“But you’re right,” Bruce said, “it is the obvious thing to think. In fact, it surprises me that I hadn’t thought it myself. Or even thought that other people might think it. People who haven’t met Kathy, and possibly people who have.”
“Kathy’s your secretary?”
“She’s fifty-three. She has three children and two grandchildren. Oh, and on top of everything else, her husband’s left her. And she’s got serious money problems.”
“If her husband was the one who left, at least she’ll get something out of the divorce, won’t she?”
“She’ll get the house. She might get more—if she lives long enough.” Bruce stopped in his tracks. “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m saying these things. Helping people plan against future catastrophes—it’s what I do. Why haven’t I done that for her?”
“What is your job exactly?”
“According to my website, I’m a quote-unquote wealth management adviser, though I still think of myself as a stockbroker. And Kathy is my quote-unquote executive assistant, though I still think of her as my secretary. And that means she doesn’t have any wealth to manage—or at least not enough to make it worth my while. Or hers. Now I’d really like to do something more for her.”
“Well, but what more could you do? She has benefits, right? That’s doing something for her. Before I retired, I always made sure all my employees had health insurance, even though it cost me an arm and a leg.”
“That’s more than your president has done.”
“Our president. No matter what you think of him, he’s our president now.”
They were back at the building. “Well, it’s been nice walking with you,” Bruce said.
“It has,” Alec said. “Maybe we can do it again sometime—if you can bear the idea.”
“I’d like that,” Bruce said, signaling the doorman not to bother holding the door for him. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go around the block one more time. Isabel still hasn’t done anything.”
They said a quick goodbye. As Bruce walked back down Park, he wondered if he should just tell Eva about taking Kathy to her chemo sessions and be done with it. There was nothing to disapprove of in that. You couldn’t disapprove of compassion—or could you? Maybe—if you perceived that compassion as part of another woman’s strategy to supplant you. Of course, to ascribe such a motive to Kathy would be unjust. Surely he could explain that much to Eva. Surely he could explain that all he had paid for was the hotel room—and not because Kathy had asked him. It was a gesture of munificence, performed of his own free will. Or would that upset Eva more—that Bruce, who for all the years of their marriage had let her buy his clothes, and decide which restaurants they went to, and where they took their vacations, and who their friends were, was suddenly acting of his own free will?
Mind you, he wasn’t complaining. Without Eva, he knew, his life would have been … not less interesting, exactly, but less full: no demands that he read magazine articles that gave him headaches, no listening to her friends arguing across the dinner table, no death marches through exhibitions at the one Met or season tickets at the other (occasionally used, more often given away like party favors). On the other side, more TV, more time spent with his parents, fewer weekend guests. Change for its own sake had little appeal for Bruce. He hadn’t asked Kathy to get sick, or anticipated the vein of empathy her plight would open in him. Nor, as far as he knew, had he said anything to give himself away to Eva. Or had he? Doubtless he shouldn’t have lost his temper over the Weisensteins’ dinner invitation. He should have just chewed his temper ten times, as he had each bite of dinner, until it was ground to a pulp. Then the conversation that had ended with Eva walking out of the kitchen would never have taken place. But he had lost his temper—an invigorating sensation, a liberating sensation, for which he knew he would pay the price. Eva wouldn’t make a scene. That wasn’t her way. Instead she would withdraw into haughty formalities. No, I wouldn’t care for any more, thank you. Having a secret from her—he had to admit it—exhilarated him.
It had started raining again. Suddenly he heard sirens, saw an ambulance racing toward him. For the past ten minutes, he realized, he had been letting the dogs lead him rather than the other way around. As usual, they walked with urgency, as if they were late for an appointment, though where it was they were trying to get to, home or away, he had no idea. He just followed.
Two days later, Min and Eva left for Venice. As the doorman put their luggage into the trunk of the taxi, Bruce stood on the sidewalk with the dogs and Min, waiting for his wife. Min had her phone out. At first he thought she was texting. Then he saw that she was playing a game.
The second she noticed him noticing, she put the phone in her purse.
“Busted,” she said. “OK, I confess. I’m an addict. Candy Crush.”
“Candy what?”
“You don’t know what it is? So much the better.” She smiled. “Well, darling, ten days on your own. While the mouse is away, will the cat play?”
“Maybe the cat will play Candygram.”
“Candy Crush. And I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s ruinous. Almost as bad as gambling.”
Right then Eva came out the door, looking sleek and elegant in a Burberry raincoat and black boots.
“Well, bon voyage,” Bruce said to Min.
“Buon viaggio,” Min said. And when he kissed her on the cheek: “Not enough. In Italy it’s due baci, two kisses, left then right. Whereas in Holland it’s three kisses—left, right, left. And if you’re wondering how I know so much about kissing, during the five minutes when I was at CN Traveler—”
“Min, come on,” Eva said, ushering her into the car before Bruce could deliver the second kiss.
Min obeyed. Eva and Bruce were now alone on the curb with the dogs.
“It’s stopped raining,” he said.
She agreed that it had.
“I’m relieved. I didn’t want to say anything, but yesterday the flight you’re on was delayed three hours. The night before, it was delayed five hours. Whereas tonight”—he glanced at his phone—“not only are you scheduled for an on-time departure, you’re supposed to get into Milan forty minutes early. The weather in Venice is sunny—high fifty-seven, low thirty-four.”
“You’ve certainly kept yourself up to the minute.”
“It’s just that I’ve got this app.”
“Bruce, I hope you understand how much I need this trip. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. Then he tried to kiss her on the lips, but she moved her head so that he kissed her chin instead. Sensing departure, the dogs stood up on their hind legs and tried to lick Eva’s and Bruce’s faces.
“They want to get in on the action,” Bruce said.
“Goodbye, sweethearts,” Eva said, bending down to rub their ears. “Take care of Daddy. I’ll miss you.”
She got into the car with Min. As it pulled away from the curb, the dogs whined and tried to give chase. Bruce held them back by their leashes with one hand and waved with the other. Even though he could see through the rear window that Eva hadn’t turned around, that she wasn’t looking at him, he kept waving, until the car was lost in the surge of uptown traffic.
10
The next night, as was required of him, he went to the Weisensteins’ for dinner. They lived on West End Avenue, in an apartment with scuffed parquet floors that squeaked underfoot and windows that rattled whenever a bus went by. “I’m afraid there’s a bit of a crisis in the kitchen,” Rachel said, accepting the bottle of wine Bruce had brought and sitting him down on an old sofa covered in balding olive-green velvet and draped with pilled cotton blankets. “What would you like to drink?”
“Gin and tonic,” he said, a drink he never would have asked for had Eva been there. Had Eva been there, he would have asked for white wine.
“Aaron, could you make Bruce a gin and tonic?” Rachel called.
“I’m busy!” Aaron yelled through the door to
the kitchen, from which a smell of frying fish emanated.
“Try to make yourself comfortable,” Rachel said, which might have been a joke, given that the sofa sagged so much that when Bruce sat, his behind nearly touched the floor, dust flew up from the cushions, the springs dug into his back. On the coffee table, yellowing sections of last Sunday’s Times lay strewn, along with back issues of magazines he’d never heard of, and advance copies of books by writers he’d never heard of, and an open laptop on the screen of which psychedelic bubbles burst into infinity.
After a minute or so, an immense white cat emerged from an open door, sauntered over to the sofa, jumped onto Bruce’s lap, and put a paw on each of his shoulders. The cat stared at him. One of its eyes was blue, the other yellow.
Rachel came out again with his drink and a bowl of Japanese rice crackers. When she sat next to him, her knees rose to the level of her breasts, as if she were a folded-up penknife. She herself was drinking whiskey, neat. “That’s Mumbles,” she said of the cat, who was nuzzling Bruce’s cheeks. “He’s a whore. You’re a whore, Mumbles.”
Bruce sneezed.
“Are you allergic?”
“A little.”
“I think I’ve got some antihistamines—”
“Don’t worry.”
Rachel didn’t get up. She was in her late forties, with glasses that were always slipping down her nose and brown hair tied up in an improvisatory chignon.
“Aaron’s doing one of his Chinese whole fish,” she said hopelessly.
“What kind of fish is it?”
“Some huge fish. I think it’s called a scump. He’s only doing it because Eva’s not here. You know how much she hates smelly foods, the way the smell gets into her clothes.”
It occurred to Bruce that with her prominent teeth, her pale eyes and bony back, Rachel herself might be a fish, or a woman metamorphosed into a fish.
“Has Eva gotten safely to Venice? How are she and Min doing?”
“Fine, I think. All I’ve gotten so far is a text saying they’ve arrived. That and a few photos.”
“Oh, good, let’s have a look.”
“They’re not that interesting. Bridges and canals mostly.”
“Is there anything else in Venice besides bridges and canals?”
“Churches. And cats.” He looked meaningfully at Mumbles, who was now making bread on his lap.
“And you’re OK on your own?”
Why did everyone seem to think he wouldn’t be OK on his own?
“I’m fine.”
“We were worried you might be at a loose end. Especially with that awful inauguration party happening next door. Well, think of this as an anti-inauguration party.”
The noise that exploded from the kitchen Bruce would have described as a sizzle had it not been so loud. He thought: Aaron is boiling someone in oil.
“It’s always a bit of a production when Aaron does a whole fish,” Rachel went on. “Well, we’ve got a nice group together for tonight. Jake’s coming—I know you like Jake. And Sandra Bleek. You remember her—Grady’s cousin, the one who was at your house that Saturday when Eva, when she wanted us to say that thing to Siri?”
Though he remembered the afternoon, Bruce didn’t remember Sandra herself until she came through the door—a tiny woman with an immense quantity of white-streaked hair, parted in the middle and plummeting over her shoulders. This hair gave her face a masklike quality that put Bruce in mind, all at once, of toy poodles, cartoon witches, and Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.
“Welcome to our anti-inauguration party,” Rachel said, kissing Sandra on the cheek.
“Your what?”
“Our anti-inauguration party, during which we don’t think about the inauguration. Collectively.”
“What an interesting idea,” Sandra said, sitting down on a slipper chair into which Bruce himself could never have fit. “And where are the twins tonight?”
“Out. We mean nothing to them anymore.”
“How old are they now?”
“Just turned eighteen.”
Bruce was surprised. The last time he’d noticed the Weisensteins’ twins—he couldn’t remember their names—they’d been children.
“It was the same with Lara,” Sandra said. “The day she turned sixteen, I took her to get her driver’s license and that was the last I ever saw of her.”
“You let her drive in the city?” Rachel said.
“No, this was on Long Island. My husband and I—my soon-to-be ex-husband and I—have—had—two places, an apartment near Lincoln Center and a house in Bridgehampton. Not one of those fancy beach houses, just an old ramshackly cottage that we bought in the nineties and never got around to fixing up. I’m supposed to be living there now. That’s what the judge ordered—that until the divorce is finalized, I get the house in Bridgehampton and Rico gets the apartment, even though it was my apartment before we got married. The lease is in my name. Her reasoning is that Rico has to be in the city for his job, whereas I don’t have a job, so I can be anywhere, which I think is totally sexist. I mean, just because I don’t go to an office doesn’t mean I don’t have a job.”
“Still, to be fair, you don’t have to be in the city for your job. You can do it in the country. You can do it anywhere.”
“But I need the city. I’m not given to hibernation. I can’t just sit out on Long Island all winter, staring at the leafless trees.”
“You mean you’d rather sit out at Grady’s house in Connecticut staring at the leafless trees?”
“At least I’ve got him there, when he’s there and not off on one of his cruises. Plus, twice a week he has a car drive him into the city. I can get a lift. And it’s a much easier drive than from Bridgehampton. There’s a lot less traffic.”
“What kind of work do you do?” Bruce asked.
“Sandra’s a writer,” Rachel said.
“No, I’m not,” Sandra said.
“Oh, come on,” Rachel said. “You write.”
“Ask your husband. That I write doesn’t make me a writer, it makes me an apprentice. An aspirant. I haven’t yet earned the right to call myself a writer.”
“She’s working with Aaron,” Rachel said.
“Congratulations,” Bruce said. “What’s the book?”
“There is no book,” Sandra said. “I mean, Aaron’s not publishing me. I’m just working with him.”
“After Aaron got laid off, he decided to go freelance,” Rachel said.
“Aaron got laid off?”
“In December. Didn’t Eva tell you?”
The truth was, Bruce couldn’t remember if Eva had told him or not. She told him so many things about so many people, he had trouble keeping them straight.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Thank you,” Rachel said. “When it happened, we were pretty torn up about it, as you can imagine. With time, though, we’ve come to realize that it was for the best. Publishing is so corporate these days, much more so than when we started out. His job stifled Aaron. Sometimes you have to get out of something before you see how miserable it’s been making you.”
“That was certainly the case with my marriage,” Sandra said.
“In any case, I’ve still got my job,” Rachel said, “so at least there’s a steady income, even if it’s only a little more than half of what it used to be.”
“And you don’t find your job stifling?” Sandra asked.
Rachel gazed into her whiskey. “At the end of the day, women are more pliable than men. It comes from having children, I suppose. Having children, you get used to not being free.”
“It’s true,” Sandra said, then added, turning to Bruce, “In some ways I envy you and Eva, not having kids.”
This was the second time in two days that Bruce had been envied for his lack of children.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a trade-off, I guess.”
“You know, I’ve often thought of asking Eva about that,” Rachel said
, “only—well—it’s such a delicate subject. I worry she might not want to talk about it.”
The way Rachel looked at Bruce, he got the feeling she was hoping he would make up for Eva’s reticence. Lucky for him, the buzzer rang. Startled, Mumbles jumped off his lap, which had gone numb from his weight.
As soon as he saw Jake, bearing flowers and a bottle of wine, Bruce hoisted himself out of the sofa to hug him. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said under his breath. “They’re talking about children.”
Uncertain how to take this comment, Jake gave the flowers and the wine to Rachel. He hung up his coat. The chaotic indeterminacy of the Weisensteins’ apartment made him nervous. The problem was the insufficient differentiation of the rooms, too many of which did double or triple duty—the living room, for instance, which was also the dining room, Rachel’s study, and—since he now regarded himself as too old to share a room with his sister, Leah—the bedroom of Ariel, the male twin. Despite the cold weather, the steam heat made Jake sweat. The overhead light gave him a headache. Nevertheless he determined to do his best, because Rachel had called him and said she needed him—“for Bruce’s sake.”
Now she said, “As I think I told you, Jake, our plan tonight is to ignore the inauguration. To pretend it isn’t happening.”
“If we’re supposed to ignore it, why do you keep bringing it up?” Aaron asked, coming out of the kitchen.
“I’m mentioning it,” Rachel said. “Mentioning it isn’t the same as bringing it up.”
Sweat darkened Aaron’s T-shirt, which was too short, revealing a few inches of hairy belly. “That’s a fallacious distinction,” he said.
“All right, then, how about this? The point of this dinner is to get Bruce away from the party his next-door neighbors are having.”
“Actually, if I were home, I probably wouldn’t hear anything,” Bruce said. “Our building has thick walls, and they’ve promised to keep the noise down. My guess is they’ll just be sitting around drinking gin.”
“Or Diet Coke,” Jake said.
“Good God, do I have to give up Diet Coke just because Trump drinks it?” Rachel said.
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