She’d been going once or sometimes twice a week to the Upper East Side to meet Elliot at the Lowell Hotel, on Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park. She rode the bus. Typically, she arrived first. She got the room key, went up, and showered; if Elliot was delayed at the lab and the day was growing dark, she might unlock the minibar and make a Manhattan or an approximation of a Manhattan, then recline naked by the window and look north toward the East Nineties, Carnegie Hill, where her mother, an only child, like Kate, had lived before marrying her father and moving to the farm.
Manhattans had been her mother’s drink. Unlike her mother, Kate tried to keep herself to three an evening. At Lorenzo’s that night, she was ahead of pace, finishing her second before having eaten a bite. She held her glass in one hand and her phone in the other, listening hard through the restaurant noise as the girl at the florist’s recited back her AmEx number. Elliot sat quietly beside her. He had his arms crossed, and his chair pushed back at an angle to make room for his legs. Susan had got up from the table; she’d announced to Kate — sounding well on the way to being tight—“Kate, you’re my best friend, but I don’t know how you drink such a strong drink.” To Kate and Elliot together, she’d added, “Will you two do me a big giant favor? Will you snag Lorenzo and ask him to bring me a Cosmo?”
“Don’t utter a word to me about my husband,” Kate warned Elliot, once Susan had gone to the bathroom.
Into the phone, to the girl, she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you. I was talking to somebody else.”
Meanwhile, in the women’s room, Susan was on her own phone, calling Jim’s number from a stall.
It was the girl who answered, of course.
“Hello, can you hold?” the girl said. The line went briefly dead. After a pause, the girl came back and said, “May I ask who is calling?”
“May I ask who’s answering?”
“Hold, please.”
“Sir?” the girl called out to Jim. She looked this way and that for him. Where had he gone? The shop closed at eight. It was nearly closing time. “A woman is calling you!”
“I’m here! I’m right here!” he answered from behind his tree.
“He’ll be with you in one second,” he heard her promise into the phone. After that, there was a pause, before, in a businesslike tone, the girl resumed with Kate. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this again. Would you mind verifying the last five digits and the expiration date?”
Back when he was in the hospital — in the past six months, there had been three emergency-room visits and two locked-ward admissions — he had spent day after day lying on a mattress, crying. His doctors (along with the psychiatric nurses and the social workers who led the daily therapy groups) had encouraged him to uncurl himself from the fetal position and try, at least try, to watch television or play a board game with the other patients, but this had mostly proved too great a challenge. There had been times when, walking to or from the bathroom or the water fountain or the patients’ common room, or standing in line to receive his medications at the nurses’ station, or even simply sitting upright on the table in the examining room, he’d had the strong sensation that the air through which he moved was gathering around him and becoming — really, no word was sufficient to name it — substantive. Its weight pressed in on him. This hurt, it hurt terribly, yet when he tried to locate the source of the pain he could not: It came, as he knew, only from himself. On the mattress, shattered and sobbing over Kate and their messed-up love, he’d lain crushed.
“Sir?”
The girl’s voice seemed to echo through the shop. He peeked up. When had she come out from behind the bouquet? He could see her standing on the other side of the tree. She was looking at him through the leaves.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“I maybe — I need a minute.” His mouth was dry and his heart was beating fast. That could be his meds.
“There’s someone who wants to talk to you. Do you think you can take the call? Would you like to try?” She held his phone out with one hand, reaching toward him through the branches.
He had to reach into the tree to meet her hand. He was sweating.
“Hello?” he said into the phone.
“What the hell, Jim?” Susan said to him from the women’s-room toilet at Lorenzo’s.
“Susan, how are you?” he said.
“I’ve been better.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re all here, Jim. We’re waiting and waiting for you.”
“I’m doing my best to get there. Have you ordered yet? What are the specials? What looks good?”
“Kate is beside herself. She says the two of you are bankrupt. She says you’ve spent all the money.”
“I haven’t.”
“Don’t lie to me, Jim. Please, don’t lie to me.” She was sniffling, beginning to weep, lightly.
“Stop crying, stop crying, baby,” he whispered into the phone. Then he laid his hand over the receiver and said to the girl, who was still peering down at him through the leaves of the tree, “You’ll have to excuse me one more time.” With a powerful effort of will, he stood upright and came out from behind the ficus. He didn’t dare look at the girl, but he heard her telling him, as he pushed painfully past her toward the door, that it looked like his wife’s American Express card wasn’t working, either — and was there any way for him to pay for the flowers?
He waved his hand, motioning that he’d return. He stepped out into the cold on Broadway. He pulled up his overcoat’s shawl collar. The door to the florist’s closed behind him.
Back at their table for four, Kate and Elliot had hit a snag.
“Let me talk to him,” Elliot said. He had his elbows on the table. He’d drunk almost none of his Scotch.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Give me your phone.” He held out his hand.
“I’m on hold.”
“Kate,” he said.
“Leave me alone.”
“As you wish,” he said, leaning back in his chair, and she burst out at him, “How can you act like this? You’re a doctor. How can you be so unfeeling?”
He said, “What does my being a doctor have to do with my feelings?” (She rolled her eyes at this, but he didn’t appear to notice.) He went on, “I may be a doctor, but I’m not your husband’s doctor.”
“His name is Jim, remember?”
“I think you’re drunk. That’s what I think.”
He got up from the table, patted his pockets — checking for his own phone — and said, “Goddamn it, I do research. I don’t treat patients. He has excellent doctors. I’ll call him myself.”
When he’d gone and Kate was alone, Lorenzo arrived with Susan’s Cosmopolitan.
“Everybody has gone away and left you,” Lorenzo said, and Kate chirped back, “Everybody’s gone!”
“Let me bring you another Manhattan.” Lorenzo placed Susan’s cocktail on the table and picked up Kate’s empty glass. Kate managed a little smile. She held her phone to her ear. “Jim? Jim, are you there?” she whispered.