“I’m so sorry,” she said, and went to James, putting her arms around his body. He smelled her neck. He moved a hand down around her waist, grabbing for her ass, rubbing his groin against her. She broke away.
“You need to eat,” she said, rooting in the fridge. Then she returned, ruffled his hair, and retreated again to look through cupboards.
Over her shoulder, she asked: “What happened? Was it Sly?”
James told her the details, sitting on a barstool while she lined up vegetables, began chopping onions and leeks into her glass bowls. She said: “What an asshole,” and “Did you talk to HR about severance?” and “We can file for wrongful dismissal”—all the things James wanted her to say, each comment another application of balm until the wound was fairly covered, and James a little drunk.
“We should put the adoption thing on hold,” said Ana, tossing the salad. She thought James would fight her, but he didn’t say anything, his head down.
The two of them sat in front of their pasta at last, neither of them eating. Ana wondered if her husband was also feeling that they had lost their grasp. Something had been severed and set adrift; Ana was left feeling arid. But she suspected James’s sensation of loss, radiating off his curved back as he picked at his food, was something entirely different, bound to a manhood she could scarcely bring herself to imagine.
In Sarah’s living room, weeks later, Ana had told her friend: “James has a beard.”
“Is it sexy?” asked Sarah. Ana had never considered this possibility, as the beard was so clearly linked to his firing, to the strange new arrangement in their house. It was the opposite of sexy. It was impotent.
“No. He looks like a fisherman.”
“Fishermen can be sexy.”
Ana shook her head from side to side and raised her eyebrows, as if considering this possibility.
Finn was sitting with his legs out in front of him, staring up at the TV, where a cartoon someone named Peep and a cartoon someone named Chirp were running through a stream. Finn had a large red ball in his lap, ignored.
Sarah sipped her coffee. She was barefoot, like Finn, both of them optimistic of the spring. Ana wore tall, slim boots over her jeans. In Sarah’s house, she never felt the need to take off her shoes.
“Did Marcus ever have a beard?” asked Ana.
“Oh, God, yeah. He went through a whole proletarian thing in his mid-twenties. He was breaking from his parents for good. Bought a van and went west, worked in a national park.”
“You’re kidding.” Ana couldn’t see this, picturing Marcus in his plain black sweaters and wire-framed glasses that made her think of German architects. “Where were you during that time?”
Sarah stretched one arm over her head, groaned a little. “Probably backpacking, or screwing around or something. We weren’t so serious then,” she said. “Really, it was only a summer, when I think about it. I guess he hasn’t had too many beards, actually.”
The credits of the television show moved across the screen.
“Mommy, more TV. TV on,” said Finn, not taking his eyes from the screen.
“Sure, tomorrow,” said Sarah. “Can you press the Off button now?”
Finn stood up and pressed the button.
“Good job, Finny! Good job!” said Sarah, clapping. His jeans had little loops on the side, like he might be doing carpentry later. They were about an inch too short.
“I can’t seem to get the sizes right,” said Sarah as Ana glanced at the pants. She opened her arms for her son to run into. “Everything he owns is either way too big or way too small.” The boy took a kiss on the head, then disentangled himself and ran toward a pile of blocks in the center of the room, beginning to stack only the blue ones. Ana wondered if Finn learned these things at daycare—stacking and sorting. She couldn’t imagine him at daycare three mornings a week, away from Sarah, though apparently he went. She had never seen them apart.
“Did you notice how I didn’t say n-o to him when he asked about the TV?” said Sarah in a low voice. Ana nodded. “I’ve been reading up. You say: Yes, later, or yes, tomorrow, instead of n-o-t now. It’s a tactic. It confuses them, offsets the meltdown.”
Ana felt a little sorry for Finn, unwitting citizen of a country of deferred pleasure. The block tower teetered.
“I think James might be depressed,” said Ana. “He reminds me of my mother these days.”
“What, is he drinking?”
“No, it’s something else. He’s just not”—Ana struggled—“alive to the world like he used to be. Does that make sense? James has never had any bad luck.”
“Do you think it’s only bad luck?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but James has a kind of … certainty that might be hard to work with,” said Sarah carefully. “You know what I mean. I mean, we love James because we know him, but I wonder, in a workplace, if that could be …”
Ana felt a touch defensive on James’s behalf, but she knew that Sarah was right, and the certainty she referred to was, in fact, arrogance. James had left the university when he became a hot young pundit, in high demand after a seminar he designed on the decline of masculinity made him an expert on men. He had a national newspaper column and a radio show by thirty, and then ten years on TV, hosting this and that, called upon to air his views on any subject. James always had an opinion: the return of debauchery, the need for a new waterfront, why hockey matters. Somewhere in there was the book about cultural identity. Oh, James had been so proud at that book launch, but there had only been two trays of cheese. The lack of cheese was the first sign that, as an author, James had arrived late to the party. Store shelves were already heaving with books on cultural identity. No one bought James’s. He went back to television, a little stiffer, a little meaner.
“I worry about him,” said Ana, but the reason went unsaid because, suddenly, Finn burst into tears. Sarah was on him instantly. Ana watched: Sarah identified the problem—the collapsed tower—and talked to him quietly through his screams, asking him questions: “What can you do to make this better? You don’t like it when things you build break, do you?”
Out of habit, Ana imagined herself with a child that age. She stored away Sarah’s wisdom and words, trying to picture herself applying them later. But the picture was fainter now than it had ever been. Any child to come would not be hers, in all likelihood. This hypothetical child might even be out there right now, floating in a woman’s belly in a faraway country, being carried through a rice field, out of the hot sun. The image didn’t excite Ana, or sadden her. It seemed absurd; the stuff of science fiction, of a future she hadn’t arrived at yet.
She looked again at Finn being stroked in Sarah’s arms and tried to envy it. She knew how James felt when Finn was nearby: She had seen his face, for once entirely drained of rage. After dinner with Sarah and Marcus, she watched her husband on the porch as Finn was wheeled away, sadly waving good-bye at the stroller. Ana rooted around for some feeling to match James’s but came up with only a casual affection for this boy, for all boys, a mild curiosity that didn’t demand investigation. Hadn’t there been a time when the sight of a pregnant woman had caused her to look away, yearning? Hadn’t she hidden in that hotel room after the final miscarriage and wept? A chill crept over her body: She needed to find that person again, or James would be lost to her.
When Finn calmed, scurrying toward a basket of clean laundry on the edge of the room, Sarah returned to the couch, rolled her eyes at Ana, and looked expectant, waiting for her to start the conversation where it had stopped. Ana admired Sarah’s silences; they had a kind of presence, like rooms she was inviting Ana into.