Leaving aside the lingering oddness of her mother’s writing style—“I am a Russian never forget, Is, forced to slum it in second class with this fat little ruffian English, so full of himself and yet so empty and vague”—this new letter was seriously weird because Isabella had absolutely no intention of visiting her father, nor indeed of finding out where he was. Neither she nor her brother had spoken a single word to Nicholas Glover for more than ten years. Not since the death of Grandpa Max (when her father had turned up only to make sure he got all the money). And Isabella was certain that her mother knew this. So what the hell was she going on about? Seriously weird too because what was there to understand? What was there to distort? It was extremely difficult to tell what was real and what was fantasy, given the background level of histrionics and exaggeration that her mother liked to live with, and she was certainly not above coming on all portentous in order to secure a visit or whatever obscure point she had set herself to make.
For Christ’s sake—Isabella collapsed onto her back again, holding the letter aloft—the very act of writing on paper, in crimson ink, and using the mail was theatrical these days. There were times when she marveled (as if she herself were not involved) at her mother’s ability to target her sense of… sense of what? Shame? Guilt? Loyalty? Indebtedness? Conspiracy? Daughterliness? It was as if her own genes were coded to recognize and instantly respond to the parental call regardless of her private will as a separate thirty-two-year-old individual. All the same…
All the same, maybe this time it was something serious. And given that she had not written back after the two previous letters, she really had better call today. As soon as she got in.
She puffed out her cheeks, kicked herself up again, crossed the room, and locked the letter in her private drawer with the others. Then, without opening the blinds, though conscious that the light was already sharpening against the skyline, she slipped on her sweat pants and sneakers and an old top. Amazing, really, that the New York birds still bothered with a dawn chorus.
Now the task was to get out without waking Sasha.
She opened their little closet—too shallow to hang anything in—and unhooked her charcoal suit. She felt relieved that the day was under way. She could be honest about her motives, too. She was leaving without waking him not because she feared further fighting, nor reconciliation, nor a silent standoff. It was less personal than that. She was leaving surreptitiously because she did not want to have to respond to, or negotiate with, another consciousness. No; what she wanted, above all else, was to start this day without his hijacking her psyche and making her cross or remorseful or resentful or mawkish or forgiving or having any other response she didn’t want to have to experience. For now, she wished only to be by herself in her own mind—a reasonable thing for a woman to wish for every so often. And when she was clear, when she was centered, then she would talk to Sasha. Really, it was just silly anyway.
She approached the door of the bedroom and inched it open. His head (at the end of the couch) would be just the other side. She stopped a millimeter before the point where she knew the creak would begin. And then she slipped through.
But all the long and narrow way past the sofa, taking care not to tread on the plate or the glass or knock over the bottle of armagnac that he had so affectedly taken to drinking, she knew that he was awake, pretending to be asleep. And after four years together, he knew that she knew. And she knew that he knew that she knew and so on and so on and so on and so why the bloody sham? And why, a second later, was she frowning with concentration as she tried to judge the exact force required to pull the front door of their apartment shut while making as little sound as possible?
Abruptly, and with a sickening feeling, she realized that her heart had a false floor and had been concealing its contraband throughout: she had been aware all along that he would be wide awake, and she had been aware that she would pretend he wasn’t. Jesus, was there no subject on which heart and mind might be candid with each other?
She slammed the door.
And then none of it mattered because she was hurrying down the tight stairwell, down the narrow corridor, down the steep stoop, and onto the freedom and anonymity and endless possibility of the sidewalk. New York’s forgiving embrace—inclusion in the shared idea of a city, however true or untrue. A union of states. The infinite context of America.
But just the same, she dared not allow her mind to look up, for she sensed that the tattered images of her dreams were still hung high on the masts of her consciousness like the ragged remainders of sails flapping after a storm.
Molly Weeks let her paper fall onto her lap, transferred her steaming takeout tea from left to right hand, and sucked her sensitive teeth, which, she occasionally reflected, were seven or so years younger than the rest of her and therefore still in their thirties. A conventional English girl from an actual convent school, Molly had married the American singer in a New Romantic band twenty-five years ago—the first of two feckless husbands—and she had since acquired that quick-switching manner wherein raw-hearted sensitivity vied with the don’t-mess attitude of the serial survivor. She wore thick-framed wedge-shaped glasses, her hair was a perpetually self-contending frizz of red and blond, and these days she was sole owner, chief executive, and chairman of the ever more successful MagicalMusic.com.
She spoke now with mock exasperation: “The world is going to all kinds of hell and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.” She adjusted her leg, the ankle of which was propped up on a pillow. “How’s the career, Is?”
The subject of Isabella’s job was one of their private jokes. Though, like most private jokes, it was also a way of dealing with a private seriousness: an abiding desire to encourage (and to liberate) on the part of the older woman; an abiding desire to evade for the time being on the part of her younger neighbor.
“Heading the same way.” Isabella, who was sitting on a dining chair that she had dragged in from the other room, abandoned the lifestyle article she was (hating) reading. “My own fault, though.” Isabella drew her finger quickly across her throat. “Last night.”
“Bad?”
“Uh-hmm. Definitely should not have told them that I drink a bottle of vodka every morning before I come into work.”
Molly chuckled and had to hold out her tea at arm’s length to prevent herself from spilling it. “This was the client party you told me about, right? The chairman and all the cheeses present?”
“Yep.” Isabella nodded. “All of them—Jerk, Snicker, Robe, and even the Smooth.” Isabella’s colleagues were well known by their various epithets.
“After everything we said about building mutually affirmative relationships in the workplace.” Molly approximated the disappointed face of the daytime-TV life coach.
Isabella played along. “I feel as though I’ve let my whole family down.”
Molly grinned. “I can’t believe they took you seriously.”
“They took me more than seriously. They looked at me like I’d just beheaded the secretary of state live on CBS.” Without flinching, Isabella sipped her tea, which was still ferociously hot, and suddenly remembered what she had been meaning to tell her friend. “Hey, you know there’s a new Russian restaurant opening up? Right around the corner from Veselka’s.”