“Tell me everything,” she said.
“Wait, you’re the one with the story. What’s going on at work? Why are you at Harriet’s? If you couldn’t stay at home, why not the Carlyle?”
“Where the bellman would have sold the information to the tabloids, and a photographer would have managed to bring up my room service tray and take a shot of me in my robe? Get real, Bridge. Use your head. You’re the one with the real story. Just talk. Start with the moment when Evan walked into your office, and talk straight through to the end. In detail, please.”
“You know what he said. He said he already told you. I don’t know, the two of you never see each other, you’ve grown apart, you’re busy, he’s busy. Isn’t that what he said to you?”
“That’s exactly what he said to me. And it’s all bullshit. What planet is he beaming this in from, Planet Greenwich, Connecticut, where Mr. Man comes home every night on the six-thirty-two and someone is waiting in an apron to hear about his day? Is he going to be the only guy in New York who doesn’t go out at night, whose wife doesn’t travel, who has a schedule too busy for pillow talk? I didn’t invent this. And I tried to cut it down years ago, when Leo was young, I’d say, Let’s stay in tonight, I’d say, Let’s not make plans. Half the time he would say we had to go to someone’s house for dinner and they’d be upset if I didn’t come along. It wasn’t my fault that the Israeli prime minister had a heart attack and I had to fly to Jerusalem, or the president made a speech and I had to go to Washington. That’s what I do. Did he think I liked being away from home in some lousy hotel room? Did he think I liked missing things at school or having to read over clips at night? That’s what I do, and I’m not going to apologize for it just because he suddenly wants to go back to the fifties and play Ozzie and Harriet. I made certain choices over the years. He made certain choices over the years. His job was just as responsible for this as my job. And suddenly I get all the blame. And I’m not taking the blame. I’ve done the best I could under difficult circumstances. I went to the soccer games. I went to the school plays. I gave dinners for his partners. I acted like I was interested in their boring wives. It’s not like he didn’t know. This is me. This is the me I’ve become and it’s too late for me to be any different now.”
There are sights you see that shock you so much your mind refuses at first to process the information, like the old line about the unfaithful husband caught in the act by his wife who asks her, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” New Yorkers are pretty unshockable, but I’m sure there would be plenty who would have been stunned to see Meghan Fitzmaurice put down a piece of nan bread, bury her head in her greasy hands, and begin to sob. She cried with the gasping, repetitive sound of a child left at kindergarten on the first day of school, and just like that child’s, her gasping gave way to a long, horrible wail. I went over and knelt at her feet and held her in my arms. I could feel each vertebra shivering under my fingers, and I tried to will warmth into her broad shoulders, the only broad part of her narrow, trembling body. After a minute she blew her nose into a paper napkin from the take-out place that said “Good karma” on it below the image of some goddess, the one with all the arms.
I’d often thought before that the distance from Saturday night to Monday morning is greater than thirty-six hours would suggest. From dinner date to desk, from house party to 9:00 A.M. class, from drunken sex with a stranger to numb on the subway. It’s as though one has nothing to do with the other, as though the woman in the slip dress dancing in Chelsea with her hair unfurled behind her like a signal flag is a different person from the woman in the black pantsuit and dark glasses standing on the corner two blocks over flagging down a cab as the wan light of a city sun wavers over the line of buildings looming to the east.
“Bridge,” she sobbed. “Bridge, I’ve been with him my whole life. My whole life.”
“I know, sweetheart,” I said.
The two of us had come a long way, from the shimmering paillettes of Saturday night to the profanities of Monday morning and the tears of this Wednesday lunch. And Meghan had come so far, from tucking her arm into Evan’s in the car after that dinner to mopping her face with a paper napkin from the Indian restaurant. She blew her nose twice, hard, and then she lifted her chin, and it was as though she was suddenly another woman. I moved back onto my heels and then up into a chair.
“There’s someone else,” she said in a flat, dead voice, and it was as though she’d never, ever cried, not for a moment.
“I asked. He said no.”
“What if I said I didn’t care?”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed. There were lines in her face that you never saw when she was smiling, or when she was on television. Ten years of getting up when it was still dark, and she’d never looked as tired as this.
“Honey, half the women I know in this city have husbands who cheat on them. Half the women cheat on their husbands, too. The stories I’ve heard. In detail.”
“Yech,” I said.
“You have no idea. Did you know that Sam Borows once left Kate?”
“What? Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Are you freaked out?”
“Totally.”
“Then why would I have told you?” Meghan said wearily.
It was as though the door that had momentarily opened was slamming shut again, the door to the room in which I protected Meghan rather than the other way around. She stood up and began to clear the table, dumping everything into the take-out bag.
“Has anyone told Leo yet?” I asked.
Meghan shook her head. “That’s the last thing I said to Evan. I said, If you’re going to do this, then you’re going to be the one to tell Leo.” It was a terrible idea, a terrible idea that brooked no disagreement.
I could tell that Meghan regretted her tears. She put on the kettle for tea and sat back down at the kitchen window. “I like this place,” she said. “It’s a nice size. I suppose we’ll have to sell the apartment, which doesn’t really kill me. It was always too big. With Leo at college, it feels enormous. I like this place. Two bedrooms, one bath, a little den, a living room with a view of the park. Maybe I’ll get a place like this.”
I looked around. It was a lovely apartment, furnished by someone with a good eye and no money for a decorator. There were two striped couches facing each other across a glass coffee table, a leather chair, and some African tribal masks. Harriet was an executive at UNICEF. The last time I had seen her, two or three years ago, we had had an interesting discussion about female genital mutilation in Africa. Hers was the apartment of a woman of a certain age and a certain income and a certain situation. Meghan would never buy an apartment like this.
“What about work?”
Meghan waved her hand in the air through the halfhearted steam from the kettle. “Josh is nervous, but then Josh is always nervous. He’s a producer, that’s his job. The numbers are through the roof, which makes him less nervous. I’ll go on vacation. The numbers will start to go down when the viewers realize it’s only the two guys. Anyway, you know the news cycle. Someone will die, someone will get married, a train will derail, war will break out. I’m going to Jamaica, and I will return lightly tanned with copper streaks, and when I’m back on the air, everyone will write about how well I look. Did I tell you Ben Greenstreet’s wife sent me flowers? A big bouquet of delphiniums and stock. My assistant said it looked like a lobby arrangement.”
“And you can talk to Evan and work all this out.”
Meghan poured the water in mugs and brought them back to the table. Then she narrowed her eyes and looked at me. “That’s what I thought at first. Save the family and all that. But I’ve changed my mind. Leo is at college, and he’s a strong person. He’ll be able to handle this. And I can, too. If Evan doesn’t know what a great life he has, that’s his problem. And it is so going to be his problem, because in two or three years he’s going to be talking up some big contact, and the guy is going to say
, Didn’t you used to be married to Meghan Fitzmaurice? And he’ll know that he’s a nobody, and that he made himself a nobody, and that he’s going to be a nobody for all time.” Meghan gulped at her tea and yelped, “shit!” and her upper lip began to bloom red. Underneath it all she has a redhead’s vulnerable skin.
“I’m just going to go away for a while,” she said. “I need a vacation. I’m entitled to a vacation. A vacation will do me good.”
“What about Leo? I don’t think it’s such a great idea to have Evan tell Leo himself. Maybe you could both tell him when he gets back.”
Meghan got a flinty look in her eyes as she looked at me over the rim of the mug. “Bridget, I know things seem a bit chaotic at the moment, but I’m still able to look out for the best interests of my son,” she said.
“I’m just trying to be helpful.”
“I know you are.”
“I’m at a loss,” I said to Irving that night when he crawled into bed at midnight smelling of cigars and Scotch.
“You taste like curry,” he said. “You see your sister?”
I nodded. “It was like Sybil,” I said. “She was about five different people in the space of three hours. I kept wondering which one will get possession of her body.”
“It’s got to be weirding her out. All these years she’s got the world by the tail, everything just where she wants it, and in one fell swoop she loses her job and her husband.”
“She didn’t lose anything. She’ll go back to work after she goes on vacation, and everything will be fine. And Evan needed her a whole lot more than she needed him.”
“That the party line?”
“What?”
“Is that the party line? Because I’m not sure I believe a word you just said, and I’m pretty sure you don’t believe it, either. You make it sound like this is a fender bender.”
“It was an accident. She didn’t know her mike was open.”
“Yeah? There are no accidents, except maybe at stop signs. Maybe your sister was tired of being herself. Maybe Evan was tired of being her shadow. I know I get tired just being around them for five minutes.”
“Where’d you get your psychiatry degree, Dr. Freud?”
Irving hooked an arm around my neck. “Both of us are more qualified to shrink people than the shrinks we know. We both spend way too much time figuring out why people do the crazy things they do. Except for you, when you deal with your sister.”
“Now you’re really making me angry.”
“Okay, then, stop being the little sister. You’re too big to be the little sister anymore. And a little sister is a drag. Like pulling a wagon, or something. Stop being a wagon.”
“Since when are you an expert on family dynamics?”
“I’m going to sleep,” he said, and then after a few minutes, “Nobody wants a wagon, kid.” He snored softly right after that, the snore of the semihammered, and the sound of it put me to sleep.
IT IS A testimonial to the topsy-turvy ethos of social welfare programs that I teach parenting classes. Actually, mothering classes would be more accurate, since in the three years I’ve been doing it a father has never attended, and only a handful of the women there had men in their lives on a regular basis. Tequila wasn’t allowed to teach the class because she didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, and Alison because she didn’t have some arcane state certification, and Jasmine, who runs the shelter and has looked out for so many kids that the photo display in her living room looks like the record of a smallish elementary school, has a criminal record from a time in her teens when her boyfriend was selling crack out of their apartment.
So I wound up teaching parenting skills one evening a week in the community room at the Harriet Tubman projects, north of Yankee Stadium, which happens to be where Tequila lives. Luckily, the community room is on the ground floor or none of us would ever make it to the class, since like most housing project elevators, the ones in Tubman break with some regularity. Fat women are always making applications to the housing authority to get moved to the second or third floor so they don’t have to lumber up the stairs a couple times a week when the elevator is broken. Tequila scored a three-bedroom apartment there by saying she didn’t mind living on the top floor.
If the world made sense, Tequila would have been teaching the course. She was one of our success stories. She had come to us ten years before, a high school dropout with four kids, all of them in foster care. She had called the police to make the father of her youngest one stop beating her, and when they came, they took the man to Rikers, Tequila to the station house to make a statement, and the kids to temporary foster care. Temporary in social welfare parlance means something different than it does in the actual world. Tequila showed up at our office six months after they took her kids. I wasn’t there yet, but my predecessor said she was the angriest person she’d ever met.
The people at Women On Women told her to do all the things we always tell people to do. Find a decent apartment. Make sure there are enough beds and food in the fridge. Go to church and to AA or NA or whatever the hell your particular A happens to be. (“Someday I’m gonna set me up a Being Goddamn Poor Anonymous,” Tequila said one day.) Enroll in a GED program and get a high school diploma. Tequila did every single one, and one at a time she got her kids back. One day when the unreliable receptionist called in sick with her regular Monday morning whiskey-sours-at-an-all-night-club flu, Tequila sat down at her desk and started answering the phones. That chesty “huh” was her signature sound. Every bureaucrat in the Bronx hated it, and her. “You know you got space for me,” she would tell a drug treatment center, or “You hold up her food stamps, that baby’s gonna starve and you gonna wind up on page five of the Daily News,” she’d say to a petty bureaucrat with a paperwork deficiency. One of her sons was at the Police Academy, one was in community college, and the youngest one was on the honor roll at a charter school near the housing project where Tequila had scored a decent-size apartment on a high floor. Our biggest fear was that she was going to get shot by some drug dealer, since when she walked her kid home from the after-school program she was always calling them names. Not under her breath, either.
And then there was Princess Margaret, her only daughter. When Tequila had first gotten her out of foster care, she had despaired; the kid would leave for fourth grade in the morning and not come home until 7:00 P.M., her eyes red, her hair disheveled. She refused to talk about what she’d done or where she’d gone, and Tequila, using the skills she’d acquired in parenting classes, reluctantly decided not to beat it out of her. Then one Saturday when Tequila made the kids accompany her to the nail parlor, where she indulged in her only vice, the painting of flowers on her talonlike acrylic tips, they had run into the wife of the pastor at the Living Rock Church of the Merciful Jesus, which Tequila attended. “I have never seen a child read in my life the way that child reads,” said the pastor’s wife, who also worked part-time at the branch of the library on Mount Morris Avenue, on a block Tequila had told the children was dangerous. And that’s how Tequila found out, first that Princess Margaret was a crazed reader, then that she was a genius. First, Tequila got her into a program for gifted kids in upper Manhattan, then a program that sent poor kids out of their neighborhoods and into the most exclusive private schools in Manhattan.
The idea of it gave me a feeling of falling off the high dive backward, but Tequila insisted that Princess Margaret was perfectly happy at the Carlisle Benedict School for Girls on East Eighty-eighth Street. This may have been because Princess Margaret was never forced to attend the social events that would have made the differences between her and her classmates so clear. Tequila almost never let her out of the house except for school. “The warden,” Princess Margaret called her mother. “Ms. Fitzmaurice, tell her that a junior in high school needs some freedom. What’s your nephew’s curfew?”
“No nephew gonna get pregnant, mess up his life for once and for all.”
“For the millionth time, I am not goin
g to get pregnant. I just want to go out on Saturday night.”
“You go out on Saturday night when you go to college,” Tequila said. The college counselor had told Tequila that the Ivy League was Princess Margaret’s best option. At the moment, Tequila was leaning toward Princeton.
From Tequila’s apartment window, the Bronx looks every bit as magical at night as Manhattan does from atop Fifth Avenue. While most of the people I meet prefer to focus on the differences between where I work and where I live, I’m often struck by the essential similarities. Most days as I walk from the subway station to our buildings, I’m lulled by the ordinariness of life. Partly it’s because it’s morning, and most of the worst things take place under the soft, mottled cover of big city darkness, in the pockets of black between the streetlights and around the footings of the projects. Partly it’s because the Bronx is just like anyplace else, only poorer. Sometimes I’m walking behind a gaggle of girls from Maria Goretti High School, their legs long and shimmery beneath the plaid uniform skirts that they have rolled up and will roll down when the school door is in sight. And I remember how we rolled our skirts at the Harper School, how Miss Means would stand in the doorway to shake our hands and say, one eyebrow cocked into an accent grave, “Have you forgotten something, Miss Fitzmaurice?” until I tugged my skirt down and moved on. And there are two little boys on our shelter’s block who go to school together, their mother watching from the window with a baby in her arms, the two of them hand in hand. They are a little closer in age than Meghan and I were, but still the older boy, who can’t be more than eight, has that proprietary sense and a rich quiver of demands: Come ooo-nnn. You’re slooo-ooow. We’re laaa-te. The old woman in the community garden rises stiffly and watches them as they go past. There’s nothing for her to do in March except walk the perimeter of the lot and dream of May: tomatoes here, peppers next to them, marigolds to keep the bugs away. Bugs feast on vegetable gardens in the Bronx the way they do in Connecticut or Iowa or anywhere else, and boys walk to school, and girls show their legs. It’s just ordinary life.