IN THE NIGHT, just before husbands called out to wives during sleep and children called out to mothers, the women were often already awake. They lay suspended in bed, and so when the moment came, they didn’t even have to judder to attention before dropping a light female hand onto a trembling male back, or skittering down the hall toward a dreaming child. But the women, who were still conscious then because of hormones or the delayed kick of a cappuccino that had been drunk too late in the day or a continual churn of anxiety that had become indistinguishable from normal metabolic rhythms, weren’t thinking about their families.
Late at night in New York City in November, with the street outside opaque and frozen, in the brief period before Leo Buckner grunted and shivered and called out in his sleep, Amy Lamb lay awake thinking about the couple. That was how she had come to think of Penny Ramsey and Ian Janeway all fall: “the couple.” Earlier that day, she had met them for lunch at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Ian consulted in the framing department. Penny had wanted to visit him there and then walk through the galleries, so she had called Amy in the morning and said, “Can I drag you out to lunch too?” surely confident of what the answer would be.
Intermittently throughout the morning, Amy had thought about the couple. They preoccupied her as she sat in the meeting at the school about the new parent newsletter. Amy often dreaded such meetings, yet felt it was her responsibility to attend them. Even before she arrived at the school she could already picture the usual suspects assembling in the room and the fruit platter that would be laid out on a table in front of them, as though they needed to be rewarded for showing up. She saw the large, hard strawberries staining the pineapple slices beside them; the translucent starburst jade of the sliced kiwifruit; the flesh-toned flesh of the out-of-season melon. Meetings at the law firm, Amy distantly remembered, had had only a fraction of the sense of pomp and urgency that these meetings did. The school meetings were somber and reflective, and tended to go on and on. The rest of life seemed as if it had been atomized, and somehow time itself appeared to have been bribed to stand still for these women alone.
The atmosphere in the music room at the Auburn Day School on this morning was clotted with smells of moisturizer and undereye-circle concealer and something indefinably, pheromonally female. The mothers smelled different from one another, but most of them smelled vaguely of nectar or gummi bears—fruity and girlish—and together in this big, bulky knot of mothers taking their seats among the stacked xylophones and zithers and cymbals and wood blocks, they all smelled good.
Often, in the middle of a meeting at the school, a mother would ask a free-associative question that wasn’t really a question at all. “My son takes soccer on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I sometimes find that he’s really exhausted the next morning. Do you think I should arrange for him to switch out of Tuesday-morning Latin, because basically he can’t even think until lunchtime? Also, I’m wondering whether the student-teacher ratio at the school is really where we want it to be?”
At which point, Amy would find herself doodling frantically on her napkin. Once, back when Mason was in kindergarten, she had gone to her first school meeting ever and had written “KILL ME NOW” over and over on the napkin. The short, dark-haired, slightly funny-looking, sympathetic woman sitting beside her had noticed it and been amused, and that was how Amy and Roberta Sokolov had become friends.
Today, at the meeting about the parent newsletter, Amy didn’t doodle. Her thoughts were mostly off with Penny and Ian, whom she would see when this ended. She was the token nonworking mother in their life, the ironic one who could dip in and out of these experiences and bring back a full report. Ian always listened to her in a good-natured but slightly confused way, whereas Penny seemed truly interested.
The discussion at the school was well attended. The usual collection of mothers had come, plus a couple of the ones who worked part-time. Dustin Kavanaugh’s mother, Helen, who ran a charity that helped to transmit enormous sums of money to the poorest people in the world, had graciously taken off an hour to help out. Even Isabelle Gordon the string theorist—everyone always referred to her this way—had taken it upon herself to show up, briefly postponing her study of the universe in favor of a school newsletter. She sat in the back of the room with her braid and fantastic shoes. She was poised at attention between Geralynn Freund, the anorexic mother, and the one full-time father in the grade, Len Goodling, who prompted a new wave of thought across the room about whether or not he had ever worked and whether he was rich or depressed or simply enlightened, the way some younger fathers on the horizon seemed to be.
The discussion today was unofficially led by Laurie Livers, who had once been editor in chief at a major publishing house. Earlier in her career, Laurie had been the person responsible for plucking the manuscript of Bigfoot Was Here: A Father’s Letters to His Newborn Son from Iraq out of the so-called slush pile, and as a result her fortunes had been tied irrevocably to those of the slender, emotional, epistolary memoir. The book had remained on the best-seller list for over a year, and Laurie had followed up the success by publishing that financial expert’s self-help book on gaining personal wealth, Beggars Can Be Choosers, but despite her swift elevation, she left publishing to have a baby, and then eventually another one, and had never returned to work. She was the mother who habitually stood in place in the lobby selling Auburn Day paraphernalia, while the boys and their mothers whirled all around the nucleus that was her unmoving form. She was as familiar and imperturbable a fixture as a guard outside Buckingham Palace. Everyone said Laurie was invaluable to the school, but what they meant was, they were glad that she enjoyed selling that crap, for they didn’t.
The way she now talked about the school newsletter was likely the same way she had pitched Bigfoot Was Here to her colleagues. “This book is about bravery and loss,” Laurie Livers had probably said. In the classroom at the school, she leaned forward in her chair and said, “Auburn Days, our parent newsletter, will make you aware of the community around you. It will be the vital link between you and your sons.”
“Aye aye,” said Len Goodling.
A mother sitting in a nearby seat squinted slightly and waved a small white hand. “I have to say, I’m a little concerned about finding a good font for the newsletter,” she said. “I think it’s important that the look be right. And so I’d like to suggest Courier 12.”
“Courier 12 looks exactly like it was written on the Smith-Corona typewriter I used in high school,” said Laurie.
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” said the other mother, Sari Handler, who everyone knew to be a bit of a dunce. She was the same person who had once, during a discussion of the upcoming woodwind concert, somehow referred earnestly to “Taco Bell’s Canon in D.” (She had also, apparently, when the boys were studying dictators, insisted that “Baby Doc” Duvalier was a pediatrician, though Amy thought this anecdote had to be apocryphal.) “My feeling is that Courier 12 gives it a homier quality,” Sari Handler said now. “Like something from the past.”
“Then maybe we ought to use Butter Churn 12,” Amy put in. There was a light spurt of laughter, and several of the women looked up to see who had said that, and one of them was Geralynn Freund. Her smile appeared almost concave, giving her expression a rictus-like, death’s-head aspect. The conversation among the women in the room ground on, and several other women were drawn in, drafting their own powers of logic and reason and knowledge into service now. Someone groaned and complained, and someone else said, “Can we move along here?” Isabelle Gordon was looking at her watch—one that had no hands or numbers, just inexplicable overlapping translucent circles that moved in a pattern, suggesting a specific time only to her—and smiling apologetically; she needed to get back to her office at the research institute. Palatino 12 was eventually mentioned as a compromise font, and after a show of hands, it won. All this for a newsletter, Amy thought, with content about upcoming field trips that would prove to be as thin as a haiku:
Please send ten dollars
To the planetarium
Their gift shop is neat
The women continued to talk, their conversation moving in widening, overlapping circles that were rhythmic and hypnotic. A couple of the mothers inched or ambled toward the door. Amy willed herself out of the gabble and trance. It was almost time for lunch at the museum, she realized, looking at the clock, and so she slipped quietly from the music room, relieved to be going past the rows of hard knees and the bags swelling with children’s soccer jerseys and rolled yoga mats and beautifully wrapped birthday presents. Some of the mothers had lacrosse sticks casually leaning against their chairs, as though they were part of a team of female athletes on a break, instead of mere stick-carriers for their sons. Also leaving the room at that moment was Geralynn Freund. Out in the hallway, the two women converged.
“I’m not very good in groups,” Geralynn Freund explained.
“This could have gone on forever. And the conversation was ridiculous.”
“Yes,” said Geralynn. “It was.”
“Sometimes the meetings are a lot better,” said Amy.
“True.”
“But when they’re like this, you just feel life passing you by.”
Geralynn agreed. She shrugged her small body into a black shearling winter coat that made her look like someone rolled up in a rug, although it also seemed to Amy that there wasn’t a coat in the world that would be thick enough or warm enough to protect her. The women pushed through the double doors. Cold sunlight flowed in, and Geralynn Freund stood in it for a moment, blinking rapidly, then smiled and hurried off.
Where did she have to go? Amy wondered. What was her day like? What did she do with herself, her hair spiky and damp, her body like a rope knotted here and there to make elbows, knees, a head? Amy could see Geralynn walking for hours and hours, calculating in her head how long it would take to burn off the calories of the kiwifruit and pineapple slices she’d eaten, until it was time to return and pick up her son.
Amy imagined this woman perpetually in motion, all wound up and then slowly winding down. But then it occurred to her that some people might in fact ask the same question about Amy: What did she do with herself all day?
THE COUPLE was already waiting in the cafeteria of the Met when Amy Lamb arrived. Penny’s hair was falling loosely from its knot, and Ian Janeway wore a tie only half knotted and no jacket. Seeing them from the entrance of the huge, bright room, Amy thought how vivid they always appeared, whether separately or together.
Over the fall, from her fixed place in Holly Hills, Jill Hamlin had become increasingly and transparently annoyed at Amy’s friendship with Penny. “Just observing the whole situation objectively, I would say you have a little bit of a crush on her,” Jill had said recently, when she’d come into the city for the day. “One of those girl crushes. I’m thinking back to that party at Penn.”
“The girl I kissed?”
“Yes, James Dean. The androgyne.”
“You just like saying ‘androgyne.’ Penny is not androgynous like that. She’s completely female-seeming.”
“So maybe you have ecumenical tastes when it comes to women.”
“I have no tastes. It’s not a crush. Is it really so shocking that she would want to be friends with me? Are the women who work supposed to be completely separate from the ones who don’t? Do we need separate drinking fountains?”
But she couldn’t tell Jill that while she didn’t love Penny, she did love Penny and Ian together—the idea of them, the couple they were, the way they softly inflated her days. She wished she could tell Jill about Penny and Ian’s affair, and then Jill would understand why Amy was somewhat evasive and protective whenever the topic of Penny Ramsey came up. But she couldn’t tell her. She had promised she wouldn’t, and so there were occasional moments like this one, in which Jill revealed a jealousy that was childish yet almost touching, and Amy could do nothing to lessen it.
Penny often called Amy to relay the latest piece of affair non-news: “Ian sent me a big piece of truffle cheese at work. My assistant Mark carried it in, and it smelled very strong. Mark kept looking at me.” Amy, hearing one of Penny’s anecdotes, would laugh or exclaim or do whatever was called for, but always she would be on Penny’s side; that was what she was meant to do. Once in a while, Ian himself called Amy’s cell phone. In his accent he would say, “Hullo, Ian Janeway here. Have you spoken to her today? She’s not picking up her mobile.”
To which Amy would say that she thought Penny was at a meeting of the museum board or at a parent conference, and Ian would say, “Right, brilliant, I totally forgot.”
Amy sometimes served as a go-between, but usually she was a simple witness. At lunch this afternoon at the Met, she sat across the table and watched their faces with a kind of slow, appreciative interest. They were lively, connected, sexual. They liked to talk about themselves in the way that adolescents do, lazily unaware of how much space and time they are taking up, and how no one on earth is really entitled to this much of it. But in the same way that the world indulged adolescents, Amy did too.
“So Penny here is actually letting me see her the weekend after next,” Ian was saying. “At her apartment.”
“Really?” Amy said. “On the weekend? Oh right, it’s the father-son thing.”
On that weekend all the boys from the fourth grade and their fathers would be traveling on coach buses upstate to the Nature Exploratorium, where they would sit in the cold around a campfire and then spend the night inside warm cabins before being returned to their families. Amy would be alone overnight for the first time in a long while. She couldn’t remember the last time that this had been the case. Leo traveled a lot to see his clients, but Mason was usually home.
“Yes, and my girls are both going to go on sleepovers,” Penny said. “I promised Ian that he and I could have an extended playdate, so to speak.”
“A sleepover,” said Ian. He grazed on his salad thoughtfully for a moment. “If you’re married and you have an affair with someone,” he said, “there’s a word for it. And there’s also a word for you if your wife has an affair. But why is there no word for what you are if you get involved with someone who’s married?”
Around them in the enormous room the sounds were relentless but acoustically pleasing. There was no doubt that their conversation would go unheard by anyone else; the cafeteria was too big, and no one would even think it would be worth it listening to. This wasn’t a place to stoke or even vigorously disguise love. It was a place for schoolchildren in groups of thirty, blowing the wrappers of straws aloft, and for old people in groups of two, shattering crackers into china bowls of minestrone, and, at least at this back table beneath the skylight, for a pair of animated middle-aged women and a slightly younger man, talking with great familiarity about the topic of surreptitious love.
It had become a common topic for the trio. Any conversation that dipped into other topics—the resurgence of museum culture, or the way that warlike America was now hated by much of the world, or really anything at all—might slowly turn itself toward this subject. “That was around the time when Penny and I started our thing,” Ian might say in the middle of something else, or Penny might say, “Yes, and ever since, I’ve been sleeping with him,” or Amy would begin a sentence, “As the keeper of your secret…” and the couple would settle into the enjoyment of all this attention.
For who else received attention like this in adulthood? By the time childhood ended, all the benevolence that had been directed toward you just because you were young and your hair was silky and you hadn’t yet been spoiled by the grit and hailstorms of life unfairly changed into a kind of indifference. Suddenly you, who had once been youthful and golden and special, were now treated as just another customer waiting in line for something. The world was suspicious of you; you weren’t so special after all.
Unless, of course, you were in love. Briefly, two people in love received the attention of everyone. Weddings were celebrated and wept over; the couple was always seen as temporarily beautiful and perfect and in no need of anyone else. Amy remembered how special she and Leo had felt early on, walking along the street to work in the morning after a night that had included the kind of sex that was every young person’s divine right. Leo had appeared brooding and reflective as they walked, and she supposed that she had too; perhaps the people who passed them perceived that they were sealed inside the contemplation of their own love. With Penny and Ian, Amy was still the only one in the city—“the only one on earth, if you want to be exact,” Penny had said—who knew about the affair. “I haven’t told anyone else. Greg can never find out. So I’m just shutting up.” Without Amy’s knowledge, it almost seemed as though the thing itself wouldn’t exist. For who would be there to say it did?
Since that afternoon in September when Dustin Kavanaugh was mugged on safety walk and the friendship with Penny was set into motion, Amy had folded the couple into her pliable routine. Beforehand, she’d been thinking about getting some kind of full-time volunteer job, but that idea had somehow gotten lost after the mugging. For now, Penny and Ian seemed to fit neatly inside her brain, clasped in an embrace like twins in utero.
At lunch at the Met, sitting across the table from them, Amy said to Ian, “It’s just as well that there’s no name for you. This way, it almost seems as if you’re just a bystander.”
“He is not a bystander,” said Penny. “He’s an instigator.”
“So there is a name for me after all. Why, because I told you I liked the way your ramen noodle soup smelled that day in your office?”
“No, because of what happened later.”
And with that, he did something to her under the table, some quick feel or pinch or squeeze, and Penny drew back and said, “Ow, Ian, stop!” in the tone of a teenaged girl having her arm twisted by a boy. “You’re such a baby.” Then she lifted her foot onto the free chair and rubbed at her ankle. Amy glimpsed her little bootlet made of fine-grained brown leather fringed in some kind of fur that made her look like a cantering Shetland pony.
Penny and Ian would sometimes rise up from the swell of their own self-interest and draw Amy in too, and she was gratified to be asked questions and to have their eyes upon her. “So, what about you?” asked Ian now. “Do you think marriage is inviolable?”
“Apparently not,” Amy said.
“We’re a very bad influence,” Ian said. “Penny says you’re happily married. That’s a nice thing to hear. Have you been married long?”
“Thirteen years,” said Amy, and for some reason she thought of Leo on their wedding day. She remembered how the white flower in the buttonhole of his jacket had reminded her of a miniature version of his face, poking out bravely, openly, waiting for her.
“That’s an impressive amount of time,” Ian said. “I can’t even imagine it.”
But now Leo, off in his own environment, was so separate from her. He didn’t want to sleep with her anymore, and he no longer needed her to be his comrade. He had his colleague Corinna Berry, with whom he commiserated about the workload and much else. Sometimes he and Corinna talked on the phone at night too. It had been a long time since Amy had stepped into Leo’s law office, and yes, she could picture his walls with their textured wallpaper and diplomas and photographs. And surely there was a picture of her and Mason there from a few years earlier; she seemed to recall her son’s corrugated, empty front gum, awaiting the shingle of a tooth. But what did she really know anymore of life in a law firm—the use of Juxtapose BriefScan, the way it all worked?
Leo’s daytime universe was now as foreign to her as the enclosure of anyone else’s world. As a little girl, Amy had loved gaining even brief entry into any small and previously unexplored place: the clothy sepia darkness below the kitchen table; or the provisional tent made from her bedsheet with its strawberry pattern on the edges, draped across two chairs; or the space beneath the desk in her father’s study, while he sat at his desk chair, grading economics papers. She could see her father’s trouser legs and his long feet in black socks, and she would grasp one of his legs as if it were a safety bar on a ride at an amusement park. It was her father’s space she was in; she could feel the sense of him there, just as Leo’s office was suffused with Leo, and just as her own office had once held the sense of her, until she had abandoned it.
Leo, in his work life, traveled every month or so, going to see corporate clients out of town for one or two nights, staying in those business-traveler hotels where the robes were thick but the grain of the terry cloth was flattened from continual business-traveler wear, as person after person, tired and alone, slipped into the garment and sat on the bed with the remote in hand, sending the channels streaming by.
Amy and Leo had become separated from each other over time; she knew that she could have used Penny and Ian as a way back to him. She could have ignored Penny’s explicit request for secrecy and instead told Leo everything, and then he would have been drawn into the story too, and there would now have been two couples in the mix, not just one. She could have told Leo all the details about the love affair, and maybe they would have been restored to each other.
“I think you should use this information against her,” Leo might say after Amy told him. “Threaten to tell the hedge-fund husband. Extort big money out of her. Hey, tuition time is coming up.”
“Or at least I could extort her for a family membership at her museum.”
“Yes! But wait until they have a really good show there. Like…an exhibit of photos of immigrants in babushkas walking down the gangplank into the New World. Do you think they’ll ever have an exhibit like that?”
“Oh, Leo, the question is, will they ever not have an exhibit like that?” And they would both laugh unfairly and embrace each other in the marital bed, secure in their love and their openness and in the fact that they had far more than Penny Ramsey and Ian Janeway would ever have together.
But Amy didn’t tell Leo about the couple. She didn’t tell Jill either but let everything languish, unsaid, and she didn’t tell any of her other friends at the Golden Horn over the stirring scents of coffee and butter, which theoretically could make anyone confess something of an erotic nature. She kept the secret close to herself, as she’d been asked to do.
It was slightly unsettling to see Penny regarding Ian with such a crooked, besotted expression; it was not unlike looking at Penny’s tiny foot encased in leather and fur. Ian, with his hair that never seemed quite combed, and the spray of freckles upon his face and neck and the back of his hands, had no real power at all except what he had over Penny. He was charming, but mostly he seemed to be one of the obscure and transient floaters who passed through the city so easily each year, absorbed into its undulating crowds, barely noticed by anyone.
“How will I manage over Christmas?” Ian asked. “Amy and I will have to see a lot of each other. You’re going to be here, Amy, right?”
“Oh yes.”
She and Leo probably couldn’t afford to go anywhere, she knew, which was disappointing but not unexpected. Winter break was still in the distance, and the Ramseys would be on the island of St. Doe’s, while Amy and Leo and Mason would be at home. They had made no plans, though at the tail end of Mason’s school vacation, Amy’s mother, Antonia, was coming to visit for several days when she traveled down to New York for her women’s conference. She would move into the tiny study in the apartment and sleep on the inflatable mattress on the floor.
“You know, Amy, you could come to St. Doe’s too,” Penny said now.
“No we couldn’t,” Amy said, but it was pathetically wonderful to imagine lying side by side with Penny on a white beach, while their sons played in the waves. Penny and Amy would coax the last of the sunblock from the snouts of bottles, would talk in discreet voices about Ian Janeway: where the relationship was going, whether Ian was “too much” in love with her. “It’s out of reach for us,” Amy went on. “I can already hear Leo’s response.”
Penny paused. “Are you positive? Don’t you have any mileage you could use? That would take away at least a little of the cost.”
“We do have mileage,” Amy said, suddenly too loud, the way Jill’s daughter Nadia sometimes spoke when she became excited. For maybe it could work, she thought, maybe it was doable. She would ask Leo tonight.
“I have mileage,” Ian put in, pointlessly.
After lunch the three of them walked through the galleries, stopping before a cluster of paintings by Magritte. The man with the green apple wasn’t there now, but still Amy recalled that day with Mason so long ago. She read a placard about Magritte’s relationship with his wife. Georgette had posed for him early on in their life together, and he considered her his muse. “I guess they were very domestic,” Penny said to Ian. “Not wild at all. She posed and he painted, and then he got famous and they traveled a lot and were very close.”
“Live with me,” Ian said quietly.
“Shh,” said Penny.
There on the walls were the floating objects of dreams, but set among them, almost scattered discreetly, were occasional female nudes, and Amy thought that maybe these were all based on Georgette Magritte, who populated her husband’s thoughts and gave him big ideas. Could that ever be enough for a full life? Karen Yip liked to please Wilson and make him feel good, and enjoy their life together. It would never be enough for Amy, though. She didn’t know what would be enough in the long run. For now, she was content to stand here, watching. Ian said something softly to Penny, then glanced all around the gallery before coming close to her and putting his lips to her forehead. They were both small, well-designed people—as compact as sexualized children. She felt oddly proud of them for their love, as though she were their generous chaperone. She thought again about the trip to St. Doe’s and wondered if it was possible to go. The couple stayed for a moment like that in the dim gray light of the gallery, and it seemed, from where she stood, that they shone, if only for each other.
Mason had recently told Amy yet another fact in his store of endless knowledge: in satellite maps of the earth, he said, you could always tell where the people were, even from great distances. Their faces, upturned slightly, gave off a shine that was like nothing else on earth—useful in love and a liability in warfare. Humans, no matter what they did, could not hide their incandescence.
NOW, IN THE NIGHT, when Leo began to groan and quiver slightly through his nightmare, Amy laid her hand on his broad bare back, and he turned toward her.
“Why did you wake me?” he said.
“You were having a nightmare. You were making those noises.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“You always deny it, Leo. But you were like a rabid dog.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He rubbed his eyes. “I shouldn’t eat before I go to sleep,” he said, nodding toward the plate on his night table that held crumbs from pecan shortbread cookies. “But right, I did have a bad dream. I was very upset,” he said, slowly remembering. “Something terrible was about to happen, and I saw you and Mason walking toward the woods—I don’t even know where we were; it didn’t look familiar—but it was dark in there, and I didn’t want you to go, because I had a feeling that you’d never come out. It was sort of apocalyptic. Although I guess with apocalyptic you can’t have ‘sort of.’”
He lay back down in the darkness, Amy close against him. “I think it’s because you’re already thinking about the father-son weekend,” she said.
“The weekend. Shit.”
“It’ll be okay, Leo.”
“It’ll be okay for you,” he said. “You get to stay home. But I’m dreading it.”
“It might not be so bad.”
“It’s not even as though we have to sleep in tents,” Leo went on. “We’ve got cabins with electricity. But think about it: all those fathers and their sons in one place. And Mason and I are supposed to take a hike together. I don’t hike. I’m not one of those dads who climb up the rock face of K2, or wherever they go for fun. Dads who hire Sherpas. I’m not like them. I don’t have their money; I’m not aggressive the way they are.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re not, obviously. Just be with him. I think that’s the point: ultrabusy fathers spending time with their sons.”
“I don’t know what’s fun for Mason anymore,” Leo said plaintively. “I don’t really have time to know whether he’s happy or not.”
Happiness had become an elusive state in them and in most of the people they knew, but still made frequent appearances in children. Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too. It was like unexpectedly spying a fawn paused on its stilty, trembling legs in a meadow. Without any self-consciousness you cried out, “Look!”
“I think he’s happy,” Amy decided. Then she added, “Once, an old woman in a museum said that Mason and I looked really happy. But it was a long time ago.”
She and Leo were quiet together in a moment of uncertainty about their son. They both felt the distinct strain of melancholy that accompanies the ritual relinquishing of a child to the world. But if it was their own happiness they were pondering at that moment, neither of them wanted to mention it. Leo closed his eyes and squished the pillow against the side of his face. Amy closed her eyes too and thought about Penny and Ian. Then she snapped her eyes open.
“About the Ramseys,” she said.
“Yes?” Leo opened his eyes again, looking right at her. Their noses were close, the points almost touching.
“I think I told you that they’re going to St. Doe’s over winter break,” Amy said softly. “She wanted to know if we could come. I told her we couldn’t.”
“That’s good,” said Leo.
“I know it’s totally out of reach.”
“Yes. It is.” He yawned. “In another life we can go,” he said. “In a parallel universe. For now, I can barely deal with the father-son weekend.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said.
There was a pause. “The guy who owns St. Doe’s,” said Leo. “He manufactures those biscuits, those Bing-Bongs. I wonder if they’re any good.”
“No idea.”
They lay in silence, and Amy listened for Leo’s breathing to shift, as it often quickly did, moving into a semi–sleep apnea that was troubling. Because he had gotten a little heavier in recent months, she worried that he would one day drop dead like that father in 14H. Sleep apnea happened in overweight men; you could hear the thin vibratory reed that was their air passage, and you lay awake beside them, knowing that all was not right. You were frightened, listening to your husband, the way a mother whom Amy had met in her Lamaze class a decade earlier had been frightened of her baby dying of crib death. As a result she had stayed awake all night in those early months, listening to the baby’s inrush and outrush of air, until finally the mother herself collapsed from exhaustion. But Leo’s breathing didn’t change at all now, for he wasn’t falling asleep. Both of them were awake; the conversation about St. Doe’s and, in a sidelong way, about money, had agitated them equally.
“You still up over there?” she asked.
“Yeah. I keep thinking about that island.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Forget it.”
“You know,” he said after a moment, “we do have mileage.”
Mileage! It was as though she controlled him like one of Mason’s electronic devices. Delicately, Amy said, “I wondered about that. Penny mentioned it, in fact. And what about those credit card points we have? But I didn’t want to bring it up with you. I know we can’t afford it at all. It’s an insanely expensive place. It’s not for us.”
“What reason did you give her that we couldn’t come?”
“I said I didn’t think we could manage it.”
“You said that? ‘Manage it’?”
“Well, it’s true.”
Leo shifted in the bed. “It makes me look failed,” he said. “Like I can’t take my family on a nice vacation.”
“Not to St. Doe’s, at least,” said Amy.
“So what did she say?”
“That was when she asked if we could use our mileage,” Amy said. “And then I thought about how we have a lot of credit card points too. Between all of that, maybe it would cover a substantial amount of the trip, wouldn’t it?” Leo didn’t reply. “We are always getting statements in the mail telling us that we’ve accumulated this huge number of points and this huge number of miles, and we always say we should do something about it,” Amy went on, “but basically it’s all theoretical. Can’t we go somewhere big, finally?”
Leo sat up in bed, dazed, his shoulders slumped, and she remembered the day on the street, after they had gone to look at the public school for Mason, when Leo had stood and done calculations on his BlackBerry in the rain. She could see that he was going into calculation mode again. “I didn’t mean that you should run the numbers now,” she said. “Obviously.”
Still, her husband rose from the bed in his boxers and with his thick bare chest, then plodded down the hall, which was vaguely lit by the pale green night-light that glowed from the guest bathroom. She followed him, saying, “Leo, don’t,” but he kept walking. The light made him look as if he were in the underground passage of a hospital, going on some ghastly, middle-of-the-night surgical mission or even some morgue mission. “Come back to bed,” she said.
But he was troubled, threatened, interested, and he sat down in the tiny study, that room that was even too small for a child to live in. Leo did not seem to fit into this room at all, and he adjusted himself in the creaky, too-low office chair and began pulling various papers from the little pigeonholes of the Sven desk. “Leo, stop,” she said. “Why are you doing this now? Are you just trying to make some kind of point? We can look at it tomorrow. You have to sleep.”
“Too late. I’m up now,” he said.
As he shuffled through papers, she saw the invoices and receipts from various business trips he had taken, and the interchangeable names of hotels in other cities: Omega Park Centre. Woodbridge Suites. The Inn on Dover Green. She watched as Leo continued to burrow through the piles.
“What are you trying to find?” she asked him.
“A mileage statement.”
He found one a few moments later. Usually the freebies that were offered in daily life were of a very low caliber, but always the act of receiving something for free was itself uncomfortably satisfying. For dinner they would sometimes order take-out from Szechuan Treasure, and if they spent twenty dollars there—which was easy to do—they would receive a free plastic container of cold sesame noodles, nestling vermiculate in a soy and peanut bath. O, free noodles! Amy would think, pathetically.
Still, even in this urban setting at a time during which everything was slightly beyond their means, something free was like a little miracle. It did not even really matter exactly what the free thing itself was: noodles, a certificate for a .05-ounce container of antioxidant face cream to be redeemed at a department store cosmetics counter after you filled out a “Facial Type” form handed to you by a distracted and facially perfect young woman. Amy would eat those free noodles and she would ask for her thimble of antioxidant just the same way that, if Leo finally said they had the mileage to get them all to St. Doe’s and then maybe enough crazily racked-up credit card points to grant them a big discount on a few nights in a beautiful room on that precious island, she would take it, she would grab it, she would do it.
“We’d probably have to leave at some terrible hour to get a decent fare,” Leo said. “And sit in the cargo hold.”
“I wouldn’t care,” Amy said.
“I’m just curious. What is it about Penny Ramsey that suddenly got you so interested?”
“She’s got a big life,” Amy said helplessly. “I like hearing about it, I guess.”
Leo nodded. His small desk was suffocated with papers and invoices and monthly statements. They were everywhere around him. He folded his arms and put his head down on top of it all. Amy recalled, distantly, that back in the beginning, when they had first met at Kenley Shuber, Leo had worried that being a commercial litigator would “stunt” him; that was the word he had used. It was over this question of self-doubt that they had first fallen in love. They had gone to drink beers together one evening at Taggart’s, a bar frequented by all the young associates at the firm. It was the first time they’d ever been alone, except for brief moments in the elevator. During the conversation at the bar he had told her how much he’d loved college, how he’d gotten excited reading Tolstoy and Kafka and Thomas Mann. They’d both been literature majors—she in English at Penn, he in comp lit at Rutgers—but he couldn’t imagine doing anything bookish professionally. His term papers tended to be awkward and formal, yet he knew he would be a big reader his whole life; he was the kind of person, he said, for whom books were built. He told her that when he was younger, he’d imagined that the work of being a lawyer—the attention to language and phrasing and specificity—would allow him to retain some of his intellectual sheen, which would deepen over time into a burnish.
Mostly, though, Leo had been relieved by the idea that you could make a steady living from being a lawyer. His family had always been on the verge of being poor. His father would come home from the magazine stand he ran, bearing a new copy of Ladies’ Home Journal for Leo’s mother and Mad magazine for Leo. He and Leo would do the Mad fold-in on the back page and read that month’s movie parody, and then both of Leo’s parents would go into the master bedroom and argue about money for an hour. “We are being killed!” he had once heard his father cry. “We are getting it from all sides!” And his mother had shouted, “Calm down, you’ll have an aneurysm!” Leo prayed to God, “Please don’t let my dad have an aneurysm,” though he did not even know what that was. Becoming a lawyer himself would protect Leo against such strife. He would take care of his own family; he would valiantly save them from aneurysms, from being killed, from getting it from all sides.
But the dream of hard work and a steady salary didn’t take into account the idea that, in college, Leo would fall in love with literature and would then put it aside, the way many of the literature majors did. “The truth,” he had said to Amy at that bar, “is that college is like this beautiful forest. And then if you leave the forest to go to law school or business school or something, everything changes.” They sat side by side on bar stools, and as he spoke Amy imagined their two bodies rolling together in wet leaves inside the gates of that beautiful forest. “By the time you get safely ensconced in some corporate job,” Leo went on, a little drunk, “you realize that the way you’re going to spend the rest of your life has nothing to do with Tolstoy and Kafka and Thomas Mann.”
Why, she had thought, lightly drunk herself, do people always say “Thomas Mann,” instead of just “Mann”? Tolstoy and Kafka were one-namers, but not him. “Right. I know,” she’d agreed urgently, and she wanted to leave the dark bar and head into a bookstore and buy Leo a beautifully bound edition of a Thomas Mann novel to keep on his night table and read a little bit of before he went to sleep at night. And then she just wanted him to kiss her; she would have done anything to get him to kiss her.
She pictured herself and Leo Buckner running back to that beautiful forest, but somehow it wouldn’t be there anymore. Then Leo would look down at himself and see that he was dressed like an upgraded version of his potbellied, embattled magazine-seller father, Murray Buckner; and she would look down at herself and see that she was wearing a little skirt and panty hose, which she would have to take off and wash after work each evening in her single-girl sink and then wring into a tiny piece of seaweed and throw over the shower handle.
That night at Taggart’s, Leo and Amy discussed whether he ought to leave the firm and become a public defender. She imagined him working in a government office with posters pinned to the walls and poor single mothers lined up on folding chairs in the hall with their paperwork in their hands, patiently waiting to see him. The floor would be covered with the worst burgundy carpeting in the world; his cheap desk chair would screech in protest whenever he leaned back.
But both of them knew that such a job would make the rest of life difficult and in many ways unmanageable. For slowly they were getting used to the not-bad salary that Kenley Shuber gave its young lawyers and the little extras that this life casually offered. Neither of them was very acquisitive, and neither was willing to sell out completely. (“I won’t be representing Big Tabacky,” Leo had said. Later, they would joke that he represented Little Baloney, and Little Honey-Smoked Turkey.)
By the time Leo paid for the beers, his fantasy of working as a public defender had already been roundly rejected, as had the more briefly sketched fantasy of becoming a specialist in constitutional law and teaching at a law school, like a highly intellectual friend of his had done. Amy and Leo had stood up, wobbly from drink, and headed back for another late night at Kenley Shuber, where the desk chairs cushioned the sacroiliac like a loving mother’s hand, and a town car rolled the young lawyers gently home after hours. Leo stayed on at the firm, and his desire to be a public defender never again overtook him with ferocity. Recalling his parents’ anguish about money, and his own need for comfort, he subtly shifted his desires, becoming more skilled and sure-handed at litigation. Amy was a pretty good lawyer too, competent at what she thought of as the safe and reliable art of trusts and estates. Then, like so many other women, she left the job she had never loved the way she had hoped she would.
Now, in the middle of the night, Amy thought she heard Leo sigh at his little desk in the study, where he sat unmoving with his head on his folded arms on top of all those papers, though the sound might have just been the heat, crackling and clapping through the vents.
“So do you think we can actually go?” she asked him, and she waited for the answer. At first, there was nothing.
“What?” Leo finally said, lifting his head. He had momentarily fallen back asleep under the desk lamp at three in the morning, with his wife standing right beside him, watching. “Where?” he asked. “Can we go where?”
“Over winter break. To St. Doe’s.”
“Oh,” said Leo. Then, finally, “Yes,” he said. “We can go.”