s appeal was that she never wavered, never gave away that her regular life did not involve Cap Ferrat or private planes, that no matter where we took her or what we did, she was never impressed (or never gave away if she was), but it was still curious to me that there was no part of my life she wanted. My work is very interesting, and in professional and material terms I think there is plenty to envy about my life. I would rather be me than the nanny to my children. It’s good for everyone, of course, that the reverse is not true. But it is a little frustrating.
She moved closer, not away, and I buried my head in her shoulder and breathed in her perfume, which I think is actually not perfume but something you buy in tubes at Bath & Body Works. I don’t wear perfume, but I like it on her—it’s something extra, unexpected. She has a pixie cut and projects an impenetrable asexuality. I think that was part of what the nanny agency liked in her—her southern accent, redolent of a churchy upbringing, and the fact that it is impossible to believe she has ever, or ever would, have any sex life. I’m sure she must, but there’s something about her that shuts the subject down, even in your own mind. Like Mary Poppins, although Mary actually does seem wildly sexual, comparatively, all skirty-flirty with Bert. I assume Melissa is a lesbian but I also know that she would never ever tell us this or give us any information with which to deduce it. We know nothing at all about her inner self. Our intimacy is a one-way valve: she knows everything about us, and I mean just about everything—the code to the house’s security system, Nova’s poor WPPSI-IV scores, the pay stubs in the desk, the stained undies in the laundry—but she herself is a pale fence in a cool, empty field.
The things we do know about Melissa we can count on one hand, and they seem almost staged—she likes elves and detests (theatrically) bananas, which she can smell across a room, even if there is just a tiny bit of one in a smoothie. They give her a particular headache, right between the eyes, which the rest of us are blessed never to have experienced. These seem like traits she chose to appeal to Nova, created for Nova, that will be replaced by new preferences and torments when someday she goes to her next family.
“You’re a good mom, Shelley,” she said, in her South Carolina accent.
“We lost her,” I whispered. “For half an hour. I was sure she was gone. I would only say this to you, but I had actually come to the point where I accepted she was dead. It seemed over. It was real to me.”
She looked into my eyes. Her eyes had a film of liquid over them—she was always so emotionally aware that she was on the verge of tears, not for her own situation but for her awareness of my own pain. It was a finely calibrated grief, and mostly for me—she would never have permitted herself actual tears. “It could’ve happened to anyone. It really could have. It’s the age. They have speed but no sense.” And then, switching to a wry look that disowned her previous statement, she added, more sharply, with less of the honey: “Does that make you feel any better?”
“You are very kind,” I said dryly.
“My job is very safe,” she shot back, and I felt tears start in my eyes and gave a sniffy laugh and then I did feel somehow a little better.
“Melissa, I’m not an alarmist” (am I? no—I’m a weigher of risk), “but tomorrow, keep the kids here. The pool and the patio, that’s enough. They can play inside too. They don’t need the beach anyway, they’ve had enough of that and Nova’s been getting a lot of sun. And let me know if you see anything. You know. Anything off.”
“Of course,” she said. “Do you want a security detail as well? The hotel can probably arrange it.”
“Can they?”
“This kind of hotel? Sure,” she said. “Routine for them.” I raised an eyebrow. Sometimes she reminds me of me.
“Really? That seems like overkill,” Rafe said, coming out of the bathroom with his toothbrush in his mouth. A little foam bubbled out from his lips—I registered Melissa’s brief, clinical, nurse-like moment of professional disgust.
“You know, it’s probably overkill, but let’s do it. Just to be on the safe side. Just until we’re sure everything is OK.” Rafe rolled his eyes at me, toothbrush still in there.
Melissa nodded. Once Rafe appears in a towel she tends to clear out quickly. She took the children away, mid-dinner, Blazer holding his bottle, and balanced on her arm Nova’s barely nibbled-at “plat enfant” from room service. I heard their bath running, distantly, in another part of the suite. Rafael and I were at last alone.
“I am so wiped out I can’t wait to crash,” I said, setting my alarm for 2:25 a.m. so I could call into the directors’ meeting back in California.
“Did you ever get back to Brad?” Rafe said, lying on his back on the big upholstered bed. I groaned.
Rafe tossed a large tasseled pillow up into the air. It hit the chandelier, which tinkled.
“Do you think this is working?” he said.
I had stepped into the bathroom to remove my makeup and I came out dabbing at my eyeliner.
“Do I think what is working?”
“Our, uh, situation.” He gestured airily—headboard, you, striped curtains, the sea. He looked at me, with the advance guilt of regretting what he was going to say next. “Our life.”
I stopped dabbing the washcloth and closed my mouth, which was hanging open. “Is this something about Melissa? She’s fantastic. I don’t blame her for what happened today, do you? I mean, maybe she should have spoken up and said that in her opinion it was too much for us to take both kids for the whole afternoon, but it’s our job to make sure she feels comfortable speaking up like that, and for her to manage up takes courage…”
“God, no, she’s great. She’s our fixer,” he said. “God, Shell, can you just…”
“Do you think we need to hire more help? We’ve got a good team in place and my understanding is they’re feeling a good balance of challenge and capacity, but—”
“Just turn it off for a sec.”
“Turn off what? My phone’s over there. My Conch is in the bathroom.”
“Turn it down a couple notches. Slow down. Talk to me.”
“I’m talking,” I said factually. “I’m talking about how staffing levels at home might be adversely impacting the ability of our nanny to make decisions—”
“Can you hear yourself? Can you just stop talking like that?”
“What?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean it the way I meant it either.” He threw the pillow into the air again and we both watched it come down. “Look, if today isn’t a wake-up call, what is?” He looked straight into my eyes. “It’s all I can think about. She could have died.”
I nodded, but I thought he was being dramatic.
“I took that call,” Rafe said. “I shouldn’t have. But you know what? You shouldn’t have taken yours.” A glimpse of white teeth, curved creases at the edge to set it off. A smile between parentheses.
“Why would your call take precedence?”
“Because I was already on the phone! You know what? It doesn’t matter. We’re living too close to the edge. Our streak was bound to end—that’s a gambling metaphor.”
“I caught that,” I said mildly, unhooking an earring.
“Ugh.” He squeezed the pillow. “I hate what this has all become. It’s just…work.” He rolled onto his side and lowered his voice. “Can we keep it going? Are we keeping it going? Think about if we’d lost her today.” He looked at me, straight on—his brown eyes, intent and boyish, fixed on this possibility. “This would be a different night. This date—we would remember it forever. The beginning of a horrible new life. Can you imagine? It could have happened. It basically did happen. If she could wander all the way to the street, she could have wandered into the ocean just as easily. God knows what that guy was up to. Who was that? It’s only luck that she’s here, alive. It’s no credit to us.”
I came and lay beside him on the bed in silence, considering this. The lowermost crystals of the chandelier moved ever so slightly in the breeze from the open French doors to the balcony. A strand of spiderweb connecting two of the crystal drops sagged nicely, in a perfect parabolic curve, forming a little bridge that a spider could cross.
“We’re lucky,” I said. But I didn’t mean it. We’re smart.
“She’d be gone,” Rafael said. “We’d have lost her—there’s a stunning finality to that. You don’t get a do-over. Can you imagine it?”
I tried to imagine it, the way I thought he wanted me to. I pictured the inquest, what they’d say: “So, Mr. Pérez, you were on your phone? Ms. Stone, you were too? You didn’t think of hanging up to search for your daughter?” He was right that it’d be awful: the jury laughing, the headlines in the paper, our jobs lost, our reputations, everything, and of course, that was leaving aside the worst part, Nova dead.
“She’d be gone and it’d be our fault,” he said.
I shook my head very hard. “Rafe, no! That’s the counterfactual, the what-if. We can’t let ourselves get upset about that. Everything’s like that. There’s always a grisly alternative scenario. Behind the worst thing you can think of, there’s always a worse one. People don’t want to acknowledge it, but risk is always alongside us. Even Melissa said it could have happened with her there.”
We both knew this was a lie; it would not have happened if Melissa had been there.
“We didn’t have to both be on our phones, though,” he said. “Other people, you know, can turn them off. They leave that stuff at home. I call my brother and he doesn’t even know I called! He definitely doesn’t get back to me. Regular people who are only VPs go on vacations where they don’t even check their email except in the morning and at night. They don’t have to be on. They don’t have to answer every time it rings. They don’t have to get up at two in the morning after a beast of a day.” He eyed the alarm clock with disdain. “They don’t always, always have so much riding on their shoulders. I’ve got to say: that life is very appealing.”
I looked at him with shock. What about it was appealing?
“Haven’t you had enough yet? I thought someday you’d have had enough. I thought we were both hard at work building something amazing but someday we’d be able to step back and admire it. I’ve believed that, all this time. But it’ll never be over. You’re never going to be finished. You’re never going to slow down.”
“Well, not yet,” I said.
When we were first dating, I didn’t really understand why Rafe liked me. I knew why I liked him, and I felt flattered someone like him was paying attention to me, but I couldn’t quite make it out from his perspective. Once I asked him.
“You remind me of my father,” he told me then. “The way you work—the way you keep going no matter what people do to you. You’re different.”
I was touched, because Rafe’s parents had a hard life. Rafe’s father came to the United States from Cuba as a young man. He’d been an executive at a sugar company in Cuba, and in the U.S. he got a job as a cashier and started over. A few years later his brother died, trying to make the crossing by boat, and he didn’t see any of his other siblings for twenty years. He had to redo his education, taking classes at a university. He was always working when Rafe was growing up, gradually rebuilding what he’d lost.
“You seem rattled,” I said, getting up from the bed. “It’s natural, it was scary. But in the scheme of things, it’s small ball. Stuff just happens. People get in car accidents all the time. They get cancer. They wake up on an ordinary morning and there’s a lump on their neck, like this woman who used to work in accounting, and a few weeks later she was dead. She went into the hospital thinking she had strep, and they said, no, you have at most four weeks left.”
“So?” he said.
“I’m just saying. Likely things don’t necessarily follow likely things. What you fear isn’t what gets you. It’s comforting to think so, but that’s not the way the world works. All kinds of things happen. You don’t think they will, but they do.” I sniffed hard, holding back the tears. “After what I’ve been through, that’s the one thing I know, if I know anything: all kinds of things happen.” I shook off the tears and went on, more briskly. “But the flip side is, if something didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. Count your blessings and put it behind you.”
He was quiet.
While I was giving this impassioned speech I was peeling off my underwear and putting on my white ruffled pajamas, the ones that Rafe says make me look like a Swiss milkmaid. “Heigh-ho,” I said suggestively, seeing myself in the large gilt mirror on the wall. I brushed my hair.
Rafe kept his gaze fixed away from me. His face was reddened, a little swollen, out of its usual sculptural shape, the lines that, when I brought him to a company holiday party many years ago when we were first dating, made the entire marketing department exchange admiring looks. One of his eyebrows starts less cohesively than the other, more staccato, as if the brow itself is like a deck of cards waterfalling into place, shuffled by a card sharp. It gives him an air of duplicity and intrigue, not at all off-putting.
“We’re not good parents,” Rafael protested. “We’re not used to being with the kids. They need more of us, Nova especially. We need to focus more on them. What if I peeled back a little, from my job. I could do some consulting. Focus on supporting you and adding value at home. I’d take the kids to the Exploratorium a few times a quarter. Isn’t there a zoo? We could get rid of the night nanny. What would you think of that?”
I blinked, startled.
“You don’t mean it,” I said. “You’d be bored this fast.” I snapped my fingers, but quietly so we didn’t disturb the kids.
Rafe, who is always competitive, snapped his fingers louder, inadvertently proving my point. “I want to try something different.”
“This is coming out of nowhere,” I said.
“I tell you all the time how much I hate my job.”
“Yes, but…” I thought that was just something he said as a social person, to relate better to other people who did hate their jobs. When he was sad on Sunday nights I thought it was just a different form of the excitement I felt about getting ready to storm out of the gate.
I thought, take a moment before you reply. I felt an emotional response welling up, and my training kicked in and I did not allow the emotional response to determine my statement of reaction. Let your gut have its due, I tell my direct reports, but don’t let its voice be louder than the data. “Interesting idea. I might need a moment to process that,” I said.
Rafe, who helped refine my patterns, my stock responses, and who knows when I’m using my work persona on him, snorted, sighed, and smacked his stack of pillows to create a dimple for his head. “OK,” he said. “You want me to do a SWOT analysis for you?”—which is a basic rough-and-ready strategy and planning tool: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats—“Fine, I’ll do it. You want me to get McKinsey in here too? Ask them whether it’s optimal to have sex tonight. Or, you know what, don’t bother.”
“Don’t snip at me. All I wanted is to talk about it tomorrow,” I said. “It’s been a day and a half. And I think of us as a couple where we both have big jobs, and we’re both committed to creating innovation and actively ch
anging the world and being at the top of our fields, and it’s hard for me to swivel away from that idea, because that’s what I want for our family.” My voice had gotten, somewhere along the course of delivering this perfectly reasonable speech, whiny.
“I am so fucking tired of innovation,” Rafe said. “I’m tired of everything. I just want to sleep without you waking me up at two a.m.”
I stared at him.
“Ask me how it’s going in Mexico,” Rafe said, swatting the tasseled pillow onto the floor and sitting up. The question turned out to be rhetorical, because he kept going. “It’ll be a disaster. I can’t just mark time and piss in the wind, while going to meetings and pretending it’s all great. You wouldn’t be happy doing that either. Things are falling apart for me, and I can’t do it anymore. Maybe something new, like getting a South American office started, would be OK. But if that doesn’t work for us, I’d rather just spend time with the kids while they’re young, play games with them, teach them baseball. I don’t know. But I can read the fucking tea leaves, darling. This—it’s not working.” “Darling” is the endearment he lobs when he’s angry, as if he thinks it throws a lacy pink tablecloth over everything else.
He got off the bed. His dark hair was a little greasy, luxuriantly curly even in the back where it’s thinning and you can see through to his scalp. He pulled off his clothes, jeans, white shirt, tossing them onto the floor near his navy blue slip-on espadrilles.
I didn’t say anything. His cock was, for once, soft and hanging slightly to the right, just as tan as the rest of him. I think he goes to a tanning parlor but I don’t question him about it. He is muscled, lean, and tall. I am still completely surprised by his physical body, and his interest in me. He is the most athletic guy I have ever been involved with by an exponential factor. Also, this is true: he’s the only non-comp-sci major I’ve ever slept with.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 4