“I will not,” he told her, hitting each word, the way she’d been taught to do in acting class, “be bullied into saying things I don’t want to say or don’t think you’re ready to hear.”
“Bullied,” screamed Lil. “Bullied. I’m not bullying you—”
“Yes, you are,” he said. “Now, listen. I’m in a strange position here. I’m trying to talk to you as a doctor, but also as a friend. You want me to talk to you just as a friend? Okay, well, then I’ll give you some advice. You’re in a destructive relationship and you should get out of it. You’re extremely bright and I can’t imagine how or why you can’t see it. But clearly your husband is doing you no good.” Lil stared at him, shocked. “But,” she said, her voice still, she knew, too loud, “but you hardly know Tuck.”
Josh waved his hand dismissively. “I know him well enough.” With the formal air of a man waiting for a train, he held his wrist up, checked the time, and walked back over to her bed. “I need to get going. If you want to leave, talk to Dr. Goldstein and he’ll, I’m sure, get the release process going. If you have any problems, just tell Emily and I’ll intervene. Tuck should be by with clothes for you. You can eat dinner in the cafeteria tonight, with the other patients. If Tuck doesn’t come, Emily and I can go over and grab some stuff for you. She still has your extra key, right?”
“Yes,” said Lil, sullenly avoiding his gaze.
“Okay,” he said, more gently now. Why had she yelled at him? He had been her ally and she had alienated him. She was left alone, as usual. “Okay, Dr. Goldstein should be in soon.” He paused by the door. “And try to get some food down. You’ll feel much better. Really.”
When the door clicked shut, she took a quick look at her lunch, now thoroughly chilled, and found her appetite gone. The nurse had not come by with magazines and Emily had not returned with her book. There was no clock in the room and Lil had no watch, but she guessed it was midafternoon. How would she pass the time until dinner? A twinge of despair passed through her. More than anything, Lil feared boredom. She slunk down in the bed, wrapped the covers tight around her, and pressed her hands to her eyes, sending bright sparks across her lids. It would be nice to sleep, she thought, but she knew sleep wouldn’t come, not now. She could no longer ignore the brightness of the room or the nasty truths crashing around inside her head. Had Tuck always been such a cold creature? To leave her alone in the recovery room? To leave her alone on Friday, as she bled and bled? To have advocated for her staying on at the hospital? So he wouldn’t have to take care of her? To see her suffering? Would the man she’d married have done such things? No, she didn’t think so. But then would she, four years earlier, have held scissors to him, just so that he mightn’t touch her? No, no. Tears arrived in her eyes with a sting. On the wall in front of her, just then, she noticed tiny spots of light, striped red, yellow, green, blue. She sat up to look more closely—where were they coming from?—and they disappeared. When she slunk down again, they reappeared. Maybe she was crazy. But then she saw their source: her ring, her engagement ring reflecting the late afternoon sun. How stupid, she thought, stupid, stupid simple irony. Like something from a Julia Roberts movie.
But here she was sobbing again, and yet, she almost felt like it was someone else, some other girl, sobbing into her pillow, thinking these childish, petty thoughts that had somehow become her own: that she didn’t want to give back her ring, or her married name, or the handsome man she’d married, or his friends who had become her friends. She didn’t want to go back to being alone in the world and having no one to care for but herself—she had never really been good at taking care of herself anyway. And if she left Tuck, what would keep her here, in New York. Her job, her friends, yes, but what were such things compared to a marriage? She’d thought friendship so important before she married, but now she felt that her friends didn’t really know her—couldn’t really know her—as well as Tuck did, even if that knowledge made him hate her. There was no point, she’d realized lately, in trying to talk to most of them about anything important. If she complained about Tuck, they offered her quick solutions, the kinds of things you read in stupid women’s magazines. If she spoke of him positively, they glanced at one another nervously. They understood nothing. They hadn’t seen her at her most base, screaming until her chest ached, sobbing in bed and bleeding; nor had they ever made her happy the way Tuck did, made her feel that she could do anything, be anything. She had known she wanted him—and only him—from the first moment she saw him, striding up the steps in front of Low Library. And still, now, when he walked into the room, she forgot that the rest of the world existed. But perhaps this was the problem. Each time he walked into the room, she greeted him like a drowning woman clutching a life raft. And each time he walked out the door, her heart seized with panic that he was never, ever coming back.
As the afternoon wore on, her eyes drooped and closed. The noises of the clinic—the squeak of the nurses’ rubber shoes, the clang of metal carts, the shouts and cries and chatter of patients—receded into a sort of background chorus, much like the traffic outside her apartment, which had kept her awake for one night, years back, when she and Tuck first moved in, then never again. Curled inside Emily’s soft sweater, the hospital blankets heavy against her legs, she slept a thick, dreamless sleep. When she woke, the sky pressed black against her window. The pigeons were gone. Someone had removed her lunch tray and replaced it with a dinner tray, the food still giving off faint wisps of steam. On the table beside her bed lay a copy of The Forsyte Saga—the copy she’d given Emily a few months back, after Emily had asked “What should I read next?” though Lil had never expected Emily would really read it. Lil had the same edition at home, a wan Sargent on its cover. She looked around the room. There was no suitcase, no shopping bag filled with clothes, no signs that Tuck had come by. She shivered a little in her sweater—she’d already begun to think of it as hers, rather than Emily’s—and realized that she felt something akin to relief. He was gone, finally. She snapped on the bedside light and ran her finger over the reproduced Sargent, a blushing girl, of about Lil’s own age, with red-gold hair and dark, serious eyes, who was, Lil supposed, meant to represent the doomed Irene Forsyte.
Inside the book she found a note from Emily, saying that she hadn’t wanted to wake her, that she’d bring clothes and things for Lil early tomorrow. Which meant, Lil thought, that it was true, it was true: Tuck was gone. She stretched her arms over her head, plumped her pillows, and opened the novel, flipping past the introduction and the table of contents to the front page of the first book, “The Man of Property.” The epigraph, which she’d somehow never noticed, though she’d read the book twice, read: “You will say… ‘The slaves are ours.’”
It was Shakespeare, apparently, The Merchant of Venice. One of her favorite plays, yet she couldn’t recall the line, nor who spoke it. She turned the page and began reading of the Forsytes “at home”—a party for the engagement of young June Forsyte to Philip Bosinney, an architect. The marriage, Lil knew, would never take place. Phil would fall in love with Irene, the unhappy wife of June’s uncle Soames, and then he would die, crushed under a carriage wheel. June would become a spinster, a bit of a kook. Irene, having tasted real love and passion, would leave Soames. Many years later, she would marry again—this time happily—to Soames’s cousin Young Jolyon, an amiable, left-leaning artist.