“I think Emily lives near here,” she said, stopping at a dark corner and peering down the street they were about to cross. “North Eighth Street, I think. That’s her street.”
“Do you want to stop in?” Will asked, in such a way that the question sounded rhetorical.
“No, no, no.” Beth flushed, feeling suddenly stupid, though not exactly sure why. Was it such a banal thing to mention that her friend lived nearby? Was that what he was implying? “I just… she’s probably not home.” She studied the buildings around her, with what she hoped appeared to be cool, anthropological interest: a barely lit bar, the restaurant in which they’d eaten—somehow they’d doubled back and she’d not realized it—and a lawn on which the Virgin Mary stood, hands clasped in prayer, a sky-blue plaster shell at her back. Was Lil and Tuck’s place near here, too? It was hard to tell.
“Then would you like to come to my place?” asked Will. “For a nightcap?”
“Um, sure,” said Beth. She wasn’t necessarily enjoying herself, but she wasn’t yet ready to give up on the possibility of enjoying herself. And she was flattered. He’d seemed only half interested in her all evening, inspecting the coterie of pretty women at the restaurant’s bar (all of them somehow sharper than she), while she, perhaps, talked too long about her family (“My mother is the best!”) and Astoria (“Lil said there wasn’t any place even to get a cup of coffee, and she was right”) and the classes she’d taught that summer (“I totally overloaded the syllabus”) and Dave, whom she’d not meant to talk about, but of course, did (“It was just so weird to see him”). But then there they were, passing under the slender trees of Havemeyer Street—just beginning to shed their spade-shaped leaves—and into the glaring light of his building’s bare, ugly lobby. He twisted open a battered tin mailbox and extracted a sheaf of envelopes and flyers, then guided her up a flight of stairs and down a short hallway to a shiny new steel door. The door, it turned out, opened directly into the apartment’s sitting room, a sparsely decorated space, with a neat white couch on one wall, a fussy little chair facing it, and a square kitchen table in the far corner. To her left, she saw a small bedroom, the mere glimpse of which made her flush. And around a corner, a tiny kitchen—really just a walled-in section of the living room—with plants on dusty shelves bolted across the windows.
Will went into the kitchen and emerged with a bottle of dark liquor in one hand, two unmatched tumblers in the other. “Remy, okay?” She nodded, though she wasn’t sure what it was. She rarely drank; she couldn’t, couldn’t smoke either, due to what her mother half jokingly called her “delicate constitution.” She’d spent her junior year of high school in bed with a bout of mono, like some sort of Victorian spinster. “Sit, sit.” He gestured toward the futon, placing the glasses on the little table and unscrewing the bottle’s cap. She sat, straightening her skirt around her and crossing her legs, fighting the urge to take off her new boots, which were pinching her toes.
“Most of this furniture was Tuck’s actually,” he said, handing her a squat tumbler. “He decided he wanted to start afresh with Lil, so he left it here. He has good taste.” He shrugged. “And I don’t have any. So I’m happy with his hand-me-downs.” He had a habit of pronouncing certain words—clichéd phrases—as though they had quotes around them. Beth was beginning to find this affectation a little annoying, in part because she was so familiar with it. Her friends in grad school had all done the same. This was the fate of academics the world over: to view even the most harmless phrases as dangerous clichés. She was guilty of it herself.
She took a tentative sip of her drink, coughing a little from its fumes, and immediately began to feel warm all over. “You didn’t have any furniture of your own?” He shook his head, swallowing. “Not much. I’m not good with stuff.” For the first time that evening, she felt she had his whole attention—but she was now having trouble focusing on him. To her right, above Will’s head, several rows of mounted shelves held well-thumbed books—she could spot no fiction published since the First World War—in front of which, at various intervals, stood an army of garishly colored children’s toys: a plastic dinosaur, a Kewpie doll, and a Lego tower. After four years around pop culture grad students, this didn’t strike her as all that strange. She knew forty-year-olds with complete collections of original-issue Star Wars action figures or Strawberry Shortcake dolls still in the original packaging.
“You have some toys,” she said, smiling.
“Yes, yes,” he agreed, nodding a bit too energetically. “Yes, I do.”
“Is there a story behind them?”
“Well, yes, yes, there is. They belong to my son, Sam.”
“Oh.” Beth grinned stiffly. “Wow.”
He turned his palms upward, smiling. “I know, it’s rather a shock, isn’t it?”
“No, no, of course not.”
“No, it is, you mustn’t be overly polite about it. I’m the Englishman, right?” he said, smiling broadly—sadly, actually—and his particular beauty hit her with a thud. For a moment, she was certain she’d never been so attracted to a man.
“Okay,” she said, drawing out the word. “I won’t. Promise. No politeness from me. How old is he, Sam?”
“Four,” he said, leaning back on the couch and crossing his legs at the knee. “He started prekindergarten last month. It’s a big deal. He has a backpack.”
“I can imagine,” she said, taking another inventory of the toys on the shelves. There was a Barbie, naked, her long legs jutting from the shelf. No gender hang-ups, Beth thought.
Will followed her glance. “It’s a game we play. He stands on the couch and lines up everything on the shelves. Hours of entertainment.”
Beth nodded, suddenly impatient. “So does Sam have a mother?”
“No,” Will replied. “No, he doesn’t. It’s quite an amazing story. He was hatched from an egg.”
“That is amazing. Does he look at all like, I don’t know, a chicken?”
“No, he’s a perfectly normal little boy. Quite blond, though, now that you mention it, a bit chickenlike, isn’t it? So maybe there is a bit of chicken blood somewhere in there. That would explain the egg thing.”
“So, he doesn’t live with you?”
“Well, it’s funny. We don’t actually have any firm custody arrangements—me and the egg, that is—so, for now, Sam stays here about half the time. Usually on weekends. Which is why I made our assignation”—a sardonic smile—“for a Wednesday. Otherwise I’d have done the proper thing and asked you out for a Saturday night. But Sam will definitely be with me this Saturday.”
“And the rest of the time he lives with a broken egg.”
Will laughed a true, unguarded laugh, his first of the evening. “Well, yes, that’s actually a pretty accurate description.” He bunched up his mouth, a not unattractive gesture. “Shall I put some music on?” Before she could answer, he’d risen and turned his back to her, shuffling through a pile of CDs on the mounted shelves. “Yes, well. Sam’s mother is actually kind of a nutcase. She is, as you’ve probably guessed, my wife.”
“Your wife?” said Beth, in a voice that sounded, to her, like a squeak.
“Yes. I’d like to say ex-wife, but we’re not quite divorced yet. Almost there, though.”
Beth stared at him.
“I know, I know,” he said. “It’s not some line. We’ve been separated for a long time. Since Sam was a baby.”