CHAPTER TWO

THE INVITATION

THE INVITATION APPEARED in Emily’s in-box early one September morning, two weeks after she’d returned from the bike tour, in a swirling pink font with tiny pulsing hearts: Soul Mate Soirée!

Had it been scratch-and-sniff like the key lime pie T-shirt Zach had brought home last summer from a trip to Disney World with his father (the air gun had been confiscated at airport security), it would have been strawberry shortcake. She almost deleted it, thinking it was yet another chain letter promising all sorts of blessings that would rain down on her if she forwarded it to seven friends—money, fame, love—which she invariably did, not because she was afraid of suffering the karmic consequences, but because she didn’t want to disappoint the person who’d sent it, even at the cost of annoying the friends she sent it to. But curiosity got the best of her and she opened it.

The proposed soirée was at Cathy’s home in Bayonne, New Jersey—probably, Emily imagined, in some kind of life-sized Polly Pocket Dream House. She hoped she could use Zach as an excuse, then looked at the date. It was Charles’s weekend. She’d never been a good liar, except when it came to Nick, the married man she dated toward the end of her own failing marriage.

After the second postscript, Cathy had written: BYOB. For Cathy, who was basically a teetotaler, this seemed a bit odd. She couldn’t possibly have meant bike, could she? Emily had roomed with a girl like Cathy freshman year, who wore frosted lip gloss, wielded a curling iron, and used double-sided tape to affix posters of orange kittens in baskets to the dorm room’s cinder-block walls. All year the girl had tried to get Emily out of her dark “urban” clothes and into one of her flouncy Laura Ashley dresses, finally succeeding for an Easter brunch in Philadelphia with her sorority pledges. Emily looked like a Jewish Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Her hand floated over the delete button. How easy to send the email to spam and pretend it had never arrived. She looked at the names of the other recipients. What must Max be thinking? Or Beatrice? Would any of them make the trip to New Jersey for this?

* * *

The following day The Love Book arrived from out of nowhere. Emily stuck it on the windowsill with the other two copies that had already “manifested” through no effort or desire on her part. The first was the multicolored Post-it–festooned copy Cathy had swiped from the auberge and accidentally left at Charles de Gaulle. The second was from Emily’s mother, who thought her daughter needed a little help in the love department. She’d even inscribed it: Time to find you another fella! Joyce’s concern about her daughter’s love life was purely financial in nature. Spousal support ended in January. Like Charles, she had little faith in Emily’s ability to be self-supporting. And now, this third copy of The Love Book of mysterious provenance with no identifiable markings other than the words Return to Sender stamped in red. She was tempted to look online for an antidote for unbidden self-help books. The last thing she needed was a soul mate. And definitely not another copy of The Love Book.

Emily made a pot of tea and sat by the window. It was Zach’s first day of school after summer break. She’d let him sleep a little longer. Her view, a patchwork of rooftops and water towers, had always seemed so exotic. She should have been working on a post for a friend’s blog, but she was thinking about the muddy ride from Lyons-la-Forêt to Ry, a soggy but not unpleasant two hours. It had given Emily a chance to think. Max had raced ahead with the tour guide, Beatrice was keeping Cathy company in the rear, walking their bikes up even the most gradual inclines, and Emily was lost in thought as she meandered along the quiet country road, her rain slicker flapping in the wind, trying not to worry about Zach, who was hiking with his father and Charles’s fiancée, Clarissa, in Yellowstone and, in Emily’s opinion, precariously out of cell phone range. Not that Zach needed to call his mother; he was a well-adjusted, independent ten-year-old. It was her issue and she knew it. Of the two of them, she often felt like the child, and, for the two weeks she was in Normandy, one whose pacifier had been yanked unceremoniously out of her mouth.

Her friends were concerned that she was isolating. Since divorcing Charles, she hadn’t made any attempts to meet someone, let alone gone out on a single date. Even Zach had tried hooking her up, first with his phys ed instructor, then a divorced dad from the stables where he rode, and last spring, when a sanitation worker whistled at her, Zach observed, “Maybe he wants to marry you?”

The divorce hadn’t been a complete surprise. Emily had known before they’d married that she was wrong for Charles, but he had been so certain. Of everything. And his certainty had made her feel safe, providing her with guidelines, parameters, and consistency. He wanted a wife and four children in a house in the suburbs with dinner on the table when he pulled into the driveway.

She’d failed miserably on all accounts. She hated cooking anything other than brownies, and miscarried with a vengeance, as if her uterus was triple-coated with Teflon. The mere idea of the suburbs gave her anxiety, and every morning she’d wake up like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, freaking out in his hotel room in Saigon, waiting for a mission.

In sum, she was a pretty useless housewife. She understood perfectly Charles’s disappointment. He thought he was getting Madame Homais, the pharmacist’s dutiful wife, but wound up with Emma Bovary instead.

When they were newlyweds, a bowl of M&Ms or cheese and crackers had sufficed for dinner; and at least in those first years, Emily had more than made up for the lack of food with an overabundance of passion. She was a freelance writer and had a tendency to lose track of time when she was in her office, a tiny alcove off the kitchen overlooking the courtyard. If there was food in the fridge, it was often spoiled or inedible, which infuriated Charles who hated to waste anything. That all changed when she discovered she was miraculously pregnant.

For the next nine months What to Expect When You’re Expecting became her Bible. She’d morphed into a food Nazi, eating only organic, unprocessed food with no caffeine, no preservatives, no artificial colors or flavors, practically no anything, to Charles’s complete and utter and maddening dismay.

Then Zach was born, and it was happily back to M&Ms, though now she dispensed with the bowl.

By the time Charles came home from work, usually past midnight, Zach finally and safely asleep in his crib, Emily was in no mood to get up and prepare anything, let alone talk to Charles about his latest case, or welcome his sexual advances. She’d pretend to be asleep, listening for the whir of his electric toothbrush, the sign that she was off the hook; he never made love after brushing his teeth. He began referring to the mound of pillows she erected between them to protect her lower back when she was pregnant as Hadrian’s Wall, a line of defense that persisted even after she gave birth. The few times Charles did manage to surmount the wall, she’d say she was too tired to put in her diaphragm.

When Zach was in preschool, she’d started going to the gym and discovered that she could still catch the eye of the occasional man. Or two. Charles spent more and more time at work, until over breakfast one day he said, “Emily”—and she said, “I know, Charles, but how will we tell Zach?” The next week Charles moved into the Harvard Club, then a small furnished studio. Six months later he was living with Clarissa.

Now that it was all finally over with, the sound of the guns no longer reverberating and the smoke cleared from the battlefield, she was sincerely glad Charles had found someone new. She wanted him to be happy, and Zach seemed to like Clarissa, except for that one time he locked her out of the apartment and disabled the doorbell when she went out with the garbage.

Emily and Clarissa even went to lunch at Fred’s, on the ninth floor of Barney’s, at Clarissa’s suggestion. Emily waited and waited for Clarissa to say whatever she felt she had to say, but die neue suburban Hausfrau just picked at her chopped salad for an hour, scanning the room, more interested in seeing and being seen than engaging Emily. It was all a little too postmodern for Emily and something she hoped to never do again.

Emily’s friends were wrong; she hadn’t been manless for the last four years, only for the past two, except for several unfortunate instances of phone sex with her college boyfriend, but it had been decidedly one-sided, so in her mind it didn’t really count. There had been some “overlap” between her marriage to Charles and her relationship with Nick, for which she would probably never forgive herself. The if onlys still kept her awake at night.

Nick had been one of her first interviews after she began freelancing again. They’d met at one of those interchangeable “authentic” brasseries in the theater district. As he spoke about his work in landmark preservation, the intensity of his gaze had ignited something in her like a leftover cassoulet brought back to life. Somehow, the lines of discretion had been blurred by denial or depression or something, she wasn’t even quite sure. None of her friends would have suspected or believed her capable of having an affair. Utterly “uncharacteristic,” they would have said—that is, if they’d found out. She’d never imagined she was capable of it either.

She came to enjoy these interludes. No talking, no having to dress up or make dinner or do her hair. Just passion. An hour later, she’d walk Nick to the door and drift off to sleep as if it had never happened. A close call several years ago prompted Emily to put an end to the affair, an end that turned out to be one of many. Zach had been asleep for hours. It was one of those occasions when Nick would arrive unannounced already half-undressed when she opened the door and carry her to the bedroom for a quick romp. But on that night, they’d accidentally fallen asleep. Nick bolted awake at 5 a.m. and was sitting on the foot of the bed, hurriedly putting on his shoes, when Zach came in, rubbed his eyes, and, still half-asleep, said, “Daddy?”

Emily put her arm around him and walked him to his room. “Go back to bed, sweetie,” she said softly.

In the morning, when Zach asked why Daddy had been there, she told him that it had only been a dream, the first time she’d ever lied to him, another thing she’d never forgive herself for.

* * *

Emily had been meaning to mail The Love Book back to Cathy, but kept forgetting. The fact that Cathy had left something at the airport wasn’t surprising; she’d been in a complete daze from the time-release tranquilizers she’d taken to counteract her fear of flying, not having anticipated a three-hour delay. Despite gulping down a double espresso, every time Emily glanced up from her magazine, Cathy had slipped a little bit further down in her chair. But The Love Book? Since finding it at the auberge on that postdiluvian night, Cathy had never let it out of her sight, lugging it in her backpack along with her other emergency supplies. The red leather book was so often in her hands that her fingertips were stained red as though she’d eaten pistachios laced with red dye. By the time Emily noticed the forsaken book, Cathy had already boarded her plane back to Newark.

All of their flights had been “eventful,” everyone’s except Beatrice’s—she’d flown Swissair. Her flight had not only taken off right on schedule, but she was bumped up to first class and wound up sitting next to one of her college roommates from Holyoke whom she hadn’t seen in over thirty years.

Max’s plane had mechanical problems and spent eight hours idling on the tarmac; Cathy was waylaid in Atlanta, after missing her connecting flight; and Emily’s bags were lost. If Emily bought into the belief that The Love Book was, as Cathy professed it to be, the Rosetta Stone of the Law of Attraction, and that like attracts like whether you like it or not, it might appear that the universe was just mirroring back what each of them had been expecting. But she didn’t. Lost baggage was nothing more than an inconvenience.

Emily realized she’d been absently flipping through the copy of The Love Book her mother had sent her. A quote by Marianne Williamson, one of many, dotting the margins like a Rorschach test, caught her eye: It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

Already she found her mind wandering.

Like clockwork, at precisely seven fifteen, the telephone rang. She let it ring several times. It was Charles calling to say he’d be swinging by in a taxi to pick Zach up at five thirty that afternoon and could she have him waiting downstairs. Charles took Zach Wednesday nights and alternate weekends. Wednesday was the hardest night of the week especially when it was also Charles’s weekend, as this one was. The distance between Friday and Sunday seemed interminable, a no-man’s-land. How many episodes of What Not to Wear or baths could she take? Nick had known her particular susceptibility to loneliness and used to call hoping this time she’d succumb and invite him over. He hadn’t called since before she left for Normandy. She didn’t know if she felt relieved or rejected.

“Can I talk to Zach?” Charles asked.

“He’s not up yet.”

“But he has to be at school in an hour.”

“I’m about to wake him. Do you want him to call you?”

“Just tell him I’m picking him up at five thirty.”

“Yes, Charles. Like always.”

“When I say five thirty, I don’t mean five thirty-seven, okay?”

“Charles—”

“Because Clarissa thinks—”

“I know what Clarissa thinks.” She’d heard it enough times. If Zach was five minutes late because he forgot to pack his math homework or had a stomachache, it was her fault; she was being manipulative. She could hear Charles take a deep breath and exhale through clenched teeth, like steam from a sputtering kettle.

“Do me a favor, just have him ready. That’s what I pay you for.”

“You didn’t actually just say that, did you?”

“Emily, don’t start. It would be nice if you could accommodate us once in a while. Clarissa and I babysat while you were off riding a bicycle in Normandy—”

“Babysat?”

“You know what I mean. So, do we understand each other?”

“Don’t worry, Charles, Zach will be downstairs at five thirty.”

“Alone, okay?”

“Yes, alone.”

In the space of a thirty-second phone call, the usual low-grade self-doubt that hovered in her consciousness had multiplied like the fruit flies that circled the overripe bananas on the kitchen counter, too far gone even for banana bread.

* * *

Zach was on the bottom bunk of his loft. He’d kicked off the blanket. He was wearing Spider-Man pajamas and a Knicks jersey, just as he’d done every night for the last five years, since the first game Charles had taken him to at Madison Square Garden. His Beanie Babies collection, handed down from an older cousin, was lined up on the top bunk. He’d dressed the squirrel like a road hog, with a leather jacket and bandanna, and put him on Batman’s motorcycle. The cow was wearing a tutu. In a place of honor on Zach’s red beanbag chair was the talking Yoda Charles had bought him when Zach was four and expressed a desire for a three-foot-tall My Size Barbie, which Charles had thought was wrong on so many levels. Emily saw it differently; he was an only child and just wanted a playmate. One night when Zach was in bed, Emily heard him whispering to Yoda, “Will Daddy come back?” But even with her ear pressed to the door and holding her breath, she couldn’t hear the answer.

For years, Charles had been urging her to donate Zach’s baby toys and clothes. She’d kept his first shoes, the red fleece onesie he wore when he learned to crawl, his snowsuit, the quacking beagle pull toy he used to take for walks in the park. He might want to give it to his children someday. So what if she was a little bit overly nostalgic. Weren’t most parents? It didn’t take up that much space in the closet.

A few months after they separated, Charles stopped by without calling (he still used his key, which enraged her, but not so much that she bothered to change the locks) to collect the rest of his things, like the red Craftsman toolbox filled with brand-new, top-of-the-line tools Emily had given him for their fifth anniversary.

When Zach discovered the toolbox missing, he said, “How am I going to fix things?”

Emily took him in her arms and tried to keep from crying. “It’s not your job, Zach. It’s not your job.”

But there were times she wondered too.

* * *

After school that afternoon, Zach was racing down Broadway on his Razor scooter with Emily trailing behind, reminding him to stop at the lights. She’d been at the computer all day and even though she was technically outside, she was still at her desk in her state-of-the-art ergonomic chair—the one Charles had given her on their last Valentine’s Day together. Her friend the editor had liked the piece about the Tour de Flaubert bicycle trip but not quite enough to publish it. With a little work, he told her, maybe. They’d discuss it over lunch tomorrow, already the second lunch they’d rescheduled. She had an idea and stopped to jot down some notes when, in the window of Barnes & Noble, she saw a giant poster for a reading by the author of The Love Book and took it as a sign. She’d write a Valentine’s Day article about soul mates. She might be able to sell it to a major women’s magazine, not just one of the free periodicals printed on recycled paper and dispensed on street corners. She was still scribbling as she stepped off the curb without looking, and bumped into a man on a BMW motorcycle.

“Hey! Watch where you’re going!” she shouted, grabbing Zach protectively. She’d lived her whole life in Manhattan—in the same zip code, actually—but only since Zach was born had she developed the ability, the chutzpah, to yell at strangers. Charles thought it unbecoming.

The man on the motorcycle apologized. When she didn’t let up, he told her to take a chill pill.

“A chill pill? You nearly run over my son and you want me to take a chill pill? You should have your license revoked.”

“It was my light,” he said. “You were jaywalking.”

“The pedestrian always has the right of way.”

“But I wasn’t even moving.”

Emily noticed Zach had put his hood over his head and taken refuge under an awning.

“Zach, are you all right? Did this maniac hurt you?”

“Maniac? You’re the one flying off the handle, lady!” the guy shouted.

Zach tugged on her jacket. “Come on, Mom, let’s go. I’m going to be late for Dad.”

His voice quavered. He’d pulled the strings on his hood so tight that only his eyes were visible. He looked like an anteater. She put her arm around him, scowling one last time at the motorcycle guy before walking off.

“That man was an asshole,” she said. “I’m giving you permission to say that word, but only if the situation calls for it. And you have to say it like you mean it. We’ll practice later. You still can’t use colorful language like that at school or around your father,” she added.

Zach stopped and glanced behind him. “That was Kenneth, my math teacher.”

“Are you sure?” Emily asked. “Maybe he just looked like him.”

“It was Kenneth.”

Emily had met Kenneth last week, but the biker outfit was a far cry from the chinos and conservative blazer he’d worn to Open School Night. The only thing that seemed to cheer up Zach was her suggestion that they stop at Alice’s Tea Cup for a chocolate chip banana scone and peppermint tea.

The bells tinkled as they entered and walked down the stairs. Stevie and Justin were behind the counter. Zach was smitten with Stevie, a twenty-four-year-old waitress with sapphire-blue eyes and short dark hair. Alice’s was a magical place where little children dressed up in tulle skirts and angel wings and were sprinkled with fairy dust when they entered, and grown women sat at antique sewing tables having tea and scones and remembering what it was like when everything was pretend.

Justin scooped up his teacup poodle, Apricot, and led them to a table. Apricot was wearing a miniature camo doggie hoodie and could have been mistaken for one of Zach’s Beanie Babies. A few minutes playing with Apricot and Zach seemed to have forgotten the run-in with his math teacher. Emily was glad Alice’s ignored the “no dogs allowed” policy enforced in most New York City restaurants.

On the way out, Stevie was talking on the phone, giggling and blushing. Young love, Emily thought, but she could barely remember.

When they were almost home, Emily saw Charles standing out front, arms crossed. He beckoned to Zach, who sped ahead. Charles walked out into the street and hailed a cab. She barely had time to kiss Zach goodbye before Charles slammed the taxi door. But she’d be getting a call soon—she was still holding his backpack.

She was at her desk, staring out the window, when the phone rang. It was Clarissa. Emily didn’t even have a chance to say hello.

“I know how difficult it is for you to have Zach ready when Charles comes to pick him up, especially since you’re so, so busy. But some of us have real jobs.”

Emily had just read a poem by Rumi in Cathy’s copy of The Love Book, which she’d opened at random. If I love myself I love you. If I love you I love myself. She’d never really understood this notion. It seemed like a tautology. A chicken-and-egg situation. In any case, she took a breath and tried to remain poised and receptive.

“I’m sorry, Clarissa, but we were only five minutes late. Charles should have called. We were just around the corner.”

“No, you should have had him ready. Emily, you’re not pretty enough or thin enough to be a prima donna, so stop acting like one. And nobody likes you.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Emily said. “Put Charles on,” but the line was dead.

Rumi had obviously never met Clarissa.

Emily closed the book. Her fingertips were stained magenta, a hint of which remained for days, leaving traces like rose petals on everything she touched. Across the courtyard, a fat naked man was staring at her from his window. She pulled down the shade and prayed that Nick would not call tonight.