He went into the bathroom and, opening his medicine cabinet, took three antidepressants instead of his usual dose of two. Then he got into the tub, letting the water fill up around him. I can’t move, he thought.
I’m too tired. I’ll have to figure out how to get the money to buy the apartment instead.
Later that evening, clean and in a better frame of mind, Billy called the Waldorf-Astoria, asking for the Rices’ room. Annalisa answered on the third ring. “Hello?” she said curiously.
“Annalisa? It’s Billy Litchfield. From this weekend.”
“Oh, Billy. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering,” Billy said. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘A lady should appear in the newspapers only three times in her life — her birth, her marriage, and her death’?”
“Is that true?”
“It was true a hundred years ago.”
“Wow,” Annalisa said.
“Well, I was wondering,” Billy said. “Would you like to go to a funeral with me on Wednesday?”
On Monday afternoon, back in her office after having spent the weekend with her family at Redmon and Catherine Richardly’s house in the Hamptons, Mindy opened a new file on her computer. Like most jobs in the so-called creative glamour business, her work had become increasingly less creative and less glamorous and more organizational; a significant portion of her day was devoted to being kept in the loop or keeping others in the loop. Originality was met with smug politesse. Nevertheless, due perhaps to her perplexing weekend, Mindy had had an idea that she planned to pursue. It had popped into her head during the ride back to Manhattan in the rental car, with James driving and Mindy mostly looking at her BlackBerry or staring straight ahead. She would start a blog about her own life.
And why not? And why hadn’t she thought of this before? Well, she had, but she’d resisted the idea of putting her mincey little thoughts out there on the Internet with her name attached for all to see. It felt so common; after all, anyone could do it and did. On the other hand, very good people were doing it these days. It was one of the new obligations, like having children, for smart people to make an effort to get some sensible opinions out there in the ether.
Now Mindy typed in the title of her new blog: “The Joys of Not Having It All.” Not wholly original, perhaps, but original enough; she was quite sure no one else was nailing this particular female lament with such preciseness.
“Scenes from a weekend,” she wrote. She crossed her legs and leaned forward, staring at the mostly blank computer screen. “Despite global warming, it was a spectacular weekend in the Hamptons,” she typed. It had been nearly perfect — eighty degrees, the leaves a halo of dusky pinks and yellows, the grass still very green on the two-acre expanse of lawn on Redmon Richardly’s property. The air was still and lazy with the peaty scent of decay, a scent, Mindy thought, that made time stand still.
Mindy and James and Sam had left the city late on Friday night to avoid the traffic, arriving at midnight to red wine and hot chocolate.
Redmon and Catherine’s baby, Sidney, was asleep, dressed in a blue one-sie in a blue crib in a blue room with a wallpaper band of yellow ducks encircling the ceiling. Like the baby, the house was new but pleasantly reassuring, reminding Mindy of what she didn’t have — namely, a baby and a pleasant house in the Hamptons to which one could escape every weekend, and to which one could someday make the ultimate escape: retirement. It was, Mindy realized, becoming harder and harder to jus-tify why she and James didn’t have these things that were no longer the appurtenances of the rich but only of the comfortable middle class.
The ease of the Richardlys’ life was made all the more enviable when Catherine revealed, in a private moment between her and Mindy in the eight-hundred-square-foot kitchen, where they were loading the dishwasher, that Sidney had been conceived without the aid of technology. Catherine was forty-two. Mindy went to bed with a pain in her heart, and after James fell asleep (immediately, as was his habit), Mindy was consumed with examining this riddle of what one got in life and why.
Just after her fortieth birthday, in the midst of a vague discontent, Mindy began seeing a shrink, a woman who specialized in a new psychoanalytropic approach called life adjustment. The shrink was a pretty, mature woman in her late thirties with the smooth skin of a beauty devotee; she wore a brown pencil skirt with a leopard-print shirt and open-toed Manolo Blahnik pumps. She had a five-year-old girl and was recently divorced. “What do you want, Mindy?” she’d asked in a flat, down-to-basics, corporate tone of voice. “If you could have anything, what would it be? Don’t think, just answer.”
“A baby,” Mindy said. “I’d like another baby. A little girl.” Before she’d said it, Mindy had had no idea what was ailing her. “Why?” the shrink asked. Mindy had to think about her answer. “I want to share myself.
With someone.” “But you have a husband and a child already. Isn’t that so?” “Yes, but my son is ten.” “You want life insurance,” said the shrink.
“I don’t know what you mean.” “You want insurance that someone is still going to need you in ten years. When your son has graduated from college and doesn’t need you anymore.” “Oh.” Mindy had laughed. “He’ll always need me.” “Will he? What if he doesn’t?” “Are you saying I can’t win?” “You can win. Anyone can win if they know what they want and they focus on it. And if they’re willing to make sacrifices. I always tell my clients there are no free shoes.” “Don’t you mean patients?” Mindy had asked. “They’re clients,” the shrink insisted. “After all, they’re not sick.”
Mindy was prescribed Xanax, one pill every night before bedtime to cut down on her anxiety and poor sleep habits (she awoke every night after four hours of sleep and would lie awake for at least two hours, worrying), and was sent to the best fertility specialist in Manhattan, who pre-ferred high-profile patients but would take those recommended by other doctors of his ilk. At the beginning, he had recommended prenatal vi-tamins and a bit of luck. Mindy knew it wouldn’t work because she wasn’t lucky. Neither she nor James ever had been.
After two years of increasingly complicated procedures, Mindy gave up. She’d tallied their money and realized she couldn’t afford to go on.
“I can count the days I’ve been truly content on one hand,” Mindy wrote now. “Those are bad numbers in a country where pursuing happiness is a right so important, it’s in our Constitution. But maybe that’s the key. It’s the pursuit of happiness, not the actual acquisition of it that matters.”
Mindy thought back to her Sunday in the Hamptons. In the morning, they’d all gone for a walk on the beach, and she’d carried Sidney as they labored in the soft sand above the waterline. The houses, set behind the dunes, were enormous, triumphant testimonials to what some men could achieve and what others could not. In the afternoon, back at the house, Redmon organized a touch-football game.
Catherine and Mindy sat on the porch, watching the men. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” Catherine said for the tenth time.