In the video I was telling the beach story. I had forgotten about it, about that day, and hearing it again felt unreal. It was nothing, didn’t matter, Nova was fine. It could have been such a life-changing day for us, but it had not been, and rather than feel perpetually lucky and wake up each day flooded with gratitude I had forgotten about it and chosen to take my daily good fortune as my due, my zero point. I did not enjoy the sensation of remembering and the sense of precariousness it gave me, when I was already feeling precarious, like a shovel digging out around the ground on which I stood. The data seemed to show that I was unsuccessful on all fronts.
I let the video run and opened a new window to see the house’s security feed. I selected Nova’s bedroom. It was dark, the transmission was low-res, and I could see little besides the white headboard of her antique twin bed, ghostly visible. Somewhere there in the dark was Nova sleeping.
I knew Nova was there, safe in bed, but I padded upstairs to check. I couldn’t see well from the hall, but two steps into her room I could hear her in-sucks of breath and soft exhalations and the slow rhythm of her teeth grinding against each other. I was also a teeth-grinder in my childhood, but I really don’t understand what Nova has to worry about. The darkness parted to show her sideways to the headboard, cheeks puffed out, an arm outstretched toward her pillow, upright on the floor. Her hand was open, cupped. She looked like a cupid in a Renaissance painting.
I stroked her forehead and cheek and said, “It’s OK, don’t worry. Please don’t worry. I will worry for you.” I picked up her hand, slack in sleep, and it curled around mine. I put it back on the bed. After a moment the grinding paused, her lower jaw still fully protruded, and I couldn’t even hear her breaths.
The hall was bright. Nova sleeps with her door open; we close Blazer’s. This is the kind of poor operational decision you make at home, with no strategy or forethought, so when we go on vacation and they share a room, somebody is always weeping. Very softly I tiptoed back down to the kitchen.
I opened a bag of potato chips I found in the back of the cupboard and flicked on the TV. I ate the chips, salt and vinegar flavor—“like crotches,” my high school friend Walter used to so charmingly say—in front of the TV, licking the salt off my fingers and watching a true-crime program about an unsolved double murder. It was very relaxing. My Conch buzzed with new messages from Cullen and Brad. I just couldn’t even. I took out my Conch and dropped it on the rug so I didn’t have to hear any more buzzes and ate the rest of the bag of chips, and then I ate all the even crotchier dust at the bottom of the bag and it was absolutely delicious.
Chapter 13
I was drowsing on the sofa with the empty chip bag when Rafael came home from his client meeting. Kind of late. Rafe went to the liquor cabinet, made himself a drink, lolled against the island with the tumbler in his hands. I pulled a blanket around myself and came into the kitchen and gave him the headlines on the board meeting, sounding shrill and pathetic. I told him about how disappointed Brad had been with my handling of the Cass piece, and how cornered I felt on the Powerplex deal.
“They’re going to fire me if I don’t get Conch working right and get these Powerplex people to sign on. They might fire me even if I do.”
Rafe sighed. “They would be crazy to fire you.”
“That’s BS—they will. Don’t lie to reassure me.”
“All right, have it your way. They’re going to fire you.”
“Thanks for your faith in me.”
Rafe poured another slug of rum into his glass. He said quietly, “When they do, let’s go on a real vacation.”
“What?”
“We could finally get time away. We could go to the Maldives. Or Australia. I don’t care. Go sit on the beach. Drink drinks.” He raised his glass. “How about it? Here’s to goodbye, Conch!”
I was white-hot with anger. I picked up a glass off the drainboard and threw it across the kitchen. It smashed against the wall. He eyed the shards on the floor. Then he turned to me and raised his eyebrows. He took a clean glass out of the cabinet, added ice, rum, and a little water from the faucet, and handed it to me. It was not the reaction I’d wanted.
I took the drink, still utterly indignant. “How can you say that? You know how hard I’ve worked.” I felt for an instant the weight of all of that work pressing on my bones.
“That Silly Valley piece was rough,” he said. “Everywhere I went today I heard people talking about it. But there’s always a bright side.”
The smash of the glass had been so unexpected that I was chastened. I clung to my blanket. “What?” I said numbly. I took a cold sip that turned hot in my throat.
“So, this might not be the time, but I have some news.”
I tightened the blanket like a full-body sling and steadied myself against the counter.
“Had a meeting with all the partners today.” He paused expectantly. “They want me to go to São Paulo.” The casualness of it, some kind of silvery tone under his regular tone, alarmed me. I thought I heard Jacqui’s door open upstairs.
“Fine,” I snapped. I went to the closet to get the broom to sweep up the glass. “Get it on the calendar.” Our rule is that whoever schedules first gets to go. We try to avoid both traveling simultaneously because of the kids, although it happens. We give ourselves a few freebies a year, because being wracked with guilt isn’t good either. “What dates?” I didn’t care. I was just trying to force myself back into normality.
“Like I was saying, São Paulo. Life in Brazil. What do you think?”
“You’ll be safe, right?” I said, more because he seemed to be waiting for something more from me than because I doubted this. There seemed to be a catch but I hadn’t caught it. I missed him when he traveled, especially at night when I sat on our white bed with my cool metal laptop on my lap and went at the keys solo, without the accompanying rhythm of him delicately picking out a different rhythm on his keyboard. He likes the flatter keyboards, I like the clickier ones where each key has more travel.
“They mean go down there,” he said. “Run the South American office.”
“Run-it run it? For how long? You mean be based there?”
He nodded—I had finally caught on. He shrugged and took a long swig of his drink. “It could be a year.”
I choked a little on my drink. “What else could it be?”
“Two. Three. This would be semipermanent. I’d get the South American office going, kick-start development there. There’s huge opportunity—” He looked at me as if waiting for me to say something. “On the plus side, it’s beautiful once you get outside the city. It’s not a bad place to be, at all. And once you’re there the flight to Buenos Aires is nothing.” He put his drink down so he could make hand gestures. “Don’t you see? This is beautiful. You do your thing with Conch, you withdraw gracefully—‘personal reasons’—we move to South America. It’s much more relaxed there. We could see my family all the time. It would be a whole new life.”
I blinked rapidly, trying to take this in. I sipped. I really don’t like rum. “Couldn’t you take the new role and commute home on weekends?”
His face fell. “Well, I was thinking we’d all go. Things aren’t going that well for you at Conch. You know, I was thinking—Nova’s still so young. She would pick up the language in nothing flat.”
“I guess.”
“New challenges are always good,” he said, though there was a tinge of unhappiness in his voice. “Don’t you always say that?”
“No question,” I admitted. “For sure.” I nodded seriously. I really do relish them.
“Look, if you’re committed to playing this Conch thing out, you could stay here for a while and see it through,” Rafe said, pacifyingly. “We’d move down there and you could join us when…you know, the board says enough.”
I flinched. He went on.
“I spend more time hands-on with the kids, so I wouldn’t want to give that up. If I left them here with you, I don’t think they’
d get a lot of face time with a parent. You can’t…” No judgment in his voice, just being honest about our commitments. I get that. I’m very engaged in my career. My ambition doesn’t leave a lot of scraps on the table. “You know, it’s more relaxed there. I could probably see them sometimes at lunch, for sure most evenings.”
“This is a minor setback,” I said. “Conch is a great product. Why do you think this is the end for me?”
“Well, maybe it’s not,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t believe it. “Think about it.”
My innards spasmed in a way that lifted me onto my tiptoes, and I clutched the edge of the island. “That makes some sense,” I said, because it’s good to show that you understand the opposing side’s point of view. “I have reservations, but I want to fully process them.” I massaged my nose, which felt very congested. “I see a future for myself at Conch for a long time. This is just a setback.” I glared at him. “Don’t you think it’s just a setback?”
“Do you want me to be honest?”
“No,” I snarled.
“You’re in a tough spot. I’m not saying it’s all your fault. Look, succeed or fail, you’re going to end up with a pretty decent payday, and you can use that to figure out your next move. Meanwhile you don’t want to be seen schlubbing around Atherton in your yoga pants.”
“I don’t need your doubt. You know what my talent is? It’s my complete belief in myself—and of course also in Conch. That’s what it takes to be a CEO. You don’t have it.”
Rafe gave me a look that wasn’t angry, which surprised me. He looked as if this were entirely expected and on some level amusing. “I don’t want to be a CEO. I don’t even want to do what I do, some days. I’d like to enjoy life. I can’t live the way you do.”
I hated hearing this so I pretended not to. “I understand you want this great opportunity and I don’t want to stand between you and it, but…” I sniffed. My nose and sinuses were filling with liquid. I sniffed again to get air in there. “I need to process the implications of you going away, with or without the kids. It seems intriguing, but there might be unintended consequences to the decision, like, just off the top of my head, what if it affects the speed of Blazer’s language development?” My sinuses were streaming liquid right out of the corners of my eyes. “Or, what about tropical disease exposure? Nova’s immune system is fragile. Her preschool is here. They already understand her unique learning profile.”
“It’s a city of, what, twelve million people? I’m sure we could find some kind of preschool.”
“We have to isolate some of these variables and determine whether they should play into this decision, and to what extent.” I tried to wipe my face dry with my fingers.
“Do you want me to say no? I’m trying to make the best of the options I’ve got. I thought you’d be excited for me,” he said. “I thought ambitious men were your thing.”
Sometimes I could not believe I had married him. “You thought I’d be excited to have you move away?”
He made a little gesture, a shrug with his hands. He looked seriously at me over the rim of his glass. “You think what we’ve got here is fun?”
“Well—” I tried to remember a time that was fun. What I remembered instead was how, when we were first dating and he’d come over, he used to bring a grocery bag full of my favorite protein drinks. It was a godsend, because I was always forgetting to eat. I was surprised at the time—it seemed so ordinary and simple, and yet unusually kind. It was like something someone from my hometown would have done, like bringing over a casserole.
“Don’t you think it’s still fun?” I said.
There was a pause. He did not rush to fill it. I gave him increasingly severe looks.
“Maybe we’d still have fun if you didn’t drink so much,” I said, and felt triumph as real anger finally flashed across his face. He glared at me and poured a long twist into his glass, emptying the bottle.
I picked up my computer and briefcase and went upstairs into my bathroom. I shut the door, unzipped the main compartment of my bag, took out the distilled water, which I keep in a Nalgene bottle that so far hasn’t leaked onto my laptop, and did my sinus rinse, left nostril first. The water shot upward into my nostril with a creaky, saxophonic screech, like in the James Bond theme when the Aston Martin tears off.
Clarity gathered, cloud-like, above my temple and I felt a satisfying rush, as if fresh air had been let in. The salt water rushed out of my nose and out of the corner of my eyes too. I took long, deep sniffs and demolished a dozen tissues, converting them to a wet pulp. Then I sat on my side of the bed, flipped open my computer, and began to type a response to one of Cullen’s messages. As I scrolled through the email the hollow space that I had just created, which had felt so good and clear, shrank and was gone. Don’t leave me, I typed to Cullen, and then I deleted it, and then I typed over that and deleted it too, in case the ghost of the typing could shine through.
* * *
—
Rafe and I have a dear friend who is a filmmaker in Tokyo. Shortly after our designer finished our house, while we were still living in the condo, we rented the house out to a friend of this filmmaker for a video shoot. In the resulting art piece, a woman in a wine-colored bra top and boy shorts, with tight, tanned abs, does advanced yoga moves at the foot of our bed, where her dreamy boyfriend/lover lies sleeping. Dawn breaks through the window behind her while she swims through her yoga routine fluidly. A lot of it involves upside-down moves—headstands and handstands that show off the controlled motion of her sculpted abs. You could see each individual muscle’s definition on her bare torso. When we saw the video rough cut, we were like, ha! Just like our life!
Our bedroom now didn’t look the way it had then, any more than Rafe and I looked like the people in the video. But looking around, seeing my tired-looking reflection in the mirror, I wondered if I should have made my marriage a higher priority. I try to make time for it, but once I prioritize Conch and my children, it’s hard to also prioritize Rafael. How many things can be the priority? Really just one at a time. “Priority” is not a word that can legitimately be pluralized. And Rafe understands, or I thought he did. He has his own work. Of all of them—Conch, Cullen, kids, Rafe—he needs me the least.
I got ready for bed and turned out the light. I heard him coming up the stairs and down the hall. I wondered if he was coming to our room or to the guest room. I wanted him to go sleep in the guest room, but I also wanted him to suffer by lying beside me as I ignored him. I lay in bed trying to gauge the direction of his steps.
The bedroom door opened. He came in. I heard him taking off his shoes, the soft swishing sounds of his clothes parting from his body and getting kicked onto the love seat.
When he was in bed I waited for him to say something. He turned away from me, curled his back, and pretended to be asleep. We lay like that for a long time, awake in the dark. I listened to my own heartbeat.
Rafe spoke first. “You’re a solid CEO,” he said, unfurling a little. This was as close as he could come to apologizing. “That doesn’t change just because you’re thrust into a situation where you can’t win.”
It wasn’t good enough.
“I’ll win all right,” I insisted. “Watch me win.” A prick of light on the ceiling smoke detector pulsed green, as if in affirmation.
He made a little noise and pushed away from me. I concentrated on my breath, the way Greer always reminds me to, and seethed. Shouldn’t your spouse cheer you on? It was infuriating. “I can do this job, and I can do it better than anyone predicted. I can guide Conch to a billion-dollar valuation, I can make it a product that changes millions of lives, and I can lead a mindshift in this industry. I’m being tested, but I’ll fight back and I’ll win.”
“Do you remember,” Rafe said quietly, “when you were pregnant with Nova, how sick you were?”
As a matter of fact, I could remember. Nausea is recallable, even more than pain. I’d had some brand of nausea I’d never f
elt before—as if there were a veil over my face, or a pillbox hat pinned tightly to my head, and askew. I still wanted to eat even when I felt this nausea, but with strategic selectivity, as if certain specific foods, if I identified and located them, would cure me.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 21