Chapter 4
T he eight days that Oona spent with her children in France felt like a longer vacation to all three of them.
Each day had its own special quality, its discoveries and joys, funny moments, and laughter.
It was the best time she had spent with her children in years, and they thrived on her undivided attention.
She realized now that without their father present, both of her children were more relaxed, and that Charles had competed subtly for her attention whenever they were together.
She wondered if he was jealous of them, or just more narcissistic than she had recognized.
It certainly looked that way now.
He had chosen a path and a life that was good for him, with total disregard for how it affected anyone else.
Will was still shaken to his core by his father’s revelations.
It was startling enough that Charles had discovered he was gay, but running off to South America with his lover gave them no time to adjust or have support from him whatsoever.
And he contacted them far less than Oona would have expected.
It was sink or swim for them now, his way or no way.
He was doing what he wanted, but hardly ever checked in with them about their lives.
It was as though suddenly he felt young and unencumbered again, with no responsibilities at all.
And he was counting on Oona, as he always had, to clean up the debris he had left behind, and cover for him with their children.
She didn’t want them any more hurt than they already were, but she was no longer inclined to repair his damage and smooth things over.
He needed to do that himself.
He paid even less attention to how Oona was feeling now.
He sent her the occasional email that sounded drunk and disjointed, sharing with her that he loved his new life of freedom from a regular work schedule, and the burdens of marriage and fatherhood, and then complaining that Roberto’s apartment was small and his cleaning woman had stolen money from Charles, and that he missed having Oona to run his life, as a kind of social secretary and majordomo.
He talked about what a smooth and efficient house she ran, despite her own career, and said she could give Roberto lessons of how it should be done.
Roberto wanted to go out every night, go to gay bars and party, and Charles wanted to stay home.
It was the difference between thirty-four and fifty-nine, which Charles didn’t seem to understand, and didn’t want to.
He seemed to be trying to turn Oona into some kind of mother figure, or sister, or confidant he could complain to, while forgetting how completely he had upended her life and absolved himself of any responsibility for it.
He sounded like a spoiled young wife, and not a grown man.
More and more she was realizing the tasks and burdens she had shouldered, so he didn’t have to.
They both came home from work at night, Charles usually after dinner with clients, or so he claimed, but he would then expect Oona to console him for whatever had gone wrong in his day, and offer creative solutions—even when her day had been harder than his, and all she wanted to do was lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and let her mind go blank for a while, not solve his work problems as well as her own.
They had slipped into a routine of camaraderie, and as it turned out, he was having an affair with someone else.
She doubted now that he had been out with clients every night and played golf on Saturdays.
She suspected now that a good many of those nights had been spent with Roberto, and not with clients at all.
He had turned out to be a liar and a cheat as well as confused about his own identity, and irresponsible.
There was a lot he would have to do to rebuild his relationship with his children, and Oona wasn’t at all sure that he was going to make the effort to do it, although she didn’t say it to Will or Meghan.
They would have to discover for themselves what kind of man their father was.
As for herself, she had the distinct impression that he was trying to keep her on the back burner in case things didn’t work out with Roberto.
He was young and from a different world, and she wondered if at some point Charles would tell her that he had decided he wasn’t gay and would want to come back to her because it was easy, and then lie to her all over again.
He had shattered all her illusions about him and their marriage.
Charles’s relationship with Roberto had gone on for a year in secret and he had lied to her the entire time.
Bailing on his job and his marriage was convenient for him now.
If one day he wanted to do an about-face, she suspected that he might want her to be part of that plan, and she was no longer a willing recruit, and nor could she see herself enlisting again.
She was surprised by how happy she was without him.
More than she had expected to be.
She had her children to keep her company, but soon she would be alone.
She wasn’t looking forward to it.
Being in France gave her some distance from it all, and she felt less abandoned by him, the way she had in the apartment in New York.
These were brand-new surroundings in a different place, and she felt liberated.
It was an unfamiliar feeling for her, and she liked it.
She could understand what he must be feeling with Roberto.
Aside from the passion, it was a whole new life they were each embarking on.
For Oona, the trip to France was the best thing that had happened to her in years.
On Will, Heather, and Meghan’s last night, they went to a well-known restaurant in a nearby village.
People came from Paris to have dinner there, and it was only a ten-minute drive for them.
The restaurant specialized in seafood, and they all agreed that it was one of the best fish dinners that they had ever eaten.
Will had selected a very nice wine.
He had become interested in wine since living in California, and frequently went to the Napa Valley to try new ones.
He had tried a number of French wines on the trip, and he had discovered some new favorites.
Oona had been impressed by his choices, and the knowledge he had acquired.
After dinner, they went home and sat by the fire in the living room, enjoying the atmosphere of the house.
“I think this is one of the best trips we ever had,”
Will complimented her.
He had had a great time with his mother and sister, and exploring the area with Heather, who always had some new fact to share, or a chateau or a church she thought they should see, and he had enjoyed them all.
“We should try to take a trip together this summer.
It doesn’t have to be as fancy as this.
We could go to Tahoe for a few days, or Santa Barbara, or the Napa Valley.”
And then he remembered that his sister would be away for a year, and it wouldn’t be as much fun without her.
A year seemed like such a long time, and it did to Oona too.
But Meghan was thrilled to be going.
Everything about Africa fascinated her.
The animals, the game preserves, the wilderness, the people, and the good she could do there.
They stayed up late talking, and Oona hated to think that it was her last night with them for God knew how long.
It gave her a little panicky feeling, knowing how far away they’d be, but she was planning to go to California to visit Will at some point in the summer, and he had promised to come to New York if he could, but whenever it was, she knew it wouldn’t be soon, and she couldn’t put her arms around them on FaceTime or Skype.
She knew she would miss them terribly when they left the next day.
It was two in the morning when they all finally retired to their bedrooms.
They had to leave by six A .
M .
to catch their flights to San Francisco and Nairobi, which was the first leg of Meghan’s trip to Kakuma, in the northwest of Kenya.
They had a long day of travel ahead of them, Meghan even more than Will.
Oona made breakfast for them before they left and stood in the driveway as they drove away with the car service.
Meghan and Heather had become good friends by then, and Will was sorry that his sister would be gone for so long.
They all promised to text Oona when they arrived at their respective destinations so she’d know they got there safely.
She worried about them even though they were grown up now.
They didn’t seem so grown up to her, and the three of them felt closer than ever before, especially since their father had left their inner circle and betrayed them.
It had created a tighter bond between them, and Heather had been a warm, easy addition.
The house seemed deadly quiet and sad when Oona came back into it after they left.
It was early and she went back to bed.
She slept for another two hours and then woke and read the American newspapers online.
She saw that the coronavirus was worsening all over the world.
In France a group of twenty-five hundred evangelists had congregated in the last week, and more than half had contracted the virus.
The word “pandemic”
was being used repeatedly.
Experts were predicting dire numbers and opinions were varied and contradictory about what to do about it.
It was unsettling reading about how quickly it was spreading.
But since there was nothing she could do, she decided not to read about it constantly.
It was just too upsetting.
Hopefully it would turn around soon, although there were apparently thousands dead of the virus in China.
She decided not to let it ruin the second half of her vacation, which would already be very different without Will and Meghan, and even Heather.
They had added so much joy to the trip, and Oona had to fight waves of loneliness when they were gone.
It was inevitable since she was alone.
She had to get used to it.
Oona rented a small car for the two weeks after they left, and drove around the countryside and neighboring villages on her own.
She didn’t go to most restaurants alone, but there were plenty of little bistros where she could go for lunch, where no one would pay any attention to a woman by herself, and she enjoyed watching people.
She went back to one of the brocantes , which were like giant yard sales, where she’d gone with her children, and found a few more things.
It was like a treasure hunt again.
She went for long walks, and went riding with one of the stable hands, who showed her the best trails to follow, and made sure that nothing dangerous happened to her.
It was a healthy, peaceful two weeks, and it felt wonderful to be in France.
She kept track of the progress of the virus on the news every day or two, and it was worsening everywhere.
It seemed hard to believe that it was getting out of control so rapidly.
It was like an unseen enemy.
In the quiet, bucolic country scene where everything seemed so peaceful, a potential killer was lurking.
It was two days before she was due to leave when the United States and all of Europe reacted to what was now clearly a pandemic, involving every country in the world.
The United States called all Americans home, their spouses even if foreign, and holders of green cards, permanent resident cards for foreigners, and closed their borders to everyone else.
Europe immediately did the same, closing the Schengen borders—the outer borders of Europe—to anyone outside them, although travel between countries within Europe was allowed.
It was a massive recall for everyone to go home.
Americans would continue to be allowed to go home at any time, but no one else would be allowed to enter the U.S.
after the next thirty-six hours.
France closed schools and universities, banned public gatherings, closed all nonessential public places, including all restaurants, cafés, stores, and hair salons, and announced mandatory home lockdown.
Only grocery stores and pharmacies remained open.
The catch-22 was that travel, particularly air travel, was said to be extremely dangerous.
Oona was scheduled to go home anyway, but getting there sounded risky with the Covid numbers rising daily, and airports crowded with people in long lines, waiting up to eight hours to complete the process of reentry into the United States.
She was grateful that Will and Heather had gotten back to San Francisco safely, without incident.
And Meghan had arrived in Nairobi and traveled from there to Kakuma, Kenya, with no problem.
She had texted her mother as soon as she arrived and was thrilled with her job at the refugee camp.
She was still in training for another two weeks but was already responsible for a group of ten little girls, as the assistant to their main caretaker, and she would have a group of her own, when she completed training.
Meanwhile, Oona did not know what to do about her own departure, when France announced the total lockdown.
Everything was due to be shut down, offices were to operate remotely, with all employees working from home on their computers, while parents, working from home, were to homeschool their kids until further notice, with teachers conducting remote classes online.
The entire country was coming to a dead stop, by order of the French president, whereas the United States was being fragmented by state and city with governors and mayors making the decisions about whether to lock down or not, and to what degree, with a vast divergence and divisiveness from city to city and state to state.
Oona didn’t know who to talk to about making the decision to travel or not.
Normally, she would have discussed something that serious with Charles, but it didn’t feel right to call him.
Legally, he was still her husband, but in fact he wasn’t, he was Roberto’s, or his boyfriend at the very least.
She called Will and he agreed that travel was dangerous, and he wasn’t keen on the idea of her flying home, potentially with a plane full of people with Covid and air circulating throughout the plane.
Most flights were being canceled.
Will said that Google had sent them home to work remotely, and their offices were closed.
The entire staff was working from their homes.
San Francisco was completely shutting down, with only essential workers, those involved in food or medical care, allowed to work at all.
No hairdressers, gardeners, restaurants, stores, or anyone nonessential was allowed to work.
Will said that everyone had been told to stay home, although New York was still much more open, and the virus was wreaking havoc there.
Oona had also sent a text to Meghan asking her to call.
She had to go into Kakuma town to get to a phone, and she told her mother that as there were almost no cases in Africa so far, she felt safer there and she was staying.
All her fellow workers had come to that same decision.
Staying where they were seemed safer, and all the workers were needed at the refugee camp.
And by the time Meghan called her mother, all air travel to and from Kakuma had been canceled indefinitely due to Covid.
So Meghan had no way out.
“What if you can’t get home later, if the situation gets worse?”
Oona asked her.
“It won’t, Mom.
Americans can always go back to the U.S.
If I could get to Nairobi and find a flight, they wouldn’t stop us from coming home, but it’s too dangerous for me to fly back right now, and there are no flights from here to Nairobi.
I’m much safer here.
There are plenty of other health risks and diseases here but not Covid.
I’ve been vaccinated for all of them.
You’re at much higher risk flying home from France than I am here, in Africa.”
By then, Oona had seen the long lines going through immigration.
Reentering the United States, the lines were said to take four to eight hours, with people who might or might not be sick standing in crowded conditions, pressed against each other with no distancing.
It didn’t look appealing, compared to her peaceful country haven near Milly-la-Forêt outside Paris.
Not knowing who else to call, Oona called Gail, who was always a sensible woman, not given to hysteria or exaggeration.
“How is it there?”
Oona asked her.
“I don’t know really.
The number of new cases is staggering here, and deaths.
The ICUs are jammed.
They closed the office, the whole building is empty, and we’re all going to work from home.
Are you coming back?”
Gail asked her.
“I haven’t decided.
I don’t even know if I have an option.
I’m not in my own home, I’m in a rented house, and my contract ends the day after tomorrow.
I have no idea if I can extend my stay, and all the hotels are closed.
I may have to fly home, but it’s scary as hell from what I’ve seen on TV.
This really feels like a war now, and they’re calling everyone back to their home countries.
It’s the unseen enemy.
It seems so peaceful here, but they’re shutting everything down, and Paris is completely locked down.
All of France is.
You can only leave your house with a permission paper, for food, for medical purposes, or to walk your dog.”
“Get a dog immediately,”
Gail advised her, and Oona laughed.
Gail always had a way of lightening the moment.
“I don’t know what to do,”
Oona said, worried, “whether to stay or make a run for it to get home.
The mobs in the airport look terrifying, and the plane could be dangerous too.”
She had no one to rush home to, no reason to go back, and if they were all working from home now, she could just as easily work with her computer in France, have Zoom meetings, and use FaceTime and Skype.
“Do you think the owners of the house would let you stay?”
Gail asked her.
“I can ask.
I don’t know if anyone else has rented it after I leave.
The owners can’t use it.
They can’t get into Europe from Hong Kong—unless they’re at one of their other homes in Europe.
According to the realtor, they hardly ever use this one, except to rent it out short-term, like to me.
It’s the wife’s plaything, and her husband thinks it’s too small.
They have a big family and an enormous staff who travel with them.”
“Have you had fun?”
Gail asked her, happy to hear from her.
It had been a stressful time in New York, worrying about catching the virus, and watching the numbers mount exponentially every day.
Gail was lonely in her apartment.
She liked going to work every day for social contact.
Oona knew she would be just as lonely on her own, without Charles or the children, and her housekeeper probably wouldn’t be able to come.
It was a lot more pleasant being in the country with the woods and the hills, walks she could take alone, and the horses to ride on sunny days.
Spring was starting to peek through the branches, although there was still occasional frost on the ground.
She could have gone to the house in the Hamptons, but it always depressed her except in summer.
It felt so bleak in winter, unlike France, and all the restaurants and shops would be closed in the Hamptons too.
Most of the United States was shutting down.
“It’s been wonderful,”
Oona said warmly to Gail.
“I had a great time with the kids.
They left two weeks ago.
Will is back in San Francisco, working from home—Google’s offices are closed too.
And Meghan loves her job in Africa.
She says it’s safer there than it is here.
They hardly have any cases—it hasn’t really gotten there yet.
I even enjoyed being here after they left.
I don’t feel lonely here.
It’s just peaceful and rural, an hour out of the city.
I’ve only gone into Paris a couple of times, but everything will be closed now, and we’ve been ordered to stay home.”
“If I were you, I’d try to stay.
Nothing’s happening here.
And it won’t make a difference if you do Zoom meetings from France or here, it’s all the same.
No one will care.
It doesn’t matter where you are.
And why should you take the risk of flying home with no one to come home to?”
As usual, Gail made sense, and after they hung up, Oona walked around the house, thinking about it.
No one was clamoring for her to go home, and her office was closed.
She called the realtor a few minutes later and explained the situation to her.
She understood perfectly, and said she’d contact the owners through their office in Hong Kong, if it was open.
The owners’ very efficient secretary would know where they were.
She called back the next morning, while Oona was looking at her suitcases, thinking she should start packing.
The idea of it depressed her and she didn’t want to leave.
She wondered if the owners would let her stay for a few more weeks.
She couldn’t afford a very lengthy stay at the price she was paying.
She thought the authorities would open the borders again in a few weeks.
They couldn’t keep the entire world shut down forever.
No economy could afford it, although this was a situation that had never been seen before, since the Spanish flu, a century before.
“I have good news,”
the realtor said as soon as Oona answered the phone.
The good news for Oona would be that she could stay a few weeks longer.
The bad news would be having to pay for it, at the price she was paying now.
“The owner is very sorry that you got stuck here.
They’re not locked down in Hong Kong yet, but the number of cases is increasing and they expect to be locked down soon too.
They can’t get into Europe now, even with their own plane, and they wouldn’t come here anyway.
They would probably go to their house in Gstaad, which is huge.
In any case, they’re very happy to let you stay as long as you want to.
They have no other rentals on the books, and because this is really a force majeure event, they won’t charge you rent.
You’re welcome to stay as their guest, until you can safely go back to the States.”
The realtor had been stunned by their offer, and so was Oona.
They were lovely people.
“Oh my God, that’s fantastic, and very generous of them.
Please thank them for me.
I’d be happy to pay something, if they’d prefer.”
“Honestly, Mrs.
Webster, they don’t need the money.
They hardly rent it out—I’m not sure why they even bother.
The secretary said they like the idea of someone staying here.
It keeps the staff working, if they’re allowed to now, and if not, it keeps the house occupied.
You’ve been a trouble-free tenant for the last month, and the secretary stressed that you’re welcome to stay as long as you need to.”
It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in years—they were just turning their home over to her and telling her to enjoy it.
She was suddenly a houseguest, not a tenant, which made her feel very special and spoiled.
It made the decision easy.
It wasn’t going to cost her a penny, and she felt happy and comfortable in the house.
As long as she was going to be in lockdown, better in France in the country than trapped in her empty, lonely apartment in New York.
She had seen a video of New York on CNN, and it had looked like a ghost town.
There wasn’t a soul in the streets, the city was under total lockdown, and the ICU wards were overloaded.
It didn’t make returning to New York seem appealing or like a good idea.
She called the head of her publishing division as soon as she hung up.
She was a senior vice president whom Oona reported to, the rare times she had to, about a major corporate decision that needed their endorsement.
Oona explained the situation and how dangerous it felt to travel home, and the senior VP agreed completely and told her to stay where she was.
She could join any Zoom meetings she needed to, and she was easy to reach by email, or her American cell.
The call was over in a minute, and Oona looked around with a grin when she hung up.
Having been in France for a month, it already felt like home.
She hadn’t brought a lot of clothes with her, but she had what she needed, and she didn’t need to dress up.
She could just wear a nice sweater whenever she had to do FaceTime or Zoom. She was all set, and she walked up the stairs with a proprietary feeling. She suddenly felt that they had given her the house as a gift, and in fact they had. She made a mental note to buy them a very nice present when she left, probably something from Hermès. They had a lot of it in the house. She’d have to go to Paris for it when they were deconfined. And in the meantime she would be there, all by herself. The idea of it sounded great to Oona. She put on a heavy jacket, since it was chilly out, and went on a walk to celebrate her good fortune, thanking her lucky stars and the owners, who were letting her stay. It was the first time in a long time that someone, a stranger in this case, had been so kind to her.
She spoke to Marie on her way out, who had already received a text informing her that Oona was staying, and Oona asked her if she was comfortable working during the lockdown, and the housekeeper said she was.
She agreed to come in for a half day every day, which was all Oona needed, to make her bed and clean the bathrooms and the kitchen.
And as soon as the lockdown was lifted, she would go back to full time, although Oona knew that she’d have to leave then and go back to New York.
But half days were fine with her.
She was all set.
She felt jubilant when she came back from her walk, knowing that La Belle Florence was hers for as long as she would be confined in France.
And it hardly felt like a confinement in a place as beautiful as that, with gardens and forest land where she could walk freely.
She started her Zoom meetings three days later, which was supposed to be her first day back in the office.
She began her workday at three P .
M ., which was nine A .
M .
in New York, and kept working and answering emails until eleven P .
M ., which was her normal eight-hour workday.
She sent Gail an email to let her know what she’d done and got a response from her within minutes.
“Welcome back,”
she wrote, joking with Oona.
The New York work schedule gave her the day free until three P .
M .
For her workday she wore a crisp white shirt, a nice sweater or one of the two jackets she had with her, and jeans, which no one could see on their screen, so she looked respectable on FaceTime or during Zoom meetings.
It was how everyone else was working too, from their homes, and it was reasonably efficient, although not quite as much as being in the office, but it would work for as long as they’d have to do it, which Oona assumed wouldn’t be for long.
She couldn’t imagine that the lockdown would last more than a few weeks.
She had dinner during the New York lunch hour, seven P .
M .
for her.
She propped her phone up on the counter in the kitchen, and several times had “lunch”
on FaceTime with Gail, which was dinner for her.
She gave her a tour around the house, and Gail was impressed by how beautiful it was.
“I’m not feeling sorry for you,”
Gail said ironically, “if that was the purpose of the tour.”
Oona had given her a glimpse of the grounds too, earlier in the day, and the first buds were beginning to appear in the garden, which would be a riot of color when they were in full bloom.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
Oona said, smiling.
She felt almost proprietary about it.
“No, it’s better than that.
It’s fabulous.
I’d be jealous if I didn’t like you so much.”
Gail grinned.
“Where’s Charles now, by the way? Is he back yet?”
“No,”
Oona said, “he’s still in Argentina, taking tango lessons probably.
I haven’t told him that I stayed.
I haven’t heard from him since the kids left,”
and she didn’t want to.
“The kids are both fine about my staying here.
They wanted me to.
It’s safer than New York.”
She wondered how Charles was experiencing Covid in Argentina but didn’t want to contact him and ask.
“Where you are is a hell of a lot prettier than New York.
Have you met any of your neighbors yet?”
Gail asked, and Oona shook her head.
The property was too big to have neighbors, and the only people she had seen locally were the people who ran the grocery store, the cheese shop, the wine shop, and the bookshop before it closed.
The only thing you could buy during the lockdown was food, or anything sold at the pharmacy.
The woman who ran the grocery store was chatty and spoke English, but no one else did.
She loved gossiping about the locals and said there was an American at the chateau now too, but she never saw him.
The employees at the chateau bought his groceries.
Oona was thinking of taking French lessons during her free hours before she started work every day.
As her office, she was using a small study that looked a little like Madame de Pompadour’s boudoir, and she switched to a library lined with antique books, which looked more businesslike and appropriate for a publisher of her stature, for her video meetings.
Oona was enjoying the time there more than ever, and as April approached, the weather was getting slightly warmer.
Some mornings she painted with paints she had ordered online, or she sat in the sunshine and read.
It was an extremely comfortable life.
In April the weather warmed up considerably, and she looked healthy and relaxed during her Zoom meetings.
Several people asked where she was, and she said she was in the country, and didn’t tell them she was in France, in a fabulous house.
They wouldn’t have taken her seriously if she had, or they would have been jealous and nasty to her.
Discretion seemed wiser.
She finally had an email from Charles in mid-April, six weeks after the kids had left, and a month after the lockdown began.
He called her on FaceTime, which she didn’t answer, and she returned the call on a normal line.
She had no desire to show him the house that he had missed out on because he left her for Roberto.
She didn’t want the intimacy of seeing his face, or having him see hers.
A normal phone call was enough.
“Where are you?”
he asked her when she called him back.
“I’ve been calling you everywhere, at the apartment, at your office, on your cell, in the Hamptons.”
“I must have been on another line when you called.
I’m working from home,”
she said.
“The office is closed.”
“Yours and everyone else’s.
The agency is closed too.
I think a couple of diehards are still going in, but not many.
Everyone is working remotely.”
“We are too,”
she confirmed.
“I’m actually working on our Christmas offerings now, to put in the catalogue.
I’m hoping to get some of our authors on the Times list, and trying to figure out our strongest authors against the holiday competition.”
Her books weren’t obvious holiday gifts since they were so literary, and had such a small, elite following.
“I know,”
he said quietly.
It was like talking to a stranger now.
She felt awkward with him, and she wondered what was happening in his life and didn’t want to ask.
“Are you in New York or the Hamptons?”
She hesitated before she answered.
“I’m still in France.
I didn’t leave.
I can work from here.
Everyone else is remote, so I decided to stay.”
“That must be costing you a fortune,”
he said, surprised.
“Actually not.
The owners consider the confinement force majeure and are letting me stay here for free.
They’re really nice people.”
There was a long silence then, and for a minute she thought they’d been disconnected, and then he spoke in a nostalgic tone.
“I miss you, Oona.”
He sounded serious and a little bit lost.
“Everything okay in B.A.?”
She tried to sound impersonal, not wanting to get in a long maudlin conversation with him about what had gone wrong in their marriage.
She wondered if he was happy with Roberto, but she didn’t want to know the answer.
He had chosen a path, and he was on it.
She had her life to live now, and he had his.
“Have you talked to the kids?”
she asked him.
He was quiet for a few seconds before he answered.
“I emailed Will a few days ago, he hasn’t answered.
He must be busy.”
That or still angry at his father.
“I heard from Meghan.
She loves her job, and Africa.”
“I know.”
“How is Paris?”
he asked her.
“I don’t know.
I haven’t been to the city since the lockdown.
I hear everything is shut down.”
They had been in lockdown for a month, and it had been extended for another month, with no sign of anything opening, but the days passed quickly.
She was often surprised by how much so.
With her work schedule, and a walk or some personal time before that, the days were flying by.
She had been in France for two months, and there was no sign of anything changing.
The prime minister spoke every two weeks to give them an update.
The number of new cases had come down, but the hospitals were still jammed and there was no talk of deconfinement yet.
It was autumn in Argentina, and Charles had been there for nearly four months.
They quickly ran out of things to say, and Oona cut the call short.
It made her uncomfortable talking to him.
He was an outsider now, part of her history, but not the present.
He said he’d call her again soon, and she hoped he wouldn’t.
She didn’t want to talk to him.
She intended to talk to a lawyer but hadn’t yet.
She was letting time pass—she was still in no hurry, and she and Charles were both out of the country.
The only link they had now were their children, who were adults, so there wasn’t much to talk about.
They would have to talk finances eventually, and division of property.
She’d been thinking about it lately, and dreading it, the painful conversation of who owned what and how to divide things up, and what to sell.
Other than that, there was a sameness to the days.
It was like Groundhog Day.
Every day was a repeat of the last one, and she had settled into a routine over the last month, and the borders were showing no sign of opening.
There was talk of deconfinement but nothing concrete yet.
Oona had heard from Gail that they were starting to let people go at Hargrove, replacing some of them with their counterparts at S&B, which had been expected, but since Oona and Gail weren’t in the office to see the new faces appear and the disappearance of old ones, they weren’t as aware of it as they would have been otherwise.
Oona had noticed some new faces at Zoom meetings, but she was never sure if they were replacements or additions.
She was counting on Gail for the gossip, but she didn’t know either.
Not going to the office made everyone feel disconnected.
On May first, when she went to the grocery store, Mme.
Bertheaud, the owner, handed Oona a sprig of lily of the valley and explained that it was traditional on the first of May to give people a little stem of the delicate fragrant flower for good luck.
Oona put it in a small vase when she got home.
She liked the tradition.
And the CEO of Hargrove, Martin Grass, called her right at the start of her workday and asked how she was holding up.
“Pretty well.
I’m still in France,”
she told him.
“There are worse places to be confined.”
He had called on a regular call, not Zoom or FaceTime, so she couldn’t see him.
They chatted for a few minutes about the extraordinary times in which they were living, and then he talked in circles about the changes that were happening as a result of the merger, and that were going to be happening in future.
None of it sounded very exciting, and then he got to the point of why he had called her.
“We made a difficult decision as part of the rollout of our new plans after the merger,”
he explained.
“It’s not one I’m happy with, but it wasn’t my decision.
When you get this big, it’s more about the bottom line, and the money boys call the shots.
Publishing is changing, and the pandemic has put some heavy demands on us, to minimize our losses.”
Oona waited to hear the rest, and it took him a few minutes to get there.
“We’ve always been very proud of your imprint, Oona.
It’s all about quality, not volume, but people aren’t buying literary work right now.
We have heavy competition from the streaming market, and people want shiny and new, they want easy to read, they don’t want to be deeply intellectual during the pandemic.
It’s all about escape and distraction.
We lose money on your imprint.
We expect to.
You don’t publish work like that during hard times, though.
During good times, we can afford it.
But right now, with all the independent bookstores closed, I just can’t justify it.
I’m afraid we are going to shut the imprint down and turn the page.
We need commercial fiction to compete with other publishers, not your list of literary authors.
These are fast-moving times and we have to move fast with them.”
“So you’re transferring me to contemporary fiction?”
she asked, sad to see the books she loved slip away into the past.
She loved the books her imprint published and was proud of their authors.
“That was the hardest part of the decision,”
Martin said to her.
“With the merger, we just have too many editors in commercial, contemporary fiction, and S&B has some really star editors in that category.
We’re bringing a number of them on board, which is bumping some of our people here out of their positions.
It’s a game of musical chairs now, and we just don’t have seats for everyone.
We’re prepared to be generous with you, Oona—you made a niche for yourself that has worked for more than twenty years, but now it just doesn’t, and I don’t have a spot for you in contemporary, which is what’s hot right now.
Most of those editors are a lot younger and don’t have your experience.
With the imprint gone, it’s not a fit with you anymore.”
As he said it, Oona understood what was happening.
“You’re firing me?”
Her voice was a squeak when she asked him.
“When this madness is over, I’m sure you will find something that works better for you at another house than anything we could offer you.
I’m really sorry, Oona.
We’re going to miss you terribly.
I wanted to let you know, in case you wanted to stay in France.
You don’t need to rush back now when the lockdown lifts.”
She mumbled a few banalities, and thanked him for letting her know.
He told her she was getting a four-month severance, which wasn’t overly generous, but aside from the money, which mattered to her, she was out of a job, and one that she had loved, effective immediately.
Her imprint had published wonderful books, even though they had a small audience and weren’t usually a commercial success.
She felt terrible for her authors, who would now have a hard time getting published.
But it was an antiquated arm of the business, a relic of the past, and so was she now.
After twenty-five years with Hargrove, she’d just been fired.
She felt foolish about starting to cry after they had hung up.
He’d wished her the very best, and told her to be careful and stay healthy, all very trite.
Twenty-five years of love and devotion had ended, just like her marriage.
Now out of a marriage and a job, she felt dazed as she sat at the desk in the little library.
All she had left were her kids, no husband and no job.
She was obsolete, washed up, finished, at forty-seven.
Her whole professional identity had been that quality imprint, which was suddenly irrelevant and out of style.
Hargrove was moving forward in a new direction, aggressively into the future with what people wanted now, and they wanted hot dogs and popcorn, not literary caviar or refinement.
Martin Grass said there was a place for it in academic publishing, but not mainstream trade publishing.
She felt almost as devastated as she had when Charles told her he was in love with Roberto.
All the things that made up her identity were dissolving around her.
She couldn’t stop crying when she hung up.
She wanted to call Charles and tell him, as she would have in the past, but it was too humiliating.
She had been fired.
She felt totally irrelevant suddenly.
She wanted to tell Gail, but she was too embarrassed, and afraid that they might be firing her too.
In the current situation of no one in the office, her coworkers wouldn’t see her leave the building or say goodbye.
She would just vanish off their Zoom screens and be replaced by new people, and they would wonder what had happened to her.
They would figure it out eventually but not quickly.
She should have known when Martin called her.
It was the death knell she hadn’t understood at first, just as she had been shocked by Charles’s announcement that he was leaving her for Roberto.
She had no Roberto, no replacement for Charles standing by, and she didn’t want one.
Now she had no job.
She felt like a giant zero, and suddenly it felt like a double loss, a double failure on her part.
No matter how nice or loyal or competent she had been, she couldn’t hang on to a husband or a job.
She felt as though she had nothing left except an apartment in New York and a house in the Hamptons, and she didn’t even know who would own them after a divorce or if she and Charles would sell them.
And she had two kids who were halfway around the world and would be ashamed of her for getting fired.
Compounded with her separation, the loss of her job felt enormous, and how could she find a new job from here? She was overwhelmed by a feeling of loss and failure, and panic.
Her world as she knew it lay in rubble at her feet.
As it turned out, the first of May wasn’t her lucky day after all.
She went upstairs to her bedroom and got into bed with her clothes on, and lay there until it got dark, feeling crushed.
The spring sunshine was not for her, it was for people with husbands and jobs, who had purpose in their lives, and she had none.
She had nothing to go home to, and no reason to go back to the States when they were deconfined.
She felt as though her life was over.
She didn’t bother to eat.
She lay in bed, mourning her life, until she finally fell asleep.
She had no idea what she was going to tell her kids or anyone else, or when or how.
When people asked what she did, all she could say was that she used to be an editor, and now she was nothing.