HOWARD HAD BEEN GONE three days when Vasanti Gupta appeared at the front door to bring Mirella some syrupy-looking orange pastries on a blue-flowered china plate.
It was Thursday morning, just before Mirella left for work. Vasanti was wearing a nectarine-colored silk print dress that made her dark skin look lustrous. In the hand not holding the plate of pastry, she was carrying a leather briefcase identical to Mirella’s, but newer, and without the place where Pearl had written her name in pink Magic Marker.
“We made these last night,” Vasanti said, in her low breathless voice. “We thought you and the children might enjoy them. These are Indian pastries,” she added, with a slight cough, as if Mirella might not otherwise have been able to identify what was on the plate.
“How nice of you,” said Mirella automatically accepting the pastries. “Thanks so much.”
Vasanti smiled. “Maybe sometime soon, we have been thinking, our families can have dinner?” She paused to cough again. “You and your children. Would you like to come to dinner at our house sometime?” She did not mention Howard.
“Thanks so much,” repeated Mirella. “How nice. We would love to.”
But as soon as she closed the door, she began thinking of excuses for why they couldn’t possibly have dinner with the Guptas. A fever for Pearl. Jacob exposed to chicken pox. Don’t you dare feel sorry me, she thought, picturing Vasanti’s kind, round face.
Howard was in Greenwich with Richard and Vivvy. He left Sunday afternoon, taking only a small suitcase, the little green L.L. Bean bag he’d had since college. Twice he’d called to speak to the children; each time Randi answered the phone. “Daddy sounded weird,” said Pearl after the second call. But when Mirella questioned her she was vague and evasive. “He sounded like his teeth hurt,” she finally allowed. Then she said, “He told me they rented a movie. He said it was called Howard’s End.”
Pearl was staying home today. Happy Faces had metamorphosed for the summer into Happy Faces Camp, which meant the addition of a plastic wading pool, but part of the preschool floor had been scorched the day before during a candle-dipping project. Camp was closed until tomorrow. Fortunately none of the children were injured, although a teacher had a burn on one foot.
“Don’t go, Mommy,” wailed Pearl, running across the front lawn as Mirella was getting into the jeep. “Don’t leave me.”
“Stop crying, Pearl,” said Mirella, aware of Mahesh Gupta across the street, leading his little girls into the garage.
As she was driving to work, Mirella thought about the call she’d had from Vivvy last night, after the children were in bed. “He’s still here,” Vivvy said, too loudly as usual.
“Is he all right?” Mirella asked.
“What?”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s all right. He spent the whole day out by the pool.”
“The pool?” It had never occurred to Mirella that Howard might be in any way enjoying himself in Greenwich. “What did he tell you?” She hesitated. “Did he tell you about the baby?”
“Yes,” said Vivvy crisply. “I think he’s being an ass. Though of course I can see why he’s pissed at not finding out until now.”
After a moment, during which she could hear background noise at Vivvy’s, the sound of water running, dishes clinking, Mirella said, “This affair business has been a shock. I don’t know what to do. I’m not sure I’ll get over it.”
She was unreasonably depressed to think of Vivvy doing the dishes while they discussed Mirella and Howard’s marriage. All day Mirella had been watching people drive their cars, cross streets, sip from plastic cups of beige frozen coffee drinks. It continued to astonish her, although it no longer should, that one person’s life could be cracking apart while everyone else’s went on as normal.
The sounds of dishwashing stopped. “It’s supposed to be a shock,” Vivvy said. “If it’s not a shock, then you should really worry. That’s when things are really bad.”
“Did he—” Mirella paused to moisten her lips. “Did he say anything about her?”
“Not really. He thinks she might be sort of stalking him.”
“Stalking him.” Despite herself, Mirella laughed. “After three years?”
Vivvy turned the water on again. “Three days, three years. Don’t forgive him,” she’d advised, “until you understand what you’re forgiving.”
Now Mirella sat in her office on Boylston Street staring at the draft of a motion she needed to file before five o’clock. A clerk called to say that Betsy Hayman’s divorce settlement had been approved by the judge. A lawyer called to change a deposition date because her client wanted to go to Disney World. A few minutes ago she herself had tried to telephone her mother. Let’s have lunch, she wanted to suggest. How about this afternoon? But the visiting nurse, whose name she couldn’t recall, answered the phone and said with a faintly hostile lisp that Mrs. Cook was out walking. Mr. Cook was at home. Did Mirella want to speak to her father?
Hauugh, said her father, when he came on the line. Harrgh. Mirella’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s all right, Dad. I’m fine. Everyone’s fine. Just calling to say hello.” Haawgg.
The morning went on. Her throat felt sore. This afternoon she had a court appearance in a second-parent adoption case with lesbian partners, for which she was unprepared. Her client was the child’s birth mother; the partner, a dentist, was the financial support, but the judge seemed to be balking. One of the ironies of this case was that the two women had such similar last names. Coners and Kahners. Oh life’s little ironies, thought Mirella grimly. She ate an orange.
Ruth was in court until one o’ clock. Mirella had called Ruth on Sunday, right after Howard left, and Ruth drove straight over, arriving at three with two bottles of Chianti and a bag of candy corn. “Comfort food,” she announced, folding herself onto the sofa. “Okay, tell me everything,” she said, after Mirella sent Randi and the children out to get ice cream in town. At first it had been consoling to talk to Ruth, but it became less so as Ruth revealed the ways in which she had always distrusted Howard. “Frankly, he’s too good-looking,” she said at one point. At another, she said thoughtfully, “His fingers always seemed too short for an architect’s.”
And somehow, as the conversation wound on, Mirella kept forgetting to tell Ruth that she was pregnant, which she had meant to confess from the moment she refused a glass of wine, but opened the bag of candy corn. Then the children returned, faces smeared with chocolate, the phone rang, and Ruth had to get home to walk her schnauzer. The opportunity was lost.
“Like so many opportunities,” Mirella found herself typing onto the computer screen. She let the words remain for a moment, before backspacing over them and returning to the motion she was drafting. “Plaintiff alleges,” she typed.
Calls were buzzed through. Randi telephoned to remind Mirella that Pearl needed a costume for the historical play Happy Faces planned to perform on the Fourth of July, in honor of New Aylesbury’s 350th anniversary celebration. A wainwright Pearl was supposed to be. Could Mirella buy leather breeches anywhere? One of Ruth’s clients, a thin, red-haired woman wearing stained denim pants, began sobbing in the waiting room. Laura, the new paralegal, who seemed hardly older than Danielle, tapped at Mirella’s door with a question about the Vassbacher case: “What is the precise legal definition of primary caretaker?”
Vassbacher himself sent Mirella an e-mail: “Any news from that lady the court sent over? Not sure how well the evaluation went. The girls didn’t say much. The toaster caught on fire while she was here.” A jackhammer pounded below on Boylston; her computer hummed like a refrigerator; the smell of orange peel rose from the wastebasket.
She was pregnant. Howard had slept three years ago with a woman named Nadine. Possibly he’d slept with her again. Three days ago he left to go stay with his brother in Connecticut, after nearly slicing his thumb off with his table saw. During the commotion, the dog stole an entire loaf of oatmeal bread from the kitchen counter, ate it, then shat all over the blue Chinese rug.
All of this had happened and here was Mirella at her desk.
It seemed like some sort of strange algorithm, these separate occurrences; she had an urge to sketch them out on a clean sheet of paper, to add them up, subtract what she could, multiply the consequences of each, already accepting that no equation would work. Sunlight from the plate-glass window behind her fell squarely against her back, heating her skin through her putty-colored linen dress. She felt a thick lurch of nausea. Time to focus, she instructed herself. Time to concentrate on the motion in front of you. Instead, she kept picturing Vassbacher’s toaster on fire.
Swiveling in her chair so the sun sluiced along her arm, she understood that she would continue to compute it all, no matter how pointless the exercise became. She would continue to search for a common denominator that would explain Howard’s affair and another baby and the possibly ruined rug and why she’d felt so distraught at the sight of Vasanti Gupta’s plate of orange pastries. She would try to comprehend all of this because she was a rational person, who put her faith in solving problems, which she was beginning to believe was one of the best facets of her character, and also one of the worst.
Oh Howard, she thought.
An oily weariness seeped through her. She lay back in her chair, bones swimming, and closed her eyes. In the hallway the woman’s weeping faded away, then ended entirely. Cheryl, the receptionist, was answering the phone rapidly in her South Boston accent each time it rang: Cook & Zeigler. CookaZeigler. CookaSeagull.
Mirella opened her eyes and picked up the phone. She dialed Richard and Vivvy’s number, then hung up and snatched her hand off the receiver when she heard a knock on her door.
“Am I interrupting?” Ruth stood at the half-opened door, her short gray hair looking greenish in the hallway’s fluorescence. “Hey, are you okay?” Coming a few steps into Mirella’s office, Ruth gave her a quizzical glance and balanced the sheaf of documents she was carrying on the end of the desk. “You’re the same color as your dress.”
Mirella fanned herself with a court order. “Is the one who was crying in the hall all right?”
“She’ll survive,” Ruth said dispassionately. “She’s just got to get her priorities straight.”
“Don’t we all,” sighed Mirella.
“No,” said Ruth. “Not like that.”
About a third of Ruth’s clients were battered women and sometimes also drug addicts, referred by the women’s shelter where Ruth volunteered on Monday nights. They slumped in the waiting room chairs in baggy jeans and nylon jackets, eyes bloodshot, radiating a strange languid belligerent despair. Later they sent religious greeting cards with shakily written statements of gratitude penned at the bottom. “You saved my life,” most of them said, in one form or another. “I thank God for you.” Ruth occasionally read these notes aloud to Mirella in the conference room at lunchtime, adjusting the reading glasses she wore on a long, clear-beaded chain.
The rest of her clients were corporate wives going after their husbands’ assets. The high-tech boom had been excellent for business. Getting rich quickly had a deleterious effect on marriage, Ruth claimed. Particularly for middle-aged male executives, who had been comfortable in the shade of modest success, but were finding it difficult to remain modest and middle-aged in the brilliance of their own new prospects.
“So how are you surviving?” Ruth gave her the same clinical look she’d probably given her weeping client.
“All right, I guess.”
“You know, you could take the day off.”
“I need to finish this motion, and I’ve got a court appearance in an hour. Plus Jerry Vassbacher just blew his GAL evaluation.” Mirella began plucking at the front of her dress. Ruth had a perspicacious way of smiling and frowning at the same time that seemed especially disconcerting today. “This was his chance to show off his great parenting skills. Then his kids sat like mummies while he practically burned down the house.”
“Who’s the opposing counsel?”
“A piranha from Rabb, Lowell & Goodfriend who was the wife’s roommate in boarding school, which means she’ll probably write off half her hours. Plus we’ve got that rhinoceros Foley for a probate judge.”
“Life in the jungle,” murmured Ruth.
“My guess is we’ll lose everything but visitation.” Mirella stared at her hands, feeling her stomach lurch again. “Even though his wife couldn’t remember the pediatrician’s name in her deposition.”
“My advice,” Ruth said, sitting down comfortably on the edge of Mirella’s desk, “is to get a bunch of women to testify. You have to persuade Foley that your guy is the kids’ mother, so get some women to say so. Teachers, friends, Girl Scout leader. If there’s a bias in favor of mothers, which, in this rare situation, there is, then go with the bias, show how it fits. Honor the rule you’re breaking. What you could do—”
Gazing at Ruth across her desk, only half listening, because this strategy had already occurred to her, Mirella found herself thinking of the shower curtain she had still neglected to buy at Filene’s, and of Pearl’s rest blanket at school, which had not been brought home to be washed since Christmas, and also of the nutritionist appointment she still meant to schedule for Jacob.
If she lost her children, she would never recover. This was not a hysterical or melodramatic idea; if she lost her children she knew she would come close to dying. Or simply become somebody better off dead.
You have to get to work, she told herself. You have so much work, don’t think about anything but work. But just at that moment, Mirella had a distinct image of Jerry Vassbacher in his bathrobe. He was standing in his daughters’ room, watching them sleep. She saw it all quite clearly, just as if she were with him in the room. He was wearing a blue terry-cloth bathrobe. Light glowed from a mushroom-shaped nightlight, for a moment illuminating the peaceful attentiveness on his face as he bent to retrieve a hairband, a plastic bracelet tossed to the floor. She watched him straighten up to brush a strand of hair away from the mouth of one child and cover the thin legs of the other, his bulky body unobtrusive, almost graceful in performing these tasks, his eyeglasses shining here, there as he moved through the darkened room.
“You aren’t listening to me,” Ruth was saying sharply. “Mirella. What is it? Can I get you some water?”
As she heard this question, and even tried to respond to it, Mirella had the feeling that once again she was forgetting something essential, something that shrank and wobbled as she tried to catch it, rolling down the incline of the tilting room.
“Mirella,” she heard Ruth say, as if she were calling from under the desk. “Mirella?”
“I’m sorry.” Mirella opened her eyes. “I’m pregnant.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s what I just said.” She tried to laugh, hot and breathless, trapped in her square of sunlight, with Ruth bending over the desk, smelling of coffee, her thin face close enough that Mirella could see the pores in her nose. No one, she thought irritably, should get that close. Up from her wastebasket floated the stinging scent of orange peel. “Although I’m not really,” she managed to say, “sorry about being pregnant.”
An instant later, she said, “Oh God, Ruth.”
Quietly, Ruth closed Mirella’s door and came around the desk. She bent over, gathering back Mirella’s hair with one hand, giving it a twist. “It’s all right,” she said. “Go on ahead,” and with her other hand, she picked up the wastebasket to hold until Mirella was done.