WALTER SAT IN JOHN’S OFFICE AND CROSSED ONE LEG OVER the other. He was complaining about some associate who insisted on writing fifteen-page memos when five would do. John’s finger still marked his location in the merger document he was reviewing when Walter had appeared in his doorway (the seventeenth sentence in the ninth subparagraph). John told him to go away; he still had at least three hours of work to do, but Walter ignored him and kept venting. The phone rang, and John lifted the receiver, cutting Walter off mid-sentence.
“John?” It was Jess. John hoped his face remained steady—his finger flinched off the document.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Can you come meet me? At Cathy’s?” Her voice was a shattered window waiting to fall.
“Yes. Be there soon.”
Before John finished placing the handset back in the cradle, Walter asked, “Who was it?”
“Huh?”
“I said, who was it? On the phone?”
John stood. His desk was covered with documents that needed his review before noon the next day. He decided better to return early the next morning than try to organize everything to take with him. Walter asked again who was on the phone.
“Nobody. Jane. I have to go.”
“Everything alright?”
“Yes. Fine. Thank you, Walter, but I need to go.”
“You want me to arrange for a car?”
“No. I’ll grab a voucher on my way down.”
He left Walter in his office. The trip to Cathy’s was a dimly lit backdrop for the scenes he played out in his mind speculating what she would say when he arrived and how he might respond. Later, he wouldn’t recall visiting the dispatcher’s desk to arrange for the car and voucher or the elevator ride to the garage. Brooklyn, then Queens, blurred past as if he were drunk, a smear across the East River as the driver sped north on the FDR Drive. As he pressed the buzzer for Cathy’s apartment, he realized he didn’t remember walking from the corner where the driver left him. He didn’t wait for Jess to buzz—the heavy wooden inner door was still broken. He pushed it aside and climbed the stairs to Cathy’s apartment.
Jess waited for him at the apartment door as he crested the stairs, beer bottle in hand. Her eyes were puffy, the whites clouded pink, but her makeup was pristine. She still wore a skirt suit, but her feet were bare. She stepped aside and closed the door after he entered.
“I was worried you wouldn’t actually come,” Jess said, leaning against the door.
“I was worried. For you.” John turned in front of the couch but made no move to sit.
“I’m late.”
“For what?”
Jess glanced away, and he comprehended like a plane suddenly hitting a rough pocket of air and losing hundreds of feet of altitude in a few seconds. He reached out for the arm of the couch to steady himself, but it was too low, so when his fingers finally contacted the fabric he bent awkwardly at the waist, legs locked straight, as if he were bowing. Later, he would think that, if he had collapsed onto the couch, let gravity pull him deeper into the cushions, inertia hold him down, the weight of the air smother the impulses firing through his limbs, maybe everything that came after would have been different. But in the moment, John didn’t want to show any more weakness—he was already ashamed of lurching to the arm of the couch—so he pushed himself upright and was immediately weightless with anger.
“How?” he asked. “I thought you were on the pill?”
“I was. Maybe…maybe it didn’t work? It’s not unheard of. Maybe I missed a day? A week? I don’t know. Things were so fucked up, John. Between work and everything else going on between us. I was drinking a lot. I just…lost track. I figured I could get back on schedule.”
“Are you only late? Or did you take a test?”
“I’m too scared.”
“So you don’t even know?” John’s voice was steam erupting from a pressure-relief valve.
“I needed you with me.” She looked down at her feet, shoulders slumped forward like she was trying to curl herself around her belly while standing. “I couldn’t face it alone.”
“You just need to piss! Jesus Christ! Stop being a little girl! You need me to hold your hand in the potty?”
“Fuck you, John.” Jess’s fists were clenched. Good.
“Why didn’t you call your husband? Is it even mine? Are there more contenders out there?” He had spent so long throwing his truest ugliest thoughts into himself like bodies into a well, there was no more room for them. It was all poisoned. She wanted him? Let her have this part of him, too.
Jess covered the five steps between them quickly. She raised the hand with the beer bottle in it. John smiled. Finally, he thought.
She hesitated when she was within arm’s length, and he tore the bottle from her hand and threw it behind him, where it smashed against a wall. Focused on the hand with the bottle, he didn’t see the other as it landed across his cheek, whipping his face to one side. He heard the impact more than he felt it, but then the pain hit him like a dope rush. He grabbed her upper arms. He wanted to shake her, watch her head whip back and forth before throwing her to the couch or the floor, climb on top of her, and—what? Fuck her? Strangle her? Whatever it took to finally throw off the restraints that held all the pain inside of them.
As John hesitated, Jess thrashed until she tore her right arm free. She swung it at him again. John ducked and her hand glanced off the top of his head. He shoved her away, and she stumbled backward.
“I’m going to fucking ruin you,” Jess said. “First, I’m going to report you to the firm. You think your partners are going to overlook you knocking up an associate? You’re barely a partner. You’re a mascot, an affirmative action project. Someone they can point to so they can pat themselves on the back and put off getting a Black partner for a few more years. They’ll push you out. And after I’ve done that, I’m going to tell your wife. You think your marriage is terrible now? Wait until she hears how much more you liked to fuck me than her. I’m going to tell her in person so she can see your baby inside me. You think she’ll let you visit your children after she leaves you? What about when they find out that you’ve been fucking around on Mommy?”
His gut lurched as fear knotted his viscera. “You don’t mean it.”
“I mean every fucking word. I’ll take everything from you. You will be nothing.”
The life she promised him was real for him in the same way that dream thoughts immediately manifested themselves in the logic of sleep. Sitting alone in some shitty office (Harris’s office.) waiting for the phone to ring (But who calls a solo tax lawyer to advise an international merger?), eating dinner alone at his desk because home is a one-bedroom apartment (No, a studio.) in Queens, when the phone rings and for a moment he’s excited because maybe it’s a client, but no, it’s his divorce lawyer telling him that the judge has ruled that he only gets supervised visits with Brennan and Hunter and not joint custody because he can’t provide a bedroom for them. But that life would come only following the shame of carrying his belongings out of his office as the secretaries gawked; the same routine in his building, doorman watching him carry two suitcases of clothes—packed while the kids visit Jane’s parents—to the curb to hail a cab to stay in some shit hotel.
“I’ll kill you.” His voice was as quiet as when his lips were next to her ear, gasping for air, telling her that he only wanted to be inside her, that she was beautiful and perfect.
“What did you say? Fucking try it!”
She rushed at him again, both hands flailing at his head. He brought his hands up over his face like a boxer as she slapped and punched, most of the blows glancing off his hunched shoulders or landing on the sides of his arms.
“Do it, you fucking coward! I want you to!”
Her wild roundhouses exposed her face, throat, solar plexus, every vulnerable part of her. He could have her by the neck, squeeze, lever her down to the couch, pin her, knees on her chest, constrict until she lost consciousness, hold her until she lay still, until the blood stopped pumping to her brain, until no air passed to her lungs. Or he could punch her in the jaw, the belly, beat her until she lay too dazed to resist while he walked to the sink to find the kitchen knife that always lay in it (Jess told him once that Cathy used it to slice an orange each day) and return to her, turn her away from him so that when he drew it across her throat her blood would spray mostly away from him.
He was out of his body. It wouldn’t even be him doing it. He would watch his body move—a boulder pushed down a slope. He shoved it, but the boulder was immovable. He dropped his hands—maybe if she got a good slap in, it would impel him to do what needed to be done. He took a right slap and a left from Jess. His arms twitched up for her throat, hands open. Jess faded backward, but not fast enough. His fingers came close enough to her throat for him to sense her pulse pounding through her carotids before they stopped and recoiled. His hands closed on nothing but air, and he brought his face forward, burying it in his closed fists, and screamed.
He shoved past her, turned at the door, and said, “No one will ever love you.”
He could have been talking to himself.
John walked west until he reached Central Park. The verdant smell of trees and grass and soil invited him in, but it would be a mistake to walk across the park this far north at night. He was the coward she accused him of being. He wasn’t brave enough to face the test with Jess or the ruin she promised. He was enough of a monster to betray his wife and children, but not enough of one to hit Jess—much less murder her. He lacked the resolve to complete their mutual destruction.
He turned south, down Fifth Avenue, the dark park to his right. He knew that he should get in front of the situation—go home and tell Jane about the affair, then go into the office in the morning and resign. Or maybe there was a path at the firm, if he could get a few key allies—Walt, for one—that would enable him to weather whatever Jess intended. He wasn’t the first partner to sleep with an associate. Maybe they’d treat him as an equal for once and shrug at Jess, quietly counsel her to some other job elsewhere, and give him a stern lecture for form’s sake and pat his back later at cocktails.
He reached Ninety-Seventh Street, where east-to-west traffic entered the park, sweating in the cool, muggy air. A few cabs passed, heading south on Fifth or west on Ninety-Seventh, but he didn’t hail any. Jess had been emotional, scared. Maybe she wouldn’t follow through on her threats if he was brave enough to return. What if he went home and confessed to Jane, and Jess turned out not to be pregnant? He turned back east, but second-guessed himself before he crossed the avenue. What if they argued again? What if she was pregnant? What if she wouldn’t get an abortion? What if she demanded he leave his family? Had enough time passed for Jess to calm down—or had she grown more anxious since he left (he glanced at his watch) thirty minutes ago?
He reached Cathy’s block fifteen minutes later, still damp with sweat and praying for a breeze. The street was still devoid of pedestrians. He hesitated before climbing the stoop to the building—so much had gone wrong, how could he possibly make it right? He considered ringing the buzzer to Cathy’s apartment, but Jess didn’t know he was going to return. Better to knock gently and say, “I’m sorry,” through the door so that she could hear that he didn’t want to fight. He shouldered the broken vestibule door open and mounted the stairs slowly, resolving with each step to remain calm, to do whatever needed to be done to placate Jess.
He stopped to listen at the door to Cathy’s apartment but didn’t hear anything from within. John knocked gently. The door moved in the frame slightly on the first knock and swung ajar on the second knock. A sliver of light escaped between the door and the jamb. The latch hadn’t caught, which was odd because he had slammed it behind him when he left. Maybe Jess left and forgot to lock it behind her.
“Jess?” John barely heard his voice in the silent hall.
He pressed on the door with his knuckles. At first, John wondered if Jess had rampaged through her friend’s apartment before leaving. The couch, typically perpendicular to the door, canted nearly parallel to it, exposing its back. The side-table lamp lay overturned, casting a parabolic light across the floor. The phone that used to sit next to it was missing. The chairs from the dinette were askew—one lay on its side. John stepped over the threshold.
He saw, past the top of the couch as he approached it, Jess’s hand on the floor, palm down. John froze.
“Jess?”
No movement. John crept forward, forcing himself to take deep breaths, revealing more of Jess’s body on the floor. She lay front down, head turned to her right as if searching for something underneath the couch, but her eyes were closed. Her right arm curled underneath her. Fresh abrasions marked her face, and now that he was closer, he saw that her cheek was swollen slightly. Bruises darkened her neck. Blood pooled underneath her from an unseen wound, dark against the worn carpet.
John stared at her back, looking for movement, but none came. Even if she weren’t breathing, her heart might still be beating, carrying everlower levels of oxygen to her brain, pumping her blood onto the floor. He should try to staunch the wound. Even if her heart wasn’t beating, he could perform CPR, blow air from his lungs into hers, compress her chest to move her blood through her body, mimic the functions of life long enough until help arrived. But what about the bleeding?
And how could he explain that he was there, that he hadn’t hurt her, that he was merely trying to help? What if he left marks on her body or got blood on his shoes, and they blamed him for what had happened to her? It was his fault. He’d left her. As it was, nobody knew he was there or that he had even been there. If he left, nobody would ever discover he’d been in the room.
Check her pulse, he told himself. To what end, though? He would be leaving more evidence if he touched her. He’d be contaminating the crime scene. But if she’d survived to this point, if she were still breathing, she might live. If she was already dead, there was nothing more to be done. But each second he waffled, waiting for her chest to heave for air, increased the risk that Cathy would walk through the door or pass him on the way out and decreased the chances—if any—that she could be saved if he tried to help her.
Did he even want to save her?
If he didn’t check her pulse, he wouldn’t have to know whether he’d simply left a body or left her to die. Leaving her now, could he live with it?
He took a step to move around the couch, then froze. Someone clomped up the stairs. John fixed his eyes on the door as the footsteps reached the landing and approached. He could shout for help but couldn’t find a sound louder than a whimper—like when he used to wake as a child with night terrors, sitting upright in his bed, mouth agape, silently screaming. He waited for the door to the apartment to open, but the unseen walker stomped past. The sound of ascending thuds carried from the hall as the person climbed to the third floor, then moved overhead as they curled to the next flight, and on and on again, until the stairwell was finally quiet.
She must be dead, John told himself. You don’t know, immediately following. Better to not know than be blamed for her murder (or assault, she might be alive). He reached for the doorknob before stopping himself from touching it. There might be fingerprints on it (the killer’s or his own). He used part of his jacket to grasp the knob as lightly as possible between his fingertips to turn it. He left the door open and prayed someone might pass who would help her (no, she was dead, he had to believe that, or he couldn’t leave).
John hurried down the stairs to the street, using his jacket again on the inner and outer doors. He walked back across Central Park, head down, hoping no one would mark him, saying to himself, You couldn’t save her. The words were never a comfort, only an accusation.