Chapter 2
“It’s a studio apartment,” Emily told Jocelyn.
Jocelyn set down her latte. “A studio, ” she repeated.
Plush curtains partially shielded their table from the rest of the tearoom, whose center was marked by a pyramid skylight so luminous it was as though the chunk of glass had been mined from the sun.
The waiter set three desserts in front of Jocelyn: a lemon tart with meringue, an opera cake dressed in ganache, and a crème caramel.
Jocelyn had been unable to decide what to order and so had chosen several options. She took a bite of opera cake.
“Jack controls our finances,” Emily said. “I have a separate account that he puts money into but it isn’t much.”
Jocelyn shook her head in dismay, tucking a black lock of hair behind her ear. “You need a lawyer.”
“It’s a separation, not a divorce.” It was important not to escalate. Escalation never worked because Jack’s capacity to escalate was greater than hers. She had mentioned a lawyer and he had said, “Fine, get a lawyer, and I’ll get a lawyer. I have more money, so we’ll see who wins.”
Jocelyn rested her narrow hand on Emily’s.
Jocelyn wore a white linen shift that accentuated her flawless, light brown skin.
There was nothing ostentatious about her except the diamonds, yet they, too, possessed a simplicity, one that mesmerized, their size stopping the mind and setting it to rest as they silently explained the restful futility of trying to guess their worth.
“New York law is fifty-fifty. You get half of everything, unless you signed a prenup.”
Emily had signed a prenup. She had been twenty-one and full of optimism.
The freshly printed document was warm, like bread out of an oven.
“I don’t want to do this,” Jack had said sheepishly, “but my parents insist. They say the terms are fair, if you really love me.” She did. Divorce seemed impossible.
“You get nothing?” said Jocelyn. “Even mobsters leave their wives something.” She reached for her phone.
“Regardless of a prenup, he needs to provide for the children. I’m sending you the name and number of a lawyer.
Use it.” If Emily had remained true to the ambitions of her youth and had gone to law school after college, she might have been able to represent herself in a divorce, or have colleagues advise her.
She would have had her own income. What was she supposed to do with a degree in Classics?
Her elite education was useless. Her mother would laugh.
But it had made sense when she became pregnant with Connor to forget about law school.
“You don’t really want to become a lawyer,” Jack said—and she didn’t.
“Classics is your passion. Law would just be to pay the bills. You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
” Jack wrote a check that vanquished her undergraduate debt.
He framed her diploma and hung it on the wall.
When guests came, he asked Emily to translate its Latin for them.
He liked to explain to people that while everyone who graduated from Harvard received a diploma in Latin, not all of them could understand, as Emily did, what the document actually said.
“A studio!” said Jocelyn. “Where do the kids sleep?”
“It’s furnished. There’s a bed. We share.”
Jocelyn took a bite of crème caramel and frowned, setting down her spoon with a dissatisfied clink . “All this over a little dunking in the pool?”
“It’s not just the pool.”
“I’ve seen this happen before. It’s always the same. A wife decides she’s done and she has her reasons, but by the time she’s proven her point it’s too late. He’ll find someone like you but younger and as accommodating as you used to be. And you will be alone.”
“I’ll have Connor and Stella.”
“You think he’s going to let you keep them? Even if he does, they’ll grow up—sooner than you think. Listen, Jack adores you. He never looks at another woman. It’s only you.”
Emily knew. The knowledge sat inside her like an extra bone: hard and jutting at a wrong angle.
She looked away from Jocelyn, who assumed that adoration was always a good thing.
Emily had believed that, too, at the beginning of her marriage.
“He gets angry when he thinks his level of love isn’t returned. ”
“So would I!”
“He can be manipulative.”
“Marriage is full of manipulation. I manipulate David all the time. He insisted we have our gardener plant sunflowers. Sunflowers! So common. I told him, ‘You’re right! Let’s have some yellow in our palette.
How about zinnias?’ David was very proud of himself, and since zinnias are annuals they’ll be dead after the first frost, so everyone wins.
Are you telling me that you never manipulate Jack? ”
“I can’t anymore.”
“Maybe you can work this separation to your advantage by reminding Jack of what he stands to lose. Just don’t go too far, because if you divorce, someone will snap him up and you’ll be penniless.
Honey, wait! I have an idea. My apartment!
” Jocelyn owned a two-bedroom apartment in the Village that her parents, who lived in Beijing, had given her when she turned eighteen and moved to New York to attend Columbia.
She hadn’t lived there in years. She and David lived in a West Village town house decorated in elements that matched Jocelyn’s looks: creamy marble, abundant light, a sculpted oak staircase with black risers and a black banister that curved, at the bottom, into such a sensuously smooth newel that to let go of it was like forgetting a nice dream.
“My renters broke the lease. Never again am I renting to college students. Why don’t you stay there? ”
Shame thickened in Emily’s throat. She couldn’t afford Jocelyn’s apartment.
“For free, of course,” Jocelyn said, which made her generosity worse for Emily, because she needed a godsend and Jocelyn didn’t.
She wished time weren’t a straight line, that it could be bent, amended.
Why can’t we go back and make different choices?
Why hadn’t she foreseen the troubled course of her marriage?
Jack had seemed to be the best thing that could have happened to her.
His proposal in Italy was a moment of great happiness.
To go back and say no to him would undo her current life, unmake her children, her very self.
But at least she could have chosen to have a career.
As soon as that thought occurred, though, Emily recognized that a career would have been no solution. How much sooner would her marriage have soured, if she had been more equal to Jack financially and professionally, and therefore, a threat?
She couldn’t untangle the past and the present and what could have been. She told Jocelyn that she had already signed a year’s lease on the studio.
“Emily, this is not La Bohème ! Are you going to sing in a garret until you die of consumption? People like us don’t live in studio apartments.”
She had never been like Jocelyn, only masquerading as someone like her. It had worked, for a while. It had been nice, until it wasn’t.
“Fine,” Jocelyn said. “My renters left behind a twin mattress. Accept that, please. For Connor.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
The waiter came with the bill. Emily looked at Jocelyn’s half-eaten cakes and put down her card.
“Don’t be absurd,” Jocelyn said.
“I can afford cake.”
“This studio life of yours isn’t forever. Go home to him, or call that lawyer and get what’s yours.”
“I’m grateful to you.”
Jocelyn gave her a smile. “It’s nothing.”
The mattress was heavier than Emily had thought.
She and Connor carried it from the apartment while Stella, who walked beside them, enjoyed the stares of passersby.
Jocelyn’s apartment was only six blocks from the studio, a distance that had seemed manageable at first. Her arms ached.
Connor got underneath his end and ported it like a canoe.
“I’m proud of you,” she told him. She couldn’t see his face.
A few blocks from the studio, as they were walking past the brass triangle whose angles were no longer than a ruler and marked the smallest piece of private property in New York City, a man in gym clothes offered to help.
Emily’s relief when he lifted Connor’s end from the boy’s shoulders was as welcome as stepping into a fresh lake on a hot day.
He helped her carry it to the building’s lobby.
Connor was furious. “I wanted to help.”
The man gave Emily an awkward smile, plugged in his headphones, and left.
“You did help,” she told Connor.
“I wanted to help the whole way.”
“But you didn’t need to.”
Stella sat on the lobby bench, rhythmically swinging her white sandals as Connor shouted at Emily.
In high school, she liked to run. She wasn’t very fast but good enough to make the track team.
She imagined wings pinned to her ankles: the talaria of Mercury, messenger of the gods.
Sometimes that helped to propel her past the finish line.
Emily had a second-place ribbon tacked to her bulletin board.
The early hour of track practice pleased her: the cold and the brittle grass. A white sky. The coach’s whistle.
Track tryouts were in October, with not long to go before the sky dumped snow everywhere and practice moved indoors.
Emily was a senior, her place on the team secure.
She watched a few juniors line up. Gen Hall pushed one foot, defiantly, right up to the line.
She wasn’t wearing proper sneakers. They were ragged Converse, the toe of one shoe open like a mouth.
The coach blew his whistle again. It became instantly evident that Gen was faster than the other juniors, faster than Emily could ever be, faster than the entire varsity team. Gen flew.
“How long do we have to be here?” Stella snuggled up against Emily under the sheet.
From his mattress on the floor of the dim studio, Connor eyed her. He wanted to know, too.
“Until I figure things out.”
“What if,” Stella said, “we got lost in a big snowstorm?”
“I would save you.”
“What if you couldn’t?”
“I would.”
Connor said, “You can’t do everything.”
“Okay, if I die in the blizzard, eat me until help comes.” She was frustrated by their worry that she couldn’t protect them, even though this was her worry as well. “I’ll make sure I die before you starve.”
“Ew, no!” Stella said.
“I want you to.” Emily didn’t like her stern tone but couldn’t help it.
“I wouldn’t,” Stella said. “I would sleep next to you in the snow.”
Emily held Connor’s gaze. “Promise me you would. Make Stella eat me, too.”
“Okay,” Connor said softly. “I promise.” His eyes glimmered, and Emily was instantly sorry.
She wanted to say so, except an apology might make her seem even more incapable.
“It wouldn’t come to that,” she said, her voice gentle.
“I would find a snowbank against a break of pines. I would peel bark from a tree to make a shovel and dig into the pile of snow until I hollowed out a little snow house.”
“Like an igloo?” said Stella.
“Yes. We would slide inside and keep each other warm. I’ll stay awake while you sleep. I’ll keep watch so that the falling snow doesn’t cover the opening. When the snow stops, I’ll drape my scarf over the lowest pine branch to mark where you are and I will go for help.”
Stella said, “I don’t want you to go.”
“Then I’ll stay and make a fire.”
“You have no matches, Mommy.”
“I’ll find a dry stick and a dry flat piece of wood. I’ll rub the stick against the hearthboard until there is enough friction to create a spark.”
“Hearthboard?”
“The flat piece of wood.”
“I don’t think this will work.”
“I read about it in a book.”
“Um, yeah, that’s why it won’t work.”
“I’ll pull feathers from my down jacket for tinder and touch them to the ember. I’ll add dry pine needles to the tiny fire, then sticks.”
“It could maybe work,” Connor said quietly from the floor.
Encouraged, Emily described how she would hunt for them, and it began not to matter whether she could do the thing that she planned.
The plan was enough. For each question, she had an answer until the children’s questions were less critique and more collaboration, and the three of them lived in the snowy woods together.
She was describing the arrival of spring when Stella fell asleep.
“Spring means bears,” whispered Connor.
“I see a bear,” Emily said. “It lifts its nose and scents the air.” Connor was half afraid, she knew. “The bear won’t attack.”
“Why?”
“We are stinky after all this time. The bear smells no soap. No shampoo. No perfume. We don’t smell human. The bear thinks, That is a bear smell: a deep stench . It lumbers away.”
“Is that the end?”
“Do you want it to be the end? It’s spring. We can find our way back to the path.”
“And go home?”
Emily said, “Maybe not yet.”
The city light from the window fell away from Connor’s face as he turned onto his side and into shadow. “It’s not so bad here.”
Emily closed her eyes. Before sleep, when imagination started to slip from control and she could no longer be responsible for what she thought, was no longer building a story but letting one build inside her, Emily saw snow: a field of it.
There were no woods. No bear. No children.
There was only Emily, and even Emily didn’t seem fully there.
She looked down and saw no hands, no trace of herself.
A dark blur moved across the horizon. It was a runner, feet so fast that they didn’t dent the snow.
The runner was a swift blade that split white ground from white sky. The runner was Gen.