235 PM Marco #2
He began reading the text that he had received, which was from a source of his.
Marco cut an endive in half, and then quarters.
The source was a well-known political operative who was currently under investigation.
He had sent Lev a joke about Angela Merkel.
It wasn’t particularly funny, and was objectively misogynistic.
As Lev read it, Marco ate a piece of endive: he was having a difficult time parsing who he was angrier at, Lev or Mia.
His immediate impulse was to physically harm Lev.
He hated him, and he wanted to take him outside and smash his face against the curb.
But he was also furious at Mia. How could she not see how terrible he was?
And how could she allow herself to become so small around him?
It was the opposite of who she had been when they were together, and seeing the transformation saddened Marco in a way that he didn’t understand.
He kept trying to make eye contact with her, hoping that he might see in her face some kind of explanation. She kept her gaze focused on her plate.
Lev reached the joke’s punchline and didn’t seem to notice that he was the only one laughing.
“Look, I know Steve’s crazy, but he’s also one funny son of a bitch.” He tossed his napkin on the table. “Where’s the bathroom? I need to take a piss.”
Emily pointed him toward the back of the restaurant. Mia speared a green bean with her fork, then set it down on the side of her plate.
“I’m sorry. He does this sometimes. He gets excited, and wants to impress people with who he knows. A few months ago we were at a dinner party in Brooklyn and he got drunk and called Cher on speakerphone.”
“What was she like?” Emily asked.
“I don’t know.” Mia ate her green bean. “She didn’t pick up.”
When dinner was over, they said good-byes on the street corner—Lev kept one hand pressed against Mia’s back as she gave Marco a swift peck on the cheek.
Emily ordered an Uber to take them back to Capitol Hill.
Once they were home she told Marco that she was tired, and that she hadn’t known listening to one man speak could be so exhausting, which was really saying something because she worked with mostly male surgeons.
Marco said good night, kissing her on the crown of the head.
Then he’d poured himself a glass of bourbon and sat down on the couch in the living room.
The television’s remote control was next to him, and he had every intention of watching something, but he never got around to turning it on.
Instead he drank his bourbon and stared at his reflection and waited to be rescued from ambivalent conclusions.
A fan spun slowly from the ceiling. Its route was uneven, and each time it rotated, there was a barely perceptible click.
Marco listened to it, his vision blurring, and suddenly realized that the click was the only thing he was hearing.
There was no more crying; Ava had fallen asleep in his arms, her body turning heavy.
Her lips were drawn, and her hands were curled in fists against his chest. Marco looked at her for a moment longer, his breath finding its own rhythm.
The ceiling fan whirred, its blades chasing each other; he put his lips to Ava’s head and brought her to the window.
Outside the glass, a sparrow hopped on the roof, inspecting spaces between the shingles.
Late-afternoon light reflected off the surface of the swimming pool, and on the far end of the lawn, Richie picked up a bocce ball, throwing it low and fast across the grass.
Clouds swelled in the distance, high above the tops of the trees. Marco brought Ava closer to him.
He laid her down in her travel crib, pulling his hand away from the back of her head.
Then as quietly as he could he repositioned the baby monitor and left the room.
His intention was to go back outside, but as he walked down the stairs he reconsidered it.
He knew that as soon as he stepped foot into the pool, Emily would assault him with questions about whether he’d remembered to turn on the white-noise machine that she had brought, or whether Ava had needed a change of diaper, and if so, whether he’d remembered to rub cream on the last bits of a rash that was healing on her left thigh.
Regardless of how he answered the questions, she would still feel the need to leave the pool and check on Ava herself, which she would do while making a flippant comment to Sasha about Marco’s haphazard parenting.
The thought of all that was exhausting, and to avoid it he stopped in the house’s observatory, where he sat on a wicker chair and began scrolling through emails on his phone.
Three sides of the room were made of glass.
Heat radiated from the sunbaked floor, and as he ran his thumb across the device’s screen, Marco felt sweat gathering in the creases of his arms. He was looking at his calendar for the next two weeks when Mia walked in.
“Oh.” She wore a pair of thin black flip-flops. The tops of her thighs were pink. “What’s up?”
“Catching up on some work stuff.”
“Do you know which way the bathroom is? I keep getting lost.”
“I think it’s behind you, over on the other side of the living room.”
Mia nodded. She glanced in the direction Marco was pointing, then came to sit down in the chair next to him. A blade of grass clung to her elbow. Marco darkened the screen of his phone and set it in his lap.
“So when did you guys get up here?” she asked.
“This morning. We stayed with Emily’s parents in South Orange last night.”
“That sounds nice.”
“She insisted.”
Mia crossed her legs. The wicker had left faint red lines on the side of her thigh. They both looked out through the glass walls and into the backyard.
Marco said, “You cut your hair.”
“A few months ago.” Mia ran her hand through it. “It was getting in the way.”
“I like it. It looks…”
“It looks what?”
“I don’t know. Chic.”
The word felt strange in his mouth. Mia laughed.
“Ava’s adorable, by the way.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“How’s it going?”
“I don’t know. I know I’m supposed to say great, so let’s just say that, let’s just say great.
” Sweat wetted the backs of Marco’s knees.
“But yeah, it’s exhausting. I mean, obviously it’s exhausting, because kids are exhausting, and it’s not like I’m the first person to realize that.
I guess what I mean is that it’s exhausting in ways that I didn’t expect.
” He stopped for a moment, suddenly hearing himself.
He realized that he had been waiting to tell her all of this, and now that he had started, he didn’t want to stop.
He said: “I’m used to being good at things, but I’m not very good at this, Mia.
And the worst part is that when I talk to other parents about it, or, like, my own mom and dad, they just look at me with this pathetic, condescending expression, like, ‘Oh, you’re so cute to think this is novel.
’ It just makes me feel like I’m doing it all wrong. ”
“You’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing great.”
“Emily doesn’t think so.”
Mia set her hand on his shoulder. She began kneading the muscle with her fingers.
She said, “Well, I do.”
As the sun gradually shifted, Marco could feel a new patch of skin on his left arm becoming hot.
He wanted something, but he couldn’t articulate for himself what it was.
He wanted her to be happy; he also wanted for her to see Lev as clearly as he did—wanted to wrest part of Mia back for himself, even if there was nothing he could give her in return.
She pressed her fingers into the side of his neck, and he turned his head to one side.
Quietly he said, “Lev seems like a real winner.”
Mia’s fingers stopped moving and he turned to look at her.
“Thanks,” she said. “That means a lot.”
She was smiling, her eyes wide and grateful, and Marco felt her fingers working again. He was such an idiot—when had it become so impossible to be direct? To say what he actually meant? He closed his eyes. His mouth was dry. Mia hit a nerve and he winced.
“What about you?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
Mia withdrew her hand.
“What about me?”
“Do you think you’ll ever have kids?”
“Oh. Ha, no.”
“You sound pretty sure.”
“Because I am. I’m way too selfish. I like going out to dinner too much. Can we please talk about something else?”
“I don’t think you’re selfish.”
“Well, I am. And Lev doesn’t want them either. So there’s that too.”
“Well, then maybe Lev’s not the right person for you.”
He said the words without really thinking, and immediately Mia flinched. The patch of skin on his arm got warmer.
“I don’t mean because of the kid thing,” he said. “I mean generally.”
She stood up from the chair, her mouth hardened to a thin line.
“It’s nice to know you can still do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Ruin a nice moment.”