Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  Joe Eido shot a quick glance at his boss, then slipped out the door. Richard raised his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  “Why?” she asked, her voice raw.

  He dropped his eyes. “I liked her.”

  “I figured that,” Sylvie snapped.

  “She was …” She waited for him to say beautiful, or smart, or funny, or quick, the endorsements he’d given her all those years ago. But Richard said none of those words. Instead, he said, “Helpful.”

  “Helpful?” Sylvie said. “Helpful?” She was no longer talking, she was shrieking. Helpful was the most terrible word she could imagine, far worse than beautiful or sexy or smart or quick, because helpful meant that this woman, this Joelle, had made herself valuable to Richard. Maybe she was the younger, D.C. version of Sylvie who would listen to his speeches and smooth out his schedules, confirm his Town Car pickups and his dry-cleaning drop-offs and make sure he knew the names of all his biggest donors’ children, and even their dogs.

  “You know what you give someone who’s helpful? You give her a raise. You give her a job recommendation. You don’t fucking fuck her, you stupid motherfucker!”

  Richard dropped his head. “Sylvie.”

  “Fuck you,” she said. Sylvie didn’t curse. The Honorable Selma cursed like a longshoreman, Ceil had cursed plenty in college, when it was unusual and still titillating for a woman to have a dirty mouth. Her daughters sprinkled their conversations with the occasional dirty word, but Sylvie did not curse. She was badly out of practice, but maybe it was like riding a bike. Maybe you never really forgot how. “Fuck you, you stupid shit son of a bitch.” Okay, maybe she needed some practice. She had a feeling she’d get plenty of chances to work on her new, old vocabulary in the days and weeks ahead.

  She stood in front of her husband, his ears bright red and his eyes on his lap. “Listen,” he finally said, scrubbing his fingers against his scalp. “We need to figure out what to do next.”

  She knew what he was talking about—after all their years together, how could she not? The official business of being a congressman or a senator might have been making laws, but the truth was, the real job was to raise money. You stockpiled cash to run for office, and, almost as soon as the election was over, you started gathering funds for the next round. A wife was an asset for such endeavors—a wife who could be counted on to organize the parties, to show up at the picnics and parades, to manage the guest list and cosset the big donors. A wife could deliver speeches and appear at your side or in your stead (and do all these things, of course, without benefit of job title or paycheck). If Sylvie wasn’t going to be with Richard on the campaign trail, he and his handlers needed to know.

  “We need to decide—”

  Sylvie cut him off. “There is no ‘we’ here,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “I, then,” said Richard. “I need to figure it out.” He pulled in a breath, and his voice took on its familiar speechifying timbre. “The way I see it, it’s a personal failing. A terrible transgression. I don’t intend to minimize that, not for a minute, but this was not a public matter. It was a betrayal that has nothing to do with my service to the people of—”

  “You got her a job,” Sylvie said, each word bitten off, hard and distinct.

  “Sylvie. Look. I know you don’t want to hear this, but it isn’t really that bad. This is going to be a one-day story, if that.”

  She gave a strange, hollow laugh. “And what a joyous day it’s going to be for all of us.”

  “She was qualified,” he said. “She’s a Georgetown law grad. She volunteered in the D.C. office last year, and then she worked as a legislative aide.”

  “How civic-minded,” Sylvie snapped. “Did you two have pillow talk about the single-payer plan?”

  Richard winced. Health care reform was one of his passions. One of the ones she knew about, anyhow. “Stupid dumb fucker,” she said, because she could, and because it felt good to say it, even though what should have been a shout was muted by the thick plaster walls of the apartment, and the heavy silk drapes and the rug that covered the office floor. The rug was the first nice thing she and Richard had bought together. They’d picked it out after he’d gotten his first annual bonus, back in 1983. Five hundred dollars. “We’re rich!” he’d crowed, running up the three flights of stairs to their Brooklyn apartment, pulling the check out of his pocket and waving it over his head.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  Richard’s face was crumpling. It was like watching one of those apple-head dolls in time-lapse photography, watching it shrink and shrivel and cave in on itself. “Sylvie … I swear I never wanted to hurt you or the girls. It’s killing me that I’m hurting you.”

  “How long?” she yelled.

  He dropped his head. “Six months. Maybe seven. It was never serious. It was just a fling.” He stood, then, and took her elbow. He meant to guide her toward the armchair in the corner. This was where she sat during their strategy sessions, when they were discussing ad buys or campaign travel or, that one terrible night, trying to keep the news of Lizzie’s arrest for possession with intent to distribute out of the papers. Except this time Sylvie refused to be guided and refused to be moved. She stood still, the pumps she’d slipped back on her bare feet planted on the rug, glaring at him. After a minute, Richard started to speak again, but haltingly. Preliminary focus groups indicate … the mood of the electorate … crucial initiatives … that disabled-Americans rights bill in committee … work left undone …

  She stared at him, unable to believe what she was seeing. Her husband—her husband!—the man she’d promised to love and to cherish, the man who’d seen her pushing their daughters out into the world and defecating on the hospital bed in the process (and maybe that had been the problem? Maybe her mother’s generation had had it right, leaving the men in the waiting room, never letting them see the blood and the shit and the tearing? Maybe then they wouldn’t fuck young lawyers who’d never been torn?); her husband, a man of endless, boundless confidence, was stretching out one trembling hand, reaching for her like a dying man from his sickbed. “Sylvie,” he said. She slapped his hand away. She wished that she could hit him again, could break his nose, could claw his eyes and blind him so that he’d never notice another woman again.

  Do you love her? The words piled up in her mouth and stayed tangled there, a choking weight, because she couldn’t ask him that.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said instead. “Don’t you ever touch me again.” She walked away from him, toward the door, then turned with her hand on the knob.

  “I will do that press conference, for our daughters’ sake, not yours,” she said. “Just me. Not the girls.” She gave him a hard look, a look he’d never seen from her before. “Do not think of involving them in any way. Do not imagine for a minute that they’ll stand onstage and endorse”—she sliced her hand through the air—“any of this.” She would keep her daughters safe. That should have been her focus all along—her girls. Not this faithless, gutless man. Diana, she knew, would refuse to be part of such a show, but Lizzie would do it, out of loyalty and her eternal hunger for her father’s love and his approval, her desperation to make things up to him, to blot out years of bad behavior and be his good girl again. Lizzie would do it, and Lizzie would not survive the pundits, the news anchors with their fake sweet smiles, the bloggers, the gossips, the twits with their Twitter accounts, every odious one of them just waiting to pounce and pass judgment. They’d stir up Lizzie’s past (Druggie Daughter Stands by Her Dad!). They’d write that her hair was stringy and her skin was bad; they’d publish and post the least-flattering photographs; they’d embroider the truth, disgusting as it was, with smutty innuendo, and Lizzie, being Lizzie, would probably read every hateful, sickening word. And Lizzie wasn’t strong.

  “I’ll do it,” she repeated. “They won’t.” And then … Call Jan for the keys, her mother’s voice said. It wasn’t a bad idea. She needed to get out of here, and Connect
icut was as good a place as any. “Monday morning at nine.”

  Already, her mind was working, coming up with a plan. She’d been quick once, in college and law school, smart and organized and never at a loss. She could be quick again; quick in her own service, not his. She’d go to the bedroom, pack a bag, change her clothes, and find a baseball cap—her husband had them from every team in the state—to tuck over her head. She’d slip out the back entrance, say “no comment” if any reporters saw her, and get herself to Ceil’s place.

  “I am sorry,” he said, standing across the room from her. Looking at him, she could see the ghost of that barefoot boy in the narrow bed, the one who’d fallen through the ice and who’d wooed her with whiskey and sweet talk, who’d asked her, Do you trust me? “I still love you, Sylvie. I never stopped.”

  But what did love mean to Richard? That she, too, was helpful? That he wanted her to stay?

  Never mind, she thought, as the numbness settled over her, encasing her like a girdle and control-top pantyhose. All of this—the apartment where she’d lived for years, the man she’d shared it with, the work they’d done, the life they’d built together—all of it was denied her, all of it was gone.

  “E-mail Clarissa the details,” she said. “And after that, I don’t think I’ll be seeing you again.”

  “Cookie!” Ceil had been waiting in the doorway of her Chelsea loft. She threw her arms around her friend as soon as Sylvie got off the elevator, pulling her through the metal door and into the welcome coolness of the high-ceilinged living room. Ceil smelled just the way she had in college, like almond soap and Coco by Chanel—from Paris, she’d told her new roommate, by way of Dillard’s department store. She looked more or less the same, too, pink-cheeked and cheerful, short and solid in bare feet, black leggings, and a tunic that brushed the top of her thighs, even though her short cap of hair was more silver than blond these days, and there were wrinkles around her eyes. Sylvie hugged her friend, leaning against her wordlessly before following her into the kitchen. “What took you so long?”

  “I took the subway.”

  “You did what?” Ceil stared at her, as if Sylvie had said she’d swum down the Hudson. Sylvie pulled off her Yankees cap and set her duffel bag down by the door. In their bedroom—her ex-bedroom, she thought—she had changed into yoga pants and sneakers and a zippered cashmere sweatshirt. She’d taken the elevator down to the lobby, and asked Juan to open the service entrance. The reporters and photographers would be out front, looking for a well-dressed lady getting into a car, or a cab. They wouldn’t be looking for a woman walking, with a baseball cap on her head and a bag over her shoulder, heading toward the subway like she was late to a yoga class.

  Ceil’s loft was one giant rectangle, with a kitchen at one end and three bedrooms at the other, with soaring ceilings and bare, glossy floors made of some unpronounceable rare wood from Brazil (a native wood harvested by indigenous people, Ceil’s husband, Larry, an architect, had explained, repeatedly and at length, at their housewarming). The furniture was all oversized, to accommodate Larry, a former defensive end. The white-painted walls were hung with challenging art: there were black squiggles and green blotches on stark-white oversized canvases with titles like Divorce Song II and Truth and Beauty, and one corner was dominated by a blown-glass sculpture that looked as if it had been squeezed from tubes of Aquafresh.

  The loft was all Larry, but the kitchen was Ceil’s, low-ceilinged and cozy, with copper pots and marble counters and a long trestle table that could have come straight out of a New England farmhouse. “Does Larry care that it doesn’t really go with the rest of the place?” Sylvie had asked—this was at the housewarming, where Larry was out in the living room explaining that the indigenous people who harvested the rare Brazilian wood were paid a living wage, and also had health insurance, thanks to the largesse of microlenders. “Well, you know, the kitchen was always going to be mine. Larry doesn’t really eat,” Ceil had said, and Sylvie realized that it was true: Larry somehow maintained his football-player bulk on espresso extruded by the thousand-dollar machine in his study, supplemented by the protein bars he purchased at his gym and the egg-and-bagel sandwiches he grabbed at the deli down the block.

  It was the kitchen where Ceil and Sylvie spent most of their time. There was a small couch and a TV set in one corner, along with shelves full of cookbooks and photos of Ceil and Larry and their children and their granddaughter. That night, Sylvie leaned against the counter, battered and numb and breathless, as Ceil put a mixing bowl and beaters into the sink.

  “Are you all right?” Ceil asked, her voice as high and sweet and chirpy as (Richard had once observed) a cricket in a Disney film. “What can I get you? Coffee? Chocolate? Carbs? A drink? A gun?” Her eyes glittered. “Listen,” she said. “You don’t have to decide right now, but I looked up hit men on the Internet, and there’s a very active community of men, and possibly some women, and for what I have to say is a surprisingly reasonable amount of money, they’ll take care of whatever problem you’re having, on a permanent basis.”

  “Ceil.” Sylvie slumped onto a barstool. “Don’t you think they’d know it was me?”

  “Yes, well, I thought of that, and if I was the one making the call, and I was the one spending the money …”

  “Then they’d figure out it was my best friend.”

  Ceil considered this. “Shoot. Maybe I’ll get Larry to do it. That’s, what, two degrees of separation? That’s plausible deniability right there.” She tilted her round face and gave Sylvie a smile.

  Sylvie rested her head on her hands. The kitchen counters were, as usual, glittering with a dusting of bright yellow powder. Ceil was addicted to Crystal Light—she’d called it Crystal Meth until her granddaughter, Lincoln, started saying it, too—but she drank it by the glass, not the pitcher, while refusing to spring for the individual packets, which were, she pointed out, almost twice as expensive by volume as the canisters. Each time she made a serving, she would painstakingly tap powder from the canister into her glass, inevitably leaving a sprinkling of mouth-puckeringly sweet yellow powder on the countertop.

  Ceil turned on her bare feet, bent, and opened the oven. A puff of warm, delicious-smelling air filled the kitchen. “Pecan-cinnamon rolls,” she announced, pouring them each a mug of coffee and grabbing cream from the refrigerator.

  Sylvie wrapped her hands around the heavy mug. Ceil’s laptop was on the counter. Sylvie eyed it uneasily. The flickering screen saver reminded her of a snake’s tongue, darting lazily in and out. Ceil saw where her eyes were going and snapped the screen shut. “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t even think about it.”

  She swallowed hard. “What … what are they saying?”

  “The usual nonsense, I’m sure.” Ceil poured the cream into a cow-shaped pitcher—the cow’s tail formed a handle, and the milk came spilling out of its mouth—and used a spatula to slide rolls onto a white-and-blue china plate. She put the plate in front of Sylvie, then took the barstool across the counter. “Just tell me,” she said, “that we get to hurt him. Just a little bit. Nothing permanent.”

  Sylvie sipped her coffee, stifling a smile at the thought of four-foot-eleven-inch Ceil hurting anyone. She’d probably do it with her immersion blender. Ceil was a great believer in the restorative powers of soup, and used her blender nonstop from September through May, pummeling a variety of meats and vegetables into liquid submission. She served cappuccino at all her dinner parties, and would offer to refroth them midway through dessert. “I bet the press is doing a pretty good job of that.”

  “Okay, but I hate him!”

  Sylvie nodded. She expected nothing less from her dramatic friend, and, at that moment, she hated him, too, but it was more complicated than that: hate and love and loyalty and embarrassment and loneliness, loneliness at the thought of a life without Richard, all of it sloshing around in her head and her guts like a toxic stew. She imagined that Ceil, who’d been her maid of honor and had known Richard almost
as long as she had, felt the same way. She nibbled a bit of the roll, then asked the question she’d come here to ask, face-to-face: “Did you have any idea? Did you know that this was going on?”

  “Absolutely not.” Ceil answered instantly, and her blue eyes were guileless. She poked at her own roll with her fork. “Although, honestly, if I had known I’m not sure I would have told you. It wouldn’t have been my place.”

  Sylvie stared at her. “You’re my best friend!”

  “But he’s your husband. And marriages are mysteries.” She raised her hands in the air, palms toward the heavens. “It wouldn’t have been my place,” she repeated. “But I’m here for you. However you want to handle this. Whatever you want to do.”

  “I can’t stay with him,” Sylvie said, and as soon as she’d spoken the words, she knew that they were true.

  Ceil nodded, unsurprised. “Should we call a lawyer?” She tapped her pad. “I made a list.” Ceil flipped the notebook open. “Actually, People magazine made a list on its website. There’s the lawyer Charlie Sheen’s wife used, when he went after her with a knife in Colorado, and the one that woman with the eight kids had, when her husband was cheating on her with some girl he met in a bar …”

  Sylvie swallowed hard, feeling dizzy. “No lawyer,” she managed, and sipped from her mug again, trying to steady herself. “Right now I just want to not see him.” She took another sip of coffee. “I hit him.”

  “You did?” Ceil’s eyes gleamed. “Well, good for you! Closed fist or open?”

  “It was most like a slap. Side of his head. His ears …” Her voice trailed off. She was thinking of Richard’s ears, the sweet pink curl of them. He had little-boy ears, she’d thought more than once. The rest of him had grown up, had grayed and wrinkled and slackened and spread, but his ears were as tender as they’d been when she’d met him, as sweet as they must have been when he’d been a boy, and, thank God, they’d never sprouted those nasty tufts of hair so many men his age got. She loved his ears. How could she hate him, when she still felt so tenderly toward his body parts?