“Daddy makes us different pancakes every single week,” bragged Clara. “These ones are my favorite, but I also like the pumpkin ones—”
“Chocolate chip!” bellowed Annie.
“And blueberry, and banana, and cinnamon apple…”
“Wow, Neil,” I said, but the extensive repertoire was only part of the reason I was so impressed. He’d created this ritual for them, so they’d have something to look forward to every week, something delicious and fun and sweet. And repetition would engrave it into memory. One happy one, from what otherwise had to have been a pretty damn sad space of time in their lives.
•
The following weekend, I arrived at Neil’s on Saturday afternoon bearing an overnight bag, nightgowns for each of the girls (I was clearly not above bribery), and a puffy pink sleeping bag emblazoned with the whole gaggle of princesses all over the front.
“Who’s that for?” demanded Clara, after they had each unwrapped their own gift. She was eyeing the sleeping bag covetously.
“Oh, that’s for me,” I said, shooting an arch smile at Neil. “For my sleepover with your daddy.”
It was worth the twenty-nine dollars at Target just to hear his delighted, dirty laugh.
“I brought PJs too,” I told him between kisses a few hours later, when we were finally alone in his room.
“You didn’t have to; I got you some.” He jerked his chin at the bed. Neatly folded on top of the duvet was a set of fuzzy gray pajamas spangled with the New England Patriots logo in red, white, and blue.
“You,” I muttered, my voice rippling with the effort not to laugh, “you are a fucking asshole.”
“Enemy territory, baby, I told you that,” he murmured as he whisked my shirt over my head.
•
The next morning was as sweet as the one the week before. I was beginning to feel like I had stepped out of my own life and into somebody else’s. Eating pancakes in another woman’s kitchen, watching her kids giggle as they licked maple syrup off their lips. Having sex with her husband in the bed she had picked out for them from the Crate and Barrel catalog. I felt dirty, like I had stolen something that didn’t belong to me, and I was going to get away with it—because the rightful owner of all of it was gone forever under the snowfall blanketing East Lawn Cemetery.
Neil had told me he suspected she would rather have been cremated, but he thought it would be easier for the girls if there was a proper grave. So they could bring tulips to her resting place. And trace their little fingers over the grooves in the stone that spelled the letters of her name, like sightless hands mapping an unseen face. I thought of him, dizzy with grief, having to answer this massively important question that had never occurred to him even two hours earlier. But he’d made the right decision; I was sure that, given the circumstances, Eva would have agreed. So there she was…and here I was. Slipping into her life like it was a jacket I’d mistakenly taken from a restaurant coatroom.
I stepped over to Neil, who was pouring a second round of batter onto the griddle, draped my arm around his back, and craned upward to plant a kiss on his jaw. But instead of turning toward me, he flinched away as if my arm were a strand of seaweed that’d clung to him in the ocean. He darted a glance at the girls, who were in their usual spots at the island. Annie was chewing complacently, cheeks stretched around an ambitious mouthful of pancake, but Clara had storm clouds gathering in her small face.
Ah.
I dove toward the refrigerator to hide my burning cheeks between its doors. Of course, I should have realized. Sleepover friend really and truly meant friend. Neil, otherwise a remarkably intelligent man, seemed to genuinely expect his kids to believe I was in the exact same category of adult as, say, his best friend, Colin—with the sole (peculiar) exception of my sleeping location.
After breakfast, I dodged into Neil’s room to grab my things while he was occupied with the girls. If this had been Adam, I wouldn’t have hesitated to speak up; whether I was upset over something real or something stupid, I always knew I could let it fly, and he would give me a fair hearing. Not to mention, love me the same at the end of it.
But I had no desire to discuss what’d happened with Neil. It was going to lead to a Talk involving a lot of things I didn’t feel like hearing, things I’d known since the beginning—but I didn’t want him to feel he had to say them. As if I needed letting down gently. As if I’d been taking this seriously. At all.
“I should get going,” I said when I returned to the kitchen, with a convincingly relaxed smile. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow. Bye, girls, have a fun rest of the day!”
Neil’s hands paused on the cast-iron griddle he was scrubbing. It had to have been a wedding present, just like my Dutch oven. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot of housework to catch up on. Glamorous, I know.”
“I’ll walk you out,” he said, setting down the sponge, but I shook my head.
“No, it’s okay,” I said, as I backed down the hallway toward the door. Past the wall covered with photos of the Crenshaw family. “I’ll see you later.”
“Stop—just hold on a second.”
He got exactly four steps before Clara yelled for him.
“In a moment, Clara.”
Then Annie. “Daddy, c’mere!”
He made a “Shit, sorry” grimace and froze.
“You better see to that,” I said, still smiling my creepily cheerful smile.
“Why are you in such a rush? Just give me five minutes.”
Impatience tightened my voice, and I didn’t try to stop it. “Neil, I have a lot to do. I’ll see you tomorrow. May the Pats lose badly.”
It was my signature parting line, and I said it to demonstrate my good humor. But as soon as the door closed behind me, I gave a groan of pure relief.
Well. So much for my guilt over easing into Eva Crenshaw’s stolen life; her husband didn’t even want me touching him in front of their children. He might be screwing me in private, but apparently even the mildest outward gesture of affection was crossing over a line I hadn’t realized was there. He was two little people’s father, and clearly he was still very much someone else’s husband. He always would be.
God, how I missed my own. I missed my own.
23
•
Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky to his brother Mikhail Dostoyevsky, December 22, 1849
As the weeks slipped by until my filing date, flicking past and out of view like the landscape outside a fast-moving car, dread congealed in my stomach. It took me a while to identify it, because it was so far from what I was expecting to feel. What I’d expected to feel, what I deserved to feel, was relief. A rising sense of buoyancy at the prospect of severing the last ties between myself and my faithless train wreck of a husband. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.
Meanwhile, I roped my schedule with Neil firmly back to two days a week from where it had somehow slipped to three. I started getting texts like It’s been three days since I kissed you. Can you show me how it works again? and It’s mighty cold in my bed—I’m concerned about possible health consequences, but I substituted occasional stolen workday interludes in place of the extra sleepover. Frankly I felt it was better for both of us that way.
I finally confessed about him, piled on my couch next to Ruby under a complex arrangement of blankets while we watched A Christmas Story late at night on Christmas Eve. I’d been laughing till I was gasping for breath, and at one point I nudged her irritably in the shoulder.
“Why have we never watched this before? This is basically the best movie I’ve ever seen.”
“Care. I have tried to get you to watch this movie at least thirty thousand times. What is the variable between this year and every other year?”
I sighed, not even having to answer.
“Speaking of whom,” said Ruby, “you’re barely over a month till your filing date. Are
you completely freaking out?”
One of the most perplexing things about Ruby is that in any given delicate situation, she can either be so willfully, mulishly obtuse you want to strangle her with her own hair—or she will abandon all social niceties and grab the proverbial bull, bellowing, by his horns. But it was late, and I was tired.
I stared ahead at the TV screen, where Ralphie’s father struggled to reassemble his shattered major award. “Honestly? I’m scared shitless.”
Ruby shifted position on the couch, sending one knee into my spleen. “You shouldn’t be. This is the right call, and you know it. As your breakup coach, I think what you need to stave off the filing blues is a trip.”
This bore every sign of trouble. Also adventure, it was true, but mainly trouble.
“Where are we going, Cancun? We gonna see if we can catch some college kids at the end of their winter break?”
“Close!” she said cheerfully. “We are going to Vegas.”
“Rube, are you serious? No. I’m down to go someplace warm, but Vegas is really not my kind of place.”
“Which is exactly why I picked it,” she said. “Dragging you out of your comfort zone is super fun for me. Merry Christmas! Hope you like your present, ’cause you’re sure as hell not getting anything else. Hey, the fire is getting a little low, can you put another log on?”
“God, you’re a pain in the ass,” I muttered, unearthing myself from the blanket fort to drop another log into the cheerful blaze in my woodstove, doing the requisite poking and turning that Ruby insisted meant I had a better idea of how to maintain the fire than she did. “So, Vegas, really? When were you thinking of going?”
“The weekend after next, and don’t even try to act horrified, because I know you don’t have any plans. Sorry not sorry,” she said, and tipped back her mug of spiked cider.
“I do have plans, actually.”
“Caroline.”
“I do!”
“Well, they can’t be that important. You have two weeks to get yourself in order, including getting a wax in case you run into any eligible gentlemen. I’m assuming your vagina looks like Sasquatch at this point.”
I smacked the side of her head. “Screw you! It does not!”
“Baby Sasquatch?”
“My vagina is in excellent condition, thank you very much. I’ve been seeing somebody.”
She lowered her mug in surprise. “Wow. Already?”
“ ‘Already?’ It’s been almost five months! And besides, it’s not like there’s some kind of mourning period; I’m getting a divorce.”
She flipped her free hand palm up, like, Hello. “Uh, there’s totally a mourning period.”
“Oh, like you know so much about it.”
“You know what? Screw you. My advice isn’t automatically invalid because I haven’t personally experienced something.”
“In this case, it is.”
“Got it. Well then, feel free to ignore me. Enjoy your kamikaze rebound. I’m sure the guy will. Poor fucker.”
“You don’t need to lose any sleep over him, believe me,” I muttered into my cider. “At least not as far as I go. He’s got more than enough baggage of his own.”
“Oh good, even better.”
She stared at me, then nudged me with her bony, wool-covered toes, but I ignored her. I did not want to talk about Neil, either the gorgeous stuff or the stuff that made me sad. Or, I suppose if I was being honest, I didn’t want to talk about the gorgeous stuff because of the stuff that made me sad.
•
January was a new month, a new year—and, after the requisite “settling in” days after New Year’s, a chance to give one last knock at the Diana Ramirez piñata. Neil had suggested a while back that I should make a menu of sorts for our prospective donor, full of tasty, tempting items she might spend her money on, so I started with a template of an older one he gave me and updated the offerings from that. A lot of what was already on it would work—$22,000 to buy some new computers to expand the interactive multimedia lab (she was a techie, so this ought to be a shoo-in); a $15,000 grant to fund a hands-on painting program at Kidspace (who wouldn’t want to help introduce kids to art?); $30,000 to subsidize a summer concert series featuring musicians to be mutually agreed upon by Diana and the museum.
The main thing I wanted to add was a direct grant to an artist, through a working residency at the museum. I loved the concept of giving an artist a studio, not a gallery. It was something I had been wanting to try out for a long time, because it introduced museum visitors not just to the finished product of artwork, but the act of making it. It demystified the process in a way that I thought was extremely important. And I knew exactly the artist I wanted to propose.
“Forty thousand dollars for a six-month residence for Farren Walker?” Neil let the list drop to his desk and looked up at me with a tired sigh. “Not Farren again. You know Tom’s not going to back you on that one.”
“I know he didn’t last time, but if I can get Diana on board—”
“Care, tell me what specifically leads you to believe you can get Diana on board with Farren?”
“She was into Farren’s work that time at my house. I know she was pretty zoned out when we had her at the museum, but I’ve been thinking about it, and I think she gets intimidated by big, serious art like the LeWitts and the climate change installation. She doesn’t want to admit it, but it’s too abstract for her. She told me that she’s interested in the process of making things by hand, so I think she’d really dig a residency where an artist can demonstrate their process and interact with visitors.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I bet you could find somebody who would make more of a splash for us, and a splash is a good thing. Farren Walker is not going to make a big splash. Honestly? If you can stand it, I think it wouldn’t be the worst idea to look at Patrick Timothy.”
“No,” I said, my voice like the crack of a whip. “Why would you even say that?”
He sighed and rubbed his brow with one hand. “Because, aside from your completely understandable dislike, the guy is the real deal. You said so yourself.”
“He is. But a photographer makes no sense for a working residency. I’m telling you, Diana will love this idea.”
“But Patrick’s credentials—”
“Oh my god!” I yelled, stamping my foot for emphasis. “Do you want to jump into bed with the guy, too? Look, I get it. Farren’s not young and media-friendly like Patrick. She’s not sexy. But she’s an exceptional talent.”
“An exceptional talent that no one outside of Massachusetts has heard of.”
“Which is exactly the point! Come on, Neil, we’re supposed to be shining a light on the best, the most creative, the most groundbreaking. Patrick is fantastic but he’s not groundbreaking.”
“Maybe not to you, but he does have buzz, and he’ll get people in the door.”
“Tom’s Murakami show is going to get more than enough people in the door. I want to give a spot to someone below-the-radar. And unlike Patrick who sold out his first show at the Haldoran in two weeks, Farren actually needs the money. I want her to have this. She deserves it.”
Neil drew his hand slowly over his head. “I know, but baby…”
“Don’t ‘baby’ me,” I snapped. “I’m pitching Farren and that’s that.”
So, I realized as I clipped my way along the resonant wooden floor of the hallway toward my office, that had to be one of the reasons why sleeping with your co-worker was generally held not to be the greatest of ideas. Because, potentially, you might disagree about something work related. At work. And the person you were sleeping with might not be your boss, but maybe he still had a say in what you did and an opinion that had to be paid attention to—and it might infuriate you. For example, when he was saying something that made a lot of sense, professionally, but was completely inconsiderate on a personal level. And he might call you “baby” in his sexy voice and it might piss you off because it made you want to be me
llow to him when you knew damn well you ought to stick to your guns.
I put Farren on the menu. I gave a glancing compromise to Neil, in a footnote to the effect that we were open to discussing other artists before finalizing any plans. But I also attached the document I’d written up the last time I pitched Farren, which included a bunch of photos I’d taken of her working in her studio, and a terrific portrait of her beaming Muppet face. It was a misleading photo—she looked innocent in it. “Don’t be fooled by the grandma face,” I wrote by hand on the page. “The woman is a menace and the most delightfully inappropriate person I know. You should come to her studio to meet her and watch her work.” There’s your personal connection, Neil. I paid Ruby a couple hundred bucks to throw the menu into Illustrator to make it look fancy and print it on the appropriate weight of card stock. I mailed it to Diana with a friendly little note, and then…we waited.
•
“Try not to get into too much trouble in Vegas,” Neil said, while an Ella Fitzgerald song drifted in the background the Friday morning before I drove down to the city to meet Ruby for our flight. “Remember the house always wins.”
“That sounds like a metaphor for life,” I said, winding my hair into its customary chignon. Neil loved to watch me put my hair up in the morning almost as much as he loved to take it down at night. It was very Edwardian of him, and I’d been trying to squash how much I adored it.
He smiled. “I suppose it is.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about us. Ruby talks a big game, but we’re way more likely to end up watching a John Belushi marathon in our bathrobes than we are to join a celebrity entourage.”
“We haven’t talked about this,” he said, “but I’m hoping you won’t be interested in any of the invites you’re going to get. To other guys’ hotel rooms. I’d like to keep you all to myself, if that’s all right with you.”
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