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He straightens up and says, “Sorry. Should have had more than coffee this morning. I’m fine. Let’s go. You ready?”
SIX (#ulink_0c3d379b-9ab2-5d83-8754-0f666924b702)
HE’S SPRINTING UP A winding hill in his neighborhood, his breath loud in his ears, the asphalt black under his beating feet, black ravens flying out of the trees, an avian army buzzing his head, flapping their wings, diving at him, their beaks pecking and pecking and pecking, their claws finding purchase on his head, his neck, his arms, his legs, his back, and then Simon Tabor is awake, fetal-curled, fists clenched, hair and body as wet as if he has just emerged from an ice bath, his insides hollowed out by the certainty that something is desperately wrong. He will never get used to this, to the way he is left with voids—in his heart, as if that organ has lost mass or blood flow; in his throat, as if that narrow tube has opened wide and air is racing inside; and in his abdomen, as if he is starving to death, though it’s not hunger at all that he feels. And this morning, there is a new element, unshed tears blinding his sight.
Slowly he unkinks his cramped arms and legs and turns over. The tears settle in the wells of his eyes, and he is loath to blink, loath to touch them, even more fearful than usual because he has no idea what this latest indignity means.
Lions charging at him yesterday, ravens today, during the frightening half hour of near-slumber, and now he is crying. It’s Sisyphean, when he’s already been laboring with his hijacked sleep, with his terror in having forgotten how to do what is natural, with his inability to figure out why this is happening, at such odds with how he otherwise perceives his life: as a mostly happy man whose marriage, young children, and professional pursuits mostly afford him pleasure and satisfaction.
A movement in the bed, Elena shifting under the striped comforter. In this year of his sleeplessness, he has learned his wife wakes in stages. He had not known that fact before. Deep sleep on her stomach until she shifts to her left side, facing away from him. Then the countdown begins. Twenty minutes until she shifts onto her back, the slightest of whistles coming through her full lips, thinned by dreams. Another twenty before she cracks one eye open, then the other.
He looks at the long line of Elena’s hip. When his misbegotten nights were new, she suggested supposedly surefire ways to shut down his nonsensical thoughts: walking after dinner; meditating before bed; taking a boiling-hot shower in their unlit bathroom and crawling wet between the cool sheets. Desperate, he tried it all. Altered his diet, too—no meat, no cheese, cut back on his drinking. Increased his exercise—yoga first, then cycling instead of yoga, and now, instead of cycling, he runs hard and fast and long every morning. But what is a boon for his body has done nothing for his soul, has not altered his inability to sink down into bliss, too aware of the spirits gathering around him in the dark. Only recently has a thought begun to form, that what he needs perhaps cannot be supplied by healthy eating or abstinence or exercise.
In the beginning, in that first month when he thought his failure to sleep was a temporary malfunction, he rocked the bed in the middle of the night and palmed the perfect globes of Elena’s ass, hoping sex would empty his brain, but Elena had sighed and mumbled, “I’ll get the pills.” A sylph in a nightgown that left her shoulders and back bare, the long yards of her black hair tight in a bun, his sleep guru refusing her mission, and when the light in the bathroom flicked on, Simon called after her, “What pills?”
Sleeping pills prescribed to Elena a year after Lucy’s birth, expired before Isabel was born.
“They’ve expired,” he’d said when she handed him the orange container. He’d looked inside and been unable to tell if, or how many, she’d ever taken.
“I think it takes decades to break down the components. They’re probably as strong, or nearly as strong, as when I got them. Give it a go. Nothing lost and all that.”
He had wanted to ask why she needed sleeping pills during that exciting time when Lucy was walking and laughing, her hands reaching out to the world, but Elena’s eyes were already closed, her breath even and composed.
For several successive nights, he took a pill that was small as a dot and weightless on his tongue, hoping she was right, but she wasn’t; potency was vanquished by time. When he told her the pills didn’t work, she looked at him in frustration. “So call the doctor and get a new prescription.” Which he did, and he took them for several more nights, but his body refused the sedation, simply wouldn’t be knocked out.
Never again has he bothered Elena during his racked hours. Sometimes he watches her sleeping, curious about what she’s dreaming, envying the way she goes under and stays under, missing how they used to wake nearly simultaneously, her first smile of the day beaming him fully alive. He’s forgotten how to sleep, but something’s changed in her, too, and he can’t trace the alteration to any specific temporal point, to any specific event, but she no longer smiles and tucks into him or rolls onto him when she wakes. Now, when she comes to, she sits upright, her face hiding its secrets from him, and it’s only when he’s back from his run, when they’re drinking their second cups of coffee, that she graces him with a smile, but it doesn’t seem to him her same I love and adore you so much smile.
He could be mistaken; it could be some pathology of his sleeplessness that is causing him to blow out of proportion the changes he senses in her, the feeling he has that she’s created subtle distance between them. But what he’s not mistaken about is that Elena no longer dresses like the woman his heart toppled for. Gone are her gauzy skirts and ruffled blouses, her tight dresses with narrow slits and strappy, sexy heels, her fitted slacks with stiletto boots, all replaced with a uniform: jeans, button-down shirt, ballet slippers. And that soft black river that once streamed over her shoulders and down her spine, that he would gather up in his hands because she left it unbound, is now always center-parted and twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.
There’s a pretty Chinese bowl from a New York museum in the bathroom, a gift for her when he had been gone for weeks on a case, that holds Elena’s stock of bobby pins. In the two years since Isabel’s birth, he has often considered whether her tightly coiled hair, her adopted uniform, indicates the practicality of doubled motherhood or something far more charged—proof that the loss of her freedom is so wild within her that she must keep herself regimented and pinned together. She is a gorgeous woman no matter the clothes she wears or how she arranges her hair, but she is severe this way, and when he sees the Chinese bowl, he always wants to dump those securing pins in the garbage, shatter that bowl, bring back his sensual, loose-haired Elena, their early-morning lovemaking, her explicit love for him.
Maybe he’s a coward. Maybe he already knows the answers, but he refrains these days from asking how she feels about no longer flying away as she used to. Until Lucy, Elena wrote for glossy travel magazines, and in those halcyon days, Simon occasionally went with her to those off-the-beaten-path places when he could. Her nightstand is stacked still with the latest issues of the travel magazines that published her work. When she was breastfeeding at night she read those magazines by the low rosy light, telling him she was keeping pace with what was going on in her absence, would not count herself out of the game. Naturally, their daughters changed everything. Now he’s flying as much as she once did, which was a lot, and she refuses to say what it’s like being unable to vanish into the excited glaze of the working day. As he does when the hollowness lifts, when he has run his daily ten miles, and drunk his coffee, and kissed his daughters. As always, he kisses Elena last before he’s out the door, but where he once found the blackness of her eyes so enticing, now he is afraid to fall into them, afraid of what he will learn, or be told, fearful that if he can’t fix his failure to sleep, he can’t fix anything else.
And this morning, tears. Poised to spill down his cheeks. There’s no way he can rise and run, not when he’s this done in. Then he’s smothering his face in his pillow, heaving silent sobs, freezing when Elena shifts onto her back, worrying she’s woken and waiting to hear why he’s crying his eyes out. What would he say? He wishes he knew, but he has no answers. And then deliverance—Elena’s soft sleeping whistles.
He wipes his face against the pillowcase, then turns over again, and checks on the crack in the uneven ceiling. A hairline days ago, it has grown wider and longer and looks like it will soon split apart the paint and the plaster.
Does that crack mean the roof is going to collapse?
He needs to do something about it, call someone, make that call this morning, before they leave for Palm Springs, arrange for whatever person fixes cracks in ceilings in old houses in the hills to come Monday, first thing. He’ll even forgo his start-of-the-week run to be here, to handle it, to not put another thing on his wife’s list of things to take care of. He should pull out the house file, see what the agreement says about the roof, if any issues were noted. He doesn’t specialize in real estate, but he is a lawyer, and he would have asked the critical questions. They’ve owned this ninety-three-year-old house for a mere five years; previous owners must have replaced the roof at least a few times over the last decades.
God forbid they need a new roof. How much would it cost? How long would it take? Would they have to bunk elsewhere for the duration? Where would they stay?
Phoebe’s apartment in the flats of Beverly Hills Adjacent is too small to house five; her second bedroom is her study, in which there is no pullout couch.
He has an older colleague at the firm, Tim Devins, who owns some huge estate in Brentwood, is always talking about how he and his wife, childless by choice, have eight bedrooms that are never used, and a guesthouse no one has ever stayed in. Tim is a friendly, generous guy, and if Simon laid out his need, Tim would probably say, “Sure, buddy, no problem, for however long, mi casa es tu casa.” But how awkward it would be to see Tim in a towel after a shower, or eating his breakfast, or lounging in his Jacuzzi attached to his pool, which surely is Olympic-sized, or kissing his sharp-featured wife before tootling off to the office.
Why is he thinking about asking Tim Devins if the Tabor family can move in while their roof is being fixed? Their roof will not need to be fixed; it is simply a small crack that needs to be filled, the ceiling repainted. And if they do have to fix the roof, and leave home for the duration, he would never ask Tim Devins.
They would stay in a hotel.
No, they would not stay in a hotel; they couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel, not if the roof needs fixing. They’d have to stay in a motel. The four of them in a dingy room at some Motel 6, he pulling his tie tight and striding out the door, leaving his wife looking as if she might lift up their daughters and fling the three of them over the second-floor railing, pitching down into a parking lot filled with campers and vans.
Why is he picturing that?
Are the changes in Elena—in her waking routine, her delayed first smile of the day, her distance, her daily uniform—because she has postpartum depression? Lucy is five and Elena was fine after her birth. And Isabel is two—does postpartum depression last for two years? And, really, most of the time, she seems herself, with her customary intensity, occasionally humming as she brushes out Lucy’s tangles, as she encourages Isabel to wear something other than the drooping purple tutu, her everyday favorite since last Halloween.
Simon pinches his arm hard. There will be no more crying. There will be no roof fixing, no motel living, no bodies hurtling to their deaths. Elena does not have any kind of depression, while he, on the other hand, cannot sleep, and whatever is keeping him up far exceeds run-of-the-mill insomnia.
But there is the crack in the ceiling, which he can arrange to be handled on Monday.
His watch says it’s seven twenty. Elena won’t wake until seven forty. The girls will wake up shortly thereafter. Elena’s probably already packed for herself and their daughters.
He could get up now and pack what he’ll need for the weekend. He could do that, and then start the coffee, make them all breakfast. Eggs? French toast? Pancakes? No, nothing hot because whatever he prepares will go cold before everyone sits down at the table. Lucy will insist on swimming in the pool before she eats, as she’s been doing each day this summer, running out of her room buck naked and leaping into the water, requiring him, half dressed, to follow and sit by the pool until he can convince her his day needs to get under way. And Isabel will cry elephantine tears until Elena climbs into bed with her and reads her a story. The only kid he’s heard of who prefers being read to in the morning and not at bedtime. So, no, no reason to cook a family breakfast. And what’s even in the fridge? Didn’t Elena say she didn’t bother going to the market because they would be gone the weekend?
Most of today and all of tomorrow on Agapanthus Lane, with both of the children in tow. A babysitter will take care of the girls tonight while everyone else—Harry and Roma, Phoebe and her new beau, Camille, and he and Elena—dressed up in tuxedos and gowns, will be miles away at the resort in Rancho Mirage, sipping champagne on the Starlight Terrace rooftop, where he and Elena married in front of three hundred guests. They haven’t been back to the resort since their wedding, though they considered returning on their first, and second, and third anniversaries. They never did, never even made a reservation, and up there tonight his father will be named Palm Springs Man of the Decade.
What comes with that designation? Will Harry be handed a plaque, or a sculpted piece of glass with his name inscribed, or the key to the city? In their conversations the past month, his father has played down the honor, saying, “I’ve just done what any other person with resources would have done to help unfortunate souls.” Which isn’t true, and when Simon said, “Dad, that isn’t true,” Harry said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
Simon puts his hands to his face, feels his lips turning up, and he wants to laugh because it’s been such a long time since he has smiled in bed. He was crying, and now he’s smiling, thinking of his father. Thinking of their spring, summer, and fall camping trips, star-studded nights, sleeping bags unrolled in the desert sand drifts just beyond the back patio, sand that was soft at first, then scratchy as the hours piled up, Harry teaching him how to converse and debate, getting into the grit of politics and free will and truth; the long hikes traversing the mountain peak, talking about manhood, and what it means to be a rare man who qualifies as a full human being. No baseball throwing, no football tossing, no Frisbee silliness, no Boy Scouts, no Pop Warner, no Little League, those activities weren’t for Harry, and hence not for Simon. There’d been no sense of loss, of missing out, because they had all those special times together. How he loves his father and his inimitable qualities for probity, his infinite well of paternal love, and marital passion, and universal caring for those finding where they fit in their new world.
Sunday morning, tomorrow morning, he could say, “Dad, let’s do our regular San Jacinto hike,” and, on their ascent, ask his father if he ever experienced a lengthy bout of sleeplessness, and if he did, what he had done to solve it, where he had looked for the answers.
“Tell me, Dad,” he would say, “help me figure out what’s going on in my head.”
Yes, that’s what he’ll do. He’ll grab his father’s hand and say, “I need a little father-and-son time, just you and me alone.” And Harry will grin and grab Simon’s face, kiss him hard first on one cheek and then the other, and say, “Did I tell you today how much I love you?”
His emotions are seesawing from happiness back to tears.
What is going on with him?
The crack in the ceiling has disappeared because his vision is again blurred. Are these new tears because when he says, “Let’s you and me sneak away for some time alone,” his father will exude palpable pleasure, or because his father is seventy now, robust and strong and active, but there is a sense of the hourglass, of the grains diminishing in the upper, gathering in the lower?
He tests the notion in his head of a world without Harry, and immediately swats it away. He can’t imagine not being able to call his father, talking to him at length on his drives home. He blinks hard several times, forces some of the wetness away.
One thing put to rest is the fear that his sleeplessness is a presage to his own death. He’s been to the doctor, had a complete physical, including a stress test, an EEG, an EKG. He is in perfect health, his blood pressure within the recommended range, his cholesterol terrific, his blood revealing no hidden issues, the electrical activity in his brain and heart as it should be. Whatever is keeping him awake, it’s not his eventual demise, but something he’d better figure out soon. The one question he forgot to ask the doctor was: How long can a body go without sleep?
THE SILENCE IN THE house is growing heavier, wife and children in that place he no longer goes, a smothering silence ripped apart by the telephone ringing.
Simon’s hollowed heart thumps into action, and he leaps from the bed, an errant tear running down the side of his nose, and he grabs the receiver from Elena’s nightstand, steps out of their bedroom, his voice low and froggy when he says, “Yes? Hello? Do you know it’s seven thirty on a Saturday morning?”
“Mr. Tabor, my apologies,” says a deep male voice with a strong accent. “This is Altan Odaman, the president of the International Lawyers Association, calling from Istanbul, Turkey. If I figured the time difference incorrectly, my heartfelt regrets. Nonetheless, I am delighted to personally invite you to this year’s conference. To be held in Medellín, Colombia, from September tenth through the twentieth. I am also delighted to inform you that, by special vote, you have been chosen to make a presentation. This is highly unorthodox, as you know. No first-time invitee has ever been afforded the opportunity to address the group. But your legal approach for recovering those Goya paintings is of great interest to everyone. Do you need time to determine your availability, or can I assume you will clear your schedule to attend? Spouses, of course, are invited as well.”
In the small landing that leads from their bedroom to the living room, Simon stares at the photograph on the wall—Elena in the hospital bed with their first child barely an hour old, named Luz within moments of her worldly entrance and called, ever after, Lucy—and he sees nothing.
For several seconds, he is made speechless by this call to join the most elite of lawyers who handle global cases that alter the international landscape. But his eight years of experience as a cross-border litigator focused on the repatriation of stolen art, relics, religious icons, and sometimes ancient bones kicks in; he is naturally quick on his feet, able to pivot his courtroom cross-examinations as required, and he gathers his wits and his words and expresses his sincere and honest delight and grateful thanks to Altan Odaman and the nominating committee.
“Yes, of course I will attend, thank you so much for this honor,” he says, and Odaman provides him with the highlights about the first-class airline tickets and the five-star accommodations, the ten-day schedule of programs and seminars and social events, telling Simon all will be set forth in a comprehensive email, and then Odaman rings off.
When he turns, Elena is behind him, tousled from sleep, her skin tawny gold, her high cheekbones flushed, her lips again full, and her smile is shot through with such love and intimacy that he doubts his sleeplessness, as if this year of sleeplessness has been itself a bad dream, doubts his concern that there’s a slackening of their prior closeness, doubts himself for debating the strength of her love.
“You’re not running this morning?” she asks, and when he shakes his head, she says, “Great. Lucy’s already in the pool. Why don’t you pack. I had your tuxedo pressed, it’s in the closet. In a little while, I’ll make birds in the nest for everyone.”
“I …” Simon says.
How does he express to Elena the enormity of the high honor he has just received from the president of the ILA, that it is even more meaningful than making partner in February? How does he implore her to accompany him, to carefully suggest it is time to leave the children behind, as they have not been left since their births? How does he convince her that they’ll figure out who will care for them in their absence, but going to Medellín, Colombia, is vital, not just for his career, although absolutely his attendance at this conference will thrust him forward exponentially, but so that the two of them can temporarily escape the tough daily grind, be alone together as they have not been in five years, recover themselves as the couple they once were. Ten days far away from their precious children, who are adorable pixies and love bugs, whose hugs and kisses are indescribable, as are their plaintive, plangent demands that their needs be swiftly met. Ten days far away to remember who they are: Simon Tabor and Elena Abascal, a couple happily married and in love.
“The ILA called, didn’t they?” And Elena’s look is that special intimate look he hasn’t seen in a while, and there is a gentleness to her voice he wouldn’t have predicted, and he is so surprised by both, by his awareness of how long they have been absent, that he must forcibly drag air into his lungs, recognizing with a jolt that his morning hollowness is gone. Whatever evaporates during these nights has resurfaced, reshaping his insides much earlier than usual.
Elena steps closer and closer until the tips of her breasts touch his bare chest. Sparks light up his body; if he looked down, surely he would see fireflies encircling the two of them. Her pink tongue flicks across his mouth, and in a heartbeat she’s tugging at his lower lip, pressing down with increasing force, imprisoning his lip with her incisors, until he tastes blood. She steps back, grips his wide-awake cock, squeezes once, then leaves him there.
He hears the door to Isabel’s room opening, and finds himself speculating, not about why ravens were trying to devour him this morning, or if Elena still loves him, or if he can induce her back into bed—it’s been so long he can’t recall the last time—or what implications the conference will have on his career, but whether, against all the odds, Colombia might be the place where his sleep is restored.
SEVEN (#ulink_230a94a1-3ff5-57dd-b9e3-466069ac5030)
PHOEBE TABOR REPRESENTS MAJOR Los Angeles–based novelists, screenwriters, and playwrights, sculptors, painters, and video artists, musicians, bands, and composers. It’s her still-minor clients, those beginning to climb the vines of recognition and success, that she worries about most, because their expectations are consistently unrealistic. They walk into her office presuming fantastic offers are on the table, and she must return them to reality. And it’s always tough, because they have written the meaningful novel, the great script, the deep play, have created the phenomenal sculpture, the suite of inspired paintings, and it’s her obligation to tell them no one is biting, or the bite isn’t as big as they’d hoped, or the film director has rejected the neophyte composer’s score, or the gallery has rescinded its offer to mount the young artist’s new show. The facts are nearly as hard to deliver as to hear, but by the time Phoebe’s clients hug her, they understand where they are, yet still have faith in their futures, because she is a truth teller. Honesty is the pillar upon which she has built her law practice. Inside, past the heavy door with its stylish engraved nameplate, Phoebe Tabor, Esq., she commands a large retinue of lawyers, paralegals, and assistants, and insists that in all their firm activities, they heed her honest manner of transparently conducting business.
And yet recently, in her personal life, she has veered in the opposite direction, adopting subterfuge as her modus operandi, although calling it subterfuge is finely glossing the state of things.
At eight fifteen this Saturday morning, Phoebe, dressed in a black sundress and Grecian sandals, all of her limbs lightly tanned, stands at her closet mirror and arranges the hair her mother calls chestnut into a loose sexy braid. She assesses her image. Yes, she looks the part, will be viewed by her family as a woman in love.
She leans in close, fragmenting her pupils, and in those fragments she sees the unjustified complications she’s brought into her life. She pulls back from the mirror and her pupils reassemble, black surrounded by irises of darkest brown, eyes so falsely guileless she has to turn away from herself.
She rustles through closets and drawers, delving through sedimentary layers of acquisitions, flinging out her choices, and packing them into her small rolling bag—used for all her loverly weekends away: an old one-piece bathing suit for the laps she always forgets to swim, a new bikini for chaise sprawling and oiling up next to the big pool alongside her sister and sister-in-law, another summery dress purchased to wear with a man a few years back who pursued her hard for a date and when she at last gave in stood her up, tennis shoes and shorts and a tank top from her youth for taking a walk in the heat with one or some or all of her family members, a college-era tennis skirt and shirt in case her father wants to play, silky pajamas that hold memories of an enjoyable four-week romp during law school, and the totteringly high silver heels purchased last week for the gala tonight, along with the ice-blue gown, already in its hanging bag. In go the miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body lotion swiped from hotelsuite bathrooms these last six and a half months. Her lip-shaped cosmetics bag stowed inside the mesh netting.
She zips up the suitcase, sets it down on the floor. The tick-tick of the wheels on the wood puts Benny on notice. Until a moment ago, he was lounging on the unmade bed, but now lets out a quivering meow. He is her sweet affectionate thing, velvety fur hiding a small, solidly compact body. At night, he stretches out on top of her, his paws clinging to her neck, his purrs soothing her lonely heart.
Poor Benny. Her subterfuge has meant she’s deserted him for many three-day weekends since February, consigned to the care of her brother. Simon is responsible, showing up morning and night, filling Benny’s bowls, keeping his heating pad on the bed on high and cold water trickling from the bathroom sink faucet, playing with Benny for a few minutes before he heads to his own home, to his wife and children. When she returns from her weekends away, Benny is churlish, his outsized paws thumping when he lands on the kitchen counter, the dining room table, following Phoebe around, baying his disapproval at his most recent abandonment. When she is again in the bed that they share, Benny lets her know he’s forgiven her by arranging himself on her head, lashing her cheek with his sandpaper tongue. But Simon and family will be in Palm Springs, too, and Phoebe reluctantly asked a neighbor to care for Benny.
Raquel was thrilled when Phoebe knocked on Wednesday night. “I want a cat sososo much, but I haven’t pulled the trig. So how coolio. Yours. Def. No prob.”
Raquel is twenty-five to Phoebe’s thirty-eight, a secretarial temp slash aspiring actress slash aspiring model who might emote as well as the best but seems to Phoebe too short and curvy to model. And it irks Phoebe enormously that Raquel seems intent on believing they are nearly identical peas in a pod. This specious view of Raquel’s, and the fact that Raquel annoys her, has compelled Phoebe to ward off the young woman’s obvious desire to be friends. In her own defense, Phoebe would say that a friendship with any neighbor can too easily become an uncomfortable burden, and after an eventful workday, she’d rather not be accosted by anyone waving a bottle, saying, “Thought we might share this.” Only twice has Phoebe relented, and both times, watching Raquel swaying back to her own front door, Phoebe assessed the avenues of employment that would afford Raquel the ability to purchase such expensive wine. Ashamed by her assumptions, she has kept her distance from Raquel the last few months.
But Raquel was her easiest choice for cat-sitting Benny, and thinking about the young woman being alone in her house unescorted, peeking into her life, Phoebe is opening and closing cabinets, sizing her things up, determining what they say about her, if she needs to find hiding places.
She scoops out of her nightstand the few books of erotica, the vibrator, the hopeful, unopened box of condoms, and in the bathroom, the nearly full container of Percocet from her wisdom teeth removal last year, and stashes the loot at the bottom of her hamper, throws in the damp towel hanging over the shower door to be safe.
In her study, she slips folders containing client information into the desk drawer, along with her personal bills and checkbooks and bank and money management statements, and locks it with the key hidden beneath.
In the living room her brother calls empty and she calls minimalistic and replete with architectural details—rounded columns leading to the dining room, pristine nonworking fireplace with a mantel holding a single blue vase filled with bright orange gerbera daisies, massive window overlooking the street—she inspects, but aside from the suede sofa and chairs the color of tangerines, the three huge paintings on the white walls she accepted as payment for legal bills owed by painter clients, bookshelves categorically organized, high-tech sound system, and her objects of art displayed in the whitewashed nooks and crannies, there is nothing revealing.
As the coffee brews, she pulls out Benny’s dry cat food and cans of wet and places them on the kitchen counter. She wants to make it easy for Raquel, to keep her curtained in the kitchen, then a path straight out the front door.
She pours herself a first cup, hears her doorbell chime, and reluctantly pulls down a second cup.
“HI, FEEBS, REPORTING FOR duty,” is what Raquel says when she steps in. “I’m sososo jelly, where are you going? Tell me the deets.”
Phoebe hates that nickname to which she never responds, hates the way Raquel insists on shortening most everything. How much extra time does it take to say Phoebe, to say jealous, to say details? Is Raquel’s life so jam-packed she can’t waste a second, cares not a whit about being fully understood?
Phoebe gives her a big smile. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll give you some coffee, show you what you need to do.”
“Great, but first I want to hear about your hot and heavy weekends!”
What, Phoebe thinks, is Raquel is talking about?
“Please, please, spill the beans! I keep running into your gorgeous brother when he comes to feed Benny and he mentioned—Well, I got him to tell me why I’ve seen him so much. Because you have a new man in your life! Taking you away to cool places. Is he scrumptious?”
Oh. Raquel is talking about Aaron Green.
“Totally scrumptious,” Phoebe instantly says.
“So where to this weekend?”
“Home for a family celebration.”
“OMG, how exciting! Are you nervous? I’d be so nervous introducing my new man to family!”
Phoebe could correct Raquel’s mistaken impression, but says, instead, “No, I’m not nervous at all.”
“That’s when you know the love is real!” Raquel squeals.
And Phoebe, who doesn’t agree that’s the way you know, pours coffee into the cup on the counter, and points to the sugar bowl, and wishes seeing herself through Raquel’s eyes weren’t so inviting.
Phoebe would never confess to Raquel that the scrumptious man spiriting her away to cool places for long weekends, and whom she has just confirmed she’s taking home to Palm Springs, is fictitious.
She would never admit to Raquel that she created Aaron Green at midnight in late January, just home from the opening of a client’s new art exhibition, her family’s messages on her voicemail pissing her off, words throaty with exhausted hope that there might have been a man there who was “worth another look,” said Roma, Harry calling out, “Love is good, honey.” “Someone I would like,” Simon had said in his message, with Elena adding, “Just so he knows your true value,” and from Camille, “I hope he’s fuckable, because that’s always the point. No, I take that back, I don’t know what the point is,” and Phoebe, who had just hung up her short bronze dress and placed her high bronzed sandals in their box in the closet, stood nude in her bedroom.
She was tired of slicing open wedding invitations. From those she employs, selecting her dinner choices with angry checkmarks, writing the identical sweet comment on the RSVP cards about her excitement in participating in the joyful couple’s bountiful happiness, and from friends whose first marriages cratered—weddings she also attended—but their luck had held and allowed them to expunge past erroneous choices and move forward into another future: Please join us in an intimate celebration of our finding absolute true love—
From her mid- to late twenties, Phoebe was first in her seat at the monthly brunch with her band of girls, Sunday afternoons of sangria and silly talk about what their futures might hold. One by one, those girls turned into women when they became wives and mothers, delighted their lives had come together so effortlessly.
“You’re gorgeous and brilliant and your turn’s coming,” they said to her, and when Phoebe’s turn never did come, they peppered her with questions: Did she really want to marry, have a child, make room in her industrious life for others?
Disbelieving when she said, “Professional success isn’t the sum total of me, it’s not all that I want, but I don’t seem to be having any luck.”
Her friends, her friends, would say, “Well, if you really want it, as you say you do, then—,” that then so forbidding, undefinable, completely elusive, as if they held the secret and were unwilling to share, as if their attainment of the marital, the maternal, the pronoun replacements—from I to we and then to us—resulted in their crowning, their elevation, while she remained on the ground, assumed to be lacking the requisite nurturing abilities that would give rise to love and marriage and motherhood.
All day, every day, Phoebe nurtures everyone, her clients, her associates, her support staff, attending their opening nights, their launches, their engagement parties and weddings, and when dancing is required, she dances as if delighted to be there—what better proof is there that she possesses the necessary talents for success in her personal life? And yet she hasn’t attained love, marriage, motherhood, the poles of the true shelter she seeks, with her wished-for family, a solid place against inclement weather, toasty inside, living each day together, making plans for the future.
As full as she has made her life, as large as it often is, that she might never again feel crazy in love, never feel her child growing inside, that she might spend the rest of her years alone—it is incalculable sadness, bottomless grief, wide and swollen rivers of self-pity. What is she supposed to do with the pulsing love in her heart, the love she has to give, if husband and baby never appear?
Raquel is still chattering, and Phoebe hears her say, “Really, that’s how it works, you only introduce a real love to the family. Right?”
“Right,” Phoebe immediately says.
The art opening had happened; the client was real, an ageless sprite named Zabi, with her magenta lipstick and Turkish slippers, her enormous fired-metal pieces hanging off the walls, like devices to protect the soft innards of some forgotten race of people less strong than sun-fried Los Angelenos. Zabi introduced Phoebe as her lawyerly god, and Phoebe had smiled, feeling her white teeth perfectly strung in her mouth, and all the time she was scanning the crowd, wishing for just one man who might make her laugh, who would know instinctively how to metaphorically strip her to her core. But there had been nobody. Or rather, there had been many, including attractive men who smiled at her, but none had taken even a half step in her direction.
Driving home, she’d thought about how she insists her clients identify their professional aims, and the personal problems that might hamper their achievement, and she took stock of herself. She was beautiful—an acknowledgment, rather than an assertion of vanity; she had an excellent brain, and a big heart, so why couldn’t she achieve her personal aims? What was missing?
