“Is Evan going to join us this year?” my father asked. He and my mother were on speakerphone in the car, driving back from an event in Boston. It was the week before Thanksgiving.
“I’m not sure.” Evan had spent the previous three Thanksgivings with us, so it was only natural they assumed he’d come this year, too. “He’s been so busy. He might not be able to take the time.”
“Julia,” my mother chimed in. “We really need to know. Jasmine is planning the menu and doing the shopping now.”
“Yeah, I know, but his schedule is so unpredictable.”
“We understand, sweetheart,” my father said. I could picture him shooting my mother a look. She didn’t understand the world of men and their work, and the precedence it took. Lately, strangely, Evan’s stock had gone up with my parents; he had a job at Spire, therefore he was a person of substance. “Evan has to do what he has to do,” my father said, respect in his voice. “Good for him. Give him our best.”
“Ask him again tonight, Julia,” my mother persisted. My father sighed in the background. “This makes things complicated.”
Didn’t I know it. The truth was I hadn’t asked yet. To not invite Evan seemed cruel, but having him there seemed even worse. I hoped, in the days leading up to the holiday, that the obvious solution would present itself. Evan would preempt my question and tell me he had to stay in New York and work. I just couldn’t get up the nerve to ask. We’d barely spoken since his return from Las Vegas. Our silences had grown denser, colder. I’d been surprised it had gone on so long—a day or two, maybe, for Evan to gather himself and save face, but a whole week? I had underestimated Evan. Or maybe I overestimated him. Why should I have been surprised that he had a breaking point, just like everyone else? A point at which he no longer wanted to bother—a point at which he stopped caring, as I already had, weeks earlier?
On Monday night, four days before Thanksgiving, Adam cooked dinner for me at his apartment. I had stopped being coy, stopped pretending at early mornings and other excuses. I wanted him all the time. It was the best sex of my life—in the shower, on the dining-room table, in every corner of his beautiful apartment. Sometimes I worried about the loss of control. I was in too deep; I was getting sloppy. Making all the clichéd mistakes that people make when they have affairs. But then I fell for the biggest cliché of all: I thought I was different. It was going to be different with us. What Adam and I had ran deeper than the physical, I was sure of it. I felt like I was finally beginning to understand myself, that I was finally seeing in myself what Adam had seen all along. Potential. Something bigger and better. A chance to live a different kind of life.
I got home around midnight on Monday, figuring I had a few hours to spare. Evan didn’t usually leave work until two or three in the morning. But as I approached, I noticed the light shining from beneath our door and the dull garble of the television coming from inside. I smoothed my hair, tugged my clothes straight, wiped away the last traces of lipstick. I’d been putting more effort into my appearance lately, but Evan didn’t notice.
He was sitting on the futon, staring at the TV. Among the beer cans dotted across the coffee table, there was a plain manila envelope. Evan reached for the remote to mute the TV. Then he turned to look at me, like an afterthought.
“Where were you?”
“Out with coworkers.” I hung my coat on the back of the door. I’d had the excuse ready to go for weeks. It was the first time I’d had to use it. “We got a late dinner afterward.”
The room smelled like beer. Evan shifted forward in his seat, tenting his fingertips over his mouth for a moment. Then he reached for the envelope on the coffee table and held it between his two hands.
“What is that?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.
He cleared his throat. “Michael and I finally talked about Vegas.”
He turned the envelope over, examining the other side. There was no postage, no writing or marking on it. I wondered what he was looking for.
“No one’s getting bonuses this year,” he said. “We’d all known that for a while. Some of the guys were pissed. They were counting on it. But it wouldn’t look right, not in this economy. Bad optics, you know.”
Optics. This was not the Evan I knew.
“Michael reiterated that today. No bonuses. But, he said, he wanted me to have this. As a token of his appreciation. He said he was proud of the work that I’d done on this WestCorp deal.”
He handed me the envelope, nodding at me to open it. Inside were several stacks of crisp new hundred-dollar bills wrapped in paper bands.
“How much is this?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
“Jesus. But Evan, what are you—you can’t keep this, can you?”
“I don’t know.”
He stood up, taking the envelope back. On his way to the bedroom, he dropped it on top of the bookshelf, like he was tossing aside a pile of junk mail. A gesture of indifference that both frightened and disgusted me. Evan couldn’t feign innocence any longer, not like before Las Vegas. He knew exactly what Michael had done—what he himself had done. They were breaking the law. And this time, he hadn’t asked my advice. He was acting like this was the most normal thing in the world. The Evan I knew was never coming back. So then what was his deal? It was so obvious he didn’t care about me anymore. Why was he still here?
Later, in bed, wide awake. “When are you leaving for Boston?” he asked.
“Oh. Uh, Wednesday afternoon.”
He was silent. I wanted to sit up, turn on the light, ask him what the hell he was thinking. But we were past that point. Whatever words we might once have said had nowhere left to land.
“Are you…” I started to say. “For Thanksgiving, are you—”
“I’m staying here. Work.”
“Right. That makes sense.”
He rolled over, away from me. Our cheap mattress bounced and sagged from the shift in weight. “Goodnight,” he said. A few minutes later, he was asleep.
* * *
Elizabeth was waiting for me at the train station. It was colder in Boston than in New York, and she wore a huge parka with a fur-lined hood. She was the small one in our family—a delicate build, a foxy face—and the parka made her look even tinier.
“This is weird,” I said, climbing into the front seat of her old silver Saab. Hot air blasted from the vents. I kicked aside the empty Dunkin’ Donuts cups rolling around in the footwell.
“What?”
“I should be the one driving. I’m your big sister.”
She laughed. “You’re a bad driver. I wouldn’t let you.”
“You got home today?”
“Yeah. The roads were terrible. It snowed last night. Can you believe that? In November.”
Elizabeth went to a small college in Maine. She had been at the top of her class in high school and would have had her pick, but she decided to forgo the most competitive schools—no Ivy League for her. She was majoring in studio art. She wrote poetry on the side, and she developed her own photographs. My parents had expressed concern about the path she seemed to be headed down, but Elizabeth kept telling them this was what she wanted to do. Eventually it sank in, and for the most part, they left her alone.
“Plus I barely slept,” she said. “I was in the studio until four in the morning. So how’s New York? No Evan this year?”
I grimaced inwardly at his name. “He couldn’t take the time.”
“Are things any better between you guys?”
“Actually, there’s this guy I sort of reconnected with. From college.”
“What?” She whipped around to look at me. “A guy? Like, romantically?”
I saw the disapproval written across Elizabeth’s face, and I changed tack. The urge to confess came so strongly, but the lie came easily, too. “Oh…um, no. Not like that. We’ve just been spending time together. Friends. I don’t know what it is.”
Elizabeth nodded, turning back to the road. She had always liked Evan, and I felt bad dumping this on her. But she was also my sister, and she knew me better than anyone did. She may not have liked what I was saying, what I was implying, but I think she understood what lay behind it.
After a long silence, she piped up again. “Hey, can you let Pepper out? Mom asked me to walk him.”
“So why don’t you walk him?”
“I’m just dropping you off. This girl from school is having a thing. Mom and Dad are at that party at the Fletchers’. I didn’t know I was going to have to pick you up.”
“Well, thanks for squeezing me in.”
“I’m just saying. I have other plans.”
“Yeah, well, so do I.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Well, I had the option to have plans. One of my boarding-school friends had started an e-mail chain suggesting that anyone in Boston for the holidays meet up at a local bar on Wednesday night. It seemed better than sitting alone in our empty house, waiting for everyone else to return. I’d been doing that too much this past summer in New York. “I’m meeting up with some Andover people at Finnegan’s.”
“Finnegan’s! Yikes. Have fun with that.”
Elizabeth dropped me off, and I found the spare key under the planter. Pepper, our black Lab, was in his crate in the mudroom off the kitchen. His tail thumped as I fiddled with the latch, then he burst out and collided with me. He nuzzled his wet snout into my palms.
“I love you, too, Pepper,” I said. “Let’s go outside, okay?”
Pepper had been my and Elizabeth’s dog. When we were younger, we alternated taking him on short, lazy walks. Suddenly I was thirteen years old again: the cold air, the sparkle of the stars overhead, the warm glow of windows in the dark, walking Pepper between homework and bed. Running through dates of battles or lines of Shakespeare or base pairs of DNA. Worrying about grades. Worrying about getting into a good college. I had never bothered to worry about what came after that. No one told me to worry. Surely another rung on the ladder awaited, and wouldn’t that next part be just like every other part? Pepper sniffed around the base of a tree. He didn’t tug at his leash the way he used to. He was an old dog, I realized, almost ten. He only had a few good years left.
Tears pricked the corners of my eyes when we got back inside. I’d been feeling strange all week. “You want a treat, Peps?” I said, brightening my voice. He wagged his tail. The clock on the microwave in the kitchen said it was just after 8:30 p.m. The group had planned to meet at Finnegan’s by eight.
My parents had taken my dad’s car to the party at the Fletchers’, which left me with my mother’s Volvo. I wondered, for a moment, whether I wanted to do this. Drink bad beer and eat greasy food with people I didn’t really care about. Maybe for once I’d be better off at home, by myself. Put on a pot of tea, curl up with a book, run a bath. Embracing instead of fleeing the solitude. I hesitated, about to switch off the ignition. Then my phone buzzed with a text from one of the lacrosse girls: Great! See you in a few! I put the car into drive and headed for the bar.
* * *
I thought things at work might have improved after the gala, but the only person altered by the news was Eleanor. She floated in late every morning, smugger than ever, leaving for lunch and often not returning. But Laurie was the same as always. A heavy cloud trailed her as she passed back and forth in front of my desk.
Laurie was on the phone around ten days before Thanksgiving. It was a quiet afternoon, and if I stopped the clatter of my typing, I could just make out what she was saying to the person on the other end.
“Well, I can’t get in the middle of this. It’s not my place.”
Silence. I squinted at my computer screen in case someone walked by.
“I’m trying.” She was nearly whispering. “I’m just trying to keep this place running. What else can I do?”
Laurie hung up, sighed loudly, and walked out of her office. She flung her coat over her shoulders. “Julia, I’m leaving for the day,” she said. “If anything comes up, call my cell.” When she disappeared into the lobby, I reached for my wallet. I still had Sara Yamashita’s business card from the night of Nick’s party. I ran my finger along the edge of the thick card stock, thinking.
“Are you kidding?” Abby said to me. This was a few days later, the weekend before Thanksgiving. We were at a Mexican place on the Upper East Side. She swiped a tortilla chip through the guacamole. “You should call her. Absolutely.”
“It doesn’t seem too pushy?”
“Jules. She wouldn’t have told you to call unless she actually wanted you to call. Come on! Quit that miserable job of yours. It’s what I keep telling Jake.”
“Things are still bad?”
Abby rolled her eyes. When Lehman went under, Henry Fletcher called in a favor with a friend at Barclays, which was absorbing certain Lehman assets. He ensured that his son would have a place in the new organization. But it had all been a waste. According to Abby, Jake’s grumpy dislike of the work had morphed into outright hatred.
“Poor guy,” she said. “He’s miserable. I mean, he never liked banking to begin with. The Barclays people are assholes, apparently. He wishes he’d just been laid off, like everyone else. He’s going to take the GMAT next year.”
“Wow. Has he told his parents?”
“Hah. You know what they’re like. He can’t talk to them about this stuff.”
She went quiet, staring down at the table. A week earlier, Abby’s father had finally lost his job. She delivered the news with a shrug, a what-can-you-do resignation, but there was a catch in her voice. The value of their house had plummeted by half. Her mom had started looking for work. They were pretending that everything was going to be fine. But Abby, as the youngest, had spent many years learning to decipher the language of her parents. She saw right through them.
“I’m sorry, Abby. That’s really shitty.”
“Oy vey,” she said with a sigh. Then she tried for brightness again. “Hey, could we get two more margaritas? And some more chips?” she said to our waiter as he walked past. She picked up her fork and scooped a bite of guacamole. “This stuff is seriously like crack. So wait a second: How do you know this girl again? This Sara girl?”
“She went to Yale. She was a few years ahead of us.”
“Funny. Her name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Well, actually—I met her through Adam. Recently.”
“Adam?” she raised one eyebrow. “Where was this?”
“Some party. He used to know her from the magazine. We sort of hit it off.”
The waiter arrived with a fresh basket of chips and two new drinks. After he took our order, Abby lifted her margarita toward me.
“I think this is great, Jules. Do it. Call her. To new beginnings.” We clinked our glasses, and I took a sip of my drink—the salty and sweet tang of artificial lime. The restaurant was loud and chaotic, with colorful Christmas lights strung across the mirrored walls and pocked wooden tables. Saturday night in New York City. Moments like this I felt lucky, almost happy.
After dinner, Abby headed toward the subway, and I pretended to walk back to my apartment. But I pulled out my phone and called Adam instead. He was at a dinner party that night hosted by a classmate of his from high school, a downtown party girl who lived in an enormous SoHo loft. “She’s a brat,” he’d said. “Trust fund when she turned eighteen. Never had to lift a finger.” Adam’s critical streak was something I was still learning to navigate. He was suspicious of people who had it too easy, but at the same time he seemed suspicious of people who hustled too hard for their success. That’s what I thought at the time, at least. Although later I realized I was wrong about the latter: it was jealousy, not suspicion.
I did sometimes wonder why he acted so friendly toward the people whom he claimed to dislike. I’d asked him why he was going to the dinner party if he hated this girl, and he shrugged. “She knows a lot of people. Her parties are good for networking.” He grazed his hand along the back of my head. “I’d have more fun with you, though.”
When he picked up the phone, there was a swell of sound in the room behind him, conjuring a picture in my mind: the beautiful people, the expensive clothing, the perfect decor. I felt a sharp pang of loneliness. “Hey, you just finish dinner with Abby?”
“Yeah. You’re still there?”
“They just cleared the main course. Maybe another hour or so?”
I took a cab to his apartment. The happiness of dinner with Abby had vanished, and I was in a maudlin mood. I wandered around Adam’s apartment with an enormous glass of red wine, tempted to let it slosh over the rim onto his pristine carpet. But Adam hadn’t done anything wrong; there was nothing I was allowed to be mad about. At some point I lay down on the couch and later woke to the sound of the front door opening. The glowing readout on the cable box said it was 2:00 a.m. I’d been in his apartment for more than four hours.
“Where were you?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
Adam sank onto the couch, slung his arm around me. “Sorry. It went later than I thought. I called. Your phone must be on vibrate.”
I rested my head on his chest. He smelled like bourbon and a sugary dessert. The faint scent of tobacco, which I had gradually grown to like. I ran my hand over his shirt, down to his belt buckle, and turned my head to kiss his neck. My addiction was kicking in despite my bad mood, despite the beginnings of a red-wine headache. I pulled him toward me. We had sex on the couch, my dress hiked up and his pants tugged down, fast and hard and mechanical. But something seemed different in Adam. He hadn’t needed this the way I had. He was going through the motions, sating my hunger without needing to sate his.
Afterward I told him what Abby and I had talked about over dinner.
“I think I’m going to call Sara. You know, Sara Yamashita, from the party. I’m going to ask her to lunch.”
“You are?”
“She told me to keep in touch.”
“Sara’s a lot of talk. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
“But it’s worth a shot, right? It can’t hurt.”
Adam reached for my hand. “Trust me, babe. I know Sara better than you do. It might not be such a great idea. All I’m saying is don’t rush into it. You want to be deliberate about your next move, right?”
“I guess.” I glanced again at the cable box—it was almost 3:00 a.m. I started gathering my things, the scarf and boots and coat I’d scattered around the apartment like an animal marking its territory. “I should get going.” Adam sat back on the couch, taking a beat too long before he stood up to walk me to the door. I wondered how much longer we were going to have to do this—saying good-bye in the middle of the night, sneaking back to our own lives. I was already getting sick of it. In the cab ride home, I checked my phone. There were no missed calls or texts from Adam, despite what he’d said—nothing, from anyone, all night. I was annoyed all over again.
When had I lost the power to control my own moods? I felt so porous that fall, so absorbent of whatever the people around me were doing. There was nothing to keep me tied to the earth. I scudded in whatever direction the wind decided to blow. My mistake was that I kept interpreting it as a good thing, confusing that lightness for spontaneity.
* * *
“Julia! Hey!”
Someone waved at me from the sidewalk outside the entrance to the bar. It was Camilla, a girl from the lacrosse team. We had lived in the same dorm for my three years of boarding school. She had arrived at school with glasses and curly hair and prissy sweater sets. But after a few months around the older girls, she’d learned the ways of experience—hair straighteners, tight jeans, push-up bras, contact lenses. She started sneaking boys back to her room in the middle of the night. She was legendary by senior year. Camilla stubbed out her cigarette as I approached and gave me a hug.
“Oh, my God, I am so glad you came. It’s fucking freezing. How can you stand this place?”
“Yeah, sorry. Not exactly sunshine and palm trees. When’d you get home?”
“I flew in on Sunday. I decided to make a week of it.” Camilla had gone to USC and was working as an assistant to some big-shot movie agent in Los Angeles. She had a tan, and her hair smelled like coconut oil. I was vividly aware of how different her life was from mine. “Let’s go inside,” she said, tugging my hand.
I followed Camilla toward the corner of the bar where the other lacrosse girls were standing. Most of them worked in consulting or in finance or as paralegals. A few of the finance girls joked blackly about how much time they had left—the bosses were just waiting for the holidays to pass before they brought down the ax. There were one or two outliers who, like Camilla and me, had found low-paying assistant jobs in more “creative” industries. “That sounds…interesting,” one girl said after I told her about my job at the Fletcher Foundation. She was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and we quickly ran out of things to talk about. I was about to use my empty glass as an excuse to leave when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Julia?” he said. The dark wavy hair; the aquiline nose. His voice.
“Rob,” I said. “Wow. Hi.”
“It’s been a while, huh?”
“Wow. What, like, four years or something?” But, really, I knew: it had been almost four years to the day since we’d broken up at Thanksgiving, freshman year of college. We hadn’t seen each other since.
“You look great.”
“So do you.” He did. Energized, happy. Rob at his best. “I was just about to get another drink. Do you want to…?”
After we got our drinks, he pointed at an empty booth. “You want to catch up for a minute?” he said.
In the booth, our knees touched for a brief moment. “Wow. It’s so strange. You look the same,” I said.
He laughed. “In a good way, I hope.”
“Where are you living?”
“Here, in Cambridge. I’m applying to med school. Working in one of my professor’s labs for the year.”
“Med school! Right. I’d forgotten about that.”
“You thought I’d changed my mind?” He smiled.
Later, a waitress came by and brought us another round. Rob could still make me laugh. He was still that boy he’d been in high school, the one who made the younger girls blush when he talked to them in the cafeteria. Whose confidence and affability extended to everyone. He would make a great doctor. For the first time in four years, I found myself thinking about him as a real person. Not as a footnote to my history, a static piece of the past. As a living possibility, right in front of me.
“Are you still with that guy?” he asked. “What was his name again?”
“Evan,” I said. I could feel the effects of my two and a half drinks. A looseness in my limbs, a narrowing of my mind. “Evan Peck. Yeah. I mean, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Things aren’t great. I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to last.”
“Really.” His leg brushed against mine. “That’s too bad.”
“What about you? Girlfriend?”
“There was this girl, but we broke up at graduation. It wasn’t going anywhere. Honestly, of all the girls in college, I’m not sure any of them really came close to you.”
He moved nearer, resting his hand on my knee. I was almost overwhelmed by nostalgia, by the rush of memories: fall afternoons on the sidelines of the soccer field, cheering for Rob after he scored a goal. Study hall, kissing in the dusty back corner of the library. The way he would sometimes catch my eye in the middle of class, backlit by the morning sun, and wink as our teacher droned on about mitochondria. Life opening up before us. That moment bursting with possibility—a feeling that now seemed light-years away. I never thought things could get so complicated. I didn’t think I was capable of feeling so uncertain, so confused. Rob leaned closer, and so did I.
“Julia!” Camilla was yelling from the bar. “Get your ass over here!”
The spell broke. We took a group picture. The band, back together again. Camilla ordered a round of tequila shots, but I demurred. I had to drive home. On my way out, I waved good-bye to Rob. He mouthed, I’ll call you.
The next morning, I went downstairs and found my mother in the kitchen, hands on her hips, staring at a casserole dish. The turkey was already in the oven. The pies were lined up neatly on the counter. Jasmine, our housekeeper, had made everything days in advance.
“Well, there you are. Happy Thanksgiving, sweetheart.” She kissed me on the cheek, then resumed staring at the casserole. She poked it and frowned. “I can’t for the life of me understand what Jasmine did to these potatoes.”
“The same thing she does every year?”
“She’s trying something new. That’s what she said. It smells”—she leaned forward, sniffing—“I don’t know. It smells off.”
“I think that’s just garlic.”
“Garlic.” She sighed. “Why does everything need to have garlic in it?”
She came and sat next to me at the kitchen table. She was wearing what she called her “work clothes”—faded jeans, an old cardigan—what a normal person might wear to the grocery store but what my mother only wore within the confines of the house. She wouldn’t be caught dead looking like this in front of her friends. She was sipping her coffee and watching me while I peeled a banana.
“Mom. What?”
“Your hair is getting so long.”
“I haven’t found a place in New York yet.”
“Why don’t you just get it done while you’re here? I can call. I’m supposed to go in tomorrow.”
“How was the party last night?”
“Oh, it was nice. The Fletchers are doing some landscaping, so their yard is a complete mess. Your father is actually on the phone with Henry right now.”
“Is something going on?”
“Everything’s fine.” She set her coffee down and rubbed at an invisible scuff on the table. “Did I tell you? I’ve been asked to join the board of that new women’s clinic. You remember, the one Mrs. Baldwin is involved in?”
“Is that why we had to invite the Baldwins to Thanksgiving this year?”
She pursed her lips. “We invited them because they’re our friends. You’ve known them a long time. Don’t you remember how much you loved it when Diana used to babysit for you? Anyway, it’s a wonderful organization.”
Charities and nonprofits sought out my mother for many reasons. My father’s firm was a generous and reliable donor; she was a lawyer herself and could perform certain legal functions; she was smart and asked the right questions. Her days had long ago become full with assorted obligations, as full as they would have been with a normal job. When I was younger, around eleven years old, she’d considered going back to work. She mused about it out loud, asking me and Elizabeth whether it would be okay by us. Until, abruptly, those musings stopped. Then she’d been brittle with us in the weeks that followed, losing her patience and snapping at us more than usual. It didn’t seem fair; it wasn’t our fault. I knew the reason—I’d overheard the argument—but something drove me to ask the question. Maybe I wanted her to finally lose it, to admit her anger. I felt an anticipation of shame, and a sick curiosity, as I said it: “Mom, why didn’t you go back to work?”
Her cheeks reddened. But that was all I would get. She had too much control.
“Because, sweetheart. I want to spend time with you and your sister. That’s my job. That’s the most important thing to me in the whole world.” She smiled, her face returning to a normal hue.
But I knew the truth. A few weeks before that, the night of the incident, I’d been setting the table for dinner when my dad got home. My mother poured a glass of wine and slid it across the kitchen counter toward him.
“I have good news,” she said.
“Oh?” My dad took a sip of wine. “This is excellent. Is this the Bordeaux?”
“James. I got the job.”
He took another sip, slowly, then set his glass down. “You did.”
I’d rarely seen her smile like that. Goofy, giddy. “They met all my terms.”
“Julia,” my dad said, “why don’t you go see where your sister is?”
I held up the forks and knives, bunched in my hand. “But I’m setting the table.”
“It can wait. Go ahead.”
As I walked out, I tried to catch my mother’s eye. But she was staring at my father, and her smile had disappeared. I ran up the stairs, then along the second-floor hallway to the top of the back staircase, which led down to the kitchen. I climbed down the back staircase as quietly as possible, stopping just before the kitchen came into view. I held my breath and listened.
“But you knew this wouldn’t work, Nina. I told you that weeks ago.”
“No. No. You said you had some concerns, and we agreed that we’d discuss them when the time came. Okay, so now’s the time. James, I had to work my ass off to get this job. This is an incredible opportunity. It’s the best class-action group in the country.”
“This is a terrible idea. The girls need you at home. And we don’t need the money.”
“I don’t care about the money. It’s important work. A third of my cases are going to be pro bono. Do you know how hard I had to push to get them to agree to that? Do you know how unheard of that is?”
“It’s a massive conflict of interest. That firm has multiple cases pending against my clients.”
“So I recuse myself from those cases. We put up a Chinese wall. Plenty of people have done this before. You think we’re the first pair of lawyers to ever run into this?”
“You cannot do this. You will not. You’d be working for a bunch of glorified ambulance chasers. You’d be embarrassing me in front of everyone we know. You’d be embarrassing yourself.”
I flinched at the sound of glass smashing against the wall.
“Nina, stop it.”
“It’s my turn, James.” She was shouting, her voice high and hoarse.
“You’re not thinking straight. You don’t want this.”
“Fuck you. Don’t tell me what I want.”
Shortly after that, my father came upstairs and told us that we were going to McDonald’s for dinner. Elizabeth was gleeful—we never ate fast food—but the whole time I felt a sad lump forming in my throat. Those french fries were bribery. My mother’s car was missing from the driveway when we left, and it was still missing when we got back from dinner. Lying in bed that night, I tried to make myself cry, but I couldn’t.
In the morning, my mother was back, smiling tightly as she waved us off to the school bus. There was a ghost of a red wine stain on the kitchen wall, scrubbed but not quite erased. The next week, she announced that we were renovating the kitchen, a project she claimed she’d been thinking about for a long time. The contractors sealed off the doorways with thick plastic. They let her do the honors. She picked up the heavy crowbar and swung it against the old walls and cabinets, smashing them into dust.
* * *
The Baldwins were friends of my parents from the neighborhood: the husband a surgeon at Mass Gen, the wife on many of the same committees as my mother. I was seated next to Mrs. Baldwin, whose earlobes were soft and stretched from her heavy pearl earrings. She took tiny, precise bites of her food and dabbed her lips with her napkin between every bite. “So, Julia. How is life in New York? What an exciting time this must be.”
“It’s good. A lot of friends from college moved down, too, so it’s been fun.” I took a big swallow of my wine. “But tell me about Diana. What’s she doing in Paris?”
Mrs. Baldwin beamed. She loved nothing more than talking about her perfect children. “Oh, Diana is just wonderful. She adores Paris. I’m not sure she’ll ever come back!” She laughed in high, tinkling tones. “She’s fluent in French—did you know that? She’s working at the American Library. She has a little apartment in the Seventh. One of her best friends is the niece of the ambassador to France, so she’s become friends with everyone at the embassy through her. Isn’t that marvelous?”
“It sounds great,” I said, reaching for the wine.
“You studied in Paris, didn’t you, Julia?”
“Yes. Spring of junior year.”
“I remember that. Your mother told me how much you loved it.”
Well, of course she did. My mother had studied in Paris during her Wellesley days, too, and she laid out the reasons why I ought to go; she was the one who pushed me from hesitation to action. At first it felt like I was just doing the sensible thing, following in her footsteps, making her happy. But I had loved it—that was true. Not instantly. It was a love that came gradually, and it felt sweeter for it.
I went in armed with a plan. My first week in the homestay, before classes began for the semester, I’d get up early and make an itinerary for the day: museums, scenic routes, famous patisseries. My hostess encountered me on one of those mornings as I was scrutinizing a guidebook over breakfast. She looked baffled when I explained: I had a long list of sights in Paris that I wanted to see. I’d use this time, before school started, to knock out as many as possible. She stubbed out her clove cigarette and sat next to me at the kitchen table.
“Julia,” she said in a thick accent, preferring her bad English to my even worse French. “This is not what you do. You come to Paris to live. Alors.” She closed the guidebook firmly. “You do not use this. You walk the city and you see it. You understand, yes?”
I took her advice, and I walked through the city for the first time with no plan and no guidebook. It was a cold, miserable, wet January day. I’d worn the wrong shoes, and my feet were soaked and freezing within five minutes. I went into a café for lunch and ordered an omelet, and the waitress smirked at my pronunciation. The food sat strangely in my stomach, and jet lag trailed me through the afternoon. When I was waiting at the crosswalk on the Rue de Rivoli, a bus roared past and soaked me with puddle spray, and that’s when I lost it. I was homesick and lonely and I missed Evan so much, and I was crying, and all I wanted was to go curl up on my narrow bed in the homestay. But going back felt like admitting defeat. So I kept walking. I crossed the Pont Royal and wound up at the Musée d’Orsay. My feet were still soaked, and my clothes were, too. My eyes felt gritty and puffy, and I was so tired I thought I might pass out. This was distinctly not how I’d imagined it—my first week in Paris, my first visit to the famous Orsay.
I sat on a bench up on the fifth floor and let the crowds slide past, obscuring then revealing the artwork on the walls. It felt good to stay in one place, to sit and get warm. The light grew dimmer from the afternoon sunset—January in northern France. I’d been sitting on the same bench for at least two hours. Eventually the crowds thinned, and I had my first uninterrupted view of the art in front of me. There was a Monet that I recognized. The Parliament building in London, silhouetted against a reddening sky, the sun reflected in the water. A painting I’d studied before, in class. That day in Paris, I stared at it for so long that it changed into something else. No longer a specific building in a specific place but a mixture of color and movement that the eye could interpret any way it wanted. It was like when you say a word over and over and it becomes strange and new, a collection of sounds you’d never thought to question before. When you learn that there is something to be gained by examining what’s right in front of you.
I lingered until a security guard told me to leave. I bought a postcard of that painting in the gift shop, and when I got back to my homestay, I tacked it up on the wall next to the photograph of my mother, the one I’d found a few weeks before. My mother as a younger woman, before her life had solidified onto its current course. Every morning during that semester in Paris, those images were the first things I saw when I opened my eyes. I began to think of them as a pair, as a symmetry. The past, the present. They reminded me of the gift I’d been given: time. Time to do nothing, or time to do whatever I wanted. I didn’t need to have it all figured out. The uncomfortable feeling that had plagued me through sophomore year, that had made me feel strange and restless—it had taken a while, but it had finally evaporated. I was okay, right where I was.
Mrs. Baldwin was regarding me with a quizzical expression.
“I’m sorry?” I said, emerging from the undertow of memory.
“I said, you’re living with your boyfriend in New York, isn’t that right?”
“Right. Right, yes. We went to college together. He works in finance.”
Those data points rendered him acceptable. Mrs. Baldwin didn’t need to know any more. She started telling me about her son’s wedding over the summer—it was just the loveliest wedding, they were married at the Cloisters, the bride’s parents were famous-ish, and the mayor came. I refilled my wineglass again, then again. The memories of Paris had made me melancholy, had reignited a longing for some vanished chapter of my life. It was a feeling too big to hold on to.
“You okay?” Elizabeth said between dinner and dessert, after we had gotten up from the table to load the plates into the dishwasher.
“I had too much wine.”
She snorted. “Sitting next to Mrs. Baldwin? Next time I’d go for something stronger. Heroin, maybe.”
“How was your end of the table?”
“He kept touching my hand. Like, to make a point in conversation. But he was leaving it there a little too long.”
“Dr. Baldwin? Ugh. Creepy.”
My parents waved good-bye to the Baldwins as their car backed out of the driveway. When the front door closed, I noticed a slump in both of them. The mask dropped, the smile loosened. They didn’t particularly enjoy the company of the Baldwins any more than Elizabeth or I did. But they did see the utility of their company. The Baldwins were the right kind of people with the right kind of connections.
“Just leave it,” my mother said when Elizabeth and I started clearing the dessert dishes from the table. “Let Jasmine get it in the morning. I’m going to bed.”
She trudged up the stairs. My father retreated to his study off of the kitchen; always more work to be done. Elizabeth shrugged and went up to her room, too. Pepper had been in his crate all through dinner, and no one made a move to let him out. So I unlatched the door and fed him a scrap of piecrust from Mrs. Baldwin’s plate, then took him for a long walk through the dark and sleepy neighborhood.