Chapter XIV
XIV
I wake up early the next morning and spend the next four hours in the kind of fugue state that only focused work can offer.
I was supposed to deliver photos from the tribute show yesterday, so now I’m in overdrive, uploading, sorting, and editing.
With the images blown up on my desktop, each face in the crowd is magnified, every grain and highlight thrown into clearer relief.
I can’t help but look for Reid. I don’t find him anywhere.
I’m done by ten, around when Emme ambles down to the kitchen in a worn-out Pixies T-shirt that drops down to her knees, a hand-me-down from her dad.
I glance at the oven clock. Reid and Gracie should be getting to the Met, I think.
The way we left things last night, I know that I need to be the one to reach out to him.
It was my temper—my fear—that flared in an act of .
. . I’m not sure what. Last night I would have said I was safeguarding something sacred, but why do I feel singed?
And why do I keep staring at my phone dumbly, as if a text from Reid will materialize out of thin air?
Why am I so scared to act on what I want, now that it’s within reach?
I leave my phone on the kitchen table and put on a pot of water for tea. I won’t let Emme have coffee yet, but she likes the ritual of drinking something hot in the morning.
Emme opens the French doors leading out to the garden, then settles into the stool across from me. I slide over her cup, heavy with honey. Distantly, I hear the telescopic whine of a siren, the staccato sparkle of birdsong.
She takes a sip. “I talked to Dad this morning. He called me.”
I raise my eyebrows. It’s probably not fair of me to be surprised that James actually stuck to our plan, but I can’t help myself.
“Oh yeah?”
“He apologized for not being able to take me to the show. One of the other attendings fell off his motorcycle and is out of commission for a few weeks, so he has to cover for him. He understands that this is a profoundly unfair reason, but apparently the entire hospital system would crumble without him there.” She rolls her eyes into her tea.
“You know, he’s kind of an asshole. Not to me, exactly, but like . . . in general.”
Which makes me feel like I’ve been stabbed in the gut with a thousand tiny needles. But this is what I wanted, isn’t it? For Emme to finally have a clear-eyed understanding of her father?
“Your dad’s not perfect—none of us are—but he’s not a bad person,” I say. I think it might be true.
“I’m starting to get why he was hard to be married to.”
I pause, trying to craft a diplomatic response.
“I knew your dad had to put his whole self into his patients to be the best surgeon he could. That’s what I signed up for when I married him—it’s something I admired about him. But you’re right, it wasn’t easy to be chosen second. It did make me feel lonely.”
But you know this, I think. My heart wrings inside my chest. He does the same thing to you.
She stirs her tea bag around in her smiley-face mug. “Do you think Reid would be easy to be married to?”
I let out a shocked laugh. This girl has never not kept me on my toes. “I’m not sure,” I say, acting like I’ve never considered it.
“Gracie wants him to get married again, because she’s worried about what’ll happen to him when she goes to college.
She thinks he uses her and his work as a way to escape, and when she’s gone, he’ll only have that one thing, which is unwise, considering how erratic his business is.
Grace says even an Oscar isn’t enough to guarantee your long-term success.
And what would he be left with if his work fails? ”
I have to actively work to keep my eyes from going wide. This is a lot of information to take in, and my daughter is not the right person to process it with. I try to sidestep the Reid of it all. “Have you ever thought about that? Me or Dad eventually being with someone else?”
“Sometimes.” She shrugs. “Honestly, my first reaction is that it feels weird.”
“Well, you did tell me that you didn’t want my heart to get stomped on again.”
She looks at me thoughtfully. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
My gaze narrows at her. “Did you not mean it?”
“No, I definitely meant it. I told you, the sad mom thing is no fun for me, to be quite fucking—sorry—honest. I love you, but you ruined banana bread for me forever.”
I laugh. The months following the divorce were a haze of sugar and flour, me feverishly flipping through my mother’s cookbooks with religious fervor, as if the power of a perfectly fluffy pavlova could save me from myself.
“I really did believe in the healing powers of baked goods,” I admit.
“But when I get past the weirdness,” Emme says, “I actually think it could be good for you to have another person in your life. Someone your own age.” She eyes me for a moment, then looks back down into her mug. “Also, like—I just don’t want to be the reason why you don’t move on.”
That she worries about fucking up my life like I worry about fucking up hers—it’s too much to bear. My first instinct is to deny the situation entirely: Who says I haven’t moved on? And who says I need to be in a relationship to prove that I have?
But that instinct alone tells me she’s right. Maybe I have been keeping Emme too close, using her as a shield to protect myself.
To Emme, I say, “I’ll take that under consideration.”
Then I put on a smile and suggest we have a couch day, which is probably not the most tactful move, but Emme takes me up on it happily.
We watch The Fellowship of the Ring, her comfort movie, pausing to order lunch from the diner and take an online quiz determining which Lord of the Rings character we are. (Galadriel for me, Frodo for Emme.)
By the time the movie’s over, it’s late afternoon. I’m about to ask her what she thinks she wants to do for dinner when she suddenly sits up from where she’s been lying on the other end of the sofa. Her expression is inquisitive yet determined, a woodland creature emerging from a long hibernation.
“Is it too late to go to the show tonight?” she asks.
I check my watch. “If we hustle, we can make it. What made you change your mind?”
“I think I was holding out hope that Dad would suddenly turn around and tell me that he could take me. But now I feel like that’s never happening.”
Her words hang heavily between us. She doesn’t speak them with malice, or even much sadness, but to my ears, they are laden with melancholy.
I realize that this is exactly the kind of behavior she saw from me with James: All this sitting around, waiting for him to do more.
Be present. Care. And the disappointment when he never did.
Emme shrugs. “I’m just not going to make what he did worse by putting myself in time-out because of it.”
This is not the first time Emme has casually doled out a nugget of profound wisdom, but this one hits hard. I’m just not going to make what he did worse by putting myself in time-out because of it. I turn it over in my head until it sticks.
Emme pushes the blanket off her, arches her back into a long, luxurious stretch, then bounds up the stairs, announcing that she’ll be wearing a babydoll dress and sneakers to the show tonight, in honor of Juliet.
I follow her upstairs to shower and change. I check my phone, which I’ve successfully avoided for the past four hours.
The screen is lit with texts and a missed call from Hayes, my agent.
I skim the barrage: There’s an opportunity with Resonance, a major music magazine.
The project would be a series of portraits of up-and-coming musicians.
Hayes threw my name into the ring, and now I’m under serious consideration for the contract.
I call him on speaker while I pull out an outfit to wear to the show.
“They need an answer by Tuesday at three,” Hayes says. I can almost hear him pacing. “That’s two days. Less, considering that it’s almost five, and I’ve been calling you since noon.”
“I can see that,” I say. “I was working on images from the Jeff Buckley thing this morning, then spent the day with Emme.” As if I need an excuse.
“The Jeff Buckley thing being the free thing? Which you took without consulting me?”
Playful condescension drips off his tone. But I adore this man—and his pragmatic approach to creativity is what makes him the best person to have in my corner. He’s the kind of person I would hate to have on the other side of the negotiating table.
“Some of us are actually willing to do things without getting paid for them,” I say.
“And I will never understand you people.”
He’s downplaying his generosity. In the throes of my divorce, Hayes took it upon himself to come over every week with martinis, omakase, and a lineup of movies he dubbed “the Bitchfest,” starting with Death Becomes Her and All About Eve.
He ditches his snide tenor. “So there have been some developments here. After the initial portraits in New York, they want you to follow three of the bands on tour for one month each—July, August, and September—and those images would run in sequential issues.”
“That’s . . . wow.”
“Yes. It is very wow.” I drop onto the bench at the end of my bed. When I don’t answer for a few seconds, he jumps in, “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
I am genuinely shocked by this offer—I’ve photographed plenty of musicians and live shows over the years, but I don’t have any experience as a tour photographer. Being embedded with performers that way is a whole thing—and it’s never paid my bills.
“What’s the compensation?” I ask.
“I’m going to be straight with you, the compensation is not up to our usual standard.”
When he tells me, I physically balk. “I’m worth more than that.” After decades of objective success in this field, I’ve come to adopt what Hayes refers to as the Average White Male Mindset: knowing your worth and asking for that or more, without agonizing or hand-wringing.