Two
TWO
TWO NIGHTS AGO.
A text at one-thirty in the morning. Then another and another.
Judd was snoring beside her and the phone just kept pinging and pinging.
She knew better than to look at his phone, what awful secrets could be hidden there, but she also believed he wouldn’t dare fuck around anymore.
The last time had been so terrible—how could he do that again?
Who would choose to go through that again?
Also she really wanted to sleep. Which were all reasons not to pick up the phone.
But: Roxy was breathing deeply at the foot of the bed. The pings were going to wake her up, or the cats.
“Judd,” she shook him. “Judd, your phone.”
Ping ping ping.
“Judd—” But nothing. Like the dead, this one. So finally—what if it was Ferry?—she picked up the phone and her reading glasses.
She didn’t scream or bite her lip bloody like she had the last time. Instead, she rubbed her eye and brought the blue light of the phone closer to her face. Meret, the new hostess, naked as the day God made her and doing something extreme with her fingers and her labia.
Ping ping ping more photos.
She had amazing, enormous breasts, and now a finger in her mouth.
This, or something like it, had happened before (twice)— but that didn’t make it any easier.
First the hideous chill creeping from her hands to her heart. Then the fight-or-flight panic deep in her gut. She threw the phone so hard across the room that it cracked on the brick wall, cracked loudly, which of course didn’t wake Judd, but did wake Roxy, who let out a sharp bark.
Then she finally allowed herself a scream—a long high one, like she was being stabbed in the chest—and then she flipped on the lights, started grabbing clothes, his clothes, why should she go anywhere at one-thirty in the morning, and threw them into a Whole Foods tote bag that happened to be on their closet floor.
Underwear, socks, a stinky T-shirt, another stinky T-shirt, fuck him and his dirty laundry.
“Amy?”
A pair of running shoes. He would never step foot in this house again.
“Amy?”
Now Roxy was up and yelping madly. She jumped up onto the bed for Judd to comfort her because when Amy was in distress Roxy was in distress. “Amy, what’s happening?” Judd with a sixty-pound German shepherd in his arms.
“I saw your texts.”
“What texts?”
He sounded confused instead of worried.
“Your texts—”
“What texts?”
Was she wrong? Had she not seen what she had obviously seen? She picked up the phone from the other side of the room; the screen was spider-webbed with cracks but still functional. Meret’s naked body frozen in fractals.
“What the fuck?”
“Look at it,” she said.
“Jesus,” he whispered, scrolling.
“I didn’t look at the history to see what you’d sent her first.”
“Nothing,” he said. “You can look. I’ve never sent her anything.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Amy, I—”
“I need you to leave, Judd.”
“Please. I mean it. I never sent her—I’ve never sent her a thing. I swear to God. Amy, you have to believe me, I don’t know what the fuck she thinks—maybe she thinks this is funny? Or it’s for someone else? I don’t know why she’s sending this to me, I really don’t—”
Amy sat down on the floor. She was still holding the bag of his clothes. Maybe she should leave? If he was going to make this hard?
“I’m begging you not to make this hard in the middle of the night. I’m really tired, Judd. Please.”
“I swear, listen—” He got down off the bed so he could look her in the eye, but she refused to return his gaze. “Ame, I know you don’t believe me, you don’t have to believe me, but I swear to you there’s nothing—”
She forced herself then to look at him. “I am exhausted. I am truly and totally exhausted. The least you can do for me is just take your stuff and go. Go to her house. Please.”
“I don’t—Amy, I—”
“Please. If you can’t do anything else for me.”
He didn’t move or say anything. She didn’t either, kept her eyes trained to the floor.
A silent standoff. On the street a group of drunks sang Billy Joel. Anthony works in the grocery store.
“Please go.”
There was nothing more embarrassing than watching a huge man in his underwear try to find some clothing on the floor.
She went to the bathroom, washed her face for full minutes.
When she looked at herself, she was relieved to find that her eyes weren’t red, she hadn’t broken out in hives. She would survive this one, too.
“Amy,” he said, behind her, his beautiful face in the mirror. Those cheekbones. “I have no idea how to make you believe me, but nothing ever—I mean nothing— I would never do that again to you. To us.”
“Leave,” she said.
“Please—”
Roxy was whining. She hated disruptions, bad energy. “You’re upsetting the dog,” she said, and he closed his eyes for a moment, but just a moment, and then he picked up the Whole Foods bag and left the bedroom. A few moments later she heard the front door open and shut.
He had taken his cracked phone with him.
Amy sat back on her bed, her face stinging from the retinol scrub she had just vigorously applied, and also from tears, because now that he was gone she would let herself cry.
Because she had to figure out how to get through the night.
And also, how to unsee Meret, her perfect tits, her shaved vulva, the whole of her human anatomy posing in what looked like a shitty bathroom, probably somewhere in the bowels of Brooklyn or maybe Queens.
Kids couldn’t afford the East Village anymore.
Roxy put her head on Amy’s lap and looked up at her miserably, like she was the one who had just had her heart ripped out.
Fine, it was fine, she’d be fine. Wasn’t she always?
Roxy too. Amy stroked the dog’s side and tried to match her breathing, but it was impossible.
Her heart was still racing. Fight or flight, although she’d never really allowed herself to do either.
But after a while, her heart calmed, and Roxy settled in her spot at the foot of the bed and soon the room filled with her gentle snores.
Amy knew it was hopeless to wish the same for herself, even with the help of Xanax.
She picked up the laptop from her bedside table and turned off her phone so if he called she wouldn’t be tempted to answer, and she turned to her animals.
In her twenties it had been drugs and in her thirties the occasional cigarette and a whole lot of wine and now, in her forties, Xanax and animals.
She scrolled through the Dodo, trying to focus on videos of puppy rescues and unexpected wildlife encounters.
A baby goat befriended by a lonely donkey.
Rescued bears frolicking in a North Dakota sanctuary.
A stray kitten nursing on the teat of a terrier whose puppies had been stillborn—a little disturbing, frankly, but sweet in its way, and the terrier clearly loved nursing the kitten, and watching that strange nurturing, the kitten rubbing its paws into the terrier’s black fur, the terrier’s little maw crinkling and relaxing, the kitten falling asleep in the curve of the terrier’s belly—Amy almost felt the acid in her gut give way.
An hour of this, and then another: an elephant pulled out of the mud, a Bernese mountain dog who wouldn’t cross the street without an adorable struggle, an Australian cockatoo who sang alongside his owner, a litter of kittens found under a trailer, an elderly man finally realizing his dream of adopting a puppy.
An injured bald eagle rehabbed and released.
An injured wild horse rehabbed and released.
Ukrainian zoo animals evacuated to Poland.
Outside, the sun rising. No news from Judd.
She hoped, despite herself, despite everything, he’d found somewhere decent to sleep.
A woman raising a baby squirrel. After she returned the squirrel to the wild, the woman sat in a beautiful chair in her beautiful house and sobbed.
Judd could have gone to Meret’s apartment, but she doubted he would: Meret probably had roommates and he wouldn’t want to look desperate, showing up with a Whole Foods bag of smelly laundry.
Judd had always maintained a very specific image at work, very in charge, friendly but distant, demanding, a perfectionist. Spot checks in the kitchen.
Spot checks behind the bar. A curated playlist, for which he paid a consultant $23,000.
On her first day at Le Coin he’d barely talked to her, just asked if she could come back tomorrow, if she needed regular work.
Sure, she said. Bring your paperwork so I can pay you, he said, and again she said sure, then stood there, waiting for the attention she was sure would come her way (he was straight, wasn’t he?).
She didn’t know then that he wouldn’t give her that kind of power in his restaurant, he wouldn’t let anyone know—much less a line cook off the street—that she was worth more than the five minutes of time he had for her.
That this was part of his whole power thing, how he made the women who worked at Le Coin want and fear him.
She stared at him, at his ice wolf eyes, and waited for the pick-up she thought was coming.
When it didn’t come she felt almost giddy.
A game! She came back the next morning with makeup on, and still that day, nothing.
Instead he ordered her around the kitchen, not screaming like some hack chef on TV but sometimes looking at one of her plates, shaking his head, silently handing it back to her like she should know what she did wrong.
“Taste it,” he’d say. “Taste.” While she went weak in the knees.