JOHN STARED DOWN AT THE CLASSIFIED ADS, STACKED across the broadsheet pages in indecipherable tiles of dense text and abbreviations. Staggered throughout the page were ads outlined in blue ballpoint pen. He didn’t circle them like some people did—not that he had looked through a classifieds page in decades. John smirked at the irony: he’d cheat on his wife, but God forbid he stray outside the lines on the classifieds page.
The legal jobs were all paralegal or secretary postings, if they were at a firm of the caliber of Taylor Wood & West, or otherwise associate listings at personal injury defense firms. Nothing approaching the status or income of his old position. If he couldn’t have as prestigious a position or make as much money, there was no point in remaining a lawyer, so he expanded outside of the legal listings—construction jobs, restaurant jobs, anything. He dreamed that he would find a new life, a new career buried in the wall of text, but nothing appeared, no stroke of inspiration. Just words and half words in tiny print, entire futures waiting for the right eyes to find them. But not John’s. He was selecting ads at random to draw his boxes around, trying to capture the potentialin them. It was something better than sitting on the couch waiting for another day to end.
He looked up. Jane stood in the doorway.
“I thought you were at work,” he said.
“I was. But we need to talk and not when the kids can overhear us.”
“Okay.”
“You need to find work.”
John waved to the sheets of newspapers open across his desk.
“Come on, John…”
“I’m looking.”
“You need to actually look. For something realistic.”
John glanced down at an entry he didn’t remember squaring off. “High-end restaurant seeks waitstaff. Min exp 5 yrs.” He didn’t remember reading it, much less running his pen around the edges of the ad no less than four times. He was not a competitive candidate for the position.
“I’m trying.”
“Seriously? Outlining entries does nothing.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Have you picked up the phone?”
“Nobody’s taking my calls.”
“I get it, maybe you can’t face your friends. But tell me the truth, have you called a single one of those ads?”
He searched the ads for one he had called. “Dental office seeks manager. Bookkeeping exp pref. Min exp 3 years.” He had not called that one. Nor any of them.
“We’re going to run out of money, John. It’s been two months since the trial.”
“Me taking just any job isn’t going to fix that.”
“Call Harris. Maybe he needs help with his practice.”
John snatched a page from his desk and began crumpling it.
“You think,” he said as he continued to wad it in his hands, “that he wants me around? He wants to send this message to his clients? ‘I can get you off, but then you’ll end up here with me, getting my coffee, sweeping my floor, organizing my files.’”
“You don’t have options.”
“When the firm buys me out—”
“You know they’re not going to pay what you want.”
“I’ll get something. It will carry us for a while. Or I can use it to start my own firm.”
“Who will your clients be? How many companies are going to hire an accused—”
She stopped speaking.
“Accused what?”
They stood apart, the questions they had never discussed pressing them into opposite sides of the room. Or maybe that force had been there even before Jessica’s murder. John remembered how it used to be that he and Jane could not be in a room before they drifted together, attraction like magnetism locking them to each other. But the polarity had reversed, and the eerie, unseen force pushed them in opposite directions.
“The kids can’t keep coming home to see you like this. When’s the last time you showered?”
It had been two days. “Are you asking me to leave?”
“They need you, John. They need you to try—”
“Because if you’re asking me to leave, I will.”
“Stop. I didn’t come here to fight with you.”
“What do you need from me, Jane?”
She stood rigidly, a tree coated with ice. “I need…They need their father back.”
“And us? I’m not just their father. I’m your husband. I—” He stopped himself. His cheeks and ears burned as if he had been drinking. He hated the feeling. He knew what he had been about to say but didn’t understand why the words would not issue from his mouth. He looked up, and Jane stood across the room. Her mouth was a thin line of frustration. Her eyes were—
#
—closed. His may as well have been, too. The room was darker than any they had shared in the city. No streetlights glowed through the windows. Only the dimmest moonlight dusted the room with silver. The ceiling fan spun silently, the slight movement of air cooling the sweat on their bodies. Their legs lay entwined.
“Can I tell you something crazy?” Jessica asked.
“Yeah. Sure.” He raised himself up to an elbow so he could look down at her.
“I sympathize with her. With Jane.”
“What do you mean?” John found it difficult to gauge her mood in the darkness.
“All those things you told me about her. How hard she works. How much she does for your kids. It’s gotta be exhausting. I wonder how she does it. Could I?”
“You could.”
He felt Jessica take a breath laden with impatience. The tension passed from her legs into his like bass from a speaker.
“Do you think she wants more?” “Than what?”
“Than being a mother. A wife. A lawyer.”
“Huh?” John couldn’t decipher Jessica’s intent in asking the questions. Her face gave nothing away. In the dark, he could only tell that her eyes weren’t open.
“Do you think she wanted to be more? To be something else?” Jessica elaborated.
“We met in law school. She wanted to be a lawyer. She became one. She wanted to get married. So we got married. Then she wanted kids. We had them.”
“That’s all she wanted?”
“I remember asking her, the first night we went home together, laying in the dark like this, ‘What would you do if you could do anything?’ She said, ‘Be a lawyer.’ I said, ‘What kind?’ She said, ‘A working lawyer.’
“When she got hired, I asked her, ‘What now? Where do you want to be in five years?’ ‘Employed,’ she said. I laughed and told her she sounded like my immigrant parents. She told me that they were smart.”
He saw Jessica’s mouth twitch, and she settled into the mattress more deeply.
“Her dreams are increments,” John continued. “I can’t even call them dreams. They’re more a to-do list. One time, I asked her, ‘What’s your dream vacation?’ She said she didn’t have one, just places she wanted to visit. She gave me a list ‘in no particular order.’ Everything is like that. She’s on a ladder. She only tells me about the next rung. Maybe there’s more. Maybe she knows what’s at the top. Maybe she dreams of it. But she never tells me.”
He stopped speaking. Jessica reached out to lay her hand atop his arm.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“But it’s not. She’s an ocean I can’t see the bottom of. When I set out, I thought I understood her. Now I’m adrift, and I don’t understand the currents or the winds or anything. Every day, all I can think is that I shouldn’t be out there. But I can’t find my way back.”
He stopped speaking to see if Jessica understood, but it was still dark, and her eyes were still closed. She took her hand off his arm, but John didn’t notice. He continued, “I can only understand her in these little things she says she wants. Every day, I know her less.”
Jessica shifted, and their legs uncoupled.
“I’m sorry,” John said. “This weekend was supposed to be for us.”
“I brought her up.”
“Still. I didn’t need to…I mean, this whole thing was meant to be a vacation from our problems, right?”
“Yeah.”
He reached out to slide the back of his finger up the length of her arm. The downy hair he never noticed in the light passed underneath. He stopped when he reached the place just below her shoulder where he knew two freckles lay side by side, almost touching, separated by the slightest margin of fair skin. From a distance, they looked joined. Discovering they were separate marks required study of her arm akin to astronomy. He knew where they were, even in the dark, because he mapped her as they lay together and told each other that it meant nothing.
“What was your dream?” John asked.
The pillow shifted next to his elbow as she shook her head. He knew if he moved his finger to the corner of her closed eye, it would be wet.
“I wanted to be a singer.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t talk about it.”
“I didn’t even know you sang.”
“I used to. In school. Choir in high school. But there was this band.”
“When?”
“College. I was dating a guy. He played guitar. I’d sing. Covers at first. But then we started writing stuff together. Really it was me. I wrote those songs. We found a drummer, and a guy to play bass. Actually booked a couple of gigs. Then he dumped me. The band broke up. That was it.”
“You didn’t try again?”
“No. I loved singing. There were things that I was trying to tell people. But doing it for real, I learned that I was only okay. None of the songs I wrote said anything a hundred other songs weren’t saying. And our sound wasn’t anything different from a hundred bands. I sing fine, but I wasn’t going to win Star Search or anything. I didn’t want to starve trying to do something I was mediocre at. Even if I loved it.”
John leaned over and kissed her forehead. He understood mediocrity. He knew from a young age that he was destined to it. No matter how hard he worked, how well he performed, he would not be a leading man, or a Major League baseball player, or president, or a Supreme Court justice, or even a rainmaker partner. Part of it was that his primary talent was relentlessness, not an exceptional legal mind. Yet he’d spent his life watching other mediocrities rise to exceptional heights because of circumstances, connections, and comraderies he could never duplicate because his skin was yellow, his eyes were sloped, and he was a foreigner in the land where he was born. At the end of his life, however grand his ambitions, however he fulfilled the promise of whatever abilities he had, the sum of it would be middling. That was what the American Dream promised for him.
“I don’t look at it like I gave up,” she said. “I just found a new dream.”
He waited for Jessica to share, but she didn’t.
“You trying to go to sleep?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why do you have your eyes closed?”
“I’m trying to picture this as something real. Just you and me. The quiet. The dark. Nothing else.”
The concept was too much for John. His wife and kids were a hundred miles away, but he felt them lingering outside the window. The night had brought them closer. The only time he had been able to push them from his mind had been in the warmth inside her, her moans in his ear, the feel of her stomach, slick with sweat pressing against him when she arched her back so he would fill her the right way, so she could take everything he wanted to give, and it was real for John then. Lying next to her, even closing his eyes, the moment was gone, left inside Jessica, an ache in the empty core of himself.
She slid her leg over, snaking her calf underneath his.
“I love the way you’re with me. You make me really happy. I don’t know how to describe it, because I know it’s not real. But it’s like I’m lost inside this book or story, for now at least. When we’re together, I feel like maybe, maybe I could write another song, something true. About hope. Even though this is hopeless. Isn’t it?”
His answer was to take her hand. She turned her shoulders toward him and pressed her face into his bare chest and kissed it once, then again.
“What was your dream?” she whispered against his chest.
“When I was a kid?”
“After that. When you were an adult.”
“I only wanted to make Jane happy,” he said.
Jessica tilted her head back; her eyes were—
#
—open wounds. The icy stance shattered as Jane threw her hands up.
“What, John?”
“I—” He tried to compose the next words in his head before speaking them. He had spent years, he realized, formulating this confession as he sat alone in his office, or walked through the park, or held the strap on the subway, or tried to find the bottom of each glass of whiskey. He had written and burned entire manuscripts trying to explain what he was about to say.
John wanted to start in the beginning, when they were leaving their first-year criminal law class. He didn’t remember why they began chatting in the hallway; they’d never spoken before. Maybe it was to compare a note or to comment about some other student, but he found his eyes locked with hers. She didn’t look away, and he fought to hold her gaze. The idle chitchat streaming from their mouths did not match the intensity in her eyes. Hers were earth colored, speckled with green, gold, amber, a forest floor in miniature. He said something that she found amusing, she laughed, and it was wind blowing through the trees as all the color in her eyes danced with light. He knew he would bend every fiber in his body to see that delight for as long as he could bring it to her.
In the early days, when they made love, she’d wrap her hand behind his head when he was close and lock eyes with his, begging him to fall into her. And even as she held him above her, he would plummet into them—through them—and in the moment of blindness when he came crashing through that canopy, he felt completely inside her. When his sight returned, floating over her again, he saw the pieces of himself strewn across the landscape of her eyes.
After her labors, in the hospital, exhaustion and joy clouded her eyes like smoke, the aftermath of the burning intensity necessary to guide her babies into the world. And in the blind eyes of Brennan and later Hunter, he saw hers.
“I loved the way you used to look at me. In the beginning. All I wanted was for you to keep looking at me like that,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I need you to see me the same way. Again. Or tell me it’s possible.”
“You fucked another woman!”
“I know.”
“I can barely look at you now.”
“Even before all of this, you stopped looking.”
“You’re blaming this on me?”
“No. On us. Just the affair. But on us. Yes.”
“Fuck you.”
“Before I met you, Jane, I didn’t know who I was, or what kind of place I could occupy in the world. And when you looked at me—the way you looked at me—I found something there: a man I could be. I thought that if I work hard, if I do what’s right, I can be that man. And I got there, didn’t I? For a little while? And then you stopped looking at me. Not just the way you used to look at me. You stopped seeing me altogether.”
“For fuck’s sake, we had babies. I had a job. What did you want? Because I didn’t make sexy eyes at you, we’re here? That’s what you’re saying?”
He knew she was baiting him. They’d been married long enough for him to know the pattern. He was supposed to shout, throw his papers or smash his fists into his desk or slam a door so that she could throw a hand up and stalk off to the bedroom to sit in silence without ever hearing what it was he was trying to tell her or without having to see what he wanted her to witness. Thinking of the pattern reinforced the urge to act on it, rip a drawer from the desk to hurl it randomly or punch a hole in the plaster wall. The rage was a solace, a warm bed he could close his eyes in so he wouldn’t have to think about all the things that lay beneath it.
But he also knew that when Jane sat on the bed and stared at the closed door, asking herself the same question he asked himself—Why are we doing this to each other?—her answers were as hollow as his. Because they promised. Because of the children. Because it was better to stay together with the countless little injuries they visited on each other rather than see the other’s eyes on the way out the door. But none of those answers solved anything, provided comfort, or washed away the disappointment etched into their days. So instead of throwing the glass of water he found in his hand, John took a shaky sip and set it down.
“You don’t know how much I admire you, how grateful I am that you raised our children, how proud I am of your career. But you left me.”
“You fucked someone else.”
“You may as well have. You left me. Except you didn’t leave. And you didn’t let me go, either. And I did the same to you. You want me to pull it together for the kids, but why? What was so great about our old life?”
“We owe it to them.”
“We owe them our best. That was not it. If you want me to be who I was, or better, I can’t be that man alone, without you.”
Her eyes dropped, and she shook her head. When she looked back, he could see in her eyes again those pieces of himself he had left inside her years ago, still scattered there, desolate and abandoned. When he left them there, he imagined they were the foundations of a happy marriage, but now he saw that they were the wreckage of two people who would never be happy.