—
A few hours later I heard Chrissy speak to Michael in a voice I would never have thought could be hers. She said, “I don’t believe you couldn’t even take the garbage out!” She did not know I heard, I had stepped out of my room to get a glass of water in the bathroom to take a sleeping tablet, and standing at the top of the stairs I heard her in the kitchen saying this to Michael, and her voice was so terribly—unbelievably—harsh. Michael only murmured something, and then I heard a cupboard door slam and I went into the bathroom quietly.
I thought to myself: She has lost all respect for him.
But in the morning, she drove me to the train station, and she said, all smiles, “Okay, enjoy New York, I will see you there in two days!”
Michael had just said goodbye at the door, quiet, as he often was. I had hugged him goodbye, and he did not hug me as hard as he had when I’d arrived.
* * *
—
The train ride into the city seemed interminable. I could not stop thinking about Chrissy. I thought: The girl is forty years old, if she gets really skinny-sick she could die. I thought: Something is wrong in her marriage.
* * *
It was a sunny day, and as the train got closer to the city, I felt a very small—but real—sense of excitement, just looking out the windows of the train and seeing more and more buildings—and people, too, who were sometimes sitting on their tiny terraces that looked out over the train tracks. All this made me feel almost happy.
But when we pulled into the city itself I could see in the distance the building I had once lived in. And I did not feel anything. And I continued to feel that way as I got out at Grand Central, which felt eerily empty to me; only a few of us walked through it, and all the stores in it were closed. And then there were no taxis, as I had thought there might not be. So I walked around the station, and on the other side was one taxi and he took me to where I was staying.
An emptiness had come into me.
iii
The Airbnb was in midtown, and there were lace curtains on the windows, and it was on the first floor of a brownstone. I had lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn years earlier and I had forgotten that one could not see much from inside, but these curtains made me feel like I was inside a coffin. When I had moved to Manhattan I had always lived high up in a building, and I had always had a view of parts of the city. So I felt even stranger as I walked through the two rooms, and when William called me I could not explain to him what I was feeling. But I told him about Chrissy, and his voice dropped and he said, “Oh God, Lucy.”
* * *
—
There was a small circular shower with a curtain around it, and as I took a shower I thought I might fall; that is how disoriented I felt.
* * *
—
For two days I walked through the city; I had not told any of my friends that I would be there, I had thought I would surprise them and then go see them, but I was glad now that no one knew I was here. I did not feel that I could give them the attention they deserved. I noticed that there were very few taxicabs around. Clothing stores that had lined a whole section of Lexington Avenue were shut, some with a kind of peeling white paper on the insides of their windows.
* * *
—
I walked across Park Avenue against the light; that is how few cars were on the street.
* * *
—
I sat in Central Park and saw the flowering bushes and the leaves that were already out and I watched people go by, there were many people. But I felt nothing.
* * *
—
I went back to Grand Central on Monday morning at nine o’clock, and as I stood on the balcony looking down, there was only one man walking through the wide stretch of the station as above him was the large ceiling with its constellations.
* * *
—
In the afternoon I went to Bloomingdale’s to get some perfume—I have a particular scent I always use—and so I went to the area on the first floor with all the different makeup places, and I bought a small bottle that I would be able to take home on the airplane—we were going to fly back—and I noticed that the salesclerk did not try and sell me anything else, which was different, usually they would say, “Are you sure you don’t want to try some of this new night cream?” Or something like that. But this salesclerk just hurriedly sold me the perfume and then she said, Oh, here, and she handed me a bag of little samples of makeup that one usually gets after one spends enough money, and my small perfume had not been enough to do that, but she shoved the bag at me and I thanked her and she said, “Sure.”
And then I could not find my way out of the store. I kept wandering through the huge makeup section, starting one way, thinking, This is not right, and turning around and going in the other direction and thinking, No, this is not right, and finally a salesman approached me with his black mask on and he said, Can I help you? And I said, I want to get out of the store. And he so courteously ushered me out.
* * *
That night as I lay awake in the Airbnb, I thought of all the people—old people and young people—who had lived out the pandemic in rooms like I was in right now. Alone.
iv
I went to meet Chrissy in Central Park, we had arranged to meet at the duck pond, and she was already there when I arrived. She waved; she had sunglasses on. “Hi, honey,” I said, sitting down next to her on a bench, and she said, “Hi, Mom. One second. Hold on.” And she texted someone and then looked at me and said, “So how does New York seem to you?”
“Oh, it’s strange,” I told her.
“Yeah? How so?”
Something was really wrong with my child.
* * *
—
A woman who was perhaps fifty years old kept walking quickly around the duck pond. She was on a cellphone and I heard her speaking Italian. Around and around she went in an outfit of dark green workout pants and a workout jacket the same color. She wore a bright orange mask, pulled down below her chin.
* * *
—
As we sat on the bench, Chrissy kept looking at her phone. At one point she said, “Sorry, Mom, I just have to answer this,” and she typed away furiously and then finally put her phone away. She seemed to relax just a little bit.
And then I had a vision: Chrissy was having an affair. Or she was about to have an affair.
I looked straight ahead while she talked, she was talking about her work, some sort of internal trouble the organization was having but her own job was perfectly safe, it was just interesting to watch these other people go after each other. Something like that she was saying.
And I said, “Chrissy, don’t do it.”
I turned to look at her, and she took her sunglasses off and looked me straight in the eye, her eyes are hazel, and I felt I had never looked at her so hard, or she at me. “Do what?” she finally said.
And I said, “Do not have that affair.”
And she kept looking at me; her eyes above her mask became tighter, it seemed to me. She would not look away. Then she began to complain about Michael. She said, “You have no idea what he’s really like, Mom. You never did. You know what he does for a living, Mom? He manages people’s money—how meaningful is that?”
“Pretty meaningful,” I said, “to those who have money.”
She got angrier. “Right. Well, there are millions and millions of people in this world without money, so ask them how meaningful it is.”
“But you knew that when you married him.”
She opened her mouth and closed it, and I realized then that when a person is having an affair, their spouse becomes demonized. This is the way it is.
* * *
—