The Times mag, in their profile, had run a photo of him at sixteen, in a green Atari T-shirt and too-long jeans, his elbow resting on a boxy Mac Plus, his cheeks, even then, covered with a dense, inky growth. Lil had loved this photo, for reasons she couldn’t explain, and she’d blushed and stammered when next she saw Ed, remembering how she’d lingered over it. The real Ed was somewhat less approachable. He always greeted Lil like an old friend, but he spoke so passionately and forthrightly and earnestly that it perpetually caught her off guard. “What do you think about this impeachment madness?” he’d asked the last time she saw him, in November, before Tuck was fired. “It’s crazy,” she’d said, stupidly, realizing that her thoughts didn’t go much deeper than that. By all rights, he should consider her an idiot. But he didn’t seem to, which made her even more uncomfortable, for this made her the recipient of his charity.
“I think he’s going to leave,” Beth told them.
“And do what?” asked Lil skeptically.
“Go back to MIT, finish his Ph.D., work in the Media Lab.”
“How could he go back?” asked Lil. She seemed almost angry. The girls looked at one another. “To Boston? To school? After running his own magazine?”
Beth shrugged. “He’s been talking about making a movie. With Jonathan. About this company they wrote about last year. They own the rights. I think he’s working on the screenplay.”
“A movie?” cried Lil. Her friends looked away, embarrassed by this display of emotion. Why should it matter to her if Ed left Boom Time? Though, of course, Sadie thought, she felt betrayed. Ed could leave, could go off and do whatever he liked, could rise from the ashes of his success, but Tuck had been forced out, demoralized.
“Would Tuck go back to Columbia?” she asked.
Lil shook her head furiously. “No, never. He thinks it’s all bullshit now.” She smiled, a bit wanly. “And I suppose it is.” They had talked of this too long and her head was beginning to ache with all that she couldn’t say. Namely, the figures that kept appearing before her eyes, the money they owed ($1,500 for rent, for December and January; $400 for Tuck’s student loans; a frighteningly high figure in credit card bills, since they’d paid for much of their wedding with plastic, rather than cede control to Lil’s parents). And the terrifying notion, which she tried to push out of her mind, that Tuck was somehow not the person she’d thought he was, someone very different from the man who’d come home from work each night during the hot summer of their engagement, peeled off his clothes, and carried her to bed, murmuring “You’re too far away” if she so much as rolled out of his arms. Everything she did, everything she said seemed to be wrong, and had been wrong since sometime in the fall, a few weeks after the wedding. But certainly it had been worse since the day Tuck was fired.
She’d been standing at the stove, browning meat for Bolognese and panicking about a rash of late papers she needed to grade, when she heard the lock turn in the loft’s heavy front door. It couldn’t be Tuck, she thought, as it was just getting on six o’clock and he never left work before seven or, usually, eight. But it was Tuck. She knew what he had to tell her even before he’d shut the door. “Hey,” she said, taking care to keep her tone light.
“Hello,” he responded jauntily, locking the door and rushing over to her. “Hey,” he said, and kissed her neck, wrapping his arms around her from behind, so that she could smell the faint odor of his sweat and cigarettes and something else, something sweet and slightly sickening. “You look beautiful.”
“Hey,” she said again, stirring the meat and half turning to face him. Strands of graying hair fell lankly over his forehead—he was long overdue for a haircut—and the lids of his eyes were crepey, worn. “Is everything okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “Why do you always expect the worst?”
“I don’t,” she said softly, willing herself not to get angry. She had so many papers to grade. She couldn’t fight with him tonight. “I don’t, sweetheart, really.”
“Well, you’re right,” he said, swiping his hair back and letting his lips go slack. “Those fuckers,” he said, gripping her arm. “Those fuckers.”
“Who, Tuck?” she asked, though she knew who, but maybe, maybe he was talking about something else.
“Who do you think, Lil?” he shouted. His face was slick with sweat, though it was cold out, and that faint sweetness was, she realized, whiskey. Oh God, she thought, he didn’t really stop at a bar on his way home. “Those fucking corporate bastards. They’ve been out to get me from the start, just waiting for me to make a mistake, looking for an excuse to fire me.”
“What?” she asked, pouring tomatoes into the meat. “What happened? Please just tell me.”
“I was fired, Lil. What do you think?” He dropped into a kitchen chair, rested his elbows on the table, and dropped his head into his hands.
“Why don’t you take off your coat?” she said, trying to quell her anxiety. “Why don’t you let me run you a bath and fix you a cup of tea? You can just relax and I’ll finish making dinner. And then we can talk.” She turned the heat down on her sauce, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and ignited the flame under the teakettle.
“I’m not,” said Tuck, his eyes following her movements in a way that made her freeze, both literally and metaphorically, “a five-year-old, Lil, so don’t treat me like one.”
“Tuck, I wasn’t—”
“I’ve. Just. Been. Fired,” he said. “I’ve just been completely humiliated.” He circled his hands in front of his face, as though words couldn’t capture the full measure of his fury and degradation. When he spoke again, his voice was a notch higher. “A cup of tea, Lil? Herbal tea, right? Because it’s too late to have any caffeine. I’d be up all night and that would be just frightful.” He grasped his cheeks in an expression of mock horror. “Thanks, but I don’t want any tea. I’d like a drink and if you had any compassion, you’d join me.”
Lil, by this point, had flattened herself against the counter and averted her eyes from his. “No, thanks, not right now,” she said, though she was thinking, Why did I bother to make dinner? I could have been grading my L&R papers. “I’m okay. If you’re not going to take a bath—”
“Lil, what is wrong with you?” Tuck shouted, banging his fist down on top of the kitchen counter. Lil opened her mouth but said nothing. Was there something wrong with her? Did she lack compassion? “You think this is all my fault, don’t you?” His voice was lower now, ragged from shouting. “Well, you’re wrong. They were itching to fire someone, to make someone an example, and it just happened to be me. I happened to be the asshole who got stuck slaving for that pathetic bitch. And you can’t, you can’t have a drink with me, like a normal human being? What is wrong with you? Why do you always blame me?”