“What?” she said.
He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that his whole face wrinkled. Then he blinked them open. “Sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”
“Whether we might talk about having a kid.”
“Not now.”
“OK. But do you mean ‘now’ as in ‘tonight,’ or ‘now’ as in ‘this decade’?”
He sighed dramatically. “What exactly is it about my profoundly non relationship with my existing children that makes you think I’m dad material? Did I not notice something?”
“But this is me. This isn’t her.”
“I’m aware of the distinction. Are you aware of the pressure I’m under?”
“It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“No, but can you conceive … can you imagine me, for one second, finishing the book with a baby in the house?”
“Obviously, it wouldn’t happen for at least nine months. Maybe a medium-term deadline would help you.”
“I’m already three years past one of those.”
“A real deadline. One you believed in. I’m saying this is something I want with you. I want you to finish the book and us to maybe have a kid. The two things don’t have to be opposed. Maybe they could be connected, in a good way.”
“Leila.” He barked the name sternly but also ironically: to be funny.
“What.”
“I love you more than anything in this world. Please tell me you know that.”
“I know that,” she said in a slight voice.
“So hear me, please. Please hear this: every further minute this particular conversation lasts is going to be a day of lost work in the coming week. One minute, one day; I can feel it. When you suffer, I suffer—you know that. So can we please just put an end to it right here?”
She nodded, and then cried, and then had sex with him, and then cried some more. A few months later, when the Post offered her a five-year stint as its Washington correspondent, she accepted. She hadn’t entirely stopped loving Charles, but there was only so long that she could stand to be around him with an ache in her chest. She felt loyal to a baby in her that hadn’t even been conceived yet. To a possibility.
It came along to Washington with her, the possibility, and it flew home with her to Denver once a month, for staff meetings and conjugal obligations. She didn’t want to think about being divorced in her early forties, working sixty and seventy hours a week and wanting a kid, and yet her trajectory was like a thing she had no control over, a hurtling into deeper space, a feeling of nearly achieved escape velocity. She knew but didn’t want to know where it was taking her. When she spoke on the phone with Charles, late at night, she could tell that he was lonely, because he’d never been so attentive to her reporting work, so eager to be of help. But when he came east in the summer, and again the next summer, her little apartment on Capitol Hill became the sour-smelling cage of a big cat too depressed to groom itself. Charles spent his days in his boxer shorts and bitched about the weather. For the first time, she felt physically averse to him. She invented reasons to stay out late, but he was always waiting for her, anxious, obsessive, when she came home. He’d finally delivered the big book, but his editor wanted revisions and he couldn’t make up his mind about the smallest change. He asked her the same editorial questions over and over, and it did no good for her to answer them, because he had the very same questions again the next night. Both of them were relieved when he returned to Denver, where a fresh crop of students was waiting to hang on his words.
She met Tom Aberant in February 2004. Tom was a well-regarded journalist and editor who’d come to Washington to poach talent for a nonprofit investigative news service he was starting, and Leila, who by now had won a shared Pulitzer (anthrax, 2002), was on his wish list. He took her to lunch and told her he had $20 million in seed money. He currently lived in New York, but he was divorced and childless and thinking of situating his nonprofit in Denver, his hometown, where the overhead would be lower. Having done his homework, he knew that Leila had a husband in Denver. Might she be interested in going home and working at a nonprofit, insulated from the impending collapse of print-ad revenues, freed from space constraints and daily deadlines, and paid a competitive salary?
The offer ought to have appealed to her. But Charles’s big book had been published just the week before and was getting slaughtered by reviewers (“bloated and immensely disagreeable,” Michiko Kakutani, New York Times), and Leila was in a state of medium-grade dread. She’d been calling Charles three and four times a day for pep talks, telling him how sorry she was that she couldn’t be with him. But it was clear, from the repugnance she felt toward Tom’s offer, that she wasn’t really sorry at all. She didn’t want to be the woman who abandoned her husband after his magnum opus tanked. But there was no hiding, from herself or from Tom, how unready she was to give up Washington.
“You’re pretty sure it has to be Denver,” she said.
Tom’s face was fleshy, his mouth somehow turtlish, his eyes narrow in a way that conveyed kindly amusement. The hair he still had farther back on his head was closely buzzed and mostly dark. The thing about men in their prime was that, within rather wide limits, it didn’t matter if they weren’t conventionally handsome. They could also get away with bellies and even with high-pitched voices, if they were scratchy high-pitched, as Tom’s was.
“Pretty sure, yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a sister and a niece there. I miss the West.”
“It sounds like an amazing project,” Leila said.
“Do you want to think it over? Or are you just going to say no right now.”
“I’m not saying no. I’m…”
She felt utterly exposed.
“Oh, this is terrible,” she said. “I know what you must be thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“Why wouldn’t I want to go home to Denver.”
“I’m not going to lie to you, Leila. You’d be a keystone hire for me. I thought Denver would be a selling point.”
“No, it’s great, and I think you’re absolutely right about the industry. We had a monopoly on classifieds for a hundred years. Roll the presses, print the money. And now we don’t. But…”
“But.”
“Well, this is coming at a bad moment for me.”
“Trouble at home.”
“Yeah.”
Tom put his hands behind his head and leaned back, straining the buttons of his dress shirt. “So tell me if this sounds familiar,” he said. “You love the person but you can’t live with him, the person is struggling, you think a separation will make it better, let the two of you recover. And then it finally comes time to get back together, because the separation was only supposed to be temporary, and you discover that, no, in fact, you were lying to yourself the whole time.”
“Actually,” Leila said, “I’ve suspected for quite a while that I’ve been lying to myself.”
“So women are smarter than men. Or you’re just smarter than I was. But to spin out the hypothetical scenario a little further—”
“I think we both know who we’re talking about.”
“I’m a fan of his,” Tom said. “Mad Sad Dad—great book. Hilarious. Gorgeous.”
“Super funny, definitely.”
“And yet now here you are in Washington. And his new book’s getting kicked in the head.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck the reviewers. I’m still going to buy it. But, speaking hypothetically, is there someone else in town here I should know about? If he’s good and does investigative, I’d be happy to look at his CV. I have nothing in principle against couple hires.”
She shook her head.
“No, there isn’t anybody?” Tom said. “Or no, he’s not a journalist?”
“Are you trying to ask if I’m available in some other way?”
He crumpled forward and covered his face with his hands. “I deserved that,” he said. “I was actually not asking that, but the question wasn’t str
aight, either. It’s just a thing with me—I’m kind of a connoisseur of guilt. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”
“If you could see my guilt levels, I think you’d find them quite appealingly high.”
The flirtation with which she made this statement made it true. It was appalling, an almost autonomic thing, the way she was warming to the first sweet, funny, successful, unmarried man she’d met since the wave of caustic adjectives (“stale,” “obese,” “exhausting”) had crashed over the big book. But no matter how guilty it made her, she couldn’t help it: she resented Charles for having failed. She resented that she now had to feel like a shallow, success-chasing woman just because she was liking Tom Aberant. If Charles’s book had been glowingly reviewed and short-listed for prizes, she could have continued on her outbound trajectory without feeling guilty. No one would have blamed her. To the contrary, it would have been blameworthy to go back to him—to have fled to Washington while he was suffering and then to swoop back in to enjoy his success. And so she couldn’t help wishing that Charles didn’t exist. In a world where he didn’t exist, she could have said yes to Tom’s extremely attractive job offer.
What she did instead was suggest that she and Tom get together again over drinks. She wore a short black dress to the bar. Later, from her apartment, she sent Tom a long and disclosive email. She delayed calling Charles that night. In her growing sense of guilt about delaying, in the guilt itself, she found the will and motive not to call him at all. (Even though the sufferer of guilt could stop the suffering whenever she chose, simply by doing the right thing, the suffering was still real while it lasted, and self-pity wasn’t picky about the kind of suffering it fed on.) The next day, she didn’t open Tom’s return email but went to work, called Charles three times, and ate a late dinner with a source. At home, she called Charles a fourth time and finally opened Tom’s email. It wasn’t disclosive, but it was invitational. She took a Friday-night train to Manhattan (somehow the guilt that should have followed infidelity not only existed before the infidelity but was hounding her into it) and spent the night at Tom’s apartment. She spent the whole weekend with him, leaving his side only to go to the bathroom to pee or call Charles. Her guilt was so large that it was gravitational, warping space and time, connecting through non-Euclidian geometry to the guilt she hadn’t felt while wrecking Charles’s marriage. This guilt turned out not to have been nonexistent but pre-forwarded, by way of time-and-space warp, to Manhattan in 2004.
She couldn’t have borne it without Tom. She felt safe with Tom. He was both the cause of her guilt and the balm for it, because he understood it and was living it himself. He was only six years older than Leila, younger than his hair loss made him look, but he’d started so early on his marriage that its ending, after twelve years, was in the fairly distant past. His wife, Anabel, had been an artist, a promising young painter and filmmaker, who came from one of the families that owned McCaskill, the biggest food-products company in the world. On paper, she was absurdly rich, but she was estranged from her family and refused on principle to take money from them. By the time Tom escaped from the marriage, her art career was going nowhere, she was in her late thirties, and she still wanted children.
“I was a coward,” he said to Leila. “I should have left her five years earlier.”
“Is it cowardly to stay with a person you love and who needs you?”
“You tell me.”
“Hmm. I’ll get back to you on that.”
“If she’d been thirty-one, she could have put her life together and met somebody else and had her baby. I waited just long enough to make that very difficult.”
“It wouldn’t have helped that she was rich?”
“She was insane about the money. She’d sooner have died than take it from her father.”
“But then that’s her choice. Why should you feel guilty for a choice she’s making?”
“Because I knew she’d make that choice.”
“And did you cheat on her?”
“Not until we’d separated.”
“Then, I’m sorry, but I think I’ve got you beat in the guilt race.”
But there was something else, Tom said. Anabel’s father had always liked him and tried to help him out financially. Tom couldn’t accept any help as long as he stayed with Anabel, but when the father had died, more than a decade after the divorce, he’d left Tom a bequest to the tune of $20 million, and Tom had taken it. It was the seed money for his nonprofit venture.
“And you feel guilty about that?”
“I could have said no.”
“But you’re doing an amazing thing with the money.”
“I’m enjoying money my wife could never take. Not just enjoying it, doing well with it professionally. Increasing my male professional advantage.”
Although Leila appreciated Tom’s company, his guilt seemed a little overwrought to her. She wondered if he might be exaggerating it (and downplaying the sexual hold that Anabel had had on him) for her sake. On her second weekend in New York, she asked him if she could flip through his box of old snapshots. There were pictures of a young man so skinny and boyish and thick-haired she barely recognized him. “You look like a completely different person.”
“I was a completely different person.”
“But, like, not the same DNA, even.”
“That’s how it feels.”
As soon as Leila saw Anabel, she understood Tom’s guilt better. The woman was intense—fiery-eyed, full-chestedly anorexic, Medusa-maned, mostly unsmiling. In the background of the pictures was student housing, slum housing, wintry pre-9/11 New York skyline.
“She does look a little scary,” Leila said.
“Terrifying. I’m having a PTSD thing just looking at these.”
“But you! You were so young and sweet.”
“That’s kind of my marriage in a nutshell.”
“And where is she now?”
“No idea. We didn’t have any friends in common, and we broke off all contact.”
“So maybe she took her money after all. Maybe she owns an island somewhere.”
“Anything’s possible. But I don’t think so.”
Leila wanted to ask if she could keep one snapshot of Tom, an especially sweet one taken by Anabel on the Staten Island Ferry, but it was too soon to ask for a picture. She closed the box and kissed his turtle mouth. Sex with him was not the drama it had always been with Charles, the pouncing, the bouncing, the screaming of the prey, but she already thought she might prefer this other way. It was quieter, slower, more like a meeting of minds via bodies.
She had a deep sense of rightness with Tom—it was the thing, among many things, that she felt guiltiest about, because it meant that Charles was not right, had never been right. Tom’s reserve, his willingness to leave her be, was soothing to her maritally poked and probed spirit. And he seemed to have the same sense of rightness with her. They were journalists and spoke a common language. But she couldn’t help wondering why a catch like him had never remarried. Before she burned any bridges with Charles, she asked Tom why.
He replied that he hadn’t stayed with any woman for longer than a year since his divorce. According to his ethics, one year was the limit, at least in New York, for any uncommitted relationship; and his bad marriage had made him commitment-shy.
“So what are you saying?” she said. “I’ve got ten months before you show me the door?”
“You’re already in a committed relationship,” he said.
“Right. Funny. Is this rule of yours something you led with on first dates?”
“It’s a tacit rule in New York dating. I’m not the author of it. It’s a way to avoid chewing up five years of a woman’s life and then showing her the door.”
“As opposed to, say, getting over your commitment phobia.”
“I tried. More than once. But apparently I’m textbook PTSD. I had actual panic attacks.”
“Textbook toxic bachelor is what it sounds more like.”
/> “Leila, they were younger. I knew things they didn’t know, I knew what can happen. Even if you weren’t married, it wouldn’t be the same with you.”
“No, that’s right. Because I’m forty-one. I’m already past the sell-by date. You won’t have to feel so guilty when you dump me.”
“The difference is that you’ve been through a marriage.”
A light went on in Leila. “No, here’s what it is,” she said. “What’s different is that I’m older than your wife when you divorced her. You didn’t trade up to some twenty-eight-year-old. With me you’re trading down. You don’t have to feel so guilty.”
Tom said nothing.
“And you know how I know that? Because I make the same kind of calculations myself. Whatever it takes to get away from my guilt, even for five minutes, my mind will do it. There was a review of Charles’s book in The Adirondack Review, online. Glowing. He sent the link in an email blast to everyone in his address book, and I didn’t see it until I was on my way up here to sleep with you. He needed somebody to tell him not to send that email blast. He needed me, his wife, to tell him, ‘Better not to do that.’ But I was otherwise engaged, on the phone, talking to you. And where’s my little rule to help me out of that one? I don’t have a little rule.”
She was putting on clothes, repacking her overnight bag.
“I’m done with the rule,” Tom said. “I only mentioned it because I trusted you to understand it. But you’re right, it does help that you’re forty-one. I’m not going to deny it.”
His honesty seemed directed at the ghost of his ex-wife, not at Leila.
“I think I’m just going to leave before you make me cry,” she said.
What drove her away from his apartment that night was an instinct about Tom. If his reserve had simply been his fundamental nature, she could have relaxed and appreciated it. But he hadn’t always been reserved. He’d been open to intensity in his marriage, so open that he now felt traumatized by it, and Anabel clearly still had a grip on his conscience. He’d had something with Anabel that he didn’t intend to have with anyone else, and an instinct told Leila that she would always feel secondary—that here was a competition she could never win.