The sun was setting. From the garage where he had left it, Bruce fetched the Outback and drove it to his own garage. From there he took a taxi home. It was the Monday before the inauguration, three days before Eva and Min were scheduled to leave for Venice. He wished it wasn’t a Monday. He wished it was a Tuesday, since on Tuesday nights Eva always had friends over and he was absolved of the need to talk. On Tuesday nights he could just sit back and let the bright chatter wash over him, whereas on Mondays, by long tradition, he and Eva stayed home and had one of the three pastas that constituted her culinary repertoire: penne with shrimp and asparagus, linguine with pesto, new potatoes, and green beans, or fusilli with ham, peas, cream, and the tomato sauce that Amalia made in batches and froze. On Monday nights they ate at the kitchen table. They went to bed early. For most of his married life, Monday nights had been Bruce’s favorite; if it were up to him, he’d once told Jake, each week would include extra Mondays, three or four at least. Now he dreaded Mondays, because these were the nights when he and Eva had to talk, and therefore the nights when he was most likely to have to lie to her.
No sooner had he let himself into the apartment than Ralph, Caspar, and Isabel laid siege to him, their welcome so ecstatic a stranger might have thought he’d just come back from a war. “It’s me,” he called to Eva, hanging up his coat and shaking the dogs off his legs.
“In here,” she answered from the kitchen.
He pushed through the swinging door. When he saw the package of fusilli on the counter, the water bubbling in one pot and the tomato sauce in another, his mouth watered. A feeling of homecoming suffused him. “I’m afraid I’m running a little late,” Eva said, reaching to open the refrigerator and at the same time giving him a kiss that was cursory but not without tenderness. To his own surprise, he held her fast for a moment, breathing in her familiar scent of perfume (Jardins de Bagatelle) and shampoo (Molton Brown) and the creams and serums (La Prairie) that she rubbed every day onto her face, her neck and arms, around her eyes. As was her habit on Mondays, she wore her hair in a loose ponytail. She had on Gap jeans, an avocado-green cashmere turtleneck, the same apron that Matt Pierce wore when he cooked for her.
For a few seconds she withstood his embrace, then slipped out of it, opened the refrigerator, and took out the bowl of grated Parmesan. Bruce sat at the table, which was already laid, and on which a bottle of red wine breathed.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, the usual,” he said—which was not, strictly speaking, a lie, since on Mondays going with Kathy to the outpatient center had become the usual. “And yours?”
“I had a bit of a scene with Amalia today.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“Well, this morning when I went into the kitchen, she was watching Good Morning America. Of course the second she saw me, she switched it off. I only caught a glimpse, but it was enough. That face. One thought pollutes the day … Who said that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyway, I was so bent out of shape, I decided to have a talk with her there and then, so I sat her down at the table. ‘Amalia,’ I said, ‘this is my house, and in my house, when that man appears on the television, we change the channel.’ ”
“What did she say to that?”
“Nothing. She just nodded in that way she has, that way that means ‘I’m hearing you, but I’m not listening to you.’ So then I said, ‘Amalia, how can you bear to look at him when he wants to build a wall along the border and send all your relatives back to Honduras?’ And she got very snippy and said, ‘All my relatives are legal.’ ”
“I’m not surprised.”
“That all her relatives are legal?”
“No, that she got snippy.”
“Why should she have gotten snippy?”
“Well, it isn’t really your business, is it?”
“She needs to know what she’s up against.”
“I’m sure she knows exactly what she’s up against.”
The water for the pasta had come to a boil. Eva threw in some sea salt, and the water surged and spat from the pot, hitting the stove’s control panel so hard it switched on the convection oven. She screamed and jumped back.
“Jesus!” Bruce said, leaping up and knocking over his chair.
“I’m fine,” Eva said, putting her thumb in her mouth. “Get out of the way. Damn. I forgot to turn the heat off before I added the salt. Why did I forget? I never forget.”
With a pair of potholders she moved the water to another burner, brought it back to a boil, and shook in the fusilli.
“It’s just a little burn,” she said, looking at her thumb.
“I’ll get the Neosporin.”
“It’s all right, I don’t need Neosporin.”
Bruce sat down again. He poured himself a glass of wine.
“It’s him,” she said. “He’s that water. That hissing, spitting water.” She tested one of the fusilli for doneness. “Min says I was the same when Bush Two was elected, but I don’t think that’s true. I mean, I never hated Bush personally. The thing about—there I go, I almost said his name. I’m afraid to say his name. It’s like a curse. The thing about that man is that what I feel for him is pure hatred, absolute blind hatred … Honestly, Bruce, I think the world’s gone mad. How do you live in a world that’s gone mad without going mad yourself? By the way, we couldn’t get rooms at the Gritti. Instead we’ll be staying at this new hotel—a friend of Min’s is writing it up for Travel & Leisure, after which it’ll be huge, but for now hardly anyone knows about it. She says it’s a twenty-first-century take on the old-fashioned Venetian pensione—you know, like the one Katharine Hepburn stays at in Summertime. Speaking of which, do you know what Sandra told me? The reason Katharine Hepburn had the shakes all those years was because when she was filming Summertime, she fell into a canal and caught some disease.”
“Not a great advertisement for Venice, is it?”
“I doubt it’s true. It’s probably just a legend.”
Eva drained the pasta, tossed it with the sauce, and heaped it into bowls. They ate with spoons. “Don’t eat so fast,” Eva said, which was what she always said on Monday nights.
“Sorry,” Bruce said. And to himself: Chew each bite ten times.
“I hope you’ll be all right while I’m away. Will you go to Connecticut this weekend?”
“Probably not.”
“I figured you wouldn’t, so I phoned Rachel Weisenstein and she’s invited you to dinner on Friday.”
He put down his spoon. “And what if I don’t want to go to dinner at the Weisensteins’ on Friday?”
“All right, no need to bite my head off.”
“I’m not biting your head off. I’m just saying, you’ll only be out of town for ten days. I don’t need babysitters.”
“Fine. I’ll call her and tell her you can’t come. I’ll make something up.”
“No, don’t do that. I’ll do my duty.”
He returned his attention to his food.
“You’ve never liked them, have you?”
“Who?”
“Aaron and Rachel.”
“He’s a loudmouth. I was hoping for a break.”
“From what?”
“Just a break.”
Now it was Eva who put down her spoon. “You’re looking forward to my being gone, aren’t you?”
“Well, and what if I am? You are.”
“It’s being somewhere else I’m looking forward to, not being away from you.”
Despite his chewing each bite ten times, his bowl was empty. “Who’s for seconds?” he asked, as he asked every Monday night.
“I wouldn’t care for any more, thank you,” Eva said.
She pushed away her bowl, which was still three-quarters full.
“Actually, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t either,” he said. “I need to watch my waistline.”
He got up and began rinsing his dishes in the sink. “One thing’s for sure,” he said. “You’ll get great pasta in Venice.”
There was no answer.
“Eva?”
But she had left the room.
At nine he took the dogs for their walk. An earlier rain had left the potholes full of water that darkened their paws.
As he turned onto Madison, he ran into Alec Warriner, surreptitiously kicking a turd from where Sparky had deposited it into the sidewalk grate.
“Caught in the act,” Alec said. “I forgot to bring a bag.”
“A likely story,” Bruce said. “Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll let you off with a warning. This time.”
For the first time in their lives, the men walked together. Whereas in the elevator Bruce’s dogs had ganged up on Sparky, out here, on neutral ground, they ignored him. Paying no heed to another dog, pretending it wasn’t there—this was the canine way of indicating acceptance. Often Bruce wished people would behave more like dogs.
“He’s reading the newspaper,” Alec said when Sparky, for the fourth time in five minutes, stopped to sniff the pavement.
“I wonder if they learn more from theirs than we do from ours,” Bruce said.
“It’s hard to imagine they learn less,” Alec said. He looked Bruce in the eye. “You don’t have kids, do you?”
Bruce shook his head.
“Me, I’ve got two daughters. Well, had. Oh, sorry, that sounds like one of them died. What I mean is that our elder daughter just disowned us. That’s the word she used—disowned—when she wrote to tell her mother and me that she plans never to speak to us again, and that she no longer regards us as her parents, and that if we make any further attempts to contact her, she’ll have our phone numbers and emails blocked.”
“What brought that on?”
“The election. It was because we voted for Trump. Tell your wife if you like. I’m sure it’ll make her feel better.”
This embarrassed Bruce. “You know, if I thought it would make any difference, I’d apologize for Eva,” he said. “Short of that, I’d tell you to take her behavior with a grain of salt, only I know a grain of salt wouldn’t be nearly enough. You’d have to swallow a tablespoon of salt, maybe more, certainly more than anyone should be expected to stomach. Anyway, I’m sorry about your daughter—that she’s so angry.”
“She’s angry? What about me? Of course, the great pity of it is that this is the daughter who lives near us. Well, nearer. Nearness has been relative for Kitty and me since our youngest moved to Phnom Penh.”
“In Cambodia?”
“Affirmative. That’s Rebecca. We haven’t seen her in three years. Judy’s in Boston. She’s a lawyer, with three kids she now says we’re not to make any attempt to contact or she’ll get a restraining order. You can imagine what that’s done to Kitty.”
“And all this because of the election?”
“According to her, yes. In retrospect, I see that my mistake was telling her how I voted in the first place. I should have lied, I should have said that at the last minute I had a change of heart and voted for Hillary, only I couldn’t—and not just because I knew she’d never believe me. The truth is, my conscience just won’t allow me to say I voted for that woman, not even to preserve my relationship with my daughter.”
“Do you really think Hillary’s that bad?”
“Your wife thinks we’re evil. Well, we think she’s evil. Hillary, I mean.”
“So you’re saying you voted more against Hillary than for Trump?”
“I know that’s what you’d like me to be saying, but it’s not. The fact is, I was pro-Trump early on. At first I kept quiet about it. I mean, even with my Republican friends, when the question came up, I’d say I hadn’t made up my mind yet, or that I wanted to see how the debates played out, or that all I cared about was keeping her out of office and getting the corporate income tax below twenty-one percent. Now I’m convinced that a lot of us were doing that—lying to each other. It affected the polls, I’m convinced.
“The fact is, on election night we were the ones who were expecting the worst. Kitty and I invited some friends over, mostly so that we could get drunk and commiserate. Believe me, no one could have been more surprised than we were when the results started coming in. That was why we went a little wild. We couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a miracle.”
“One man’s miracle is another’s nightmare, I guess.”
“Mind you, I get why you dislike him. I really do. The thing is, though, I also get him. I mean, sure, he’s crass, but at least he’s our crass, you know what I’m saying? New York crass. Now, Rand Paul—there’s a guy I don’t get. There’s a guy who seems to be from another planet. Guys like Donald, I’ve known them my whole life. At Wharton, I was just a few years behind him. I’ll admit it, I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago a few times. Crazy tacky, sure, but at the same time, there’s something sort of fun about it, like going to Disney World and sleeping in Cinderella’s castle. Now, I’m not saying we’re friends, or even that I like him especially, I’m just saying that I understand him, how his brain works, what he’s after, which is more than I can say for … But I’d rather not say her name. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to say her name.”
“Don’t you worry that he’s a loose cannon?”
“And she’s not? I mean, just for example, right now the Pelosi crowd’s in a tizzy about his having the nuclear codes, right? Well, the way I see it, the really scary thing would be her having the nuclear codes, because she’s such a hawk. As for him, tell me honestly, do you really think he’d ever do anything to put all his precious real estate at risk?”
“Have you told your daughter this?”
“Judy? She’d hang up before I got three words out. Now that I think about it, it was probably because of her that I kept my mouth shut all that time about voting for Trump. But now that she’s not speaking to me, my attitude is, why hold back? Why not come out of the closet? Why not throw a party?”
“Still, you must miss her sometimes.”
“My wife misses her. As for me … I have to be honest, there are times when I wish we’d never had kids in the first place. A whole category of difficulties removed.”
“And yet there’s a loneliness. Especially as you get older. This feeling of something not being there that should.”
“As opposed to something being there that shouldn’t?”
“What’s the difference?”
“You tell me. Aren’t you finance guys supposed to see every loss as a potential gain?”
Bruce did not reply. Alec was right. The idea that losses could be turned into gains was so fundamental to his way of understanding the world that he had never questioned it.
They turned left. “My secretary has cancer,” he said, not quite believing he was saying it.
“I’m sorry to hear that. What kind?”
“Lymphoma … She’s a good person. She’s worked for me for twenty years. I’m trying to help her, only I have to keep it from my wife.”
“You mean you want to give her money?”
It was only when Alec said it that Bruce realized that this was exactly what he meant.
“If I did, and Eva found out, she’d be angry. She’d say I was getting too involved.”
“Translation—she’d think you were sleeping with her. Are you sleeping with her?”
“No, of course not. And you’re wrong—Eva would never think that.”
“Why not? It’s the obvious thing to think. Sparky, no!” The dog was lunging at a shadow, obliging Alec to reel him in. “Well, if you want my opinion, the solution is obvious. You should sleep with your secretary. I mean, as long as you’re going through all the trouble of keeping the thing a secret, you might as well get something out of it, right? Oh, God, was that an offensive thing to say? I guess it was. Sorry, I’ve got a bit of a problem with that. I’m like Sparky, my wife says. I leap before I look.”
“But you’re right,” Bruce said, “it is the obvious thing to think. In fact, it surprises me that I hadn’t thought it myself. Or even thought that other people might think it. People who haven’t met Kathy, and possibly people who have.”
“Kathy’s your secretary?”
“She’s fifty-three. She has three children and two grandchildren. Oh, and on top of everything else, her husband’s left her. And she’s got serious money problems.”
“If her husband was the one who left, at least she’ll get something out of the divorce, won’t she?”
“She’ll get the house. She might get more—if she lives long enough.” Bruce stopped in his tracks. “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m saying these things. Helping people plan against future catastrophes—it’s what I do. Why haven’t I done that for her?”
“What is your job exactly?”
“According to my website, I’m a quote-unquote wealth management adviser, though I still think of myself as a stockbroker. And Kathy is my quote-unquote executive assistant, though I still think of her as my secretary. And that means she doesn’t have any wealth to manage—or at least not enough to make it worth my while. Or hers. Now I’d really like to do something more for her.”
“Well, but what more could you do? She has benefits, right? That’s doing something for her. Before I retired, I always made sure all my employees had health insurance, even though it cost me an arm and a leg.”
“That’s more than your president has done.”
“Our president. No matter what you think of him, he’s our president now.”
They were back at the building. “Well, it’s been nice walking with you,” Bruce said.
“It has,” Alec said. “Maybe we can do it again sometime—if you can bear the idea.”
“I’d like that,” Bruce said, signaling the doorman not to bother holding the door for him. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go around the block one more time. Isabel still hasn’t done anything.”
They said a quick goodbye. As Bruce walked back down Park, he wondered if he should just tell Eva about taking Kathy to her chemo sessions and be done with it. There was nothing to disapprove of in that. You couldn’t disapprove of compassion—or could you? Maybe—if you perceived that compassion as part of another woman’s strategy to supplant you. Of course, to ascribe such a motive to Kathy would be unjust. Surely he could explain that much to Eva. Surely he could explain that all he had paid for was the hotel room—and not because Kathy had asked him. It was a gesture of munificence, performed of his own free will. Or would that upset Eva more—that Bruce, who for all the years of their marriage had let her buy his clothes, and decide which restaurants they went to, and where they took their vacations, and who their friends were, was suddenly acting of his own free will?
Mind you, he wasn’t complaining. Without Eva, he knew, his life would have been … not less interesting, exactly, but less full: no demands that he read magazine articles that gave him headaches, no listening to her friends arguing across the dinner table, no death marches through exhibitions at the one Met or season tickets at the other (occasionally used, more often given away like party favors). On the other side, more TV, more time spent with his parents, fewer weekend guests. Change for its own sake had little appeal for Bruce. He hadn’t asked Kathy to get sick, or anticipated the vein of empathy her plight would open in him. Nor, as far as he knew, had he said anything to give himself away to Eva. Or had he? Doubtless he shouldn’t have lost his temper over the Weisensteins’ dinner invitation. He should have just chewed his temper ten times, as he had each bite of dinner, until it was ground to a pulp. Then the conversation that had ended with Eva walking out of the kitchen would never have taken place. But he had lost his temper—an invigorating sensation, a liberating sensation, for which he knew he would pay the price. Eva wouldn’t make a scene. That wasn’t her way. Instead she would withdraw into haughty formalities. No, I wouldn’t care for any more, thank you. Having a secret from her—he had to admit it—exhilarated him.
It had started raining again. Suddenly he heard sirens, saw an ambulance racing toward him. For the past ten minutes, he realized, he had been letting the dogs lead him rather than the other way around. As usual, they walked with urgency, as if they were late for an appointment, though where it was they were trying to get to, home or away, he had no idea. He just followed.
Two days later, Min and Eva left for Venice. As the doorman put their luggage into the trunk of the taxi, Bruce stood on the sidewalk with the dogs and Min, waiting for his wife. Min had her phone out. At first he thought she was texting. Then he saw that she was playing a game.
The second she noticed him noticing, she put the phone in her purse.
“Busted,” she said. “OK, I confess. I’m an addict. Candy Crush.”
“Candy what?”
“You don’t know what it is? So much the better.” She smiled. “Well, darling, ten days on your own. While the mouse is away, will the cat play?”
“Maybe the cat will play Candygram.”
“Candy Crush. And I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s ruinous. Almost as bad as gambling.”
Right then Eva came out the door, looking sleek and elegant in a Burberry raincoat and black boots.
“Well, bon voyage,” Bruce said to Min.
“Buon viaggio,” Min said. And when he kissed her on the cheek: “Not enough. In Italy it’s due baci, two kisses, left then right. Whereas in Holland it’s three kisses—left, right, left. And if you’re wondering how I know so much about kissing, during the five minutes when I was at CN Traveler—”
“Min, come on,” Eva said, ushering her into the car before Bruce could deliver the second kiss.
Min obeyed. Eva and Bruce were now alone on the curb with the dogs.
“It’s stopped raining,” he said.
She agreed that it had.
“I’m relieved. I didn’t want to say anything, but yesterday the flight you’re on was delayed three hours. The night before, it was delayed five hours. Whereas tonight”—he glanced at his phone—“not only are you scheduled for an on-time departure, you’re supposed to get into Milan forty minutes early. The weather in Venice is sunny—high fifty-seven, low thirty-four.”
“You’ve certainly kept yourself up to the minute.”
“It’s just that I’ve got this app.”
“Bruce, I hope you understand how much I need this trip. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. Then he tried to kiss her on the lips, but she moved her head so that he kissed her chin instead. Sensing departure, the dogs stood up on their hind legs and tried to lick Eva’s and Bruce’s faces.
“They want to get in on the action,” Bruce said.
“Goodbye, sweethearts,” Eva said, bending down to rub their ears. “Take care of Daddy. I’ll miss you.”
She got into the car with Min. As it pulled away from the curb, the dogs whined and tried to give chase. Bruce held them back by their leashes with one hand and waved with the other. Even though he could see through the rear window that Eva hadn’t turned around, that she wasn’t looking at him, he kept waving, until the car was lost in the surge of uptown traffic.