Chapter 10 – June
JUNE
The thing nobody tells you about a grand gesture is the expiration date.
Ours lasted about four days after the wheels touched down at Teterboro.
Four days of Matt looking at me like he'd actually seen me in Athens, of his phone face-down at dinner, of him asking about my morning like the answer mattered.
And then Tanya's twenty-week scan came back with a shadow on it that turned out to be nothing—absolutely nothing, a shadow in the literal sense, a positioning issue resolved in forty minutes—and the gravitational pull of her crisis reasserted itself like it had never left.
Now it's been three weeks since Greece, and Tanya is five months along, and my husband has become something between a crisis counselor and an on-call concierge for a woman who is not his wife.
"So Greece didn't really change anything," Priya says, spearing a piece of grilled octopus with the kind of precision she used to reserve for red-penning essays.
We're at a little Greek place in the West Village, which is either poetic or masochistic, I can't decide. I chose it. I told myself it was because the octopus is good, but honestly I think I wanted to see if saganaki could taste like the Parthenon at sunrise. It doesn't. It tastes like cheese.
"It changed things," I say. "For four days."
"Four days." Priya sets down her fork and looks at me the way she used to look at students who were about to fail and didn't know it yet. "June."
"He remembered Athens. He remembered a sentence I said eight months ago. He went looking through old emails to find it." I hear myself and wince, because I'm defending him with the same evidence I'd use against him. He had to search for me, like I was an archived file.
"And then he spent the whole trip on the phone with Tanya."
"Her fiancé was living a double life, Priya. He had a whole other woman. Danielle. Who also didn't know." I tear a piece of pita I don't want. "She's pregnant and alone and her entire future collapsed in one weekend. I can't begrudge her needing?—"
"Matt," Priya finishes. "You can begrudge her needing Matt. You're allowed."
I don't answer, because the honest answer is that I've tried.
I've begrudged it in the shower, in the car, at two in the morning when his phone lights up the ceiling with her name.
I've begrudged it so thoroughly that the begrudging has worn a groove in me, and now it just runs on its own track, background noise.
"She goes to his office now," I say. "Did I tell you that?
She just... stops by. Denise lets her up.
Denise, who guards his calendar like a state secret, waves Tanya Curtis through because Matt told her to.
Last week I brought him lunch and she was already there, sitting in his chair, crying about a crib she couldn't assemble. "
"His chair."
"His chair. He was perched on the windowsill like a gargoyle, rubbing her shoulder." I laugh, and it comes out uglier than I intend. "I stood in the doorway holding a forty-dollar sandwich and felt like the other woman."
Priya reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, and her hand is warm and dry and utterly steady, and I hate how much it undoes me.
"Here's what I don't understand," she says gently. "Rob's gone. The wedding's off. She's got money—Rob was paying for everything, sure, but Matt's been covering things since the scandal broke, hasn't he?"
"He set up an account for the baby. I found the paperwork on the counter." I pause. "He didn't hide it. I almost wish he had. Hiding it would mean he knows it's a strange thing for a husband to do. Leaving it out means it never occurred to him I'd have feelings about it."
"June." Priya's voice drops into the register she used to save for the parent-teacher conferences where someone had to hear a hard truth. "She has money, she has family?—"
“Her sister’s in Portland and her mother is difficult, but present.
” I've catalogued all of it, the whole architecture of Tanya's isolation, because I needed to know whether it was real or constructed.
The worst part is that it's real. She genuinely has no one in this city permanently.
She arranged her entire life around a man who was arranging his around someone else, and now there's just...
me and Matt. Her oldest friend and his wife. That's the whole list.
"She has your husband," Priya says.
"Yes," I say. "She does."
We sit with that for a while. The waiter clears our plates and Priya orders baklava for both of us without asking, because she's known me long enough to know I won't order dessert for myself but will absolutely eat half of hers.
"Did you tell him?" she asks. "About the chair. The sandwich. Any of it?"
"What would I say? 'Please stop comforting your pregnant, abandoned childhood best friend'? I'd sound like a villain in a movie. I'd be a villain in a movie."
"You'd sound like a wife."
There's no answer to that, so I eat the baklava, and we talk about Diane's daughter's college applications, and Priya doesn't push, because Priya knows exactly how long you can hold a person underwater with the truth before they stop surfacing.
Matt called while I was walking home. I'd been saving the good news—well, the neutral news—for the evening: he'd promised to be back by six, and I'd planned to cook the sea bass with the fennel he likes, and I'd bought a bottle of that Assyrtiko we drank in Athens, because I am apparently the kind of person who tries to bottle a four-day miracle and serve it with fish.
"June." His voice already has the apology folded into it.
I know the sound. I could identify it from a single syllable, the way you can identify a song from one note.
"I'm not going to make it home. I'm so sorry.
Tanya has her anatomy scan—the follow-up, for the thing from before—and Rob was supposed to go, and obviously he's not?—"
"Obviously." The word lands flat.
"She asked me to take her. She's terrified it's going to be bad news again and she doesn't want to hear it alone.
" He exhales, and I can picture him exactly—hand in his hair, pacing his office, the skyline behind him.
"I know I said six. I know. If you tell me no, I'll figure something out.
I will. But she's already at the clinic and she's shaking, June. She called me from the parking garage."
And there it is. The trap with the velvet lining. Because somewhere in midtown there's a frightened pregnant woman alone in a parking garage, and I am a person, an actual person with a working heart, and the idea of saying let her shake makes me feel like something scraped off a shoe.
It's an intimate thing, though. That's the part I can't say out loud.
A scan is not a ride to the airport. It's a dark room and a screen and a beating heart on a monitor, and that's the kind of moment that belongs to a mother and a father, or a mother and her person—and I am watching, in real time, as my husband becomes her person, and everyone involved gets to feel noble about it.
"Go," I say. "Of course. Go."
"You're incredible. You know that? I love you. I'll make it up to?—"
"It's fine, Matt. Tell her I said good luck."
I hang up before he can say the rest, and I stand on the sidewalk outside our building while the doorman pretends not to have heard any of it.
At home, I put the Assyrtiko in the fridge next to the sea bass I'll cook tomorrow for one.
I take out the baby shower folder instead, because the Marlowe needs final numbers by Friday, and Tanya—poor, abandoned, five-months-pregnant Tanya—still expects her shower to be perfect, and Matt still expects me to deliver it.
Forty names. Aunt June—obviously.
I work until midnight, and when the door finally opens I don't look up, because I've learned that looking up is where the hoping starts, and hoping is how he keeps me.
"How's the baby?" I ask the spreadsheet.
"Perfect. Healthy. A girl." His voice goes soft in a way it hasn't gone soft for me in months. "June. You should've seen her little hands."
I should have, I think, is exactly the right sentence. Just not the way he means it.
"That's wonderful," I say, and I smile at him, and somewhere in Athens there's a version of me still standing on that hill in the gold light, waiting for a man who brought his body and left himself behind.
He's not coming back for her either.