Because Tom was laughing. He was laughing as if what I was saying was just crassly, unbelievably silly. “Honey, wait up, Randalls is a business, they want to build, that’s what they do, so—what’re you so upset about? Nothing to you, you hardly know those people anyway—”
I stared down at him, feeling outraged, angry, confused. I opened my mouth to start trying to explain about Mrs. G and her friends, about the community that will be destroyed if they’re scattered to the four corners of the city, but then I shut it again. Why do I care? Is it because Randalls aren’t crossing their i’s and dotting their t’s? Is it because Mrs. G has been helping me and I want to do something for her in return? Or is it because I turn out to feel a terrible sympathy for people who don’t understand the system, who aren’t trained and educated to get the things they want?
Tom was still staring up at me, as if he’d found himself inexplicably in bed with the wrong woman. “Q, this is ridiculous, no one thinks rent control is a good thing anymore, you’re British, maybe you don’t get it”—he reached up to chuck my chin—“come lie down again, this is silly, come give me some lovin’—”
Tom represents Randalls. Tom represents Randalls. The thought of making love with him suddenly disgusted me. “You have to be kidding,” I said, furiously, pushing his hand away. “My God, I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” upping the ante considerably, but I didn’t care. “These days, Jesus, Tom, all you think about is your career, your firm, making money—is that all there is to you now?” I went on (feeling that I was on firmer ground at last). “All you care about is you, whether you’re going to make partner, it makes me sick, it makes me just sick. You don’t think about me, or the neighborhood, or the baby, or anyone but yourself. Fuck you, do you hear me? Fuck you. You can sleep on the fucking floor tonight as far as I’m concerned.” And with that I rolled over, turning my shoulder sharply against him.
There was a long, long pause. I heard Tom breathing hard behind me. With an enormous effort I forced my own breath out slowly and quietly, pretending (quite implausibly) to be on the very edge of sleep. Finally I heard a low, furious, hissed “I see,” followed by the jolt of the bed as he got out, then the sounds of blankets and the yoga mat being pulled from the top shelf of the wardrobe and thrown onto the floor. A few moments later one of the pillows propped beneath my back was unceremoniously pulled from the bed (I squawked in spite of myself) and dropped heavily onto the mat. Tom settled himself into his small hard bed. We both lay and stared at the gray ceiling.
This morning, when I woke up, Tom was gone; the yoga mat and blankets were nowhere to be seen. I heard the sounds of movement in the kitchen, the clatter of plates, the thud of the fridge door slamming shut, and I called out to him to come to me—but, a moment later, Alison’s unwanted head appeared around the door instead. “Oh you’re awake,” she said, bustling officiously into the room with a tray and settling it on my bedside table. I pulled the cover up to my chin and wished she was back on the other side of the hemisphere. “Here’s coffee and croissants for the two of us, decaf for you of course, Tom declared he had a work emergency and vanished out the door at half-past seven. Flung himself out the door, more like, with a face black as thunder and eyes like two glowing coals. Having a barney, are we?” she added, with faux solicitude as she settled herself comfortably on the end of my bed, watching my face intently.
Needless to say, I denied anything was wrong and launched into a highly unconvincing monologue about how pregnancy had brought us closer together.
36
Tom and I met on a warm late-September Sunday afternoon four years ago, in a coffee shop just off Washington Square. I’d arrived in Manhattan two months earlier and was working my way down a list of friends and passing acquaintances who lived in the city, trying to make a new life for myself. Whitney was the cousin of a friend from university, and she was genuinely nice, a cheerful advertising executive with braided hair and a tiny diamond in her left nostril. (I never saw her again, because that night I slept with Tom and forgot everything and everybody I’d ever met. I found her telephone number in my wallet six months later, folded up between an ATM receipt and an old Metro card, but by then the moment for friendship had passed.)
Whitney and I had just sat down and were enjoying our lattes in the afternoon’s amber sunshine when a man in his late twenties with a blunt Caesar cut accosted us. Could he and his friend join us? he asked, flashing us a glimpse of too-white teeth and too-taut biceps as he smilingly pulled out a chair, secure of our assent. Whitney said something—I don’t recall what now—but as a putdown it was masterly. The man with the Caesar cut shrugged casually, pushed in the steel chair, and said something about “tight-assed chicks” as he poured himself into a seat at the next table. His friend—a quiet-looking, slender man with curly black hair, sea-colored eyes, and a beautifully tailored sports coat—looked horrified, and when Caesar got up to buy a packet of cigarettes, he came over and hurriedly apologized.
Whitney nodded vaguely at him as he spoke; I don’t think she even quite knew who he was, but I’d been watching him covertly over the rim of my glass since Caesar’s intrusion. He wasn’t quite my type—not the type of the last few years, anyway; I had a history of going for boyish-looking blond men, usually about an inch shorter than me and six months’ younger. This man was dark, tall, and quite obviously a grown-up; his clothes were carefully chosen and carefully pressed, and they looked expensive. He couldn’t be more than thirty, but he already had money. Businessman or lawyer, I pondered, before settling, after some thought, on lawyer. He had the faintly effete, intellectual look of a man who had considered academia but judiciously selected a career with better job opportunities, I decided—and I was right.
I discovered this a few hours later, sitting on a bench in Washington Square. Whitney and I had parted at the mouth of the subway at West Fourth with promises of friendship that were undermined from the outset by my deceitful claim to need the 6 uptown from Bleecker Street. When she was safely out of sight, I doubled back to the coffee shop, hoping to find him still there—and the gods favored me, because I arrived just as he was paying the check with a flourishing signature and a Mont Blanc pen. He looked up at me as I hovered uncertainly ten feet away from where he was sitting, then smiled, stood up, and walked over as if we’d arranged to meet all along. “My name’s Tom,” he said, extending his hand with an appealing combination of confidence and deference. “You’re beautiful. Would you please take a walk with me?”
I remember Caesar gaping in surprise; I remember the touch of Tom’s hand on the small of my back as he steered me across the road toward Washington Square. I remember passing the silent chess players encircling the park’s entrance, the cacophony of barking as three dozen dogs tore round and round the dog run. I remember overexcited kids splashing about in the fountain, the faint hush of cool air playing in the gold-tinged leaves at the tops of the trees. I remember stealing secret glances at my companion’s tanned skin and long eyelashes, his slender, capable hands.
We sat down on a bench near one of the enclosed play areas and watched children on swings sailing high up into the air, their nervous mothers in tight Gucci jeans clustered against the fence. Tom opened with another apology. Caesar was a former classmate from Harvard, he explained, a once-good friend who now worked for McKinsey, the management consultants. He didn’t normally hang out with such superficial people, he assured me. The last time they had seen each other Daryl was still a shy nerdy math major, but money and position had changed everything. Tom told me he wouldn’t be seeing Daryl again, and I think I fell in love with him at that moment because of the sweet severity in his eyes.
By that evening, I knew all about his family relationships (friendly), his college experience (good), his ambitions (serious), his last girlfriend (married), and everything I heard confirmed my initial impression. He was mature, hardworking, established, available—everything a grown-up woman wants in a man. And everything she wants from a man
too. The first three nights passed in a haze of sweaty, vaguely S&Mish sex that left me embarrassed but desperate for more. His teeth marks were at my throat, mine encircled his thighs. Then, on the fourth night of our relationship, he chose to be tender. I woke up the next morning knowing for certain I was going to be his wife.
I remember gazing at him over dark coffee and blueberry pancakes at the end of the first week and thinking to myself, on top of all this, he’s American. I wasn’t clear at the time why this was so important, but I knew that it was. Months later, half-drunk, I told a friend that one of my boyfriend’s great charms was that he lived a long (long, long, long) way away from my mother.
We were married two years later in circumstances maximally designed to irritate her. The judge Tom clerked for performed the ceremony in his chambers, attended by just two witnesses (Mark, and a friend of mine from primary school, who happened to be visiting). Afterward the five of us sat down to brunch at our favorite place in the West Village and enjoyed cinnamon-sprinkled French toast before a crackling fire. Of course, this wasn’t nearly romantic enough for my mother. As far as she was concerned, either we had to elope, preferably pursued by a wronged first wife, or host a grand affair at which she could swank about looking important. The second, of course, Alison had already provided, with her very fancy St. Margaret’s Westminster wedding, and I strongly suspect Jeanie will manage the first (although I seriously doubt my mother will enjoy the reality of the thing. When she thinks of elopement she thinks of moonlit churches and a scape-grace aristo escaping his family’s wrath, not Camden registry office with a pock-marked goon named Dave).
My mother found Tom bewildering from the very beginning. Until she met him, she preferred to pretend he didn’t exist. Then, when we went to visit her in London and his physical presence rendered that strategy useless, she attempted to pretend he was actually English. And when Tom refused to play ball, calmly discussing congressional politics and possible judicial nominations for the Supreme Court, she decided war was inevitable and began an all-out campaign to convince me to drop him. “I don’t know Q, I never thought you’d be one to settle,” she said, wide-eyed with pseudoconcern. “I thought you were the kind of girl who’d wait until the Right One came along. Biological clock ticking, is it dear?”
Her campaign failed, of course, and we got married, although one thing she said has been haunting me these last few weeks. “He’s very handsome, but will he give you the space to grow?” she asked, when I called her to explain we’d been married that morning. “I’m fifty-six and I’m only just beginning to discover who I really am, Q. I had no time for self-discovery while I was married, your father was too busy pursuing his own dreams to think of helping me with mine. I know you think I put my work first when you were growing up, but somebody had to earn the money to support us all. Well dear, your bed is made now, but all I can say is, I hope your new husband will listen to your dreams.”
37
Monday 2 P.M.
“What are your dreams, Q?” This from Alison, over dinner last evening, which was unfortunately à deux because Tom worked right through the night.
Alison and I were eating leftover party food (which is guaranteed to put anyone into a bad mood), and she was telling me about some prize she’d recently won for an abstract sculpture of a cat. (It doesn’t look anything like a cat, obviously. To wind her up I told her it looked more like a rabbit, but then to wind me up she said I’d detected that the piece complicates the whole nature of the relationship between predators and prey.)
“I mean, you got on the high school/university/law school track, and you never seemed to think about getting off. Do you really want to be a lawyer? You’ve come all the way over here to the States. Sometimes I wonder if you’re actually hiding from us, so we won’t see that you don’t know what to do with your life. Am I wrong?” She lifted her eyes to mine; I saw the challenge sparking within them.
I met her gaze, levelly. “What on earth makes you think I don’t want to be a lawyer?” I said, coolly.
“Well, you don’t seem to care that bed rest keeps you from the office. I mean, I understand wanting a holiday, I understand wanting a break from the grind, but if I couldn’t do my sculpture—don’t snort, Q, it doesn’t become you—I’d get really frustrated. Mummy would go mad if she couldn’t teach her classes, Jeanie absolutely adores her master’s courses, and I think Tom would tear out that curly hair of his if he couldn’t be a lawyer. His job seems to absolutely consume him. But you—I don’t think you give a damn, darling. You don’t even seem to think about your work these days, not the way you used to think about your essays and things at Oxford, at least. That tells me you’re not happy with your choice of career.”
As you can imagine, my blood was boiling by this point. I was really mad, let me tell you. Listen, sister dear, I told her. We don’t all have husbands who support us. Some of us work for a living. Yes indeedy. And just because I don’t have some artsy-fartsy job doesn’t mean I’m not fulfilled by what I do. I actually help people, which is more than can be said for your cats that look like rabbits and your pots that complicate the nature of the relationship between working and being bloody useless. Ha! What do you think of that? I flung at her, lip curled.
She shrugged and started to say something about how her art pushes at the boundaries of the normal, but I changed the subject. I didn’t want to hear any more of her rubbish.
38
3 P.M.
It’s not true that I don’t think about work. Brianna keeps me upto-date on my old cases, Fay tells me about the new ones, and I’ve been helping Residents Against Demolition in their fight against the landlord. So there.
It is true that my work at Schuster doesn’t occupy every sliver of my tortured soul the way Tom’s work occupies his, but that’s because I’m more balanced. Yes, that’s it—I have a very balanced attitude to life. That’s what I’ll tell Alison the next time she brings it up.
4 P.M.
Alison denies I have a more balanced attitude to life. “Don’t give me that nonsense, Q. You spend ninety hours a week at work. That’s not balanced, now, is it? But you could convince me it was at least reasonable if you seemed to find it exciting, if it was obviously stimulating you. But I don’t see anything of the sort. So what’s going on, dear?”
I told her her stupid pots made me sick.
Tuesday 1:30 A.M., written in the light of my laptop screen
Tom and I have technically just made up. I say “technically” because, when I saw his shadow in the doorway an hour ago, I sat up in bed and said, in a voice that sounded perfunctory even to my ears, I’m sorry I flew off the handle on Saturday night. And he said, stilted, cool, ambiguous, Yes, I’m sorry too.
There was a pause. I wondered what to say, how to make things right again without giving in, without taking back the truth, the heart, the nut of the argument. And then he suddenly said, Look, Q, I’m exhausted, I don’t have time for a big emotional thing with you right now, okay? I’ve hardly slept in two days. I’m just going to make up the mat on the floor again tonight, that way I won’t disturb you and you won’t disturb me.
Okay, I said, equally cool, do what you want, settling myself back into the bed with a theatrical flounce. With tightened lungs and tingling fingers, I lay and listened to him making up his thin narrow mat.
So now he’s lying on his side on the floor five feet away from me, face turned away from the bed, a mop of dark hair just visible above the top of the blanket. I’ve been watching him sleep for the last half hour, wrapped up in a body that suddenly doesn’t seem to belong to me anymore.
39
Wednesday 1 P.M.
It’s incredibly windy today, and the sky is heavy and overcast. One of the old ladies in the apartment building opposite is trying to hang out her laundry, she’s struggling to tie shirts on a makeshift line strung across her shallow balcony. Today’s entertainment for a weary, heartsore Q.
Alison asked to see my baby purcha
ses last night, and Tom-to my surprise—emerged from behind a stack of books and said he wanted to see them as well. So he and Alison fetched the boxes out of the nursery (aka the spare room, aka Alison’s perfumed lair); Tom found a couple of pairs of scissors, and the two of them sliced and ripped and tore until the sitting room was overflowing with furniture, linens, ointments, toys, and a million pale blue Styrofoam chips. Alison praised my purchases effusively, and even Tom seemed affected by the sight of the tiny sea grass bassinet. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him lift one of the soft blue sheets gently to his cheek. It hardly seems possible that our baby son will be lying within them in a few weeks.
After dinner, Alison brought up the job topic again. It was horrible timing; looking at baby purchases had introduced a new flush of warmth into the atmosphere between Tom and me, a small return to intimacy. It wasn’t much, but I felt a lightening in my chest all the same as Tom grinned at me over a teddy bear that plays “Moonlight” when you pull its ears. He took a real shine to it and sat fiddling with its curly golden coat all the way through the meal.
The subject of careers cooled things down immediately.
“Tom, do you think Q enjoys her job?” Alison asked, watching Tom closely as she sipped from a goblet of raspberry-hued Chilean red.
Tom, perched on the window bench, went very still. “What do you mean?” he asked, cautiously. I saw his knuckles whiten around his coffee cup.
Alison made a small moue with her red lipsticked mouth. “She didn’t tell you about our conversation?” she asked, her eyes darting between us; I knew what she was thinking. I felt anger welling up inside me.
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