A Thousand Pardons

5



AFTER A PREMIERE there was always a party. Hamilton tried to remember where it was as he sat on the lid of the toilet in the Ziegfeld bathroom stall. The ordeal of watching his face on screen, like the window to a dead self, was hard to shake, and he was having trouble remembering even the most basic information about himself, much less something as arcane as the location of the party at which he would soon be expected to appear. If indeed he’d ever known it in the first place. That was the kind of thing other people knew for you. And then suddenly it hit him: he jumped up and burst out of the men’s room and stood there on the thick carpet and, looking around to confirm it, realized that his two handlers, those corporate robots attached to him by the studio publicists for the movie, were not there. He’d shaken them when he got up and left in the middle of the show. What do you know, he said to himself with a reflexive pang of satisfaction, I guess they liked the movie.

He found a door marked Fire Exit and said a little prayer before pushing it open, a prayer that was heard, because no alarm went off. Just like that, he was outside the bubble, in the unritualized world of some foul-smelling alley on Fifty-fourth Street. He felt a constructive kind of fear. Industry parties were a Catch-22 because even though they were soul-scalding and hateful, at least you knew what would happen there; you knew everything every smarmy a*shole was going to say before he opened his mouth and said it. If he could just remember where the party was, he could go there now and have a few drinks while it was still blissfully a*shole-free.

But the party will not start until after the end of the movie, intoned a voice in his head, as conversationally as if it had been speaking all along. No one will be there. Plus it is the first place, maybe the only place, the handlers will think to look for you once they realize you are gone.

There will be drinks at the party.

But there are drinks everywhere. This is New York.

He checked to see if he was carrying any cash with him; then he cursed himself for openly thumbing through the contents of his wallet in some dark New York City alley. His greatest fear was that he was no longer suited for living—real living, without all the armature of fame that sprang up around you and brought you what you needed and tricked you into depending on it. He made his way out to the street and began scanning the signage for bars. He did not have a drinking problem per se, he felt; he just had so many other problems, so many other sensitivities, and they all eventually funneled toward alcohol as the only way, however temporary, of clearing the cache, of resetting himself. The first place he saw was full of young after-work types, but that would have been deadly for him: he’d be recognized on the spot. He could not stand to be alone alone when he felt this way; what he wanted was to be alone in a crowd, to have the same sort of border between him and strangers that those strangers had between one another. Beyond Sixth Avenue there was an ancient-looking, half-full, low-ceilinged dive called Cornerstone’s, and he ducked in there like he was coming in out of a snowstorm.

He ordered a bourbon on the rocks. He saw a rare, expensive bottle of Pappy Van Winkle on the top shelf and wanted to ask for that, but he didn’t dare call even that much attention to himself. The bartender, who was at least sixty, didn’t so much as look at him. Excited, Hamilton tried not to power through that first bourbon too fast, but he still found his glass empty by the time the bartender completed a lap. “Again?” the bartender said. At first Hamilton misunderstood this entirely, but then he nodded and nudged his glass forward.

Somewhere behind him he was being watched—in the theater, by hundreds of people who stared at his ten-foot-tall face and had no idea what they were looking at, what he was doing, no apparatus for judging it at all. They corrupted it by looking at it. What was the point? Once he’d said in an interview that his dream was to make movies that were never shown to anybody; even people he considered friends had mocked him for that one. He wanted to give it all up, but it was too late, there was nothing else on earth he was equipped to do. His painting, his poetry, his publishing efforts, all these were ruined for him too by the corrosive quality of people’s attention to them. And the ranch? Please. They were all laughing at him there, or they would have been if he weren’t signing their paychecks. Not literally—someone else signed their actual paychecks, or so Hamilton assumed, never having seen one. He would have to make a note to change the way that was done.

When he watched himself on screen, he had one important thing in common with everyone else in every theater everywhere, and that was the understanding that, even though you were asked to pretend you were watching some fictional character with a made-up name, you knew at every moment that you were really watching a movie star named Hamilton Barth. That seemed like the greatest, most fundamental failing any actor could possibly admit to, and yet his whole life was based on it, it was perversely considered a mark of his success. Why should that seem so particularly humiliating tonight, though? He’d been through it many times before. There was always that strange confrontation between himself and his image on the screen—an image that should have seemed like a memory, since it was in one sense an actual record of something he’d actually done, but somehow it never felt that way to him, it just struck him as a vision of something that might have become of him if he’d led some other life—but tonight, he recalled, there was this third layer, that chick with the Chinese daughter who either had really grown up with him or else was the best-prepared tabloid reporter ever. Helen something, from Malloy. No, of course she was telling the truth, of course she had grown up in Malloy and remembered everything about him, things he had forgotten without even trying. Why didn’t he remember her? Why didn’t he remember anything truly specific or important about those years, the years that had supposedly made him who he was? Whatever the hell that meant. That was your only true, uncreated self, yet Hamilton knew eighty-year-old guys who remembered more of the arcana of their own grade school years than he did. Why? How had this happened? Why did this Helen look so old to him? Probably just because he so rarely came into contact with women his own age anymore. He had an urge to track her down again, recognize more of her thrillingly trivial memories; but what good would that do him, to research his own self the way he would research any other part? At his core he was nobody, and his nobodyness felt like something unforgivable.

He could sort of remember that cigarette-in-the-couch story. Or remember people talking about it. No, it was no use. He’d lost the capacity to look back. The past was too full of mistakes anyway, mistakes and crimes, your own and others’; if you kept your eyes forward, you didn’t have to spend all that energy trying to resolve what couldn’t be resolved. He would just continue moving forward, only forward, like an animal, though it did help a bit, he supposed, to know that there was someone out there who remembered him as he used to be, as he really was, someone in whom that memory still lived, so that he, Hamilton Barth of Malloy, New York, was not yet dead forever.

“On the house,” said the bartender, smiling, and slid him another bourbon. Hamilton smiled back, gratified, until he realized that if the bartender was comping him without recognizing him, that meant this must have been his fourth drink, or his sixth, he forgot what the custom was. He looked at his watch. The movie must have ended about twenty minutes ago. There was no way to stop drinking now. He looked in his wallet again and counted about fifty dollars in there. Enough to pay for four bourbons, but maybe not for six. Where the hell was the afterparty? Somebody had told him at some point. It was fluttering on the outer edges of his memory. Saint something. St. Patrick’s, St. Catherine’s. He caught the bartender’s eye and made a sickly scribbling motion in the air, and then he sweated out the thirty seconds or so before his tab arrived. Forty bucks. Thank God. He put all fifty on the bar and said, “What’s the name of that guy, the old guy with the morning show on TV, shouts all the time, has a blond co-host?”

The bartender pulled his head back warily. Maybe the question was a little too out of nowhere, or maybe Hamilton, despite his best effort to act casual, had made it sound a little too urgent. “Regis?” he said icily.

The St. Regis. That was it. Hamilton had no idea where it was, and yet a short time later he found himself there anyway. Perhaps he had thought to ask someone; he didn’t remember anything like that happening, though, and so he chose to believe the evening was starting to break his way. They were all in some sort of ballroom—he and two hundred other people—and now, instead of ignoring him because they didn’t know who he was, as the good folks at Cornerstone’s had done, they were ignoring him because they were trying to be cool about knowing precisely who he was. One young woman, obviously an actress, waved gaily to him from the other end of the bar. He thought she might have been in the movie with him, but that was the kind of boundary that was losing its sharpness now. Then he saw up close two faces he definitely recognized, the faces of his keepers from the premiere, Sturm and Drang. One looked relieved and the other looked pissed. They were like two halves of the same stupendously boring person.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” one of them said to Hamilton, who was straight-faced as far as he could feel. “We might not have jobs tomorrow. Where were you, in some bar?”

He nodded.

“Oh, great,” said the angry one. “And I’m sure no one whipped out a phone and took your picture there. I’m sure you were totally incognito there. I’m sure that picture isn’t on TMZ already.”

“That’s all correct, actually,” Hamilton said. “Though weirdly expressed. Why, were you out looking for me?”

The two handlers’ four eyes flashed toward each other, then back at Hamilton. “Seriously,” said the relieved one, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry right now.”

“Have a drink,” Hamilton said, clapping them both on the shoulder, “and for God’s sake, never, ever separate into two people. Because that is a slippery f*cking slope.” He made the journey from the bar at one end of the ballroom to the bar at the opposite end. People waved, and he waved back, and he hugged and kissed them lustily whenever they hugged and kissed him, but whenever they spoke to him it was as if they were a hundred feet away, and with no idea what they were saying he had to try to make the appropriate facial expressions until they stopped. Time passed and he had a vague sense of the ballroom being less crowded than it had been, unless it had somehow gotten bigger. He saw a young, red-haired woman in a very short black skirt—hot, but small, like some sort of curvaceous doll—sitting alone with her heavily tattooed arm across the back of her chair; at the far end of the arm was her hand with a martini glass in it; at the near end, her chin was sunk gloomily into her shoulder. With her legs crossed, she was more exposed to Hamilton and the rest of the room than she seemed to realize—

“Whoa!” Hamilton said. “Bettina!”

Bettina raised her eyes, the way a dog would do. “Well great,” she said. “There goes my last shred of hope, which was that you’d forgotten what I looked like.”

She was very drunk, which was exciting because it ran so afoul of his first impression of her. It was so boring to be right about people. “Bettina, don’t worry, Bettina,” he said, pulling up a chair in front of her; whoever had been at Bettina’s table had abandoned her there. She had the look of someone who had already embarrassed herself, who was regretful but also past caring. “Are you afraid of me? There’s no reason to be afraid of me.”

She looked at him and smirked, as if offended to be considered stupid enough not to be afraid of him.

“Bettina, it is so important that we found each other,” he said. “Let me go get you another martina. Martini.”

The crowd had thinned out to the point where he didn’t even have to wait in line at the bar. He held up the martini glass and then two fingers, as if it were very loud in the ballroom, which it no longer was. The chandeliers were so clean—whose job was that?—but he could not look up at them, he had to look down at the two precious martinis as he made his way across the floor, which seemed to have opened up to the size of a parking lot. Please let her still be there, Hamilton said to himself, please please please.

Not only was she there but she seemed to have perked up a bit. Her head was almost vertical. She accepted her martini with a look of deep cynicism. “What are you doing?” she said.

“I need,” he said, “to get to know you.”

She took a sip and closed her eyes. “You mean you think you’re going to f*ck me?” she asked him.

“It is not about that,” he said. “I mean it is honestly only partly about that.”

“I’m sure you’re used to getting whatever you want.”

“If only,” he said. “I wish. As if.” He tried to think of another phrase that meant the same thing.

“Can I ask you something? That old broad at the theater tonight, the one with the Asian daughter: you don’t even know who she is, do you?”

“No,” he said. “No idea.”

She sat back and flipped her hands up in the air, satisfied and disgusted at the same time.

“I get treated like shit in my job,” she said. “This is the part where I say: ‘But I’m not a bad person.’ But you know what? I am a bad person.”

“No,” Hamilton said soothingly.

She closed her eyes and nodded loosely. “This is the part where I say: ‘Seriously. You don’t know me.’ But you know what? I think you do know me. You look at me and say, ‘Oh, I know her,’ and you’re actually probably right.”

“No, I do not know you,” Hamilton said, his voice reverent now, a whisper. You are the one, he was thinking. Though he was unsure what he meant by that. You are the one. She was some kind of kindred spirit, that was for sure, some kind of sinner who understood what an unfairly hazardous world this was, at least when she was drunk, a state in which he determined to keep her. Himself too: usually these evenings shot up like a firework and ended in a blackout that was like a depressive rebirth, but with a partner like this at his side, a partner in crime, he had an interest in keeping things going, in postponing tomorrow morning for as long as humanly possible. He now found himself kneeling on the floor in front of her, in order to hear her better and also to worship her. Right alongside these feelings of worship, but somehow not corrupting them or affecting them in any way, were sexual imaginings of the most baroque, polluted kind, having to do with her smallness, her perfect scale, her miniature manipulability, various humiliating scenarios in which no part of her touched the floor, in which he dominated her as a giant might do.

“I mean I don’t know why I should care,” Bettina was saying, “about my stupid f*cking job, whether I lose it, whether I keep it. Public relations—what the hell does that even mean?”

“I don’t know anyone who knows,” Hamilton said. He patted her hand with his. She didn’t seem to notice, and in truth he couldn’t really feel it either. He looked around for her martini and handed it to her.

“Don’t you wish you could become someone else,” she said, “just like that? Just say, ‘This is the night I am absolved for every mistake,’ and then just start again as this other person? Look who I’m talking to, though. Hamilton Motherf*cking Barth. Like you’d be free to change who you are even if you wanted to.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “I could do it.”

She laughed at him. “No way José,” she said. “You’re f*cked in that department. The world owns your ass.”

He stood up. His anger only sharpened the sexual outline of his every thought. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, with no idea what his next sentence would be. But he needed to stay with her, and he needed to be somewhere that was not here. “Can you rent a car?”

“What?”

“I can’t. I mean I can, but I know from experience that if they see it’s me they’ll drop a dime and five minutes later there’ll be photographers up our ass like Princess Di. So can you rent it?”

“Don’t need to rent any car. I own a car. I drove here. But where do you need to go?”

“We, Bettina. We. We need to go somewhere and be alone together.” He lifted her gently to her feet. She was like a feather. “You have a coat somewhere, right? Where are you parked?”

“Is this really happening?” she said. They started toward the door. Already he felt reborn and invisible. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “Back at the theater? I lied to you when I said my name was Bettina.”

“That is the best news of all,” Hamilton said.

SARA AND CUTTER did not have any classes together—not so unusual, in a school that size—and by third period on Wednesday she still hadn’t seen him, though they’d been texting all morning, after texting well into the night before. They’d snarked on every camera-phone photo she’d sent him of that stupid ass-kissing zombie movie premiere, where everyone was so in love with themselves; still, she looked forward to doing it in person all over again. But when she got to the cafeteria, he wasn’t there. She went to his French classroom before the start of next period, and he wasn’t there either. Where had he been texting her from? She typed the question and received in return a photo of Cutter, grinning and wearing pajamas, in what she presumed was his own kitchen.

So he’d ditched. He did that more often lately. It wasn’t as bad as the day he’d actually come to school but then skipped all his classes anyway, hiding in the library or the unlocked maintenance rooms or other little interstices he managed to know about—exercising a sort of pointless, arcane freedom, and waiting for pushback, which he never seemed to get.

Things with Cutter had progressed quickly, in ways good and bad. Sometimes there would be afternoons spent in each other’s company—at some Starbucks, or on one of the benches in Carl Schurz Park watching the river traffic and the joggers and the checked-out nannies pushing strollers toward the playground, or even just in Sara’s apartment cracking each other up in front of daytime TV—that felt like love, or at any rate like ease. On the couch with their shoulders pressed into each other, they would laugh and eat leftover takeout and mock the clueless neediness of the Real Housewives or whatever other sad sacks were whoring out their dignity on reality TV, a genre of which they never tired. They made out a lot too. Which was great, but if she was honest with herself the major appeal of having him in her home with the TV on lay in the reduced risk of his acting out in some public way that might embarrass her, or endanger him, or both. She had already begun, for instance, finding excuses not to go into stores with him, because no matter what sort of store it was—a Duane Reade, a Starbucks, a Sephora—when they were back on the street he would pull out of his jacket something he had shoplifted for her. She started to understand why his other friends were always so careful to limit their exposure to him, to stay outside his bubble. She did not want him to get caught, of course, but she couldn’t think of anything else that would stop him; and he never got caught.

What was worse was how bad he tried to make her feel for stressing. He mocked her for her fear of getting into trouble, but then, when she insisted she wasn’t afraid of that—and she wasn’t, not really—he critiqued her even more sarcastically, saying she was like someone whose jail cell door had been opened but she was too scared, too guilty to walk through it. Jail cell? As was often the case, she could follow what he was saying only so far, but no further. He’d always seemed older than she was, and one day he’d let slip that in fact he was almost sixteen. He’d been left back, despite being the single smartest person she had ever met.

His provocations could turn casually mean. But she forgave him everything. She could feel herself committing that cardinal feminine sin, the one you saw on reality TV shows all the time: she thought she could save him.

She answered the kitchen-photo message with a plea to return to school the next day. He promised that he would, but then on Thursday there was still no sign of him. She missed half of first-period chem standing in the hall outside his homeroom waiting to see if he would show up. Glumly she went back to her own schedule, and then, out of nowhere—at ten in the morning, in Spanish class, at a moment when she wasn’t supposed to have her phone on but had forgotten to switch it off—she got a call. Mortified, she pulled the phone out of her bag and held it below the level of her desk, as if that would make any difference when it was blaring its ringtone; she started to shut it off, but then she recognized the phone number, even though she hadn’t seen or used it in many months now. It was still programmed into her contacts, though; above the number on the tiny screen was the word Home.

“Señorita Armstead?” the teacher said testily.

When lunch period came Sara ran into the corridor and turned her phone back on, but by the time she had two bars she’d decided not to return the call anyway, whoever it was from. The whole thing was too creepy. Like a horror movie: The call is coming from inside the house. Whoever it was hadn’t left a voice mail. She thought briefly, reflexively, about calling Cutter to get his take on it, but there was more than half a chance the call was from him in the first place—just using the time on his hands to prank her. They gave her only twenty-five minutes to eat anyway.

There were no missed calls when she checked her phone again outside school at the end of the afternoon. But then it rang while she still had it in her hand, almost as if someone was watching her. She was too freaked out to answer. She went home, did an acceptable percentage of her homework, and saw that Cutter had posted nine messages on her Facebook wall asking what she was doing; she called her mother at the office, ordered Mexican for dinner, and was sitting on the couch watching 16 and Pregnant when her cellphone rang again.

“What the f*ck?” was the way she answered it, having decided it was probably Cutter, who had hacked the number just to show her how far inside her head he could get.

“Is that Sara?”

She had a profound moment of unbalance, like tipping a chair back too far. She looked at the incoming number again. “Daddy?” she said.

“Hi, honey. I’m sorry I called you this morning. I was just so excited to call that I actually forgot—well, I didn’t forget you went to school, obviously, but I guess I forgot what day it was.”

“Dad, where are you calling from?”

He laughed, a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time, though it wasn’t enough by itself to calm the furious beating of her heart, or the anger that her fear provoked. “Caller ID, eh?” he said. “Okay, maybe it was kind of a gratuitous touch, but I called the phone company and they still had our old number available. I’m calling you from our house. Our old house. I bought it.”

“What?” she said. “From who?”

“From your mother, technically.”

“How did she not tell me that?”

“I don’t think she knows. I kept it anonymous, because I figured she would never go for it otherwise. She told you the house was sold, though, right?”

“Yeah. She’s all pumped to have the money.”

“Well, good, that’s kind of what I was hoping. Anyway, here I am. I don’t know where our furniture is, but otherwise everything’s the same. What do you think?”

What did she think? Even in moments of extreme weirdness like this, it was just easy to express herself to him. Much easier than talking to her mother.

“I think it sounds pretty messed up,” she said.

“Well, granted.”

“I mean, for one thing, I thought you were broke.”

“I wasn’t, it turned out. Though I kind of am now.”

“And then—” She closed her eyes, not because she was upset but just to try to get her thoughts in order. “Why would you want to go back there,” she asked him, “by yourself, when you made such a big display about wanting to get out when Mom and I were living there? You liked the house, it was just us you didn’t like?”

A lengthy pause on his end. “Good for you,” he said softly. “I’m not sure I know why, really. The short answer is, it’s my home. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way, because it’s kind of a mess right now, but I made it, and I feel like I should live in it. And it gets you and Mom some of the money you should have gotten in the first place, and it keeps somebody else from moving in and just painting over, papering over, what happened here. I have to live here because it reminds me every day of who I am.”

It was an event, this phone call, even apart from what was being discussed; she hadn’t heard the sound of her father’s voice in months. Texting had just seemed like the default way to communicate—it was the way she communicated with everyone, even Cutter—but she could see now that there was something else to it, some sort of insulation or remove, that maybe they’d both needed.

On the TV screen a baby’s crying was muted. Framing the set was a view out the window of hundreds of apartments, hundreds of lives, all too small and too far away to be made out in any detail.

“So you’re telling me all this why?” Sara said. “What do you expect me to do?”

“I don’t expect you to do anything. It’s not even important that you come back here ever if you don’t want to. I just like the thought of you knowing that the place where you grew up is still here and that nobody else is living in it.”

Her eyes began to sting. “This makes no sense to me at all,” she said. “You had this huge meltdown, and you just got out of jail for it. Why go back? Why not just take your money and go somewhere else and try something new?”

“Turns out it’s not so enticing,” he said. “Turns out it’s kind of frightening, being nobody. Anyway, telling yourself you’re nobody doesn’t make it true.”

“It’s better to be someone everybody’s mad at?” Sara said.

He said nothing for a moment, then laughed softly. “You should see what happens when I go into town, to buy food and whatnot. Everyone who recognizes me hates my guts. Which is both a bad feeling and a good one. Good because it’s bad. It’s hard to describe.”

Sara tried to imagine it. “Do any of them ever ask,” she said, “whatever happened to me?”

“No,” he said, “but that’s only because nobody who knows you will speak to me at all.”

“You said you’re broke now. Do you have a job?”

“Yes. Of sorts.”

“So you’re just going to live there like nothing happened?”

“No,” he said, “I am going to live here like everything happened.”

She had a strange urge to tell him about Cutter—the stealing, the ditching, the self-destruction—and to ask for his advice, if only because she knew he wouldn’t lose his shit over it the way her mother surely would. “So,” she said instead, “what was jail like?” but then she heard the key turning in the front door lock behind her. “Gotta go, bye,” she said to her father and hung up on him.

Helen came and collapsed on the couch beside her, coat still on. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It just never ends. Every day I look up and suddenly it’s dark out. You poor thing.” She kissed Sara on the forehead, looking at the TV. “What on earth are you watching?” she said.

She disapproved lately of all of Sara’s habits, her likes and dislikes. As their circumstances bettered, her mother seemed determined to effect some corresponding improvement in Sara herself, some movement toward an ideal. This Sara resented intensely. Her mother wanted to change her wardrobe, to change the books she read, the TV she watched. She suggested that they join a gym together: “God knows I could use it,” she’d say, as if that made the whole notion any less repellent, or less insulting. In this atmosphere there was absolutely no question of discussing, or even mentioning the existence of, her shoplifting, class-cutting, alcohol-consuming, iPod-mugging, disobedience-encouraging boyfriend. Helen would have heard only the bad parts about him and would have devoted herself full-time to scrubbing this ethically compromised boy out of her daughter’s supposedly exemplary life. And this was why asking for advice on, or even mentioning, her sporadic contact with her father over the past several months would have been pointless as well. Her mother would have called the cops, and changed Sara’s phone number, and for what? For the sake of some perfectly untroubled adolescence she was apparently supposed to have, some perfect life she was supposed to aspire to, like that of some saint, never mind if the life she had right now, with all its flaws and drama, was hers. A saint was exactly what she was not.

Take the question of private school. Her mother wouldn’t let up about it lately. And it was true that the high school where she was enrolled next fall was overlarge and academically half-assed and socially fraught: but who imagined that Sara was too good for that? She herself was fraught in ways her mother was stubbornly unable to see. “It’s just the two of us now,” Helen loved to say. But it wasn’t. Her father, the more she thought about him, constituted a kind of parallel universe, a splinter family, and Sara was starting to think that maybe that was the family to which she truly belonged. Just as he had—only more literally—she’d become aware as she grew older that she was not living the life she had been born to live. And the guilt generated by her escape from that life was something she, like her father, had no desire to run from. Why her, after all? She was not so special. She was not without her weaknesses, her faults. And her advantages—where did they come from? What made her more deserving of luck or grace than anybody else whose real parents didn’t want them? It was important that she not pretend to be better than she was. Her father understood this kind of self-censure—more so than ever, in his current state. Her mother’s heart was closed to it.

Two hours later Sara’s phone went off again, this time a text from Cutter. Hungry? it read. Sara glanced up at her mother, six feet away on the couch in front of the TV, sound asleep. She texted back a single question mark, and a few moments later he had sent another grinning photo of himself, this time at a booth in a restaurant. It took her a few seconds to recognize it, from the menu he held in his hand, as the Hunan Garden just down the block from her apartment building. She felt her face grow hot.

Wtf are you doing?? she texted him.

Come on out. Free wine.

No way. Mom right here.

So I’ll come up to your place, then?

“Whoo!” Helen said suddenly. “I just nodded right off there!”

Sara willed herself to be calm as her mother slowly made the move from the couch to her own bedroom and shut the door. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she had gone to the Duane Reade to buy a new highlighter—lame, but better than no note at all—and slipped out the front door and down the hall to the elevators as quietly as she could.

Cutter looked euphoric, fresh as a daisy. It was after ten o’clock, and the waiters were glaring at him. He beckoned her into the booth where he sat with a pot of Chinese tea and an untouched tofu stir-fry of some kind. “I can only stay a minute,” she said. “You have to come back to school. Promise me you’ll be there tomorrow.”

“I was actually thinking about going out to the Island tomorrow,” he said. “The weather’s supposed to be nice. You should come with me. If we go tomorrow, we’ll have the house to ourselves.”

Her head drooped. If he didn’t go to school, he would fail, and if he failed, the two of them would not be together next year. But she didn’t want to make their relationship into the carrot. She was feeling a little locked in as it was. “So guess who called me tonight,” she said. “My dad.”

“No shit,” Cutter said, his face splitting into a huge smile. “Is he back in the joint? Making his one phone call?”

She shook her head. “He’s been out for a while. It was just a month, you know. Anyway, no, he actually called me from inside our old house upstate. He’s back living there now. My mother thought she was selling it to some stranger but she was actually selling it to him. Isn’t that insane?”

She was just hoping to amuse him and maybe garner some sympathy over the strangeness of her family; but he didn’t look amused at all. His brow furrowed, and his chin even shook a little bit, as if he might cry. “So he wants you to move back up there?” he said finally.

“No, he doesn’t. He said he doesn’t. He said he’s just doing it for himself. So he can go into town and have everybody hate him, or something like that. Crazy, right?”

Cutter shook his head. “Don’t you see what this is really about?” he said. “Your parents feel guilty every time they look at you and so they try to get rid of their guilt by buying you things. You see that, right? The guilt?”

Though she didn’t quite see it, Sara nodded soberly anyway, not wanting to agitate him any further. “Guilt over the divorce?” she said softly.

“No!” Cutter said. “Because you’re Chinese!”

“What?” she said in a harsh whisper, conscious that they were now under the probationary stare of the old Chinese guy who worked the register.

“It’s the American story in miniature,” Cutter said. “They came into your home and took you away from who you were, from everything you knew, and then, in order to have it both ways, they spend your life trying to buy you off to get you to forgive them for what they’ve done. They’ve deracinated you, and they can’t stand that you know that, and confront them with it, just by being. Just your face is a reminder of their crimes.”

Sara hadn’t heard the word “deracinated” before, but she got the picture. “I need to get back,” she said. “My mother could wake up and then I’m screwed.”

“Screwed how? What are you afraid of? What can they do to you they haven’t already done? She’d probably just feel guilty. All parents feel guilty. Because they are.”

She shrugged. He grabbed her wrist.

“You want to feel screwed,” he said, “come out to the Island with me.”

She shook him off and stood up. “Please go home,” she said tearily. “I’m worried about you. I don’t like being the only person who knows where you are.”

He folded his arms. “Whatever,” he said. “Go. I’m thinking about ordering dessert.”

The next morning there was no sign of him, and Sara’s chem teacher asked her to stay after class; her mind raced through all the different types of trouble she might be in, but it turned out that Ms. Markell wanted to nominate her for a scholarship to this summer chem-bio program at Columbia, a program designed to offer research opportunities to minority students. It was, she said, very prestigious, and down the road would put Sara on the radar of some very prestigious universities. “I guess I’ll talk to my mother about it,” Sara said, and Ms. Markell said of course, though she had already taken the liberty of emailing her mother with the great news. Sure enough, when Sara left school she had a text from her mom with three exclamation points and a suggestion that they meet at Hunan Garden for dinner.

“I hope you won’t be mad,” Helen said as Sara picked at some dumplings with her head down so that her hair concealed her face from the waiters, “but I called Nightingale and scheduled a tour for next Thursday. I know it’s supposed to be hard to get in there after ninth grade, not a lot of spaces open up, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, especially not when you’ve got a credential like this in your pocket that very few other people have. Anyway, don’t worry, a tour doesn’t commit us to anything. It just seems worth a shot, especially now.”

“Mom, there’s something—”

“It’s all girls at Nightingale, as you probably know, which may seem strange to you at this point, but all the studies say it’s a good thing, at least in the classroom. Funny it isn’t all that common anymore. Anyway, it’s not like you’ll never have the opportunity to, I don’t know, date or whatever it is you—”

“Mom?” Sara said. “Shut up a second. I have to tell you about something.”

Helen’s BlackBerry made a whirring noise and started to squirm across the Formica, but she ignored it. “Okay,” she said cautiously. “What is it?”

“I talked to Dad,” Sara said. The whole restaurant seemed to fall silent. “I’ve been in touch with him almost all along. I even saw him once, back in Rensselaer Valley, before we moved. I want to go see him this weekend. I have a right to do that, and he has a right too.”

“Do you even know where he is?” Helen said, the color draining from her face.

Try as she might, Sara couldn’t completely suppress a smile. “Hold on to your hat,” she said.

SHE HADN’T DRIVEN ANYWHERE in a while—another old-life routine she didn’t miss a bit—but the next morning Helen walked to the Hertz three blocks from their apartment and returned behind the wheel of a clean, strange car. It wasn’t even nine in the morning but there was nowhere to park on their block; her plan had been to go back upstairs, but instead she had to call Sara on her cell and let her know she’d be idling in the car outside. Sara, of course, reacted as if the inability to find a parking spot was purely a failure of intelligence. Helen hung up—she knew it would be a while now, that Sara would make a point of taking her time—adjusted the strange seat, which had a really disconcerting internal heating element she could not figure out how to control, turned the radio on and then off again, and then just sat there and grew furious.

She’d been made a fool of. What the hell could her ex-husband, the parolee, be trying to pull? Why buy back the house that was not only the scene of his disintegration but the reason for it as well, the house that had supposedly revealed itself to him over time as spiritually toxic and soul-snuffing and redolent of death? There had to be something. He did not play around where money was concerned. She tried to think what his angle was, but each idea made as little sense to her as the one before. Was it some sort of long con she was too dumb to understand? Though their divorce was technically final, they had agreed in principle to a future court date at which the judge would revisit questions of custody, alimony, etc., once Ben was done being sued and his financial picture was clearer. She had always assumed that the purpose of this hearing was to make sure she and Sara were sufficiently provided for, but why should she assume that? Was Ben somehow laying the groundwork to take all the money back from her, so that he would once again have everything? But that didn’t explain why he was actually living there. Surely it was enough, for whatever cryptic legal purposes, just to own the house. He hadn’t expressed anything but disgust toward it for as long as Helen could remember.

It crossed her mind, of course, while everything else was crossing it, that he wanted to reconcile with her. But even if such a thing was imaginable, this was a pretty antagonistic way to go about it. Their one phone conversation last night had been angry on her end and perversely calm on his. She’d threatened, with no sense of how realistic she was being, to have him arrested, for communicating with their daughter without her knowledge. His refusal to raise his own voice just made her crazier. He wanted to see his daughter again. That’s all he said.

What really frustrated her, though, was that no matter how fearful and protective all this made her feel on behalf of Sara—this poor girl whose life had been flipped upside down by the father who had rejected and embarrassed her, and was now summoning her back to a parody of her old home as if none of that had happened—she couldn’t find any pretext for expressing it because Sara herself was as happy as a clam. Every time Helen undertook some speech about how Sara didn’t need to be scared or about how it was okay to be angry, her daughter would just laugh at her. Literally. Here she came now, waving charmingly to their weekend doorman, through the glass doors and practically skipping into the passenger seat.

“Look at you,” Sara said in a tone of condescending gaiety. “Ten and two. What a good girl. Even when you’re not moving.”

“Did you lock the door?” Helen said, but Sara’s earphones were in, which meant conversation, such as it was, would be one-way only.

Helen hated the angry network of New York City highways, even on a Saturday morning, when they would presumably be less choked, so despite the extra time it took, she crossed all the way over to the West Side; from there it was a straight shot to Rensselaer Valley. It was a beautiful morning, and a pleasant enough trip up the Saw Mill, and if Sara wasn’t talking to her, at least that meant she wasn’t mocking or insulting her. But somewhere around Chappaqua, when things outside the car began looking familiar to her, Helen started to feel so nauseous that she thought she might have to pull over. She hadn’t expected to react so strongly. It wasn’t as though she’d hated it while she lived there. They took the Rensselaer Valley exit, and Sara immediately perked up, like a dog, Helen thought uncharitably. There was the train station; there was the elementary school Sara had gone to, back when Helen was stupid enough to think that all was right in their world. That was it: she hated this place because she believed that some earlier, embarrassing version of herself still lived here. A kind of muscle memory took over once she passed the school, and in another moment, almost as if she were only a passenger in the car herself, they were at the top of the hill that led down to Meadow Close. There didn’t appear to be any curtains or shades on any of the windows, but apart from that the house, from the outside, looked haughtily, insultingly unchanged, as if it could not have cared less what had gone on inside it. Helen turned in to the driveway and coasted to a stop.

“Are you coming in?” Sara asked.

“Absolutely not,” Helen said. Sara shrugged and opened her door. Helen watched her walk up the flagstones and then push through the front door just as if she still lived there. Then there was nothing to see, nothing to hear. The wind came up and blew some of last fall’s dry leaves around the brown, brittle, shameful yard.

Was she just going to sit there in the car for—she checked her watch—six hours, until the agreed time came for the end of Sara’s visit? Maybe. There didn’t seem anything particularly wrong with that plan right now. She certainly didn’t feel like moving a muscle. But then it occurred to her that Sara and Ben might not plan to just sit and talk inside the house for six hours. They might want to go into town for some reason—to eat, for instance, since she doubted Ben had picked up any cooking skills in the joint—and if the garage door opened to expose Helen still sitting there in her rental car like a zombie, well, the looks on their faces would be a humiliation that didn’t bear thinking about. Her face reddening as if they were already staring at her from behind the nonexistent curtains, she started up the car, backed out of the driveway, and headed into town.

There wasn’t much to do in Rensselaer Valley on a Saturday, or any other day for that matter. There were two restaurants, three if you counted that little Polish bakery where no one ever went. Having had just a glass of cranberry juice for breakfast, she was tempted; but wherever she might go, the chances were too great that Ben and Sara would walk into the same establishment and find her sitting there alone. No version of what would ensue was acceptable to her. She thought about texting Sara to ask her to please stay out of the deli, but if a request like that sounded a little crazy to Helen’s own ear, it would sound ten times as crazy to her daughter and she would never hear the end of it. At length she went to the newsstand across Main Street from the train station, bought a cup of foul coffee and a bag of peanut M&M’s, and went back to the lot behind the storefronts to sit in the front seat of her car, which she still had trouble recognizing. The newsstand guy, a put-upon old Arab gentleman, was someone she had spoken to perhaps two hundred times before, but her face provoked not a glimmer of recognition in his. Good. She did not want to be recognized.

She hadn’t brought any work with her—she hadn’t given a thought, it seemed, to how she would spend this first-ever afternoon in which she had ceded custody of her daughter—but she was able at least to open up her email, and there was plenty there to keep her occupied. The board of supervisors in a town in California that was seeking bankruptcy protection apparently still had money in its budget to hire Malloy to burnish its image enough to get its members reelected. The head of a charity that had collected millions of dollars to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan was combating news reports that the schools themselves did not actually exist. A corporate client in Poland, of all places, had been personally referred to Helen by the London office; the client was a natural-gas extraction outfit that had secretly released several tons of toxic chemicals into the Danube River, not just destroying livelihoods and threatening industries but actually killing people—eight or eleven, depending whose count you accepted. Strategy here was not the problem: the problem was the chairman of the company, who was a hoary veteran of the old Communist days and who magnificently resisted all efforts to squeeze out of him any sort of admission, public or private, of wrongdoing. The London team had grown so frustrated that they were trying to punt the case all the way across the Atlantic to Helen, just because they knew, or at any rate had been told about, her particular specialty. It was hard to tell whether they admired her or considered her a convenient sap.

She remembered her coffee, and took a sip, and just then a pair of gloved knuckles rapped softly on her driver’s-side window and caused her to lose half the mouthful down her chin. The tapping startled her worse than a shout would have done. Holding the BlackBerry at arm’s length to protect it, she turned to her left and saw Patty Crane, the mother of Sara’s former best friend, Sophia, hunched over and staring at her through the glass as if Helen were Amelia Earhart. She made a ridiculous motion with her hand that Helen finally recognized as a plea to roll down her window. Sighing, she worked up a smile and obliged.

“Helen?” Patty said theatrically. She was one of those local women whom Helen had never really liked and yet with whom she had somehow spent, over the years, an awful lot of time. “I feel like I’m seeing things!”

“Nope,” Helen said, laughing gamely, but not opening the door. “It’s really me.”

“Are you back in town? I drove by your house a week or so ago and saw lights on, but I just thought it had finally sold. It is so good to see you!”

No reference was going to be made to the past, to the source of her and her family’s disgrace. More than that: it dawned on Helen that Patty knew exactly who was living in the old Armstead place, that every vicious gossip in town must have known about it within a day of Ben moving in there, but she was going to go on pretending that she didn’t. Why? Why must it all be so ritualized? The mechanics of sparing Helen humiliation and actually humiliating her were so indistinguishable that surely even Patty didn’t know which of the two she was doing, or why.

“I’m just here for the day,” Helen said. “I’m waiting to pick up Sara.” She waved the BlackBerry. “Doing a little work while I’m waiting.”

“Oh, you’re working? How exciting. What are you doing?”

“Public relations,” Helen said. “Crisis management.”

“How exciting,” Patty said.

“How is Sophia doing?” Helen said, just to get the focus off of her; but then she failed to listen to the answer, which, unsurprisingly, went on for some time. She was thinking instead about Patty, with her bobbed hair and her down vest and the jeans stretched over her wide, field-hockey hips, and how if you took all that off her and put her in a bonnet and a gingham dress she might have been cheerfully handing out rocks with which to stone Helen and her whole family, or spitting on her in the stockade. Just then her BlackBerry buzzed; she glanced at it and saw an automated text from the IT department at work, informing her that the office servers would be down overnight, as if anyone would be sending business emails at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday anyway.

“It’s Sara,” Helen lied shamelessly. “She’s waiting. Gotta go. Patty, it was so great to see you, please give our love to Sophia and to”—she couldn’t summon the husband’s name—“to your whole family,” and she started the car and backed away. In truth she still had almost four hours to kill. She couldn’t return to Main Street now, though. She drove slowly through the familiar lanes. Across the train tracks, past the high school, and toward the fancier end of town there was a small pool club, to which the Armsteads had belonged when Sara was younger. Even on a Saturday, it seemed bound to be unpatronized this early in the season, and two minutes later Helen pulled into its empty parking lot and switched the car off again. Then, with the branches waving in-audibly in front of her windshield, she began to cry. She kept telling herself to stop. She didn’t have a good enough excuse for it, she felt. Everything in her life, if you took a step away from it, was going pretty successfully.

STILL, SHE’D BARELY COLLECTED HERSELF by the time she picked up her daughter at the foot of their old driveway. “So how did it go?” she asked, expecting cruelty, in the form either of silence or of a diatribe about what a relief it was to have at least one parent who knew how to mind his own business, but what she got was even worse than that: six hours in her father’s company had left Sara calm and expansive. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m sure that was a bummer for you, being stuck all afternoon with nothing to do but worry. But there’s nothing to worry about. He’s great. I wouldn’t say ‘same old Dad,’ exactly. He does seem a little different, but in a good way, to be honest. We just sat and talked. I think it would be good for me to spend more time with him. It didn’t really seem that weird at all. The weirdest thing about it, actually, was being back in our old house. It shouldn’t have seemed weird, but it did. It’s like a cave. There is seriously almost no furniture in there.”

Helen drove on, listening, more murderous than relieved. And she didn’t feel much better even by Monday morning, when she arrived at work to find six messages already on her desk, left by the weekend switchboard: four were from London, but the other two had a U.S. area code, one she didn’t recognize. No name, though, so she ignored them. She was supposed to get ready for a hastily scheduled meeting with someone who currently played in the NBA. Nobody seemed to know exactly when he was coming in. His name meant nothing to her, but she could tell he was a big deal from the way the male employees on her floor kept popping their heads in her office door, pretending to look for one another. It was something about a paternity suit filed by a teammate’s wife, or maybe child support, but whatever it was apparently didn’t constitute enough of an emergency to get him out of bed in time to meet before ten-thirty, so Helen went off to the morning meeting, where she hoped she wouldn’t be expected to speak knowledgeably on the current state of mind of the dithering Polish executive.

At least she wasn’t the only one feeling besieged. Arturo had new assignments for all of them—a rebranding in the wake of a mine collapse, a newspaper caught plagiarizing a blog—and affected to be unmoved by their complaints of being overworked already.

“I have to be able to service my existing clients,” Ashok said hotly.

“Your clients might be just as happy to see a little less of you,” said Arturo. “Everyone, these things go in spurts, as you know very well. So you have too much work and not enough time? It’s a crisis. Manage it. See you tomorrow, unless you f*ck something up between now and then.”

Helen, having caught Shelley yawning three or four times, squeezed in next to her as they were filing out of the Fishtank. “You’re buried too?” she said. “Anything I can help with?”

Shelley smiled and pantomimed embarrassment. “It’s not work, actually,” she said in a low voice. “Had a date last night. It went well, yada yada yada, I should maybe go down to the caf for a Red Bull. Want to come with me and hear the tabloid details?”

Helen begged off and walked back to her office alone. A date on a Sunday night? Well, why should that seem odd? There were ways to live other than the one she knew. She could be leading some other life herself. She could have gone out Saturday night: at one point on the drive up to Rensselaer Valley, Sara had taken her earphones out and asked about staying the night with Ben in their old house, and Helen had said no, but why? Why hadn’t she just said yes? Then she could have driven alone back to the city—a single woman on a Saturday night in Manhattan, the most decadent place in America—and picked up some guy and brought him back home and screwed him and kicked him out and then picked up her daughter at the train the next day like a spy or a con artist, as if the two sides of herself didn’t even care to know each other. But it was too late for that. Not just in terms of the weekend, but in terms of her ever becoming the kind of woman who knew how to do that kind of thing, without exposing herself as deluded or pathetic or ridiculous.

“You didn’t bring any books. Don’t you have homework?” Helen had asked instead.

Sara had closed her eyes. “Obviously,” she’d said. “Obviously I have homework. It’s the weekend, and I am not five years old. Did you seriously just ask me that?”

Her own office did not of course have glass walls, so Helen shrieked a little in surprise when she entered and saw a statuesque young woman, whom she had never seen before, standing calmly beside her desk.

“Helen?” the woman said. “I’m Angela. I work for Mr. Malloy. If you have a few minutes, he’d like to speak to you upstairs.”

“Of course,” Helen said, trying to recover. “I mean, it’s very nice of you to come escort me, but the phone would have been fine too.”

Angela smiled and held up a small silver key chain, with just one key dangling from it. “Special elevator,” she said.

Though she knew full well that Mr. Malloy’s office was only on six, somehow Helen had expected it to be higher, and the view to be better. When she entered, Malloy was looking out his broad picture window, through the rain, at the office building directly across the street. His hands were in his pockets, and he was smiling. Angela withdrew and pulled the door closed. He caught the reflection in the glass and turned around. “Ah!” he said. “The elusive one!”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. I brought a visitor around to meet you earlier. I would have warned you, but I didn’t receive any warning myself.”

Helen sat down without waiting for an invitation, and crossed her legs and folded her arms. “The team meets every morning at ten-thirty,” she said hoarsely.

“Yes, of course it does. Unfortunately I only remembered that when we got to your empty office, but I didn’t want to go down the hall and scare everybody. So how are you doing, Helen? Of course I know you’re doing very well, I hear good things, but I mean how do you like it here? Are you happy?”

If he’d left off that last bit, she could have given the reflexive answer one was supposed to give one’s boss; instead, she just smiled and gamely nodded. She wondered what he had been hearing about her, and from whom.

“Good good good,” Malloy said. “And your family?”

It was likely that he knew all about her family, just because he seemed to make it his business to know such things, but the question had a generic enough sound that she felt comfortable answering just by putting one thumb up in the air. “So you mentioned bringing someone to visit me,” she said. “A client?”

His glasses rose a little higher on his cheeks as he refreshed his smile. “Yes, in fact. A man of the cloth. I have to say this is a new one in my experience. He works for the New York Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, if you please, and he comes here as the personal representative of the archbishop, who naturally can’t be seen skulking around in places of ill repute like this one. They are in need of our services—specifically of the world’s best crisis management advisers. I took the liberty of scheduling a meeting between the two of you tomorrow morning, at their place this time, and that meeting, my dear, you will not miss.”

She struggled to think of something to say, but she was not fast enough to stop him from trying to interpret her silence.

“It’s true that I have taken a special interest in you,” he said. “Arturo and the rest of the merry band downstairs, they do a good job, but frankly I don’t think they see it yet.”

“See what, sir?”

“See you. See what you do.”

“I’m starting to wonder,” Helen said, “if I’m seeing it yet myself.”

“Well, sure,” Malloy said. “That doesn’t surprise me. But I see it. What you’re doing is the wave of the future. I think we’re going to rewrite the textbooks for crisis management before we’re done.”

“There’s a problem of scale,” said Helen. “The bigger it gets, the less real it seems to me.”

“I think what you should be asking yourself,” Malloy said kindly, “and what others will be asking themselves as they continue to watch you succeed, is not how real the process is, whatever that may mean, but what the results are.”

His office was not as big as she’d imagined. He kept the blinds wide open. Her eyes refocused on a woman in the building across the street who was hitting a printer repeatedly with the heel of her hand, and then again on her boss, an old man with seemingly infinite patience, or maybe he just didn’t have that much to do.

“You’re telling me the archbishop wants to meet with me?” Helen said.

“Well, I can’t guarantee you that His Eminence will be there in the room with you, but as near as dammit, as they say. They thought they were coming to talk to me, but I told them that you were my designated crisis management specialist around here.”

“And what,” she asked, “is the nature of their crisis?”

Malloy smiled crookedly. “Oh, come on,” he said. “I assume you read the papers.”

Angela knocked, and entered holding her key chain. A few minutes later Helen was downstairs in her office again. She felt sleepy. She felt like an instrument, but of what? She’d taken a job just to support her family, but now the job had grown to love her unabashedly and her family didn’t seem to need or even want her anymore. She shut her door just to give herself a few extra seconds if the basketball player and his agent happened to show up. Her phone rang; the caller ID showed the same number left on the weekend messages. Above the number was the unhelpful semi-legend LKSD INN CLT VT. She picked up and absently said her name.

“Helen?” a man’s voice said urgently. “Oh God, is this really you? Or an assistant?”

Helen’s face twitched in surprise. “No, this is me,” she said. “Who am I speaking to?”

“There’s no one else on the line? Or in your office? Do these calls get recorded?”

The voice had a little catch in it, like a sob. “It’s just me,” Helen said, a little testily in spite of herself. “Who is this?”

“It’s Hamilton,” the voice said.

“Hamilton? Why are—how did you—is something the matter?”

“Yes,” he said in a whisper.

“Where are you calling from?”

“A pay phone. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’re not still in the city, though?”

“No, definitely not. I’m in some motel or something. I don’t remember how I got here. There’s a lake out the window. Champlain, maybe? I got on a binge after I saw you and I don’t remember how I got here.”

“Hamilton,” Helen said, “that was five days ago.”

“I remembered you said the name of your place was Malloy,” he said, sounding more like he was crying now, “and I found your card, and I need help, and I can’t call any of the people that I would normally call.”

“Why not?”

“I think I may have done something bad,” Hamilton said.