Authors: Anna Quindlen
“We decided on Sunday night to split,” he said, mumbling so that his words were barely intelligible.
“You and Meghan?”
“Well, me, really. I did, Bridge. I’m so sorry. It’s just—I don’t know, there’s really nothing there anymore. I mean, it’s not like a marriage. It’s not even like a friendship. I don’t come home and say, Hey, honey, I’m working on this big deal and I have this kid working on it with me and he’s good but he keeps making mistakes and, by the way, I ran into Ed Lawrence from college today, remember him, he works for the Justice Department now and he has a kid at Cornell. I don’t sit in front of the TV and watch the news with my wife and say, Man, that scumbag, I hope they fry him, or get up in the morning and read the papers and say, Hey, Meg, look, they’re closing down the overpass to the highway, that’s going to kill us when we leave for Connecticut on Friday nights. Because we don’t go to Connecticut anymore, we’re way too busy, and when I’m having breakfast Meghan’s already gone and all I see is the coffee mug to prove she’s even been there and at night she’s sleeping with that eye mask on and the only time I see her at dinner we’re with some other couple at Le Bernardin or at a dinner party where she’s at one table and I’m at another and sometimes I just look at her and I think, That’s not my wife, that’s not that woman I used to swing in the hammock with or read to while she drove the car. When’s the last time she drove a car, Bridge? I look at her at some dinner party with people I don’t like in an apartment that looks like every other apartment in New York, and I think, Damn, that’s Meghan Fitzmaurice.”
This was the longest comment on anything Evan had made since he gave the Class Day speech at Amherst. It was followed by silence, or what passes for silence in a neighborhood in which at least one car alarm is always going off.
“That’s why she clobbered Ben Greenstreet Monday morning,” I said softly.
“Yeah. I mean, I think she would have clobbered him anyhow. But that’s why she clobbered him in the particular way she did.”
Outside I could hear some woman yelling, the way women have yelled since time began, “You get your ass in here. Now! Don’t make me come over there!” Oddly enough, it didn’t really fill the silence.
“You’ve been married twenty-two years,” I said.
He nodded again. “I want a normal life,” he said.
“I am coming out there,” yelled the voice from the back.
“Don’t you dare say that to me,” I said. And suddenly I understood what that poor schlub Greenstreet had faced. The anger started at my feet and moved up like a pitcher filling. Maybe this was what a hot flash would be like. I’d know soon enough.
“Don’t you dare say that to me. Normal life? Jesus Christ, don’t you dare. I love you, Ev, but she’s my sister and you knew what she was and what she was like when you first met her. If you didn’t want that, the time to back out was twenty-two years ago, not now. Not with a life and a history and a kid, for Christ’s sake. What about Leo?” What about me, I almost said.
“Leo’s at college. We see him five times a year. When he wasn’t there it made it even worse. We had nothing to talk about.”
“Oh, what is this, empty-nest syndrome? Am I going to read about this in the
Times
next week, the empty-nest syndrome for guys? All the more reason to stick around. This is chapter two. Or three. Or whatever.”
“You have no idea what it’s like.”
“Oh, please.” Then I stopped. I’m not that slow. “Oh, wait.” The heat my anger was radiating had become so strong that I felt a trickle of sweat run down my side beneath my sweater. “Who is she, Ev?”
“Oh, don’t start that. That’s all Meghan could say. I just told you, it’s the pace of it, like we’re on some hamster wheel, like none of it’s real. There’s no there there, Bridge. We’re never alone. We’re never relaxed. Leo’s gone. This is more of a conversation, this one I’m having with you, than I’ve had with Meghan in years. It’s not even because of what Meghan does, although God knows that’s hard to live with—Hey, Ev, saw the wife with the pope today. Hey, Ev, wanna grab some dinner, see Meghan’s in Bangladesh—but half of those guys live this way, too. They don’t even know their wives. They talk about the kids or they don’t talk at all. I just don’t want to do it anymore.”
I leaned in close so our heads were almost touching. “Who is she?” I whispered. It was quiet out in the front room. Tequila was listening so hard it was practically aerobic.
“I feel like it’s the invasion of the body snatchers, like one night while we were asleep these people took over our lives, this woman who never sleeps, who can’t go to the corner without someone taking her picture, who hasn’t been inside a grocery store in years. And then there’s me, some sort of work automaton, who has the best skis and the best bike and the best tennis racket and gets to use each of them maybe once a year because I’m either at the office or I’m on a plane or I’m at some damn business dinner or I’m in the health club at the Four Seasons, and half the time I can’t remember which Four Seasons I’m in, Prague looks the same as Dallas, as much as I see of either one. And like a year ago we were in a car on the way to some screening or something and I said, Let’s just stop this. Let’s just kick back and enjoy the rest of our lives. We’ve got the money. Let’s take the time. You know what she said to me? She said, Buy yourself a red Porsche.”
It sounded like Meghan.
“Who is she?” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know why I thought you’d get it. I thought maybe you could convince her that this isn’t about that.”
“Ev,” I said in a whisper. “It’s always about that. When one of the women here comes in and says her man broke the TV and then left, he’s gone to some other woman. When one of your partners leaves his wife, he’s found another one just waiting to happen. When Ben Greenstreet split, it was for someone else. That’s what guys do.”
“And I always thought Meghan was the cynic and you were the idealist.”
“You know and I know that Meghan is about as cynical as a baby. It’s the conventional wisdom that says otherwise. And you’re supposed to know a whole helluva lot more than conventional wisdom about Meghan.”
“It’s just too hard,” he said.
“Try harder.”
“I can’t.” He stood up. His pale pink shirt was dark from perspiration. Betrayal is aerobic, too. “She’s going to really need you, Bridget. I know you think it’s the other way around. But you’re the only person who keeps her sane. And normal. Or relatively normal.”
“If it’s someone we know, I will kill you, Evan. I swear to God I will kill you with a steak knife.”
“I just came here to see if we can stay friends. That’s why I came in person. We’ve been family for so long.”
“You’re the one who seems to have forgotten that.”
“I just don’t want you to hate me.”
“I can’t promise that, Evan. I can’t. I can’t even talk to you anymore. Just give me Harriet’s number so I can call my sister and talk to her.”
“I don’t have it,” he said. “I’ll have my secretary try to find it and give it to you.” And then he was gone. For a moment I wanted to follow and watch him get in the car. I felt as though I would never see him again. But of course I would: across the aisle at Leo’s graduation from Amherst, in a crowded living room when we met the family of the girl Leo would someday marry. Somehow the thought was much worse than never seeing him again. It would have been better that he disappear than that he become a vaguely familiar face.
“Sometimes I can’t believe she’s interested in me,” he’d told me once when we were having breakfast in the shabby apartment they rented one summer in Boston. It was the summer Meghan was an intern at the network affiliate there, the summer that would become the fat paragraph in every profile, and already she had started to shine like a copper ornament in the garden of everyday.
“I’m not sure it’s going to work out,” Meghan had said about Evan that same summer, and then, when she saw the look on my face, “Oh, God, Bridget, just stop. I can’t stay with a guy because you want a big brother!”
Evan had three older sisters, and he never seemed to mind having acquired overnight a younger one. If Meghan was working for the summer as an intern in Boston and he was taking a course at Harvard, they enrolled me in an art history enrichment program and found a place with a sleep sofa in the living room. If the two of them were going on a ski trip with college friends, they insisted I skied as well as I walked. (That was true, I guess; for years I could barely get from the front door to the curb without falling down. When I was four my mother nicknamed me Clumsy, until my father apparently told her to stop because it was just country clubby enough to stick. Or at least that’s what Meghan says.) When I graduated from college, Meghan was stuck on assignment at a coal mine collapse in Kentucky, but Evan sat with my aunt and uncle. He gave me a watch for a gift; he had picked it out himself. I’ve worn it ever since. I’m a creature of habit.
“Tequila,” I called, “call Evan’s office and ask his secretary for the number of a friend of Meghan’s named Harriet. The last name is Kraft with a
K,
I think, but it might be with a
C.
Or maybe even two
f
’s—Kraff. And call Meghan’s assistant at the office and get the number of her most recent cell phone. I just really need to track Meghan down.”
“I bet everybody in the world is trying to find your sister, baby,” she said, “but Tequila gonna make it happen.” She came to the door. She was wearing stretch leggings so tight you could see her cellulite, and a sweater with a koala bear on the front, probably handed down from some charity grab bag. She’d spent most of the weekend having her hair braided. If she’d had wrinkles, she would have had a face-lift and a hairdo all in one, but Tequila was only thirty-five, although her oldest child was twenty.
“He taking a hike?” she said.
“Apparently.”
“He got a girlfriend?”
“He says no.”
Tequila let out a “huh” that sounded like the noise a weight lifter makes when he cleans and jerks two hundred pounds. “Men,” she said. “Can’t live with them. I’m gonna find your sister, baby, wherever she is.”
She’s under the porch, I thought.
“I
T WILL ALL
be over by tomorrow,” I muttered to myself as I turned onto West Sixty-ninth Street, trying to convince myself. “It will all be over by tomorrow.” A couple passed me, a forty-three-year-old woman talking to herself on the street, and didn’t even look twice. When I first moved to the city, I figured that people who talked to themselves on the street were either actors going over their lines or crazy people. Now that there were these tiny cell phone headsets, every third person on Broadway was barking orders or chortling wildly. The whole town appeared to be peopled by unmedicated schizophrenics.
“It will all be over by tomorrow,” I muttered as I turned the corner onto the block where I lived, passing the newsstand and the sweet-faced Indian man who smiled at me every evening. “Meg’s Name Mud” one of the tabloid headlines read on the front page. Thank God they didn’t know the real story: Meghan and Marriage, Over and Out. Tequila had finally somehow gotten Harriet’s number, and I had gotten Harriet’s machine. Harriet, according to her slightly breathy message, was in Kenya at a conference on malaria. “Meghan!” I yelled after the beep. “Meghan! Pick up right now!”
Meg Mum on Marriage, and everything else. It was Tuesday evening, less than two days since the Greenstreet interview, three since the dinner at the Waldorf, and yet I felt that a crack in the sidewalk had opened and swallowed my life as I knew it. I would not have been surprised to find my apartment building in flames, my furniture on the street, the subways stopped, the park gone. Instead I saw Irving Lefkowitz swinging down the street toward me, and the blanket of dread lifted. He had a spring in his step, a song in his heart, and a bottle of middling California chardonnay, proving that even the least kempt among us are not immune to the wine impulse.
“Talking to yourself,” he said with a grin.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” he said. “You live here. I like it here. What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“We can talk when we get inside,” I hissed. My sister once told me that you never know where a reporter might be hiding.
The good thing is that my apartment is on the top floor of a five-story building, with a view of carefully landscaped town-house yards. The bad thing is that it’s a walk-up. More than once Irving, who is twenty-four years older than I am, has predicted a coronary and an ambulance trip to Roosevelt Hospital on the third-floor landing. Then he gets inside, bends at the waist with his hands on his knees, breathes deeply a couple of times, and is all ready for a drink and a cigar.
“Look, you’re overreacting to this,” he said, putting the wine in the fridge and pulling out a beer. “Everybody’s overreacting to this. It’s got a day or two more in the news cycle, and then it’s over. It’ll follow your sister around for a year or two, and then before you know it people will be saying, Yeah, what’d she say?”
“Did you actually see the show?”
“Nah, you know I can’t watch that crap. I slept on the office couch and took a shower in the commissioner’s bathroom. Then I went out for a jumper on the Brooklyn Bridge, which turned out to be nothing.”
“They needed you for a jumper on the bridge?” I took his beer and took a sip. The cat sat on the couch just behind Irving’s left shoulder. They say cats can always sense those who hate them. Irving took the beer back, put his hand under the cat’s behind, and flipped her onto the floor.
“Whatever,” he said enigmatically.
Irving is the deputy commissioner for public information for the New York City Police Department. This is a position that is traditionally held by well-connected former reporters, what the rank-and-file in the department like to call “lame-ass hand jobs.” But for some reason the mayor appointed a serious hard-guy cop as commissioner, and the commissioner appointed Irving, who is frequently called in the tabloids “a cop’s cop.” Much of this is because he looks, shirtless, as though he has a third nipple just below the one on the left. This is the scar of a bullet hole. Legend has it that, spewing blood and clearly on his way to a splendid police funeral, Irving nevertheless managed to kill the guy who shot him, who turned out to be a serial rapist who had used his gun in a fashion that was apparently impossible for him to use his penis. For this act of bravery, Irving won the department’s highest honor and was christened by the
Post
“The True Blue Jew.”