RUTHIE RODE OUT the storm alone, huddled on the couch, clutching a blanket. Barely sleeping, alternating panic with rage that battered as hard as rain. She had never hated anyone before. She understood why it was called a “towering” rage. It made you bigger, stronger, as gigantic as a building, willing to crush whatever lay between you and your enemy.
Adeline had taken something from her that wasn’t a house, wasn’t a man. It was the past. I was never in love with you, Mike had said.
The first time he’d said it was only months after they met. Holding hands on Franklin Street, leaning into each other, and him turning to her and kissing her, saying, Watch out, I think I’m in love with you.
Watch out? A warning she’d ignored.
Did men have to do that, reframe the past into a lie, so they wouldn’t feel guilty moving on? They had the strength to break things, but not the strength to carry them.
They’d met in the mid-nineties. She was at a party at a loft downtown. She was wearing a baby-doll dress, hugely popular at the time, with tights and boots. She’d bought the dress at the Saturday flea market on lower Broadway. Her hair was pinned on top of her head. She was having a miserable time. Everyone at the party seemed to know one another, and she’d long before lost the friend she’d come with.
There was an artist who dressed Barbie dolls as all the Bond girls, then took color-saturated photographs of them against tiny fabricated settings. There were painters. Matthew Barney was expected at any moment. Everyone was gathered around a sculptor who was supposed to become the next big thing, but Ruthie no longer remembered his name, because he’d never become the next big thing. Matthew Barney had become the next big thing.
Ruthie had clutched her beer and swerved through the crowd. She was working for Peter and going to grad school at night, and she was always exhausted. She wasn’t over Joe. She half hoped he was there with Sami so that she could ignore him. She wanted to go home and polish off some cookies in her pajamas. She left, clomping in her heavy boots down the stairs, worn and sloping to the middle. Five flights down, hoping for a cab, her black coat flapping open.
At the bottom of the stairs, a man was pushing through the battered metal door. His coat was wet, and so was his hair, subduing the dark blond. When he looked up at her, she felt the impact of it in her stomach.
She smiled as she went by. She opened the door and the wind blew the wet snow in her face. She felt the tug of attraction to the stranger, but she also felt the tug of Pepperidge Farm.
She heard footsteps behind her as he hit the stairs. He went up two stairs and stopped. For a moment there was just silence. Him on the stairs, her at the open door. A taxi went by slowly, still within hailing distance if she ran out and shouted for it.
She turned.
Their eyes, as they say, met. That first look, that spark, and there is nothing better in life. Just for that moment, though. It can go all kinds of ways from there.
Mike tilted his head. “Goodbye, road not taken,” he said, so softly it was like the drift of snow against her neck.
Ruthie, in her day, had been a sassy, accomplished flirt. She lifted one eyebrow, a skill she was passionately proud of. “So,” she said, “take me.”
She can still, if she wanted to, remember the impact of the slow, delighted widening of his smile, and how he gave her a second, more serious look, and how she saw that he appreciated his good fortune. Someone so handsome, she’d thought, wouldn’t be hers to keep, but she’d give it a whirl.
Mike had told her later that he’d lusted for her as she opened the door and watched how she didn’t flinch from the cold. How the snow had melted in her hair, how the snap in her eyes had sent a jolt of joy through him. She’d fallen for him that night, the next morning, waited for his call, waited for their casual dates, agonized over how long it would take before they spent Sundays together, and then, at last, when they were, in fact, a couple, when he had met her father (agonizing), when she had met his parents (difficult), she had a roaring fight with Peter, took a curatorial position in Philadelphia, and moved.
Mike took over her illegal loft sublet. They settled into long-distance coupledom. Marriage was never mentioned. A boat that solid shouldn’t be rocked. Ruthie got a better curatorial position in Massachusetts and moved again. More weekends, more vacations together, but Mike was a New York artist and he would never move, he said. They spent a lot of time plotting his career, talking about trends, galleries and museum shows and submitting work. They didn’t have the tedium of competition. She had no regrets about giving up her own work. She’d been surprised at how little it mattered. Bringing art to people turned out to be more important to her than making it.
Then she got pregnant with Jem. Diaphragm failure, what were the odds? Ruthie had been sure that it would be the end of the relationship. Oh, she knew Mike would say the right things, but she could not see him taking her to doctor appointments, pouring her glasses of milk. He was a kind man, but it was clear to her that he liked the people he loved to fend for themselves. She knew her need of him would signal the slow seepage of doubt into what they had. She couldn’t imagine him with a baby on his shoulder. Though, to be fair, she couldn’t imagine herself with one, either. Mom. Dad. She would say the words in her head, and she might as well have been saying orangutan or Republican.
It had taken him a week to absorb the news and suggest they get married. Ruthie looked at Mike, at his ardent face, and especially at his worry that she would turn him down, and felt a page in her life turn. It filled her with joy. Mike asked her in concern if she had to throw up.
Within a month, she had left her job and moved back to New York, picking up a part-time job at the Whitney. They bought a bouquet at the Korean deli and went down to City Hall. Their friends threw them a party. She wore the baby-doll dress, so perfect for her widening waist.
Their families didn’t come. Lou and Berte called with apologies, they were about to be grandparents any minute. Mike’s parents said they would fly down, but it had snowed heavily the day before and the roads to Logan, they said, were too treacherous to drive. Ruthie wanted to erase the twist that happened to Mike’s mouth whenever his parents came up in conversation. Mike had gone to Yale, but he’d worked his way through and come out with substantial debt. For a wedding present, his parents gave them a family heirloom, a silver bowl with a dent in it. After his parents died in a car crash—it turned out Richard Dutton was indeed a bad driver in snow, especially after a pitcher of martinis—Ruthie sold it on eBay.
Married. With child. Stroller in the hallway, crib at the foot of the bed. Balancing blue-wrapped packages of laundry while mincing through slush. Mike out at openings while she stayed home and nursed. Mike looking trapped, Mike looking haunted. Until the September morning he was making himself coffee when an airplane flew so low overhead that he ducked.
Orient had saved them. It had given them a common enemy, mold and rot. It had given them something to talk about and something to fight for and the sweet exhaustion of finishing a project. They had become the Duttons: such a great couple, him so friendly, her so fun, and that beautiful Jem. Look, they are planting hydrangeas, they are strolling to town, they are laughing on the porch.
Now he was truly gone. There were letters from an attorney, there were details she would not answer but would have to, and soon. They would do the civilized things. They would not criticize each other to their daughter. They would co-parent.
She would do those things; she had already done them for three years. Now there was the other woman. There was blood in the water. Another woman could take her place in her bed, but not in her kitchen. Not with her child.
Adeline was used to getting her way. Adeline had a ten-year plan. She would live in the home Ruthie had created out of mildew and mice and mud, and she would invite their friends to dinner parties, and her money would make things right, make things perfect. She would erase the life Ruthie had strived to create by doing it better than Ruthie ever could.
Unless.