The Hole in the Middle

Chapter 13: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2011

If I’m honest, the headache that I have on Thursday morning has nothing to do with my cold and everything to do with the fact that I drank three-quarters of a bottle of Chianti by myself last night while the kids and I watched back-to-back episodes of Go Diego Go. I’m not proud of myself, and in a penitent act of self-flagellation, I call Janelle Moss to talk about the Gala.

When she answers, the background noise is deafening. It sounds as though she is standing in an airplane hangar or a wind tunnel. “Sophie!” she bellows, “I’m in the middle of a blow-out. I’ll call you back in five!”

I sit at my desk and contemplate my options. I eye my computer and telephone warily; both seem to vibrate with malevolent energy today. I opt for the telephone.

First message. “Sophie, it’s your mother. What happened at yoga last night? Leo said that you quit! Call me.”

Next message. “Hi Sophie, it’s Dana. Is everything OK? Your mom was worried after you left yoga last night. Give me a call.”

Next message. “Hi Sophie, it’s Jenny. Funny to run into you last night. We need to chat about an incident with one of your staff members. And could you send me a note letting me know when you’ve done all the performance review meetings so I can put it in the file?”

Next message. “Honey, it’s your mother again. I just opened the mail and saw your adorable Christmas letter! It’s so nice to see you keeping up our family tradition! I was going to chat with you last night about the Christmas presents for the boys but you left early so I didn’t get the chance. I’m running out of time, so if I don’t hear from you by the end of the week, I’m just going to go ahead and buy them whatever I want and you won’t have anything to say about it. Deal? And I still want to talk to you about yoga.”

There are additional messages, but I hang up instead and consider my Christmas dilemma. It’s tempting to take the passive approach here, and just let my mother loose on the toy store with no restrictions. But inevitably she will hit upon the very thing that Jesse has identified as the perfect Santa gift, and send him into orbit. Jesse doesn’t have a lot of rules about the holidays, and only one of them is iron-clad: no one can outshine Santa. With my dad gone, though, I find it almost unbearable to ruin any small pleasure that my mother gets from doting on my children, especially around the holidays. I groan aloud and feel my hangover gathering in one painful knot in the center of my forehead. I throw back a couple of Advil.

The phone rings. “OK,” says Janelle. “Sorry about that. What’s the status? Any progress?”

“Some. My staff and I have been brainstorming some great new ideas. I should be able to share them with you on Monday, and then we can present them to the committee.”

“If you want to get the committee to agree on anything, you’ll need to be prepared. Here’s the skinny. There are four people you need to worry about: Addie Sims, Katerina Blackwell, Jane Phipps and me.” She pauses. “Are you writing this down? Addie’s husband left her for his twenty-five-year-old dental hygienist last winter, at which point she practically moved into her spinning studio. She is interested in any theme that allows her to expose as much of her body as she can. Katerina has a high-school education and met her husband when she was a flight attendant servicing the first class cabin. And I do mean servicing. She’s extremely sensitive about her background. We’re hearing a lot from her about how the event has to be “elegant” and “classy”. She and Addie nearly came to blows over the male models in the loincloths. Jane is an accountant, which is a very big deal for her. I swear she mentions it at least once every meeting. She has elected herself our unofficial budget chief. Between us, she’s more than a little cheap. She was very down on the Pharaoh’s Tomb and the belly dancers. So there’s your challenge, Sophie. If you can think of a theme that will make the three of them happy, you’ll win the day.”

“What about you?” I ask.

She laughs in a short, sharp burst. “If I put my name on something, I want it to be the best. I want to throw a party that people are still talking about in five years. I want to raise more money than we’ve ever raised before. What can I say? I’m competitive.” There is a longish pause, while I try to figure out the appropriate response. Janelle beats me to it. “Still alive there, Sophie? Look on the bright side. At least I’m not making you guess how to make me happy.”

“And I appreciate that,” I say.

“So tell me about yourself,” says Janelle, “Since we’re going to be working so closely together. Do you have kids?”

“Two boys,” I say.

“And you work full-time?”

“That’s right.”

“My goodness, how I admire you working mothers,” says Janelle. “I just don’t know how you do it! Do your kids miss you?”

“It’s what they know,” I say lightly. “They don’t complain too much and they get lots of time with us in the evenings and on weekends.”

“But surely something has to give with the schedule you must keep,” says Janelle sympathetically.

“Well,” I say, deciding that it would violate female conversational norms not to offer up one of my deepest failings to this near stranger, “If I had to choose one thing that I would have to admit has fallen through the cracks, it would be family dinners. With our schedules, we don’t get to sit down together for a family dinner too often. But hopefully we’ll get around to that when the kids are older and can eat a bit later.”

“You know,” says Janelle. “When my oldest daughter was interviewed for admission to Harvard, she was asked what event in her life had influenced her the most. Quite a question, isn’t it? Some kids talked about how their mothers survived breast cancer, or how they had helped to build a school in rural India, but do you know what Chelsea said? She said that most important influence on her life had been family dinners.”

“Extraordinary,” I say flatly.

“Isn’t it? But of course, I made such an effort to make family dinner special every night. I’d always put a candle on the table or some fresh flowers, so that the kids would think of it as a meaningful part of our family life. When I look back, the investment seems so small relative to the rewards. In high school, our kids’ teachers were amazed at how well-informed the kids were about current events, but that was because the emphasis was always on the conversation, the exchange of ideas, rather than the food. Of course, this is what all of the studies say – that family dinners are a key ingredient in putting your kids on the road to success.”

“Wow,” I say, largely because I can’t think of anything else to say. “What a story. I won’t forget it.” I clear my throat to get rid of the twinge that could be either tears or laughter. “Well, Janelle, I look forward to working with you. I’m sure the Gala will be a great success.”

“It better be,” she says with a hint of menace. “No one wants to preside over the Ishtar of the Gala season. We’re in this together. When will you have a new set of concepts for me?”

“Monday latest,” I say.

“Until then,” she says and rings off.

“Your husband wants you to call him!” Joy yells from her cubicle. I reach him on his cellphone; he’s spending a lot of time these days with various groups of people that start with in- or con- – investors, inspectors, insurance adjusters, contractors, consultants – so he’s rarely in his office. “Hi Soph,” he says, “I’ve just got a second.”

“You called me,” I point out, I think reasonably.

He sighs audibly. “It’s about the dinner party tomorrow.”

“Dinner party,” I echo, wracking my brain to figure out what he is talking about. Are we going to a dinner party? Was I supposed to book a babysitter?

“You didn’t forget did you?”

“Of course not,” I say. And suddenly it comes back to me. We’ve had this party in the works for ages. We have so many outstanding dinner invitations to return that we decided to get all of them out of the way in one fell swoop, although to our guests we are selling it as an effort to introduce our like-minded friends to each other: “I’ve been dying to introduce you! You have so much in common!” But the truth is that some seriously interventionist hosting is going to be required to keep the conversational ball rolling. A home-cooked meal for six guests who don’t know each other on a Friday night: I’ve clearly been blocking it out.

“I want to invite Anya. It’s been a rough week at the office and her husband is out of town. Is that OK?” I have to give him credit for asking permission instead of resolving to proceed and ask for forgiveness later. And anyway, speaking of permission, his gambit opens the door for me to resolve a problem of my own, namely what to do with Will on Friday night.

“That’s fine,” I say. “I’ll invite Will Shannon, then. He’s in town and wants to see us.”

“Great,” says Jesse, although there is tightness in his voice that suggests another reaction to the prospect of dinner with Will.

“That’s eight, ten including us, Jess. We’ve got to find some time to sit down and plan the menu. Are you home tonight?”

“I’ll try,” he says, “Call you later.”

I do a little math. If I’m going to cook dinner for ten people tomorrow, even with an eight o’clock start, I’m going to have to leave work early, which is going to be very hard to justify since we are shooting the holiday appeal ad on the weekend. I have until Monday to save the Gala, the ADHD press conference is this afternoon and I have approximately one hundred and fifty unanswered emails in my in-box. There is no way around it: I’m going to have to cancel my lunch date with Zoe. I shoot off an apologetic email and start working my way through the backlog, only to be interrupted by the phone.

“No,” Zoe says.

“No, what?”

“No, I do not accept your cancellation,” says Zoe. “Everyone has to eat, including you. I’ll meet you at Carlo’s in fifteen minutes.”

“Zoe, I’m sorry. I just don’t have time to go to Carlo’s today. I’d love to, but I can’t. Can we do it next week?”

“Forget Carlo’s then. I’ll meet you in the food court in your building.” Zoe’s voice sounds thick and scratchy. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

“Are you all right?” I haven’t seen Zoe cry since her father’s funeral fifteen years ago, but I’m pretty sure I recognize the signs. I suppress viciously the resentful thought that I am tapped out this week; I couldn’t possibly be a lousy enough friend to find Zoe’s emotional crisis inconvenient – could I?

“I’ll be there in a half hour,” I say. Just enough time to check in with Erica and make sure that the press conference is on the rails and to return all of the emails with big, red exclamation marks next to them.

“I have a lunch meeting with a vendor,” I tell Joy as I race out the door. “I’ll go straight to the press conference after lunch.” She doesn’t believe me, of course, but she won’t be able to say that she doesn’t know where I am if Barry comes looking for me.

I find Zoe hunched over a plastic table next to the Chinese noodle stand, shredding a napkin into a tiny mountain of white fluff. I order two shiny plates of noodles, slide one in front of Zoe and sit down across from her. “What’s going on?” I ask.

“It’s Richard,” she says. “I think he wants to leave me.”

This is much worse than I imagined. It’s terrible to say, but I was kind of hoping that Zoe’s music-producer brother had taken another overdose, since I know exactly what to say in that situation without getting myself into trouble. Zoe’s husband Richard is a more complicated subject, one that we have tacitly agreed to avoid over the years. The best that I can say about Richard is that he is urbane and sophisticated, and a good dinner companion to the extent that you are prepared to let him do all the talking. The man never runs out of commentary on the poor quality of the latest season at Bayreuth, or the ubiquity of heavy blackberry notes in the new Australian reds, or the rise of boutique hotels in Iceland, but no one (in our house at least) would call him fun. I dip my toe in, cautiously.

“Is there someone else?”

Zoe shakes her head. “I don’t think so. He just keeps saying that we’re in a rut, that he needs to spend some time alone. He says that I distract him from pursuing his deeper purpose.”

“Which is?” I try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. Richard has never struck me as someone with a deeper purpose.

Zoe’s eyes are red. “I have no idea,” she says. “This all started in the summer, when he said that he wanted to go camping! Richard, camping! And when I asked where this was all coming from, he said that our life was alienating him from his natural world, if you can believe it. Natural world! Richard doesn’t even like having flowers in the house. He says they’re messy!”

I pat Zoe’s arm sympathetically. “Maybe he’s having a mid-life crisis. Isn’t he turning forty this year?”

“I suggested that in therapy last week. But our therapist says that my need to categorize everything is part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

“You’re in therapy?”

“There’s nothing wrong with therapy! You and Jesse should consider it. It’s a healthy way to work out the normal differences and strains in a relationship in a safe environment. A little self-reflection can be good for you, you know. You should examine your own need to compartmentalize everything. You’re the least integrated person I know.”

I am not going to rise to this bait. If I were a therapist, I would say that Zoe has a tendency to project her insecurities outward. And so I say, mildly: “And this makes me what? Un-integrated? Disintegrated?” But as I say it, I have an alarming vision of myself disintegrating into dust and blowing away. I take a deep breath and remind myself that it’s easy for Zoe to extol the virtues of self-improvement; she has no kids and therefore, even with all of the demands of running HENNESSY, the hottest ad agency in town, she still has a reasonably unfettered ability to engage in pursuits from French cooking to jewelry-making to Italian lessons to kick-boxing. Added to this is an enviable amount of time for what she refers to as “maintenance” – both inner and outer – which is why she has visible triceps and flat abs and spends a lot of her disposable income on various forms of therapy.

It occurs to me that Zoe and I have swapped philosophies since the early days of our friendship, the era before I moved into the house on Abernathy. I can picture myself back then, sucking back thermoses of strong, terrible coffee, filled with restless energy and wracked with perennial worry about the future. I fretted about my grades and my major and my career prospects and the various boys that I considered sleeping with – whether they liked me and how much they liked me and whether we had enough in common to justify sleeping together, if there was any ethical or moral requirement to find such a justification. And after a while, I would stop worrying about whether the boy in question liked me enough and start worrying instead about whether I liked him enough; and then I would agonize over how to break up and when to break up and whether we would still be friends, and all of this rumination meant that I never felt that I was having a moment of pure experience since I was simultaneously ten steps ahead, dismantling and analyzing the moment as it was happening. That was before I met Will Shannon, of course, and figured out that being immersed in pure experience was both more and less than I’d bargained for. Zoe, though, was a master of the art of living in the moment, and of making every moment as pleasurable as possible. I would come home to the apartment after a long, contentious meeting at the Women’s Campus Collective, or a nighttime shift with the Safety Walk program, and Zoe would be sitting up waiting, with a cold martini already mixed.

And now Zoe has embraced the power of the examined life, whereas I now believe that too much contact with my innermost thoughts and feelings can only lead to trouble. And how would I find the time to live an examined life, anyway? These days, my life exists at the other extreme of the doing versus thinking spectrum. My days are measured out in tasks that must be checked off; I know the day is over when I’ve run out of energy to check even one more box, and then I pass out and start again the next morning. No doubt there are many complicated feelings to mine from the depths if I had the time or the inclination, but what good could possibly come of that? If my psyche were a map, it would be have huge swaths of unexplored territory like medieval illustrations of the world, with warnings at the edge: Here Be Dragons.

I take a deep breath. “Zoe. This isn’t about me. How long have you been in therapy?”

Zoe sighs. “Sorry. Since September. I should have told you, but I was embarrassed. Richard started seeing someone and he thought that the work he was doing would be more productive if the therapist could interact with me as well.”

“Why, so that he can blame everything on you?”

“It’s starting to feel that way,” she sniffs. I feel hot with anger at pompous, mean-spirited Richard. Who does he think he is? I can’t believe how much effort I’ve invested in trying to identify and appreciate his good qualities, time which now appears to have been utterly wasted.

I look at my watch. I’ve pushed it as late as I can, but my time’s up. I give Zoe a hug. “I’m so sorry I can’t stay longer,” I say. “We’ll book some time on the weekend to do this properly, OK? But in the meantime, try to remember that you were something special long before you met Richard. Trust me. I was there.” She gives me a watery smile, and I silently curse the responsibilities that are pulling me away from something so much more important. I blow Zoe a kiss and race for the door.