Chapter 27
Patrick
She’s already telling Erick goodbye when I ask.
I ask anyway, which is a decision I make approximately one second before I make it, standing three feet back while she crouches to his level with her full attention and tells him she had the best morning of her entire life and he was a better guide than any professional guide she has ever had.
Erick receives this as information he already knew but is glad to have confirmed.
“If you come back I’ll let you be in charge of the penguins,” he says. “But you have to promise not to let them out.”
“I would never,” she says, with complete seriousness.
“Good. Because last time someone let one out it was a whole thing.”
She looks up at me over his head. Her eyes are bright and there is a version of this moment I could memorize and live in. I don’t say that. I say: “Do you want to have lunch with us?”
She stands. Looks at me. Something crosses her face that I can’t fully read and she puts it away before I can.
“I can’t,” she says. “But thank you.”
She kisses the top of Erick’s head. He hugs her around the knees with the ferocity of a four-year-old who has decided a person belongs to him. She extricates herself gently, lifts one hand at me, clean smile, nothing in it that tells me anything, and walks toward the park exit.
I watch her go.
I had all morning. I had her right there, no desk between us, no professional context, my son holding her hand through three exhibits, yet still couldn’t tell her how much I wanted her to stay.
Monday I am at the office before anyone.
I saw her eighteen hours ago. It changes nothing. I woke up wanting my mouth on hers and decided not to pretend otherwise.
I hear the elevator at 7:52.
I’m at my desk when I hear it. I make it to four seconds of restraint and then I’m in the reception area, waiting for the doors to open, because I can’t stand there another moment without kissing her.
She steps out. Black dress. Hair down. Bag sliding off one shoulder already, the perpetual losing battle with that bag.
I cross the room and kiss her. One hand at the back of her neck, the other at her waist. I hold it longer than normal. I don’t care. It’s 7:53, no one is here, and I missed her in the specific, inconvenient way I have apparently decided to miss her, which is constantly.
When I pull back her eyes are still closed.
“Morning,” she says.
“I missed you.”
She opens her eyes. Looks at me. Something moves through her expression and gets locked down before it finishes but not before I see what it is.
“You saw me yesterday,” she says.
“I know.”
She adjusts the bag on her shoulder, and I see her expression deciding what to give back. “I missed you too,” she says, brisk, stepping around me toward her desk. “Don’t make it weird.”
I watch her sit down and open her laptop with the focused efficiency of someone who is absolutely not still feeling that kiss.
I go back to my office.
The morning is good. Focused. I get through the Pellegrino review, two calls, plus a draft response on the Singapore contract.
I attribute none of this productivity to Elena because I am not that far gone.
I am somewhat that far gone. I send her a document at 11.
She sends it back at 11:23 with three precise notes and one observation that’s genuinely funny.
I sit at my desk for a moment after reading it, just smiling.
This is the problem. It’s not only the rest of it, though the rest of it is significant.
It’s this. The way she thinks. The speed of her.
The jokes that land because they’re aimed exactly right, not a degree off.
Three months ago I would have said I didn’t want this.
The disruption of it. A person in my life who takes up space, who changes the air in the room, who sends back a contract note with a joke attached.
I would have been wrong.
Wednesday evening my mother calls.
I know before I answer. This is not the call she makes to check on Erick’s schedule or ask about the school calendar. This is the call she has been building toward since Sunday morning.
“He talks about her constantly,” she says, after we’ve gotten through the opening.
“I know.”
“Every sentence. Elena said this, Elena knows that, Elena is funny—”
“He likes her,” I say.
“That’s not the point, Patrick.”
“What is the point.”
A pause. The pause she uses when she’s deciding how much force to bring.
“The point is that he is four years old and he is attached to a woman you have known for very little who is your employee, who is ten years younger than you, and I’d like to know that you have thought about what happens to him if this goes wrong. ”
I am quiet.
“I’m not saying she isn’t lovely,” my mother says, in the voice that means she is absolutely saying that.
“I’m saying that Erick is not equipped to understand what she is to you.
He doesn’t have the framework. To him she’s just…
” She stops. “She’s someone who showed up and held his hand and knows about dinosaurs and now he talks about her the way he talked about you when he was two and you were the best thing he’d ever seen.
Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I understand exactly. “He’s falling for her.”
“He’s already fallen. That’s the problem.”
I look at the window. The city at night, lit and moving, indifferent. Erick is asleep upstairs. I can hear the particular silence of a sleeping four-year-old from here, the quality of stillness in the house that’s different when he’s in it.
“What would you have me do,” I say.
“End it cleanly, before—”
“No.”
The word comes out flat. Not raised. Not defensive. Just final.
My mother waits.
“She’s not a mistake I’m making,” I say.
“She’s not a phase. She’s not someone I’ll come to my senses about.
I understand your concern. I understand where it comes from.
And I need you to understand that this conversation is the last one we’re having about whether Elena is appropriate, because she is my choice and that is not going to change and I would very much like you to know her before you decide who she is. ”
Silence.
Long enough that I wonder if I’ve gone too far. My mother is not a woman who responds well to being told a conversation is over. But she is also a woman who understands, when someone speaks to her in that register, that they mean it.
Thursday I take her to dinner.
Not the Italian place. Not anywhere familiar.
A restaurant on the Upper East Side where I have a standing reservation I almost never use, white tablecloths, the kind of lighting that makes every conversation feel like it matters.
I want her in a room that asks something of her so I can watch her meet it.
I pick her up at seven.
She’s already outside in a black dress, hair up with a few loose pieces at her neck, leaning against the front steps with her coat folded over one arm.
“You’re on time,” she says.
“You look incredible,” I say.
She smiles and lifts one finger at me. “Please keep your hands to yourself. It took me a very long time to achieve this look.”
“Understood,” I say. “Very well achieved.”
“Thank you.”
She laughs once, soft, then gets in.
In traffic she keeps one hand on the seat belt and looks out the window for a block before turning back to me. “Where are we going?”
“Upper East Side.”
“That sounds fancy.”
“It is. You can handle fancy.”
“Is that flattery or a warning?”
“Both. If you were considering paying, forget it, and if you were thinking that dress wasn’t dangerous you’re mistaken.”
“I know. That’s why I’m pretending this is normal.”
“How’s that going?”
“I have made peace with forty percent of it.”
“I’ll take forty.”
At the restaurant the ma?tre d’ takes our coats and leads us in. She sits across from me. I open my menu. She opens hers.
The sommelier appears at my shoulder.
“Good evening. May I help with wine?”
I look at Elena. “Your call.”
She blinks once, then turns to him. “I’m looking for something dry, not too oaky, medium body.”
“White or red?”
“Red. Maybe a nebbiolo? Unless you have something lighter that still has structure.”
He nods. “We have a Langhe nebbiolo that would suit that exactly.”
She glances at me, then back at him. “We’ll do that. Thank you.”
He leaves.
“Impressive.”
“Panic and confidence have the same posture if you’re committed.”
“Useful skill.”
“Required skill.”
We eat and we talk and she tells me about the Okonkwo rejection, not as catastrophe, just the plain honest account of something that hurt and she’s figured out what to do with.
She says the part wasn’t right anyway, that she played it too still and she’d have done it differently knowing what she knows now.
She says she has two more auditions lined up, smaller, not what she wanted.
I say: “You’ll get one.”
She says: “You don’t know that.”
“No. But I know how you work.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Cuts something on her plate. Then: “Most people say that and it sounds like nothing. Like the thing you say.”
“I’m not saying the thing you say.”
She looks up.
“I’ve watched you for five months. I know what you do when you want something. You don’t stop. You adjust and you try again and you don’t stop.” I hold her gaze. “You’ll get one.”
She looks at me a long time. Not performing anything. Not deflecting. Just looking.
“Okay,” she says finally, quietly. Like she’s decided to believe it.
David pulls up outside my place at ten forty-three.
Erick is at my mother’s. The house is empty and the city is doing its late-Thursday thing outside the windows, taxi-lit and quiet. She steps out of the car. I put my hand at her back and feel her lean into it, that small unconscious press, the thing she does without noticing.
I watch the loose piece of hair that’s come down from whatever she pinned it with, the line of her jaw, the particular set of her mouth when she’s quiet.