“I’m not going to go look for it,” I find myself saying into the phone. It’s not really a decision, it’s more like a discovery. I’m not going to be a woman hopelessly searching for a wedding ring in a public courtyard. Even if the situation does not in fact carry the metaphorical weight it misleadingly seems to carry. Still no. I had recently seen a photograph of Susan Sontag wearing a bear costume but with a serious expression on her face; you could see that she felt uneasy.
“Just go and even try not looking for it,” my husband is saying. “Just give the courtyard a little visit. Please.”
“There’s no way it’s still—”
“You really can’t do this one little thing?”
“This is my fault?”
“I’m on hour twenty-nine of my shift here.”
“I’m not doing nothing,” I say. I find I’ve neither raised nor lowered my voice, though I feel like I have done both. “You think I’m not capable, but that’s not right. You just don’t understand my position. You see me all wrong. It’s not fair, it’s not right—”
“I’m so sorry, my love,” he is saying. His voice has hairpin-turned to tender. Which is alarming. “I’m on your side,” he says. “I really do love you so much. You know that, right? You know I love you so much.”
We hadn’t always conversed in a way that sounded like advanced ESL students trying to share emotions, but recently that was happening to us; I think we were just trying to keep a steady course through an inevitable and insignificant strait in our relationship.
“I’m sorry, Boo,” I say. “I’m the one who should apologize.” I am suddenly missing him very badly, as if I have been woken from one of those dreams where the dead are still with us. Being awake feels awful. I language along, and then at some point in my ramblings he says to me, “I have to go now,” and then he is gone.
* * *
The daytime hours in this neighborhood belong almost exclusively to deliverymen and nannies. The deliverymen are all men. And the nannies are all women. And the women are all dark-skinned. I had not given much thought to my neighborhood’s socioeconomic or gender clustering before I became a daylight ghost. I mean, sure, I knew about it vaguely, but there it was — under cover of day, one saw, or at least it seemed as if one saw, that decades of feminism and civil rights advances had never happened. This was appalling. Yet there was not no comfort for me in the idea that men had strong calves, and carried things, and that it was each toddler’s destiny to fall in love with another woman. Was it my fault that these feelings lived inside me? Maybe.
I had not always — had not even long — been a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed and someone who considered eating less a valid primary goal. I had been a fairly busy environmental lawyer, an accidental expert of sorts in toxic mold litigation — litigation concerning alleged damage to property and persons by reason of exposure to toxic mold. I handled the first toxic mold case that came into the firm, so when the second case turned up, shortly thereafter, I was the go-to girl. A Texas jury had made an award of thirty-two million dollars in a case in 2001, and that had set a lot of hearts to dreaming. But the Texas case was really an insurance case, and so not a precedent for toxic mold cases. Most people don’t understand that. An insurance company had failed to pay promptly for repairs to leaking pipes in a twenty-two-room mansion that subsequently became moldy; all claims relating to personal injuries from toxic mold were dismissed, and an award was made only for property damage, punitive damages, mental anguish, and to cover plaintiff’s legal fees of nearly nine million dollars. But since the case was on the evening news, it was, predictably, radically misrepresented. Hence, toxic mold — litigation fever. It has been established that mold, like dust, is environmentally pervasive; some of us are allergic to some molds, just as some of us are allergic to dust, though whether any mold can damage our health in a lasting or severe way is unlikely, and certainly not scientifically proven. Also clear is that basic maintenance is an essential duty of a property owner. But beyond that … I handled quite a large number of mold cases. I filled out the quiet fields of forms. I dispatched environmental testers. The job was more satisfying than it sounds, I can tell you. To have any variety of expertise, and to deploy it, can feel like a happy dream.
But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can’t help people eat cereal any longer.
I judged my sentiment foolish, sure, but it captained me nevertheless. I laid no plan, but that afternoon I found myself saying to the managing partner, “I’m afraid I’ll need to tender my resignation.” I used that word, “tender.”
I could have rescinded all those words, of course.
But that night, after the tender word, I said to Boo, “I think I’m leaving my job.”
He set down his handheld technology.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll find some other work.”
“No, it’s really OK,” he said. “You don’t have to work at all. If you don’t want to. Or you could work at a bakery. Why not? You’ll figure it out. Under no time pressure, OK? I like my work. We can live from that.”
My husband is a pretty understanding guy; nevertheless, I found myself thinking of an old Japanese movie where the father gets stomach cancer but the family keep it a secret from him, and are all just very kind to him. “But you might wake up one day and not like your work anymore,” I said.
“That’s not going to happen to me,” he said. “I’m just not like that.” Then he added, “I could see you were unhappy. I could see that before you could. Honestly, I feel relieved.”
* * *
When the phone rings again — Unavailable — I pick it up right away. I had been so childish about not wanting to go look for the ring; I would tell Boo that I would go look for the ring, and then I would do that, I would go and look for it.
“Fifty-five minutes,” he says.
“I’m so sorry, I—”
“You said half an hour. It’s about expectations and promises. You don’t have to make these promises. But you do. You leave people expecting. Which is why you’re not just a loser working a shit job but also a really terrible person, the very worst kind, the kind who needs everyone to think she’s so nice. I never found you attractive. I never trusted you. You say, Yes, this, and I’m Sorry, that, and Oops, Really Sorry, and We Just Want to Do What Makes You Happy, but who falls for that? I don’t fall for it. I’m the one who sees who you really are—”
“I think you—”
“Why do you apologize and giggle all the time? To every guy the same thing. Why do you wear that silver leotard and that ridiculous eye shadow? Your breasts look uneven in that leotard. You know what you look like? You look like a whore. Not like an escort or a call girl. You look like a ten-dollar blow job. If you think you’re ever going to pass in this city as anything other than just one more whore-cunt—”
I hang up the phone.
I turn off the phone.
I pour myself a glass of water, but first I spill it and then I altogether drop it, and then I clean that up poorly. I don’t even own a silver leotard. Yet I had been called out by a small and omniscient God. I was going to be punished, and swiftly. I put on my husband’s boots and his raincoat, unintentionally creating a rubbery analogue of the clean and flat-chested look I have for years longed for. I left the apartment and headed out to the courtyard, a few blocks away; I wasn’t going to come back without that ring.