“We need to take it back to Jesus,” said James.
“You propose living by Jesus’s doctrine?” asked Marcus.
“Well, I mean, I can’t, but even people who reject Christianity dig Jesus. Who’s not down with Jesus?”
Sarah shifted and unstuck the baby, who emerged endlessly out of the sling. A magician pulling a toy snake out of a hat.
“He’s a long guy,” said James.
Finn made a hissing sound, then burped. Sarah patted his back, and he flopped over her shoulder. James saw the baby’s reflection in the living room window, his head bobbing. He looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost, this bald kid. James wondered if anyone would be offended if he made this observation out loud. Marcus was easygoing, but it was hard to know for sure; the women were the ones bonding in this foursome. They went for lunch when James was on the road for work. What did they talk about? James tried to imagine Ana talking about him, their sex life, his balding head.
James wondered if Marcus possessed a less genial side. He couldn’t figure out where to place him yet, if he should invite him to play hockey or take him to a lecture. He couldn’t quite see a future with Marcus in it. Marcus didn’t smoke.
“Does anyone want to hold him? I’m pretending to ask politely, but I’m actually begging,” said Sarah.
“I will.” James rarely saw his nephew and nieces, though they lived only a half hour from his home. Holding his nephew as a baby, he had felt that he was holding a mewing, grotesquely small version of his brother. He kept expecting the baby to sit up and say: “So, Jimmy. I made an awesome trade today! Markets are up!” The boy bucked and twisted in his arms. But when held by his mother, as if to make a point, he softened, even cooed. This had seemed to James to indicate a future mean streak. He had kept his distance since.
But Finn was more of a public concern. Happy in all arms, he seemed to belong to everyone. Finn sat propped in James’s lap, facing outward with his legs straight in front, shaking a plastic cup. “Ba,” he said. “Babababa.”
“Exactly,” said James. James had developed an unspoken narrative in which he and Finn had a special bond. He did not tell Ana how it made him feel, this warm bag of socks over his shoulder, the pleasure he got when Finn moved his penny-shaped mouth.
He was certain that Ana was still heartbroken, as sick inside now as after the third miscarriage, when she vanished for four days, leaving only one voice mail. She returned in the same clothes she’d left in, walked past James in the foyer, and straight into the bathroom. While she showered, James looked in her purse and found nothing, until, at the bottom, his fingertips touched a layer of sand. Sand! She had driven all the way to Lake Superior, she finally told him, her hair wrapped in a white bath sheet, seated on the edge of the white duvet. She had gone to see the rock in the shape of the old woman, and she’d slept in a motel with a sanitation sash across the toilet and a hundred channels. Those were the only details she shared.
She felt better, she told him, and she was sorry.
James stood outside the door to the bathroom as she showered, wondering if he should get angry, wondering if this great writhing hatred within was visible to her. He did not want to find out, so he brought her tea, rubbed her back as she fell asleep on the new sheets he’d bought to replace the ones she’d bled into, the ones onto which she had leaked their lost child.
* * *
James watched her, carrying in an apple green lacquered Asian serving tray with a pot of decaf coffee, four mugs. Finn giggled while Ana poured the coffee.
“Oh, Ana, it’s always perfect here,” said Sarah, leaning back with her coffee, one hand stroking a forest green silk throw cushion.
“It really is great,” said Marcus. “It’s like a hotel.”
“Tell me about work. Tell me about the crazies,” said Sarah.
Ana pictured Christian. He was junior but she had worked with him on several cases, most recently researching a patent infringement. He appeared at her office door far too often, breaking the silence of the fifteenth floor, where Ana and her fellow neck-bowed research lawyers clicked away. Christian brought with him his litigator chatter, his unmet high-fives and golf scores.
Ana described how Christian insisted on using a billfold instead of a wallet, and the way he demonstrated this characteristic constantly. He played off the partners’ vanities, researching their past successes and bringing them up in meetings, wide-eyed: “Oh, wow, I studied that case in first year. You killed! Oh, wow!” And the men above her adored it. Even as they shushed him for his obviousness, their bodies inflated before her eyes, their cheeks reddened with pride.
Ana was surrounded by men all day, and had been for years, but she didn’t understand them, really, their shimmery foreheads, their noise, their presumption.
Sarah listened, asked Ana questions that no one else asked her about intellectual property. “What’s the infringement?”
“Oh—it’s nothing. It’s a tech company suing another tech company over storage device interfaces.” Sarah nodded lightly, her mouth pursed in listening. “I give the opinion. They ask for it, I give it.”
The men drifted off into a separate conversation about hockey. James talked from down on the rug with Finn, who attempted to pull himself along the edge of the coffee table. Every few minutes, James would grab him and make farting sounds on the baby’s belly, and the boy squealed with delight.
Ana’s certainty that she was dull was offset by the wine, which had the effect of speeding her up. So she told Sarah how there was a new young temp on her floor, a meek young woman merging documents for special projects.
“Special projects!” said Sarah. “I love that. Makes me think of birthday parties for handicapped people.”
This girl, Ruth, was off-putting. She hovered with a half smile, hoping someone would talk to her. The other day, her cardigan was buttoned wrong, and it dangled lopsided off her torso.
“I didn’t know if I should pull her aside and tell her.”
“What did you do?” Sarah asked. “I know what I’d do.” (Only later did this aside come back to Ana. In the night, she jolted awake: What would Sarah do? Why does she know so easily?)
“I did tell her, but late in the day. Around three. She was mortified, too, and since then, she’s seemed kind of angry with me. She walked right by me yesterday, and not even the office nod.”
“That’s fucked,” said James. Ana startled. She hadn’t known he was listening.
“Is it? She’s the youngest woman on our floor, she’s not even a lawyer, and I criticize how she looks. Doesn’t that affirm a certain currency for her?” Ana frowned. “Maybe I did it because I’m threatened.”