Chapter 20
Patrick
Friday morning there is an envelope on my desk.
She left it there while I was on a call, the way she always does when she wants to leave something without having to interact.
Her handwriting on the front: Erick. Inside, I already know, is the next installment of the Rex story, the dinosaur narrative she’s been writing with him in, slipped in with the inter-office mail like a classified document from a parallel universe where my son and my assistant have an ongoing creative correspondence that I am technically peripheral to.
I haven’t opened it. I don’t open his mail.
I look at it for longer than is reasonable and then I put it face-down on the corner of my desk and I go back to the Paris contract.
The mind, I am discovering, is not a reliable instrument when deprived of sleep and given too much time to run.
It constructs scenarios with no basis in evidence.
It told me, on Thursday morning, that she would come find me.
That she would walk into my office with that expression she gets when she’s about to say something she’s been holding onto, and she would explain Wednesday, not because she owed me an explanation but because she would want me to know.
Because that’s what people do when they want more than the terms they’ve set.
She didn’t come find me. Not Thursday. Not Friday morning. And I sat with that and examined what I felt about it and what I felt was something I am not going to name because naming it gives it a shape and I don’t want it to have a shape.
My mother calls at one-fifteen.
Sarah’s parents are coming at two to collect Erick for the weekend.
They live in Greenwich, civilized, courteous arrangement, once a month, Erick goes to them for two nights and comes back having been fed things I don’t keep in the apartment and having watched things I wouldn’t choose.
He loves it. He comes back talking about Grandpa’s garden and the dog next door and the way Grandma makes pancakes, and I listen to all of it and I am grateful they exist and I keep my guilt somewhere they can’t see it, which is the most I can offer them and which they have, over three years, learned to accept.
My mother wants to be there to say goodbye to Erick before he leaves.
This is how she puts it. What she means is she wants to assess the situation, which lately has expanded to include any information she can gather about my assistant, because Erick mentioned Elena’s name to her and my mother’s threat-assessment system engaged immediately.
“He drew her a picture,” she tells me. “He says you might ask her if she wants to be his mom.”
“Yeah, he has been telling me he wants a mom, figures.”
I took a mother away from him. That’s the part I carry. And now he’s decided he wants Elena, which would be easier to manage if I didn’t want that too. But she doesn’t want us. She told me exactly what this was from the start, and the last thing I need is my mother rubbing my face in it.
The correspondence between them doesn’t make any of this easier.
“Is there something going on between you and this woman?” she asks. Direct. She has never been one for circling.
“I wish,” I say.
A silence.
“Patrick.”
“I’ve told you before. Women like that don’t have relationships with men like you without an agenda.”
“Women like what?”
A pause in which she selects her words. “Young. Attractive. Without much to her name. I’m not saying she’s a bad person. I’m saying you’re an easy target and Erick would be caught in the middle of it.”
“I’m aware of what’s at stake.”
“Then act like it. I don’t want to watch that boy get attached to someone who sees a wallet where his father is standing.”
The thing is, she’s wrong about that. Elena has shown no interest in what I have.
None. She made the terms and they had nothing to do with money and she has held to them with a precision that makes it very clear what she wants from me, which is limited and specific and entirely physical.
My mother thinks the only reason a woman like Elena would want me is for what I can provide, and the fact that Elena clearly doesn’t want that is supposed to be reassuring.
It isn’t. It leaves me with nothing she’s interested in.
“I can’t tell Erick to stop,” I say. “She’s earned whatever he feels for her. That’s not something I get to take away from him.”
“Patrick—”
“I’ll call you this weekend.”
I put the phone down.
I look at the envelope for another moment and then I put it in my bag so I can give it to Erick, and I go back to the contract. I don’t think about what my mother said because my mother is wrong about Elena and I am not in the habit of entertaining wrong assessments, even from people who love me.
At five o’clock, Elena leaves without saying goodbye.
I hear the elevator. I register her absence, the particular way the floor settles when she’s gone, the specific quality of silence that exists when it’s just me up here, which I know too well and which tonight feels different. Heavier. More like something was removed than something ended naturally.
She has said goodbye every day since she started. It’s nothing, two words, but it’s been there, every single day, a small constant I’ve stopped noticing because it was always there.
I noticed its absence immediately.
I sit at my desk and I look at the city and I think: she’s angry.
That’s fair. I’ve been cold and careful and I know she felt it, I could see her cataloguing it the way she catalogues everything she’s trying not to react to.
The slight over-focus on the screen, the chin that comes up a fraction when she’s deciding not to say something.
The version of me that agreed to the terms she set has no standing to complain about any of that.
The other version of me is standing at the window of an empty office at six p.m. feeling the full radius of what I have done to myself.
8:01 PM
The house without Erick is a different place. Quieter, larger. Maria has gone home, the kitchen is clean, and the only thing brightening the room is Erick's drawings on the fridge.
I pour a drink and I stand at the kitchen counter letting myself look, finally, at the shape of this thing.
I like her. I like her so much it hurts. That’s the blunt fact, the one I’ve been stepping around with careful precision I hired someone to do a job and ended up with someone I can’t stop watching think.
I thought I could manage the distance between what I had and what I wanted. I have been wrong about that for weeks and I have been pretending I wasn’t because pretending was the only available option. The same way I have been pretending, with considerable success, that I am fine for three years.
I’m not fine.
I don’t know what I am. Somewhere between too far in and not far enough, standing in my kitchen on a Friday night with Erick at his grandparents’, an envelope of dinosaur drawings in my bag and a woman who left my floor today without a word.
She could be anywhere in this city right now doing anything, and I have no idea what that thing was in her calendar that said Love—
I think about Alister, who has been telling me for years to go somewhere that isn’t here. Take the weekend, go to the Hamptons, stop treating your own life like a work problem.
I haven’t gone to the Hamptons house in three years.
It’s Sarah’s, in every way that matters, her books still on the shelves, her specific arrangement of the kitchen, the garden she planted and never saw finish growing.
I’ve kept the place because getting rid of it felt like one erasure too many.
I’ve stayed away because walking into it felt like a verdict.
Tonight I decide I’m going.
Not because I’m ready. Because I’m tired of organizing my life around the things I’m not ready for.
I leave at six in the morning, which is earlier than necessary, but I haven’t slept in any useful way and the apartment has started feeling like a place where I keep my furniture and my guilt, so I get in the car and I drive.
I don’t call David. I drive myself, which I rarely do anymore. The road in the early morning is mine and quiet, I have exactly what I asked for, time with my thoughts, and my thoughts are not behaving.
They are telling me, with increasing urgency, that I am an idiot.
That I found someone extraordinary and I made an agreement that protects me from her and now I am driving to a house full of a dead woman’s things to prove to myself that I can handle it, and the whole architecture of this: the distance, the terms, the careful management, was all designed to avoid exactly the kind of want I am currently drowning in.
I built the wall. I put Erick’s name on it.
I called it protection and it was, partly, but it was also cowardice, and I have known that for weeks and I have continued anyway because continuing felt survivable and changing felt like falling.
The water is somewhere to my right. The traffic has thinned. The light is the particular gray-white of early morning on the island.
I pass a service station, slow down, pull over.
I sit in the car in the parking lot of a service station on the Long Island Expressway at half past seven on a Saturday morning.
I take my phone out of my pocket. I look at her name in the contacts and think: I’m not ready.
I don’t know how to do this. I think: she doesn’t want more, and the rational thing is to keep driving, walk into that house, come out the other side, deal with my feelings about Elena like a grown man who has his life in order.
(Me): Can I see you?
I hesitate, stare at it longer than I should, then hit send.
The three dots appear almost immediately. Then:
(Elena): Yes.
Something in my chest loosens, a tension I hadn’t even registered until now.
(Me): Send me your address. I can be there in two hours.
I sit in the parking lot for a moment longer.
The early traffic moves past. Someone goes into the service station and comes out with coffee.
A dog in the back of a station wagon watches me through the glass with the steady, unimpressed look of an animal that has seen many humans make complicated decisions at highway rest stops.
I put the car in gear and I turn around.
I don’t know what I’m going to say to her. I don’t have a plan, which is an unusual condition for me and one I’ve been actively avoiding because plans have edges and edges mean I’ve committed to something and I am not in the habit of committing to things I can’t execute with precision.
But I’m done driving away from the things I want.
That, at least, I’m sure of.