Fairly regularly, Emmett slept with women who were not his wife, but as he grew older this was more for the physical exercise than anything else, as though his cock needed an aerobic workout, as well as his heart, oh, his heart. But never were the women he slept with all that interesting to him; that was the condition that Madeline had set, and he would honor it forever. Never were they anything like Faith.
Madeline, as she aged and they grew apart, became ironically more interesting herself, and certainly more compassionate. Her interestingness sprang from that compassion, and she gave large sums of money to progressive causes, which often involved women’s rights. She sat on the boards of museums but also on the boards of women’s clinics in the Bronx and Oklahoma. Even when Emmett wasn’t in attendance, she overlapped with Faith here and there, and the two women once found themselves uncomfortably sitting only three seats away from each other at a dinner devoted to maternal care in Africa. Neither of them said a word to the other. The images projected on-screen, of girls with agonized faces, girls suffering the indignity of fistula—what a horrible word—blocked out any long-ago image of young Faith Frank, and how Emmett had slept with her, and had begun to love her starting that night.
But then, in the year 2010, Madeline Tratt Shrader, a dynamic and plump major philanthropist, age seventy, asked Emmett’s assistant Connie to schedule a dinner for her and Mr. Shrader at the Gilded Quail, a restaurant in Chelsea that had the ambience of a private railroad car from the nineteenth century. A waiter came bearing plates dotted with examples of molecular gastronomy: horseradish “air,” sous-vide trout with a “root infusion,” a shot glass filled with three layers of intensely flavored soups that went from icy-cold to hot as you threw back your head and drank. Then the waiter retreated with such solemnity that it was as if he had seen a ghost: perhaps the gilded quail itself, in hologram form, eyes glowing gold.
In the dark and narrow space Emmett looked at his wife across the landscape of a thousand years, in awe of the life they had had, their daughter, Abby, grown now and in finance on the West Coast and the mother of two surfboarding sons who said dude a lot. A cold conch shell with a virtually unreachable pink glazed interior was what the Shrader marriage was now.
Madeline lifted a fork of gently and purposefully wilted lettuce, studiously chewed it, then said, “Emmett, I have to tell you something.”
“All right.”
“I’ve fallen in love.”
His first instinct was to smile as if it was a joke, but of course it wasn’t, and then he felt the self-consciousness that the evening called for—his wife’s having made a formal appointment to see him, and see him alone. They had not had dinner alone by themselves in months, nor shared a bedroom in a decade.
“With who?” he asked, incredulous, too loud. One of the waiters thought he was being summoned and stepped forward, then realized his error and quickly retreated.
“Marty Santangelo.”
“Who?”
“Our contractor. And we want to be together.”
Emmett sank back against the cushion of the antiquity that served as a dining chair. He took umbrage. He felt wounded in some way that he couldn’t name, despite the aspic chill of their marriage. Maybe it was because Madeline had made everything possible for him in the beginning. Maybe it was because they had been going along like this for so very long that any change—even a potentially welcome one—would have to be initially disturbing when you found out about it.
Emmett Shrader did not like change unless he initiated it, and he was often initiating it, though in small ways. He knew that people described him behind his back as having ADD, and once, as an elevator closed, he heard someone say, “Give that man some Adderall!” followed by peals of group laughter. Maybe the assessment was accurate, but he was shocked at the idea that Madeline should want change, and sitting in the Gilded Quail with his marriage ending, and having eaten only the second course out of eight courses—six more to get through with his future ex-wife!—he wanted to cry into his fist.
Madeline moved out soon after that night. In the first days of his sudden, late-life singledom, Emmett was as wildly alone as he’d ever felt, reaching for the Viagra and fucking women all over the city, in their apartments and townhouses, and in his apartment, where the walls were glass and the views were so ostentatious that the women always said “Oh!” and he had to impatiently wait for the moment of wonder to end, and in a suite at the Carlyle Hotel, and then in a ryokan in Kyoto, and once in the private compartment of an Emirates flight to Qatar.
Once he contracted chlamydia from a pretty young finance blogger, but it was easily treated by azithromycin. Often he tasked Connie with buying Hermès scarves for women afterward, and occasionally even those Birkin bags that women often craved so deeply and weirdly that it seemed like a Darwinian urge.
And then one morning in that same strange and exhaustingly active year, Emmett saw a very small mention in the New York Times that “Bloomer magazine, which had its moment back in the heyday of the women’s movement but never entirely caught on, yet valiantly kept publishing,” was closing. There were quotes from two of the founding editors at the magazine, and one of them was Faith Frank. Her name on the page seemed to him set in boldface.
“We got a lot done,” she was quoted saying. Shrader’s throat and chest felt thick as he remembered Faith Frank and their one night. But it wasn’t just sex he remembered. He also remembered how much he had wanted her in his life. There are some people who have such a strong effect on you, even if you’ve spent very little time with them, that they become embossed inside you, and any hint of them, any casual mention, creates a sudden stir in you.
Because Madeline had put a lot of their money into women’s causes, Shrader had been regarded over time as sympathetic, an advocate for women. Sometimes he felt guilty that he was getting away with it, while actually holding no deep convictions in this arena. But then he thought that by now he did have such convictions; they’d become real. Whichever was true, he had never been allowed to spend any more time with that unequivocally authentic advocate for women, Faith.
Now the rule about never seeing her was finally lifted, like a curse in a fairy tale. Madeline had her new life with the contractor. It was the middle of the night when he turned on his bedside lamp and asked his butler to get his assistant on the phone at home in Flushing. Connie Peshel answered the phone in a frightened voice. “Mr. Shrader? Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine, Connie. I want you to call Faith Frank tomorrow.”
“Who? The feminist? That one?”
“Yes, that one. Find her contact information and make an appointment for her to come in. Tell her I have a business proposition.”
Faith had come without asking for any details. She had sat right across from him in his office, and she was still elegant and impeccable and super-smart up close, and Emmett desired this much older version of her all over again, but with a new, churning feeling that reminded him he was no longer that dark-haired young Nabisco exec in a Nehru jacket, and that she had changed too. In her bed in 1973 he had swept his face up and down and to some extent into her body and along the planes of her face with an urgency that must have contained the subconscious knowledge that what they were doing would never happen again. He had eaten her like she was his last meal. They were all over each other; he smelled like Cherchez, she smelled like lime. They were both raw and messed up by the end of it. He, at least, was left besotted.
Since that long-ago night, Faith had gone out and lived and had an enormous career, just the way he had done, both of them making inroads, digging in, having an effect on many other lives. Now after all these decades of digging they were back together. How amazing life was, with all its surprise endings. Not that this was an ending. Maybe it was a beginning. He didn’t know how this would work, what would happen. He just knew he wanted her near him every day.