Chapter 7
I’ve been patient
I said I was sorry
I’ve been a jerk but it would help if you acknowledged your own part in this
Texts from Jack came multiple times a day, buzzing Emily’s back pocket as she tidied the studio, shopped for groceries, and dropped the kids off at their private school, avoiding the other moms, who probably already knew about Jack and Emily’s separation.
Jack’s texts were more error-free than most people’s.
He always used spell-check after dictation; many times she had watched, her chest tight with loving compassion, as he corrected texts so that no one would see traces of his dyslexia.
Even when another partner at his hedge fund sent messages that made Jack throw his phone against a wall, he would pick up the phone, brush it off, and craft a careful response.
He used to ask Emily to check his outgoing messages and emails, but that had been earlier in their marriage, before the one time that Emily had offered before being asked and was told, “What makes you think I need your help?”
Emily’s phone buzzed again.
I love you
I miss you
Em, please
Come home
It’s been a month. Aren’t you tired of living in that little shithole
I want to see the kids
You can’t keep me from my children
Don’t ignore me
You are my wife
You are my everything
My heart is always on my sleeve for you
How can you throw our life away
I bet your happy now
I’m alone and sad just like you wanted
Are the kids ok
I miss them
They need there father
Can I see them this weekend
Can I see them next weekend
Call me
Call me
Drop them off at our house Saturday morning at 10 am or my lawyer will fucking make you
When Connor was born, he had trouble nursing.
He latched badly, and Emily’s nipples cracked and bled.
He didn’t gain much weight during those first weeks.
Jack weighed him every day in a gold-trimmed porcelain cake pan balanced on a baking scale.
Connor’s pediatrician blamed Emily’s milk flow and told her to pump after every feeding to boost her supply.
“That’s eight times a day,” Emily said, stunned, close to panic.
“Every three hours.” She had already tried pumping, which required at least another half hour to get a few milliliters of milk.
Pumping hurt even more than breastfeeding. “I can’t.”
The pediatrician said, “Don’t you want your baby to thrive?”
Emily suggested formula to Jack.
“But milk is best,” he said.
“If we bottle-fed him, you could take a turn.”
“I’m already holding down the fort, Em. I have to be able to work, and to work I need sleep. We can’t both be out of commission. Otherwise, I can’t take care of you.”
Emily’s breasts were rocks, her nipples points of fire. She didn’t think she’d had more than two consecutive hours of sleep. “What about one bottle of formula during the night? We could hire a night nurse.”
Jack—bewildered, disappointed, yet with the expression of someone trying to be gentle—said, “I thought you wanted to be a mother.”
Connor was always too skinny, from his infancy to when he was a toddler, stick-legged like a lamb.
He was little different as a ten-year-old sitting on the studio floor, body hunched and thin.
He slowly ate pasta while his sister, five years younger yet weighing as much as him, asked for more.
“I miss Daddy,” Stella said. “What is he eating? Where is he being?”
“He’s at home,” Connor said.
“I miss home. I’m bored of sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor. I’m bored with this old place. It was fun but now it’s boring. It’s not like camping. You said it was like camping but it’s not.”
“I miss him, too,” Connor said. When Emily brought their empty plates to the sink, he followed her, silent and anxious. He touched her elbow and said, “Is it my fault?”
The first contraction of his birth had made Emily seize Jack’s arm. She told Jack that she was frightened. He brushed hair from her sweaty brow and told her not to be. They had the best doctor, the best hospital. Everything was going to be fine. She would have a safe delivery.
No, that wasn’t the problem. Panic rolled over her flesh. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t do it. Another contraction stole her breath. When the pain lessened, she said, ashamed, “I don’t know how to be a good mother.”
He had heard this worry before and reassured her again. He said that he knew how she had been raised and it wasn’t going to be like that, not with their baby. Emily was not her mother. “You will love our baby so much,” he said. “Trust me. You will do anything for him.”
Connor was born and Jack’s promise came true.
It was true when she heard Connor’s first cry, true when he was given to her, small and warm.
It was true now as he looked up at her in the studio’s kitchen.
“No,” she said, and hugged him, wishing that he were an infant again so she could hold his entire body and make him feel the safety she had seen on his face when he slept in her arms. “None of this is your fault.”
She didn’t want the children to be with Jack.
But she also didn’t want Connor to believe that he was the source of the problem.
She had to make a choice. There were no good choices.
She waited until Connor and Stella fell asleep.
In the darkness, she texted Jack and said that Saturday morning would be fine.
Let me tell you about New York in the fall, she imagined writing to Gen after she dropped off the kids with Jack, who waited for her to come inside and, when she didn’t, said, “Let’s be adults about this, Em.
” He said this in front of the children, who had leapt at him, hugging whichever limb was closest. Emily wanted everything to be normal for Connor and Stella, so she came inside the house.
She could smell freshly baked banana bread.
The kids did, too. They hurtled down the hall toward the kitchen.
“Stay,” Jack said to Emily, voice soft. “Please.”
It was strange to be home yet not be home. It felt like she wasn’t really there, as though she had become a flat image of herself, painted onto one of the transparency sheets used with overhead projectors in high school, the sheer copy of her face cast upon the walls of her foyer, upon Jack’s face.
I told him I would pick the kids up tonight, Emily wrote to Gen in her mind. Then I shut the door behind me. I walked south. Orange leaves fanned out on the sidewalk. A ginkgo dripped yellow.
I didn’t say goodbye to Connor and Stella because it felt like I had cut my heart out of my chest. How do you speak after that?
I walked all the way downtown. I passed delis with their flowers lined up outside in buckets.
I watched a man talk into his cellphone and remembered how, in college, when cellphones became somewhat common but not very, it was unnerving to see someone walk alone, talking to the air.
For a second, I’d wonder if the person was crazy.
Now, when everyone uses their phone to optimize everything, and a walk means time to make calls, it’s rarer to see someone walk in silence like I’m doing, and I only appear to be doing that, since inside I am talking, and I am talking with you.
This is different from the beginning of freshman year at college, when I would write real paper letters filled with my new life.
There is a museum of glass flowers here on campus.
I went to Walden Pond. I am learning Latin.
I am better at Greek. I miss you, I would write.
When will you be here, when will I see you?
I folded the pages, I stamped the thick envelopes.
Now you are unreachable. You’re not the sort of person whose address can be found in the phone book, even if phone books still existed. I have seen you in magazines. On television. I stared at you—how you had changed, how you had remained the same.
At the end of freshman year, for months after you left, I wrote letters that I stacked like a mason, one on top of the other, my anger an invisible mortar.
I had no intention of sending them. I would keep them for myself.
Why should you get to know what they contained?
Even the ordinary things, like how one day I hated coffee.
It tasted like burnt wood. All of a sudden.
I never drank it again. I wrote that down, but I mailed nothing.
Did I say anger? I meant hurt. But it was a plan, anyway: the pencil, the paper, the hoard of words I refused to share.
Now I don’t have any plans. I don’t know what I am doing. I don’t know what to do.
Washington Square isn’t far from the studio.
My feet hurt. But I don’t want to stop walking.
If I do, I will think about Connor and Stella eating banana bread.
But it’s just for the day. I will see them tonight.
I pass through Washington Square’s arch and watch the park’s dusty brown squirrels.
Connor carries almonds for them in his pockets.
Once, a squirrel touched his knee with its paw.
I left the park and entered my new building.
I dumped my keys on the studio floor and when my phone buzzed with a text from Jack, I sank down next to my keys and closed my hot eyes, fists pressed against them.
C+S want to stay the weekend, Jack had texted.
I’ll bring them to school Monday. We are making mini burgers! Come join us.
I nearly called him. Instead, I called Jocelyn.
“Emily, calm down,” she said. “Be reasonable. He hasn’t seen his kids in a month. You can survive a weekend without them. Unless you do want to go home.”
“I can’t.”
“Then come to my place. I’m having a party. A fundraiser. It will distract you.” Her fundraisers for charity are legendary, attended by celebrities invited to make the party more exciting for donors. “Put on a dress. Put on some lipstick. Pull yourself together.”
I should have known. I should have asked about the guest list. I should have guessed that when I entered the parlor, more than eleven years since we last spoke, fifteen years since we last touched, I would look straight through the crowd and see you.