“I feel like …” said Ana, groping for it. “I feel like I miss him. I miss something we were.” She was remembering the previous night, how she had returned home and James was gone, as usual. He had made some kind of silent commitment to not being home when she got home, as if to sustain the scaffolding of the life before he got fired. Ana did not ask him where he went.
In the immediate wake of the firing, there had been meetings, interviews, and then a long late-night conversation about James taking “a break.” Perhaps they could live off her salary while he tried his hand at fiction, maybe wrote a script on spec for a hard-hitting cop show about the politics of downtown living. Ana trod delicately while they spoke, knowing James did not want to hear anything but yes, yes, yes, that he saw everyone but her huddled together against him in a giant no. They could afford for James not to work, after all, because Ana had always made more money, and because, most of all, they didn’t have children. Neither of them said this, but it was there, breathing between the lines of the conversation.
James had come in after Ana had changed from her dress into blue jeans and a T-shirt, was pouring herself a glass of white wine and standing at the back French doors, looking out at the churned-up garden, still unfinished. The landscapers had vanished around the time James lost his job.
James slammed the door, dropped his jacket on the floor, kicked off his shoes so they blocked the doorway. Ana was watching all of this from far away in the kitchen, across the first floor, seeing through the walls that used to be there. James had a drink in his hand within seconds. He had not said a word.
“Nice day, dear?” she asked in a June Cleaver voice.
“Not really,” he said. “Do you know the only thing worse than having someone say to you: ‘Do you work in television?’ ”
Ana didn’t answer, recognizing a setup.
“It’s: ‘Didn’t you used to work in television?’ ”
Something had happened at Starbucks.
James told this story while lightly pulling at his beard, like he might be trying to hurt himself. Then he said: “Good night,” and went to bed without supper.
Ana didn’t want to tell Sarah these details. They were humiliating and could be used against her. Ana was still selective with her new friend, still wondering if she was like the other girls Ana had known in her life, with their dizzying switches from kindness to spite. James had told Ana she would always have a problem with other women because she lacked sentimentality, and because she was beautiful. But Ana hated this idea of her sex and refuted it, looking always for that woman friend who would hold her fire and prove James wrong.
And so Ana kept coming here to Sarah’s, watching Finn grow, carving something into the space when the men weren’t around, listening to her friend talk about her own long days, her fears for her son, her hopes for her future. Ana genuinely liked this woman, this chaotic person who left a huge bag of cat food in her hall for weeks and weeks, just walked around it instead of moving it to the pantry. The house was filled with unfinished gestures, doors off their hinges propped against half-painted walls.
Her own home was a study in paucity. In the past couple of years, Ana had gotten rid of every little tchotchke: a pink velvet bobbleheaded rabbit she bought in Chinatown on a whim; a virgin pencil case, useless because it was too short for pens; an empty picture frame; little half pads of stickies. Over the course of one week, she moved from room to room, drawer to drawer, putting items in liquor store bags. Days later, when she heard the rattle of the garbage truck in the alley, Ana watched from the window, wondering if she should cry out: “Wait!” and save the bobblehead, or even the pencil case, save them not because they were attractive or useful but just because they were hers, and in that way, valuable, maybe.
And yet, Ana felt calmed at Sarah’s. She didn’t require her white space when Sarah was around.
She helped her clear the coffee dishes. Finn circled their feet like a shark.
“Sarah …” Ana began, moving the dishes around on the counter.
Sarah turned to her, open-faced.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“Know you wanted a kid.”
Sarah raised her brows a little. “Oh,” she said. She puzzled a moment. “Well, I guess it’s kind of like when you ask gay people, ‘When did you know?’ and they say, ‘I always knew.’ ” Then she added: “What about you? When did you know?”
Ana moved the dishes side to side.
“I’m not sure,” she said. Then she looked up. “Same, I guess.”
Finn moved in, and Sarah leaned over to pick him up, distracted by his murmurs.
At the door, Ana kissed Sarah on the cheek, and Sarah tilted her head. “Everything okay?” It sounded so much like a statement that Ana could only nod her assent.
When she’d arrived home that night, James had dinner on the table, a glass of red wine poured and breathing for her. It was as if he had felt her pulling away, betraying him just a little over coffee, as if her lack of faith were casual and passing.
He was funny and light. Even the beard looked trimmer. They ate dinner in the breakfast nook, with the French doors open, looking at a huge hole in the yard. After months of delays, the contractors had showed up with shovels and begun digging again. James had simply found them there, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He did not ask what they did with all the dirt they removed.
After dinner, as Ana cleared the dishes, James rubbed up against her, and to his surprise, she responded, pushing back, putting her hand down his pants. He had developed a nut brown tan from the sun where his face was unbearded. Ana wondered if he’d had a good day writing, and felt, maybe, that a corner had been turned.
James pulled the blinds in the living room and the kitchen, sealing the house from one end to the other. Ana appeared behind him naked. She unfolded a clean kitchen towel, carefully placing it over the sofa cushions before lying down, spreading herself open, and he stood above her, looking down, breathing heavily. It was the first time in a long time that they had been together without the presence of this third, shadow person, nudging them forward, giving them reason. The absence flickered as sadness in James, and then it snuffed itself out. He buried his face in his wife’s neck, moving his tongue between her breasts. For Ana, she felt as if she had been fucking while swathed in a gauze for two years, trying to feel through the thing between her and her husband. But now, with her hands on his hips, her body was greedy, ferocious for him. They closed in on something like joy.
Only when she had tied the last garbage bag and closed the windows and drawn the curtains and folded the laundry and put it away—only then did Ana stop and take a different kind of tour of the house, touching surfaces with her fingers. In part, she was checking the thoroughness of her work, but also, she fingered Marcus’s shirts hanging in the closet, ran her nails through a mound of necklaces in Sarah’s jewelry box. She touched the walls of photos in their mismatched frames. The family was so young; no old or sepia shots of ancient relatives, nothing from a life before. It was as if when Finn arrived, he brought with him the present and erased everything behind him. The city was filled with these urban orphans. Ana had seen cases of erasure often in her Legal Aid work as a student; poverty and aloneness arrived together often. A few circumstances and they were in the system: an only child; a refugee claim; a parental estrangement; an accident.
But there were different kinds of connection now. Why hadn’t she considered this?
Sarah and Marcus had one desktop computer, in a room that was part den, part office. A small spotted blanket with a stuffed cow’s head curled on the office chair. Ana suddenly remembered Finn dragging it around by the head, holding it up to his mother, saying, “Moo.” That’s something, she thought, putting the cow blanket in the basket of things to take home. I know something.