Sensing a nervousness in her—she seemed to be shaking giggles out of her mouth like a swimmer shaking off water—James began to be James, spilling over with curiosity. Within a moment, she had a glass of juice in her hand, and Finn was sitting next to her playing with the clasp on her purse, and James had learned that she had two daughters in the Philippines, in a town he had never heard of. Still, he nodded with an insider’s understanding when she said the name: “Oh, yes, of course.” And Ana, putting on her coat in the hallway, heard her husband and recognized in his response the smallest lie.
At the door, waving good-bye, both Ana and James were flung backward into their childhoods, each separately watching a marching band of babysitters who had walked through their parents’ doors over the years: the gum chewer, the sour old woman, the preadolescent with the babysitter course card. For James, the doorways were always the same, and his parents’ assurances the same, and his excitement the same. For Ana, the memories arrived in an aureole of confusion. Everyone was faceless, and the doors led to apartments and houses she’d lived in for only months at a time, some of which she wouldn’t recognize if she walked by them today.
“We’ll see you soon, buddy,” said James, preening a little for Ethel. He crouched down to give Finn a hug.
Ana made rustling noises, noting that James had never called Finn “buddy” in his life. Finn laid out Ethel’s makeup kit on the coffee table. Ethel seemed unfazed.
“Good-bye,” said Ana, who bent down and delivered an awkward kiss atop Finn’s head. She felt a million eyeballs rolling over her as she did it.
They left him like that, lining up lipstick next to ChapStick next to hair clips. James wondered lightly if Finn lifted his head or felt any kind of sadness when they shut the door, if the boy’s unease in any way echoed his. He pictured Marcus’s ashes in the basement and felt a panicky certainty that Finn needed more comfort. For a moment, he thought of turning to Ana and saying: “This is insane. We have to go back.” And pushing through the door to scoop up the boy and bury his face in his honey hair, feel his small cat paw hands around his neck. Ana would send Ethel home and lock the door behind her, keeping the three of them in and the cold October evening at bay.
He stopped walking.
“What is it?” asked Ana. She looked grave, as if anticipating exactly what he was thinking, but terrified to hear it said out loud. He won’t be able to leave him. His wife, bundled and moving slightly to keep warm, her hands in her leather gloves anxiously swinging by her side.
“Nothing,” he said. And then he lunged at her, grabbed her from the waist, and pulled her to his mouth, lips smashing.
“James …” She pulled away, ran her fingers through her hair.
“Let’s go in an alley and fuck.”
“Jesus.” He reached for her again, tried to get his hand through the buttons of her jacket, but there wasn’t enough space. “You’re going to rip it—” said Ana before he closed his mouth over hers.
“Let’s get ugly,” whispered James. “Let’s get a hotel room.” He was panting now, shaking her lightly from the shoulders.
Ana shoved him back. “James. It’s not like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. It’s not—We’re not—”
“Animals?” he said, and he let out a dog bark. Ana stared, and James felt all the lust draining from him as his wife frantically pushed down her short hair, which was perfect, entirely in place.
He breathed in the cold and made a declaration: “Let’s take a cab.”
Rick Saliman had spent thousands of dollars bonding his teeth, and the result, when he pulled back the curtains of his lips, was a strange erasure of the lines between each tooth. Something smooth and terrifying, resembling a long, narrow bar of soap, sat where his smile should have been.
“James,” he said, and gripped James’s hand like they were jumping from a cliff together. This was Rick’s greeting: No hello, just the loud singular recitation of a name. On the strength of this fantastic memory, and three decades of practice, the Saliman name was second on the firm’s stationery, right after the dead McGruger.
“Rick,” said James. Ana swooped over the waitress walking by and grabbed a glass of white for her, red for James.
“She does everything for you, is that right, James? Even gets the drinks these days?”
Ana tried a laugh.
“Only the things that matter,” said James, raising his glass for emphasis.
Ana left his side, beckoned by a wave from Elspeth, who stood with two young associates, new hires. One was blond, breakably thin beneath feathery hair; she reminded Ana of Woodstock, Snoopy’s friend. The other was tall, taller even than Ana, and less pretty, but she exuded a kind of burned anger—her eyes narrowed when offered Ana’s hand.
“Jeanine is working with Steven’s group,” said Elspeth, and the tall one gave an exhausted sigh topped by a world-weary smile that Ana found falsely mature for her face.
The blond one gazed sleepily around the room as if looking for a place to nap.
Ana felt a pull in the back of her head, an interior whisper—How’s Finn? Who’s in my home?—and she wondered if it was like that for Elspeth all day every day. Elspeth had three children, boy-girl twins and a boy. Ana discovered these children only after the two women had worked together for a year, when she saw Elspeth waiting for a descending elevator at 9:30 in the morning, her eyes teary, her jacket on, clearly hovering in the shadows hoping to be unseen.
“What’s wrong?” asked Ana, who hadn’t sought out this moment but was merely on her way to the bathroom.
“My son’s sick,” said Elspeth.
Taken aback, Ana said: “You have a son?” And the son was sick, which could mean a cancer boy, bald in a ward somewhere being entertained by a volunteer clown. “Is he all right? What do you mean, sick?”
“Oh, he’ll be fine. But the school sent him home, and my day nanny is having day surgery, and of course Tom can’t take a morning off. I tried to get our night nanny to come early, but she sees our number on the phone and doesn’t pick up. And I have a conference call at eleven.…” And off she went in a gnarled, furious voice entirely unlike her calm, measured self at meetings. Ana stepped back a foot or so, overwhelmed by a mixture of sympathy and disgust. Ana had taken to heart the two tenets she learned early on from a female professor in law schooclass="underline" “Never cry, and always take credit.” And at the same time, Ana was mortified to recognize in front of her exactly the situation she, who considered herself a feminist (Right? Didn’t she? Had it really been that long?), knew was disastrous, unfair, a shivering, pathetic creature of inequality flushed out into the light.
She put her hand on Elspeth’s arm and offered a Kleenex from her pocket. She rode down in the elevator with her and put her in a cab. The look of sheer gratitude on Elspeth’s face when she glanced back through the glass filled Ana with self-loathing. Why was there so little altruism in her? She thought about those workplace surveys that get published in national magazines and newspapers once or twice a year: Is this a good place for women to work? In truth, the firm was not, but Ana liked the idea of working in a place that was and decided this was a moment in which to pretend otherwise.
Since that day, Elspeth had confided in Ana from time to time. Shutting Ana’s door behind her, she gingerly showed her photographs of the kids. Ana nodded and murmured, and Elspeth relaxed into it eventually, growing more familiar, bitching about this and that family matter, presenting Ana with a picture of a life that was torturous in many ways, all drop-offs and pickups and nanny extortions and infected mosquito bites and exorbitant hockey fees. But sometimes, once in a while, great pride over somebody’s triumph at school. A picture painted. A report of a surprise cuddle from the eldest late one night.