A door slams. I look behind me into the short hallway leading past the bathroom, trying to discern whether the bang was in my apartment or the neighboring unit. Footsteps answer my question. I check the time as I log off. Ten o’clock. Dinner has been staling on the stove for the past forty minutes.
I exit the bedroom and peer around the wall into the living/dining room, spying on my spouse. I do this often now, watching him from a distance, trying to ascertain his mood before engaging. Since Nick’s disappearance, he’s toggled between stages one through three of grief: tearful shock, frantic denial, and raging anger. I never know whether I should settle down for a silent night of him staring into space or brace myself for an endless rant against the inept police who still can’t figure out how his friend and law partner “fell off the motherfucking map.”
David stands in the dining area. His suit jacket hangs from one of four chairs surrounding a round glass table. It looks slept in. My husband came of age in the midnineties, when men were waxing philosophical about shampoo. He prides himself on his bespoke suits, and his vanity is filled with retinoid creams. The state of his blazer is a very bad sign.
He gazes out the French doors leading onto our Juliet balcony, hands shoved in the pockets of his pinstriped pants. The traffic noise is louder in the living area. One of the doors must be cracked. Though the apartment lacks central air, we never open them wide. A squat, seventy-five-year-old railing is the only thing preventing our potted Ficus from falling eight stories to the street below.
“Hey, you.” I drape my arms over his shoulders and punctuate my statement with a peck below his ear. He pats my hand against his chest before pulling away. There are no words.
As much as I’d like to fault Nick’s disappearance for his silence, our conversations have been dwindling for the past six months. It started, I think, with a case: a ten-million-dollar wrongful death suit against the state of New York, filed on behalf of the heartbroken mother of a high school senior who committed suicide after four years of merciless bullying. Nick had always been a strict constructionist with regard to attorney/client privilege, but the publicity surrounding the case had made David follow suit for the first time. Overnight, every question about David’s day became a threatened violation of his professional ethics. Now I don’t ask.
A dozen years together has eliminated any pressure to cough up a few sentences for politeness’ sake. Our relationship has discarded formalities like my spouse’s scalp has shed hair. All that’s left of David’s once Richard Gere–worthy mane are buzzed salt-and-pepper sides and a receding widow’s peak. He overcompensates with a permanent five-o’clock shadow, which I find sexy, albeit sandpapery.
His shoulders rise with each breath. I monitor their tempo, wait for the rhythm to pause. “You hungry?”
He grunts something affirmative. I walk through to the kitchen and turn on the gas burner beneath my room temperature pasta dish. “How are you?”
He responds, though not loud enough for me to make out the words. I think he’s said, “Oh, you know.”
I grab two plates from the cupboard and a pronged spoon, which I use to dish out some of my reheated concoction. While David keeps mulling over the view, I shut off the range, grab utensils, and balance the plates on my forearm like a diner waitress. I slide his dinner in front of the seat draped with his wrinkled suit jacket and set my place beside him. His briefcase claims my chair. As I move it to the floor, I spy a stack of papers slipped into the back pocket. They’re stuffed vertically into the flap so that half of an enlarged photo sticks out.
Have You Seen This Man?
David has used Nick’s headshot from the firm’s website. The image doesn’t do justice to the dead. Nick was handsome, though not in a generic, Hollywood way. He had wavy black hair that he wore to the nape of his neck and a Roman nose made more prominent by his narrow face. Deep-set eyes. Thin lips. Static images emphasize the angularity of his features. To appreciate Nick’s beauty, one had to see him in action: smiling, frowning, posing. He had a roguish quality, a swaggering confidence that he possessed despite, or maybe because of, his small stature. Nick couldn’t have been taller than five foot six; I towered over him at five foot nine. But like an actor, he commanded a room with his presence and orator’s voice, delivered with a Mississippi twang and a side of biting wit. Friends of mine who didn’t find him attractive on first sight would be falling all over him by the end of a night.
I put David’s briefcase on the floor by his jacket and ask if he’d like wine, mostly to draw his attention to the table. He mumbles, “No thanks,” and pulls back the chair. As soon as he sits, he begins shoveling pasta into his mouth, the first stage of ignoring me. I interrupt his eating before his eyes glaze over. “I have an appointment tomorrow.”
David’s chewing slows. I decide to interpret his deliberate mastication as a flicker of interest.
“Dr. Frankel will check on the cysts and the scarring. Last week she told me that the synthetic hormones seem to be helping other women in the trial . . .”
David shoves another forkful in his mouth.
“I want to ask her about the migraines too. I know I’ve had them before, and it’s common for them to get worse with the hormones, but they’ve been really increasing in frequency . . .”
Though I’m not hungry, I take a bite of penne for fellowship and wait for David to speak. Maybe I shouldn’t expect it, but I’d like a little empathy, perhaps an apologetic sorry that the drugs have me in a state of constant hangover. David meets my gaze and stabs at his pasta.
I put down my utensil and rub my temples for emphasis. “Aspirin always worked for me. Now it doesn’t even help most of the time.”
“Then stop with the drugs.” He points at my left forearm with his fork, indicating the implant.
Though most people wouldn’t notice, a trained eye would see six raised lines, each about an inch long, spaced equally apart like a flesh-colored bar code or scarred brand. Beneath each track mark is a needle filled with one month of fertility hormones. Two are already spent.
“No one is making you take them,” David continues.
Tears, on a hair trigger since the new hormones, flood my vision. I flutter my lashes at the ceiling. David considers crying a female form of manipulation.
He shrugs. “I was ready to call it after the Clomid failed. But then you wanted this experimental thing . . .”
My pulse throbs in my temples and my teeth. The doctor’s visit should have been a safe discussion, even a welcome one. David, after all, had encouraged me to take the fertility hormones after a year of single-line pregnancy tests and the endometriosis diagnosis. He’d known how desperately I wanted to have our baby, to raise a little person derived from our union, endowed, perhaps, with my creativity and his dark hair or blessed with his studiousness and my bone structure. And he’d wanted our baby too. He’d often mused about watching our genes flourish under a progressive parenting style, so unlike the authoritarian structure with which he’d been raised. How could he give up on our child? Over pasta?
My legs are trembling. Adrenaline urges me to run, to escape to the bathroom, where I can turn on the shower and dissolve into a sobbing mess. I place my palms flat on the glass table and breathe. I will not flee. I will not lose control. David doesn’t mean it. This is Nick’s fault. Stress from his partner’s disappearance has overwhelmed him to the point of—temporary—surrender.
“Honey, I know your friend is gone and—”
“Missing.”
“And I know it’s not the best time to do this. But each day that I age decreases our chances of conception. I’m doing what I can, and I need you to do your part too. We need to make time for—”
He pushes back from the table and reaches for the briefcase.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not having this conversation.”