The family visit didn’t go well.
Thanksgiving dinner started the disaster rolling, first because we’d ordered a precooked turkey from Chelsea Market—“Oh my, you don’t cook your own turkey?”—then the awkward dinner seating around our kitchen countertop—“When are you buying a bigger apartment?”—with the finale of me not being able to watch the Steelers game—“That’s fine, if Michael wants to watch football, we’ll just make our way back to the hotel.”
Richard had invited us down the hall for after-dinner drinks, to his palatial three-story apartment facing the Manhattan skyline, where we were served by Sarah—“Of course we cooked our own turkey. Didn’t you?”
The conversation had quickly turned to connections between the old New York and Boston family lines: “Fascinating, isn’t it? Richard, you must be almost a third cousin to our Lauren,” quickly followed by, “Mike, do you know any of your own family history?”
I did, and it involved steel working and nightclubs, so I said I didn’t.
Mr. Seymour finished off the evening by interrogating Lauren about her new job prospects, which were nonexistent. Richard offered suggestions about introductions he could make for her. They’d politely asked me how my business was going—I worked as a junior partner in a venture capital fund specializing in social media—followed by proclamations that the Internet was just too complicated to even talk about, and then: “Now, Richard, how is your family investment trust being managed?”
To be fair, Lauren did defend me, and everything remained civilized.
I spent most of the rest of the time chauffeuring them around to meet their friends at places like the Metropolitan Club, the Core Club, and of course the Harvard Club. The Seymours had the distinction of having had at least one family member of each generation attend Harvard since its foundation, and at the namesake club they were treated like visiting royalty.
Richard even graciously invited us to the Yale Club for a drink on Friday night. I nearly throttled him. Mercifully, it was just a two-day visit, and we finally had the weekend to ourselves.
It was early Saturday morning, and I was sitting at our granite kitchen countertop, feeding Luke, him in his high chair and me balancing on a bar stool while I watched the morning news on CNN. I was cutting apples into little chunks and leaving them in front of him on a plate. He was merrily picking each piece up, shooting a toothy, gummy grin at me, and then either eating the fruit or squealing and throwing it on the floor for Gorbachev, the Borodins’ rescue dog mongrel.
It was a game that didn’t get old. “Gorby” seemed to spend as much time in our apartment as he did at home with Irena, sneaking over to scratch on our door anytime their front door opened. Watching Luke throw food down to him, it wasn’t hard to understand why. I wanted a dog, but Lauren was against it. Too much hair, she said—even having Gorby over was testing her patience, as evidenced each time she asked me to help remove dog hair from a suit jacket or pair of pants.
Banging his fists on the tray, Luke squeaked, “Da!” his universal word for anything involving me, and then stretched out his small hand—more apple, please.
I shook my head, laughing, and began cutting up some more fruit.
Luke wasn’t even two years old, but he was the size of a three-year-old, something he must’ve gotten from his dad, I thought with a smile. Wisps of golden blond hair floated about his chubby perma-glow cheeks. His face was always stuck in a mischievous grin, showing a mouthful of white button teeth, as if he was about to do something he knew he wasn’t supposed to—which was almost always the case.
Lauren appeared from our bedroom, her eyes still half-closed. “I don’t feel good,” she mumbled, staggering into our small bathroom, the only other closed room in our less-than-thousand-square-foot apartment. I heard her coughing and then the sound of the shower turning on.
“Coffee’s on,” I muttered, thinking, She didn’t drink that much last night, while I watched some enraged Chinese students in the city of Taiyuan burning American flags. I’d never heard of Taiyuan, so while I dropped more fruit chunks in front of Luke with one hand, I queried my tablet with the other.
Wikipedia: Taiyuan is the capital and largest city of North China’s Shanxi province. At the 2010 census, it had a total population of 4,201,591.
Wow. That was bigger than Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city, and Taiyuan was China’s twentieth-largest. With a few more keystrokes I discovered that China had more than 160 cities with populations over a million, where the United States had exactly nine.
I looked up from my tablet at the news. The image on the TV had switched to an aerial view of a strange-looking aircraft carrier. An anchor on CNN described the scene, “Here we see China’s first, and so far only, aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, ringed by a pack of angry-looking Lanzhou-class destroyers as they face off with the USS George Washington just outside the Luzon Strait in the South China Sea.”
“Sorry about my parents, honey,” whispered Lauren as she snuck up behind me, mopping her hair with a towel and dressed in a white terry cloth bathrobe. “Remember, it was your idea.”
Leaning down to cuddle Luke, she kissed him and he squeaked his pleasure at the attention, then she wrapped her arms around me and kissed my neck.
I nuzzled her back, enjoying the affection after a tense couple of days. “I know,” I replied.
A US naval officer had appeared on CNN. “Not five years ago Japan was telling us to get our boys out of Okinawa, but now they’re begging for help again. Japs have a fleet of their own aircraft carriers coming down here, why on Earth—”
“I love you, baby.” Lauren had slipped one of her hands under my T-shirt and was stroking my chest.
“I love you too.”
“Have you thought more about going to Hawaii for Christmas?”
“—and Bangladesh will be hit hard if China diverts the Brahmaputra. They need friends now more than ever, but I never imagined the Seventh Fleet parking itself in Chittagong—”
I pulled away from her. “You know I’m not comfortable having your family pay.”
“So then let me pay.”
“With money that comes from your father.”
“Only because I’m not working because I quit my job to have Luke.” It was a sore point.
She turned to grab a cup and filled it with coffee. Black. No sugar this morning. Leaning against the stove, she cupped her hands around the hot coffee, hunching inwards away from me.
“—starting cyclic ops around the clock, constant launch and recovery missions from the three American aircraft carriers now stationed in—”
“It’s not just the money. I’m not comfortable spending Christmas there with your mother and father, and we did Thanksgiving with them.”
She ignored me. “I’d just finished articling at Latham and passing the bar”—she was speaking more to herself than to me—“and now everyone is downsizing. I threw the opportunity away.”
“You didn’t throw it away, honey.” I looked at Luke. “We’re all suffering. This new downturn is hard on everyone.”
In the silence between us, the CNN anchor started on a new topic. “Reports today of US government Web sites being hacked and defaced. With Chinese and American naval forces squaring off, tensions are heightening. We go now to our correspondent at Fort Meade Cyber Command headquarters—”
“What about going to Pittsburgh?” I proposed. “See my family?”
“—the Chinese are claiming the defacement of US government Web sites is the work of private citizen hacktivists, and most of the activity seems to be originating from Russian sources—”
“Seriously? You won’t take a free trip to Hawaii and you want me to go to Pittsburgh?” A muscle tightened up in her neck. “Your brothers are both convicted criminals. I’m not sure I want to expose Luke to that kind of environment.”
“Come on, they were teenagers when that happened. We talked about this.”
She said nothing.
“Didn’t one of your cousins get arrested last summer?” I said defensively.
“Arrested.” She shook her head. “Not convicted. There is a difference.”
I stared into her eyes. “Not all of us are so lucky as to have an uncle who’s in Congress.”
Luke was watching us.
“So,” I asked, my voice rising, “what was it your father wanted you to think about?” I already knew it was some new offer to entice her back to Boston.
“What do you mean?”
“Really?”
She sighed and looked down into her coffee. “A partner-track position at Ropes and Gray.”
“I didn’t know you’d applied.”
“I didn’t—”
“I’m not moving to Boston, Lauren. I thought the whole idea of us coming here was for you to start your own life.”
“It was.”
“I thought we were trying for a brother or sister for Luke. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“More what you wanted.”
I stared at her in disbelief, my vision of our future together starting to unravel with just those four words. But there had been more than a few uncomfortable words lately. My stomach knotted.
“I’m going to be thirty this year.” She slapped her coffee cup down on the counter. “Opportunities like this don’t come around often. It could be my last chance to have a career.”
Silence while we glared at each other.
“I’m going to the interview.”
“That’s the discussion?” My heart began to race. “Why? What’s going on?”
“I just told you why.”
We studied each other in mutually accusatory silence. Luke started to fuss in his chair.
Lauren sighed, her shoulders sagging. “I don’t know, okay? I feel lost. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
I relaxed, and my pulse slowed.
Lauren looked at me, and then away. “And I’m going for brunch with Richard to talk about some ideas he had for me.”
My cheeks flushed hot. “I think he beats Sarah.”
Lauren gritted her teeth. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Did you see her arms at the barbecue? She was covering up. I saw bruises.”
Shaking her head, she snorted, “You’re being jealous. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What should I be jealous of?”
Luke began to cry.
“I’m going to get dressed,” she said dismissively, shaking her head. “Don’t ask stupid questions. You know what I mean.”
Ignoring me, she leaned down and kissed Luke, whispering that she was sorry, she didn’t mean to yell, and that she loved him. Once she’d calmed Luke down, she gave me an evil look and stalked off into the bedroom, closing the door heavily.
Sighing, I picked Luke up, eased his head onto my shoulder, and patted his back. “Why did she marry me, huh, Luke?”
After two or three sniffling sighs, his little body relaxed into me. “Come on. Let’s take you over to see Ellarose and Auntie Susie.”