Andrew asked if anyone was hungry. They pulled over at the next rest stop. Elisabeth requested a turkey wrap and took Gil for a diaper change.
In the crowded ladies’ room, hand dryers blasting, she put Gil down on the plastic changing table and smiled at him. He was a source of comfort she could plug in to at any time, a piece of herself outside of her.
“What do you think?” she whispered. “Not good enough for our Sam, is he?”
Gil looked up at her, revealing a new front tooth poking through.
When he was changed, Elisabeth went to find Andrew and tell him about the tooth. She spotted him in line at the sandwich place. Sam and Clive stood behind him, whispering, as if they were his teenage children.
Andrew had just gotten to the cash register when Elisabeth reached his side.
“So that’s two large turkeys, a roast beef, a meatball, and four Cokes?” said the girl behind the counter.
“Umm, yes,” Andrew said. He handed her his Visa.
Elisabeth looked to Clive and then to Andrew and back again. She met her husband’s eye and he knew what she was asking—why was he paying for all of them?
Andrew shrugged, and Elisabeth understood. Clive hadn’t offered to pay for his and Sam’s.
It bothered her to a degree that was out of proportion with the offense. Were they to take Sam along on a road trip alone, they would buy her lunch, no question. But Clive was a grown man.
Sam deserved someone solid, someone her own age. A younger version of Andrew. Elisabeth remembered thinking early on in their relationship that he was dad smart. He knew about art and world history and the nuances of every country’s political, economic, and social climate. If a child were to ask him anything, he could answer. While she had been known, when trying to make a point but fuzzy on the particulars, to say that something had happened “in the olden days.” She looked at Andrew and thought: Husband. She looked at Clive and thought: Fling.
Sam had stayed too long at the fair, but she didn’t realize. She seemed to think they could go on forever. Elisabeth recalled an email Sam sent over Christmas break, a sliver of doubt poking through. But she retreated quickly from it, and never raised the issue again.
* * *
—
Sam and Clive were staying with a friend way uptown for the weekend, but first, they accompanied Andrew and Elisabeth to the Algonquin.
They were going to see a Broadway matinee and have an early dinner. Sam and Clive would babysit at the hotel, in the room, if they wanted, or in the spacious lobby full of plush velvet sofas.
The kid at the front desk handed Andrew two room keys. The four of them, plus Gil in the stroller, and all their bags, crammed into the elevator and rode in silence to the top floor.
Elisabeth had paid extra for a small suite.
When Andrew unlocked the door and pushed it open, Sam and Clive gasped.
“Absolutely gorgeous,” Clive said. “Look at that bed, babe. We should get one like that.”
It was a four-poster, lifted high off the ground. Elisabeth was overcome by a sudden fear that they’d have sex in this room.
“This is the nicest hotel room I’ve ever seen,” Sam said.
“I booked online,” Elisabeth said. “I got a great deal.”
It wasn’t true. The room had been a splurge. She supposed she felt bad that Sam would likely be spending the weekend on a pullout couch or a futon.
She didn’t think Andrew was paying attention to the conversation. But just in case, she didn’t want him thinking about money right now. For the past two months, he’d been keeping close tabs on what they spent, worried in a way she’d never seen before.
He would periodically swing in the other direction and make a grand gesture that Elisabeth didn’t really need him to make. He bought her gold earrings for Valentine’s Day, and suggested the weekend away. At those times, it was almost like he was trying to convince himself that she hadn’t ruined them after all. That they could still have the things they desired.
But more often, Andrew was panicked.
“We have nothing saved,” he pointed out, again and again.
She thought it was passive-aggressive, how he made it sound like this was a circumstance that had occurred on its own. Like they had gone broke from natural causes. His refusal to come out and blame her when they both knew she was to blame only highlighted what Elisabeth had done wrong.
Clive picked Gil up and started dancing with him.
“You put your right arm in, you put your right arm out,” he sang. “You put your right arm in and you shake it all about. You do the hokey-cokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about!”
Gil shouted his approval.
Sam said, “In England, they say hokey-cokey.”
“What do you say here?” Clive said, still dancing.
“Hokey-pokey.”
He paused, then continued, theatrically, “You do the hoooo-key-cokey. You do the hooo-key-cokey.”
Elisabeth wished he would shut up. Why was cokey so much more annoying than pokey? But it was. The English and Americans were so often like this. Such tiny differences and yet they amounted to something. Brits had that tendency to slip into baby talk. Choccy bickies and all that.
“We should change,” Andrew said. “We don’t want to be late.”
Elisabeth unzipped her suitcase. Her dress was slightly wrinkled, but she couldn’t be bothered to take out the ironing board. She hung the dress on the back of the bathroom door and ran the shower. In an attempt to make a bit of an effort while she waited to see if this would work, she pulled out her makeup bag and applied eyeliner, eye shadow, and mascara on top of her antiaging serum. She covered her dark undereye circles with concealer. She was adding lipstick when Andrew ducked his head in.
“Let’s get going,” he said. “The show starts in half an hour.”
Elisabeth slipped the dress on. She couldn’t tell whether the steam had helped.
Stepping back into the room, she told Sam, “Anything you need, text me. We’ll be back early.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Sam said. “Have fun!”
She held Gilbert on her hip, so natural with him. He had recently entered a stage where being in the care of anyone other than his mother brought on tears. The only exception was Sam.
* * *
—
Elisabeth waited until they were outside to say, “Well, he’s terrible.”
Andrew looked around. “Who?”
“Clive!” she said. “He’s an old man!”
“I think he’s younger than us.”
“Compared to Sam, I mean.”
Andrew reached for her hand. They walked that way up Eighth Avenue. She’d hated hand-holders when she lived here, two people taking up an entire sidewalk in the name of love. But this was the first time he’d taken her hand in the last six weeks. Elisabeth didn’t want to break the spell, even if Andrew was forcing himself to do it, to try.
They passed the Times building and she looked up at the newsroom, staring for a minute as if her former self might come to the window and wave.
Elisabeth quickened her pace. She didn’t want to run into anyone she knew.
“Doesn’t it feel weird to be here as just another tourist?” she said.
“Yes,” Andrew said. “I love it.”
All through the show, she wondered what Sam and Clive were up to. She hoped it went without saying that she didn’t want them to leave the hotel and go traipsing around Times Square with her baby.
Afterward, they took a cab downtown for dinner at the Little Owl, their old favorite. It was early. They had the place to themselves. They talked about the play, and what to order.
The waitress brought them a bottle of wine.
They clinked their glasses together.
Elisabeth took a sip. “That’s good,” she said.
Andrew tried his, and nodded in agreement.
“Do you know, I think Clive believes Sam is going to marry him,” Elisabeth said.
She thought she saw a twinge of exasperation on her husband’s face, but she kept going.
“If he gets his way, he’ll whisk her off to England and she’ll never get a job in the galleries.”
“If they get married and she’s a UK citizen, then who knows?” he said. “She could get a gallery job in London.”
“You heard him! If they get married she’ll be barefoot and pregnant, making jam in the Cotswolds in a year.”
“You don’t even know what the Cotswolds are,” Andrew said.
“He talked her out of graduating Phi Beta Kapa,” she said. “So that he could hang out with her more this semester. That’s not what someone does when they have your best interest at heart.”
She had tried to change Sam’s mind, and Sam had said, What’s the point? So I can get bragging rights for one day when they call out my name at graduation?
Elisabeth knew that was Clive talking. She should have said as much. She should have been more forceful.
“Sam doesn’t know enough to know what a loser he is,” she said now. “She’s impressed by him because she’s a child, basically. Anyone old enough to rent a car seems mature to her. He’s taking advantage of her youth.”
“Seems like he’s crazy about her to me,” Andrew said.
“Seriously? That’s your takeaway?”
“Okay, fine, it’s a slightly creepy dynamic. But I don’t have to date the guy. What do I care? There must be something she sees in him.”
“Yeah, he’s hot.”
“He is?”
“He’s not my cup of tea. But objectively speaking, yes. He has that sleazy-hot thing going.”
“Sleazy hot.”
“And they have tons of hot sex.”
“She told you that?”
“Not in so many words, but can’t you tell from looking at them? But what does he want with her? If he wants to be married so bad, there are thousands of attractive, lonely thirty-five-year-olds in London he could call.”
“Is that so?”
“I’m assuming. But anyone age appropriate would be too smart to get involved with a guy like him, you see?”
“You really hate his guts,” Andrew said.
“I love Sam. I want the best for her.”
“Do you think she’s smart?”
“Yes. Why would you even ask that?”
“If she’s smart, she’ll figure out what’s right on her own.”
Elisabeth considered this.
“Once Sam described to me this big wedding she wants to have,” she said. “It was all very childish, the kind of thing a little girl would come up with. I should have seen it then. She’s caught up in a fantasy.”
Andrew shrugged.
“But that’s not like her, is it?” she said.
When he didn’t answer, she said, “Your father thinks he’s a weirdo, too. He said as much over the phone after he picked Clive up at the airport. He also said he thinks the whole going to London after graduation thing is a way of avoiding reality. Getting a job, facing rejection, all that.”
“If George thinks it, then it must be true,” he said.
“Yes. We have to find a way to get her away from him.”
“I was kidding,” Andrew said. “Can we talk about something else please? I sense you going over to the dark side.”
He was right. Here she was, out with her husband, in the place she’d been longing to be for months, and she couldn’t let herself enjoy it. She was fixated on her babysitter’s love life instead.
Living in the city, you could easily blame it for your unhappiness—there was always a train delay or an angry stranger to accuse of ruining your day. One of the riskiest parts of leaving was that you might find out that, all along, the city wasn’t the problem. You were.
“Sorry, yes, let’s talk about something else,” she said. “The grill? What’s the latest?”
He’d been working on a prototype. She hadn’t asked him about it lately. In part because he was still upset about Denver. In part because she knew it required more money than the college had agreed to give him, which led them back to that check from her father.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Andrew said. “The provost paid me a nice compliment. He said the students on my project are getting a lot out of it. He said I have a way with them that he doesn’t see all that often.”
“That’s so nice,” she said.
“Yeah. I know we joke about them, but I kind of love working with these kids. I’d been telling the provost how Cory came up with a really interesting idea. You know Cory? The tall kid with the mustache who you met at the Christmas party.”
She nodded. “Ophelia.”
“Right.”
As Andrew talked details, Elisabeth drank more wine and tried to pay attention. But she felt her frustration rising when he mentioned needing a grant, searching for investors sooner than was customary.
She wondered if in every married person there was a pit of fear about whether a spouse had chosen him or her for the wrong reason. Andrew moved to the city and socialized with guys from Greenwich and Darien. Some part of him felt less than. Had he seen her as a way to become the man he wished he was, even as he pretended to understand why she rejected her father’s money?
“Andrew,” she interrupted without meaning to. “I’m not going to deposit the check.”
He looked crushed. At least, she thought he did.
“We keep tiptoeing around it, but I can’t do it. I won’t take my father’s money. Period. He’s an evil bastard.”
“Agreed,” Andrew said. “But he will be one whether we keep his money or not.”
“So that is what you want.”
“Instead of losing all the money we’ve saved? Yes. If I get this grill off the ground, we could fix my parents’ problems right away. It’s killing me that they have to sell that house.”
“And you’re putting that on me?”
“Putting what on you? I was talking about what could happen if the grill is a success.”
“Right. But we’ll only know if it can succeed if I agree to take the money.”
“He’d be paying you back what you loaned your sister. That’s all.”
“When the whole point of loaning it to her was that neither of us would have to be dependent on him.”
“But she didn’t abide by that.”
“Yes, and your dad spends all his time in his man cave ranting on about the goddamn Hollow Tree, instead of dealing with what happened, trying to find more work, admitting that no one is ever going to buy that house and they can’t afford to keep it. But I’m supposed to forget my principles and swoop in to save him?”
“I never said that,” Andrew said softly. “Go ahead, rip up the check. Do what you want. That’s what you always do in the end anyway, isn’t it?”
* * *
—
Improbably, they had sex that night for the first time since the baby came. Not because either of them wanted to, particularly, but because it had been so long and they’d gotten a hotel room and it felt like it was now or never. The sex didn’t hurt like she expected it to. It felt pretty much like it always had. She remembered now how nice it was to feel close to him in this way, especially when they were so far apart on everything else.
Elisabeth fell asleep beside Andrew, but woke up after a bit, restless. She didn’t feel like stewing over their problems. She took her laptop into the bathroom and shut the door. She logged on to BK Mamas, where the fight about a name change was still raging, fourteen hours after it started. Around 6:00 p.m., Mimi Winchester threw in one of her
grenades: While we’re on the topic of appropriate naming, can I just say—this is meant to be a board for BK Mamas. That is, moms who live in Brooklyn. I know for a fact LOTS of people here don’t live in Brooklyn anymore.
Twenty-nine women responded, accusing Mimi of elitism.
Sorry people like you came along and priced me out of a neighborhood I lived in for seventeen years, one of them wrote. I may live in Queens, but I still think of myself as a BK Mama, and always will.
Amen! wrote someone.
Preach, said someone else.
And then the woman in Queens announced the creation of a new group, the clunkily named Once and Always BK Caregivers.
Elisabeth clicked to see how many people had joined. One hundred and forty so far, though she doubted many of them had left the original group. She joined this one too. What the hell?
The clock on her laptop read 10:32.
Sam and Clive were probably out somewhere, beginning their night. Elisabeth wondered what Sam’s friends thought of him. They couldn’t possibly think he was good for her. There was something off about Clive, beyond the age difference, something she sensed but could not put into words.
She still had access to all her research tools from her days at the paper. There, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she casually conducted a records search: Clive Richardson, age 33, London.
Nothing of a criminal nature came up. No bankruptcies or DUIs. But there was a marriage license, issued not even two years ago at the London City Hall. And divorce papers, signed six months later.
Elisabeth was almost positive Sam didn’t know about this.
She searched online for the ex-wife—Laura Garcia. But it was too common a name, and it was getting late. Elisabeth closed her computer and tucked the information away, to be deployed at the appropriate time, whenever that was.
Before getting back in bed, she went and stood over her sleeping baby. He didn’t yet know anything bad about the world, didn’t know that people were so often something other than what they claimed to be. Gil woke up each morning with a smile on his face, expecting the best from everyone. When did that change? She hoped she could make it last as long as possible.
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