“Hey, she gave you back your own used napkin,” I mumble.
“Indeed?” Gloria turns it over. A telephone number is scrawled in one corner. “Yes, I rather thought so.” A look of mild yet unmistakable interest flickers through her eyes. “Listen, it was good seeing you. I’ll go settle the bill now.”
She stands up, tall, elegant, collected, and looks down at me.
“Everything will be all right, little sister. Or maybe it won’t be, in which case it will be something else, something new, which may turn out even better once the dust settles. Mel and I are here for you.” She touches my cheek, briefly. “But you really need to stop with those Freudian slips. She was your mother, too.”
I watch her moving away, as though in slow motion, into the black-and-white geometry of the room, the assured clicking of her heels slicing cleanly through the clanking of silverware, through the muttering of other diners’ conversations. There is a sound, a nagging, repetitive sound, like the buzzing of a very loud, angry bee. People at the neighboring tables turn their heads to glare at me, and snapping out of my reverie, I reach for my purse and fish out my cell phone.
It is my lawyer.
“Are you anywhere near my office?” she says. “We need to talk.”
What Happened at the End
And so, half an hour later, still reeling, I sit in a glass-walled office high above Manhattan, across the desk from my lawyer, who is telling me that her private investigator has turned up nothing, nothing at all, for my husband is clever and careful, if not actually clean, whereas the evidence against me is solid. There is the family doctor’s testimony on the subjects of my depression and my propensity for self-medication and self-harm, there is the recent photograph of me inebriated in the park, there are maids willing to confirm the abundance of mouse droppings and ill-smelling weeds all over my former quarters, and to corroborate my erratic habits and odd behavior, such as my staring into a handheld mirror for hours on end or not speaking for months at a time—and, given the facts, the custody hearing is not likely to go my way. Financially, too, everything my husband owns is either part of his inheritance, to which I have no right, or else squirreled away in offshore accounts and shell companies, equally out of reach, and I have next to no claim on absolutely anything, which she has been trying to get through to me for days, for weeks, but do I listen?
And at last, I am beginning to listen.
“There is the Fifth Avenue apartment, though,” I say. “Half of it should be mine. I don’t want to live there, but we can sell it and split the proceeds. It would be more than enough to buy a modest place for me and the kids.”
She snaps my file closed and sits back, exasperated.
“I’ve explained. Over and over again. It belonged to your father-in-law. Roland got it through his inheritance. It’s nonmarital property.”
On the streets below, cars honk, people walk, vendors hawk pretzels and newspapers—life as usual, life as I have always known it.
As Gwen’s words sink in, I force myself to breathe.
“But the house on Martha’s Vineyard?”
“The same.”
“And the furnishings? The artwork? The royal treasury?”
A lonely siren cries somewhere far away. I am starting to panic.
“The same.”
“But surely, half of my husband’s income—”
“Half of it would be yours, yes. If your husband had any income. As it happens, though, he draws no actual salary, he just runs his late father’s company.” I open my mouth. “Which is his inheritance, and thus nonmarital property.” I close my mouth. “On the other hand, Roland’s lawyers have just informed me that your own income since your separation—all the money you’ve earned from your cleaning business, which appears to be doing quite well—is subject to the marital division, so they are now demanding half of everything you’ve made in the past six months.”
“But… but it’s all gone!” My heart is pounding now. “I gave some to Melissa, and I’ve been paying rent, and there are Jasmine and Alice—I hired them to help out last month, I told you—and then I bought some presents for the kids, and… and it was so little, anyway, nothing compared to his millions upon millions… They can’t do that!” I cry, and in a smaller voice: “Can they?”
“Oh, they can,” she says. “In fact, they have.”
A second siren has joined the first, and another, and yet another, until half the city seems to be screaming with doom and disaster.
“But what do they want? What does he want?”
“He wants full custody of the kids. And to keep all his money. And come trial next month, he may well get both. Of course, I will do my best. But.”
“But he can’t do this to me! I’m better at taking care of Ro and Angie than he’ll ever be. He won’t even bother himself, they’ll just have a staff of nannies round the clock… Wait—what about Nanny Nanny? She’ll tell the court I’m a good mother, she knows, she was there, all the nights I spent by their beds, all the stories I told them—”
“Sadly, Nanny Nanny no longer works for your husband. She hasn’t been seen since before Christmas. And I’ve heard rumors…” Gwen lowers her voice. “The family cook served roast leg of lamb at the holiday feast, and—”
“And what? Please tell me.”
“And my sources inform me, it tasted more like goat. Like tough, old goat.”
For a minute we are silent.
“So, then, what can we do?” I ask, defeated.
She faces me squarely.
“Nothing. There is nothing to do. Unless you are finally willing to tell me what happened between you and your husband at the end.”
I look through the window at the city of glass and steel before me, and I think of the last months of my marriage, not so remote in time, and yet belonging to the fabric of some entirely different life, ruled by other laws, held together by other truths, an out-of-time fairy tale with a rosy beginning that promised happiness never-ending, stretching all the way from that snapshot of the blue spring skies protectively enclosing a white-veiled bride as she ran down the grand staircase hand in hand with her beloved, both smiling radiant smiles, to the two of them, thirteen years hence, standing side by side in the dimmed ballroom of their silenced home, clothed in the somber black of grief, jointly experienced and yet unshared, their faces blank, their stiff hands not touching.
After the last courtiers had departed muttering condolences, the fairy-tale princess, about to become the fairy-tale queen, slunk away to her own bedchamber without another look at the man who was not her true husband, who was left all alone, hunched over, in the dark. She was feeling faint and not sure of anything, her reality a mere step away from a dream. Her head ached as though she had not slept the night before, and perhaps she had not. Her feet were sore as though she had recently walked a long distance, and perhaps she had. Her lips bore a faintly tingling impression of other lips pressing against them, and this she could not bear to think about at all, for the kiss, whether real or imagined, had been warm, exhilarating, overwhelming, alive, nothing like any of the stilted, close-mouthed, obligatory kisses dimly remembered from the first year of her marriage (there were no later kisses to remember), and the lingering thrill of it, while making her heart beat faster, only served to add to her confusion and misery.