By now her poor date would be standing on the street corner, looking around hopefully for her, the wind ruffling his— well, no, he didn’t have enough hair for that, but still, it was awfully hard on the poor guy. Nevertheless, she plowed on dutifully.
“And that brings us to the second option. You force his hand, which is what you’ve done.”
Nervously, Valerie began to twist a lock of hair. “Go on,” she said.
“Well, basically he still thinks you’re the bee’s knees, and he still feels guilty about lying to his wife—probably still feels at this point that cheating on her is worse than leaving her. Deep down he agrees that he has to choose between you, so it’s good you hit him with this while he still has a conscience to torment him.”
Valerie’s finger twirled faster around her hair. “So you figure he’ll leave her?”
“No! Haven’t you been listening? The chances of his leaving her are nil if you don’t force his hand, and very poor even if you do. Face it, Vee, you’re going to lose him. The question is, now or later, and how much will it hurt? If he’s very important to you, then it’s worth risking the heartbreak of losing him now, just on the infinitesimal chance that you might get him. But if he’s not, then you’re better off calling him back and apologizing, telling him you lost your mind, and letting things peter out of their own accord, since that way, by the time you lose him, you won’t care. If you ask me, that’s what you should do. The no-pain option.”
“But I do want him.”
“Really? I mean, really? Is he… you know… The One?”
Dear God in heaven, if you give me this man, I promise I will never ask you for another single thing. “Yes. He is.”
“Oh, wow. Well, in that case you’ve done the right thing.”
Valerie closed her eyes and savored those words for a moment. Then she snapped into action. “Right. I have a big day coming up, and I need some sleep. Call you tomorrow.”
Click. The dial tone buzzed in Agatha’s ear. She was an hour late for her date.
* * *
Despite Agatha’s reassurances, Valerie jerked awake in the middle of the night and lay staring into the darkness of her hotel room, her heart thumping with terror at what she had done.
And the next morning she was like a person recalling with mingled horror and defiance a rash act committed during a drinking binge. She dressed and applied her makeup carefully before going down to the lobby to drink cup after cup of black coffee, just as if she had a real hangover. She was jumpy all morning, listening out for The Call that would change her life. Call, Adam, call, she chanted in her head. She couldn’t bring herself to switch off her phone, even during her meeting with Valvassori. The question of whether or not this man would buy her plan for his factory seemed ludicrously unimportant now, and her utter indifference to the matter allowed her to deal with his hedging with impressive firmness. He was going to capitulate, she knew, but she hardly cared, which only went to prove, she thought grimly, that when the prize didn’t matter to you, you won it every time, but… she couldn’t bear to think what this would mean about Adam should the reverse be true. Nor could she imagine a sadder future than that of a rich and successful architect with no one to talk to when she got home. The appalling waste! Would she one day look back on this as the defining moment of her life, the day that Valvassori said yes and Adam said no, condemning her to a life of professional success and personal failure? Oh, Adam, Adam, don’t let me go to waste. Call me. Call.
Obediently, the phone in her bag began to chirp. At first she was unable to credit it, wondering in confusion if she had somehow caused it to happen. Then she wrenched open her bag and dug frantically, but her overeager fingers were too clumsy to find the phone, so she tipped the contents out onto the table and caught the phone as it nearly skidded over the edge. “Hello? Hello?” she panted, her back turned rudely on Valvassori.
“Hi there, you daredevil. Has lover boy called yet?”
“No.” Valerie had to unclench her teeth to get the word out.
“Ooh… that’s too bad. Well, never mind. You’re doing the right thing. Bye-ee.”
Valerie’s face acquired an expression that further impressed her client. She put away her phone and pointed the face at him. “Sorry about that, Mr. Valvassori. Where were we?” A few minutes later, he had bought the factory, and Valerie was almost sorry he had, now that she had equated professional gain with romantic loss. But there was one bright aspect: It gave her an excuse to call Adam—made it necessary, in fact, to call him. As her project partner, he had the right to know.
“Hi, it’s me,” she told him briskly, and raced on, not wanting to linger dramatically. “He bought it. Just a few last details to hammer out tomorrow morning, and then I’m coming home.” She let that sit there.
“Excellent work,” Adam said, nervously jovial. “Well done. The… uh… atrium. They fell for it, then?”
“Well, they hedged a little, over budget and all. But I gave them your ‘in harmony with nature’ line, and they didn’t dare disagree.”
“You pulled it off. Congratulations.”
“Well… you, too. We did it together.” The silence that followed sounded pathetic and pleading to her, so hesitantly she filled it with, “Remember… please remember what I said yesterday, Adam.”
“Yes.” Adam frowned, because James had just poked his head around the door to ask a question but broke off short when he saw that Adam was on the phone, signaling, No problem, take your time. James would wait.
“I love you,” Valerie said.
“Me too,” Adam answered quietly, and he hung up. James grinned at him, knowing what “Me too” was in response to—as who does not?
“I don’t know what you’re up to, pal,” James said with a chuckle, “but I sure hope you know what you’re doing!”
Adam’s left cheek pulsated.
* * *
That evening Adam stood in his front yard contemplating his house and trying to summon inner calm and courage for the task ahead: the leaving of his wife, Sophie Dean. It was a pleasant-enough house. A family dwelling of a style that could best be described as “rectangular.” Spacious rooms, big windows, plenty of light. A practical eat-in kitchen large enough for a living area at one end. Located in a residential area chosen for its mature trees, big gardens, and proximity to good schools, it was a sensible place for an “upwardly mobile” young family to live—an expression that set Adam’s teeth on edge. Not close to downtown, it was true; not, indeed, within the city limits at all. In the suburbs, in fact. In Milton. To put it bluntly, it was a suburban house in Milton. And that was okay; that was no crime. Ironic, though, that the idealistic young domestic architect he had once been, devoted to the creation of ideal spaces for people to grow and develop in, should end up living in anodyne suburbia. He and Sophie had talked about moving back into the city—to Back Bay, if they could afford it, or the South End—when the boys reached adolescence, but for the time being this was the practical solution. The children could ride bikes on quiet streets, play in their own yard, and run in and out of neighbors’ houses in safety. (They had even had a puppy for a few days, and what a mistake that had been. Another suburban dream gone sour. The dog kept running into the street with Matthew right behind it, not looking out for cars, risking his life to save the dog’s, until after a close call involving much squealing of brakes the puppy had been returned to its former owner. No more pets, they decided, until Matthew’s survival instinct was stronger.) Inside, the house wasn’t decorated to their taste; they had laughed at the previous occupants’ color sense, but what was the point of redecorating with the boys still so small and scribbling on walls? Little boys are hard on a house. Better to save the money and give them free rein. Of course. Viewed separately, all the decisions that added up to Their Life were logical and sound. But put all the parts together and… This house, for example—yes, spacious; yes, schools; yes, pleasant, but… But it was a boring goddamned suburban house that he
didn’t want to live in! A house that was “perfectly good,” as Valerie’s mother used to say (poor Valerie), as in “a perfectly good jacket” or “perfectly good food,” meaning that it was ill-fitting or bad-tasting, but it would have to do. “Perfectly good” was no good at all, and here was Adam, forty years old and living a “perfectly good” life! Bloody ironic when you considered that he had gone to the trouble of uprooting himself and crossing the Atlantic in search of adventure—all to wind up in the American counterpart of Twickenham, for God’s sake!
The evening ahead seemed impossibly difficult. Simplify your goal, Adam told himself, pare it down to one achievable task. All he had to do was utter one sentence. All he had to say was, I’ve fallen in love with someone else. I’m leaving. All right, two sentences. It would take four seconds. And then it would be done. Adam walked slowly up the steps to his house, concentrating. The whole thing hinged on finding the right moment to introduce those four seconds. He pushed the door open, and Sophie was in his arms. “Oh, Adam, I thought I heard you. I’ve missed you so much today! I couldn’t wait for you to get home. Boys, look! Daddy’s home!”
“Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” they shouted eagerly.
This wasn’t the moment.
After dinner he lay in the tub, staring unseeing at the ceiling for so long that Sophie called to him softly from the bedroom. “Honey, have you fallen asleep in the tub? Honey?”
“Coming.” But he didn’t move, just continued to stare at the ceiling. This wasn’t the moment either. Damn it, why didn’t she help him, give him an opening? Why couldn’t she say something like, What’s the matter, darling? You seem so unlike your normal self. Are you in love with someone else? Would you like to move out—is that it? But she was too damned tactful to pry into why he was so touchy. He groaned aloud.
Her voice wafted in sweetly from the other room. “Come to bed, sweetheart, and I’ll rub your shoulders.”
The Moment, he was beginning to suspect, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the overhead light fixture, existed only in a parallel universe. There was no place in this world for that four-second announcement.
Later still, after Sophie had fallen asleep, he was sitting alone downstairs in his bathrobe, scotch in hand, when the telephone interrupted his brooding. He snatched it up after the first ring—the children were asleep!—who in the hell… ? “Hello?” he said softly, and then in a harsh whisper, “What? What in God’s name are you doing calling me here? Have you gone mad?”
Prior to placing this rash call, Valerie had been sitting curled up in her hotel room with the lights off and the curtains open, hugging her kimono around her knees for protection, looking out over the twinkling city lights and feeling like the smallest and loneliest thing in that vast panorama. Alone, unloved… and in Newark, New Jersey. She had even begun to wonder where her father was, and that was an impossibly bad sign. She had put him out of her mind years ago. Agatha was wrong, of course, about men never leaving their families. Valerie’s father had. The charming, boyish father she’d worshipped had left home without a backward glance. The mystery wasn’t why he had gone but how he had stuck it out for so long, until Valerie was eight. Not that her mother was a bad person. She was just… no fun. Muted, pale, tentative, round-shouldered. Everyone said that pretty, vivacious Valerie took after her father, but clearly she hadn’t been attractive enough, because he had run off with a pretty woman who worked in a travel agency. At first he sent birthday presents (never money, as Valerie’s mother pointed out repeatedly), but after a few years the presents stopped coming. End of story with Daddy. Valerie had no idea where he was now, whether he was still with that woman, or whether he’d had other children. Once, in a weak moment, she had tried searching for him on Google, but his name was so common that without any other clues it was hopeless. And anyway, if he were alive, wasn’t it up to him to search for her? Never mind. He might have been run over crossing a street years ago. All she knew about him for certain was that he was a man who had put love first, and she had tried to console herself with that thought throughout her lonely childhood. But all that pain was behind her, she reminded herself firmly. And indecisive, weak-willed Adam was not going to force her back through the squalor of memory lane. Enough already! Defiantly, she tried his cell phone once, twice, three times, but it wasn’t switched on.
She leaped up and began to stride around the room, her kimono swishing against her trim calves, glad to be moving and angry instead of curled up and miserable. If only she could talk to him! She couldn’t call his home phone, of course. No, wait! Why not? Why not just call him at his goddamned house, wake everybody up, and let him know how unhappy she was, alone and cast off in a distant city, her whole future at stake? It was “against the rules” to call him at home, but whose rules? And wasn’t it against the rules for him, a married man, to sleep with her in the first place, make her fall in love with him, and then jerk her around with his weak-assed inability to leave a woman that he himself said was incapable of making him happy? Wasn’t it against the rules to raise her expectations and then break her heart? Why should she be the only one to respect the rules? Had her father respected the rules? There were no damned rules, except the ones Adam invented to protect himself and keep her at a disadvantage! Her hands shaking with self-righteous anger, Valerie swooped on the phone and punched in his home number, which she’d memorized long ago, just in case. But when he answered on the first ring, his “Hello?” sounding hushed and concerned, “It’s me,” was all she could say.
“What?” he whispered harshly. “What in God’s name are you doing calling me here? Have you gone mad?”
She burst into tears.
“What if Sophie had answered the phone? What damned game are you playing now?”
“I’m so sorry, Adam! Have I ruined everything? Say I haven’t, please!”
He held his hand over the receiver and cocked his head toward the upstairs, listening for signs that the telephone had woken Sophie. Nothing. He put the receiver back to his ear.
“Adam? Adam? Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m just so afraid you won’t tell her. I’m so afraid you’ll abandon me. I need you so much, Adam, and I love you so much. It’s so hard for me to trust anyone. I’m always so afraid they’ll let me down.”
“I won’t let you down.”
“Oh, if only I could believe that! I know, Adam, I know how hard this is for you. Don’t think I don’t. Don’t think I’m a monster.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Really?” Valerie sniffed and wiped her face with the flat of her hand. “You know…” She swallowed her tears and sniffed again, and a hopeful note began to creep into her quavering voice. “You know, when you have something hard like this to do and it seems impossible… it’s just like looking out the window of a train.”
“What?”
“It seems like such a huge thing to do, so scary, but once you do it, it’s gone. Finished! Like when you flash through a town on a train and you see all those little houses and backyards and a quick swatch of this and a quick flash of that, and then whoooomp! You go into a tunnel, and when you come out the other side, everything’s different. It’s a wasteland, the town’s gone, those little houses have disappeared as if they never existed. And you don’t exist for them anymore either. Only seconds have passed, but they’re already miles and miles behind, in a different world. It’ll be like that when you tell her—really hard, but only for an instant… and then it’ll be done.” Her voice wobbled again as she whispered, “You’ll be free.”
“Darling, lie down now and go to sleep.”
“You won’t abandon me?”
“Shhh. No, I won’t. Now, go to sleep.”
* * *
Adam tiptoed into the bedroom. Sophie was asleep. Silly to tiptoe when his intention was to wake her. “Sophie?” He sat down gently on the bed and touched her hair. “Sophie?” He couldn’t bring himself to speak above a whisper. She stirred,
made a little sound, reached out and took his hand, still asleep. Adam looked gravely at their joined hands. After a moment he eased himself off the bed and crept out of the room.
That spring, some four months earlier, Adam and Valerie had had the incredible good luck to be sent together on business to Paris. It was just at the time when it was becoming clear that their sleeping together was not an aberration but rather the beginning of a love affair. The month was May, the city was sublime, and Adam had marveled at finding himself cast in the role of clandestine lover. He had never felt so lucky or so daring before. Valerie had insisted they get a few pictures of them together so she would have something to remember him by. For her long, solitary nights, she had joked, something to slip under her pillow. Adam had felt flattered by her insistence, enough so to override his native caution, and after a delicious, boozy lovers’ lunch on the Île Saint-Louis he offered no objection when she asked the waiter to snap them. She had mugged for the camera, hugging and kissing him, dissolving into laughter for the final shot, looking vibrantly happy and beautiful. Later she made copies for him. “Don’t think I’m going to be the only one pining,” she’d said. “You’ve got to sigh for me, too—otherwise it’s no fun.” He had been uneasy about accepting them but felt it would be ungracious or, worse, unsophisticated, to refuse them. That night he had hidden them in a book on a high shelf in his study at home, feeling like a naughty child, excited by the knowledge that Valerie’s image dwelled secretly in his house, trapped between the dusty pages of an old textbook on building materials, their weight-bearing properties, and their responses to torsion and stress—something he felt fairly sure Sophie would not be dipping into. Now he retrieved the photos from the book and stood with them in his hand, looking around vaguely, wondering where to leave them… somewhere the children would not happen upon them. Then he thought of a place. He crept back up to the bedroom, eased open the drawer where his shirts were kept, slipped the photos in, and carefully slid the drawer shut again. Tomorrow when Sophie finished the ironing, she would open the drawer to put his shirts away, and then…
Leaving Sophie Dean Page 4