“No.”
Siobhán was positive Jess had met him at some party or other, their wedding at the very least. As if Jess would be able to recollect all three hundred people who’d attended Siobhán and Patrick’s wedding seventeen years ago, after an entire bottle of prosecco and a mishap with the shuttle bus. As if she ever talked to anyone at those parties other than the people she already knew. That was Malcolm’s thing. He was the host of their table. He was the host of the elevator that brought everyone to the top floor. He was the host of the line that snaked its way to the buffet, cracking jokes and pumping the hands of everyone he knew and hadn’t seen in ages. Neil and Malcolm had both been groomsmen, Siobhán reminded her. But Patrick had had ten groomsmen, and Jess had been seeing Malcolm for only a few months. She and Siobhán were friendly at the time but not close yet. She spent most of the night waiting for Malcolm to wrap up his duties so they could hang out.
Siobhán said he was worried about his kids, the poor guy. “His ex should be in jail,” she added. “Can you imagine Patrick picking back-to-school clothes for Cara?”
“I’m sure he’d figure it out,” Jess said.
“Anyway, he’s a lawyer,” Siobhán said, in the soft voice she used when she was trying to sound innocent. “I think he does something very similar to what you used to do at the firm.”
“Oh no. No-no-no. What did you say about me? There are a zillion different types of lawyers, Siobhán! As soon as he hears how long I was at the firm and then this sudden pivot, he’ll know I left because I didn’t make partner.”
“Well,” Siobhán said. “I wanted him to know he has things in common with people here. He claims he’d never even been on this side of the Hudson before he came to look at the house he bought. He relied completely on Patrick’s stories about Gillam, so now the people in those stories have to show up! He doesn’t care why you left the firm!
“Also,” Siobhán added. “We’re having those ribs you like. I’m making the marinade right now.”
“Oh really?” Jess said. She’d just eaten a dry turkey sandwich at her desk. “I could drink that marinade.”
“I know you could.”
“Okay, we’ll be there. But stop discussing my résumé, please.”
“I love you.”
It wasn’t that he’d care. It was just embarrassing. Jess had been at Bloom for a few months by then. They owned the Half Moon but it was still so new. They weren’t behind yet, though a simple comparison of the profit and loss sheets month over month, charted on a graph, predicted very clearly where the line was headed if something didn’t change. She’d followed that line to its obvious conclusion, had stayed late at work one evening creating a spreadsheet so she could show Malcolm. And she’d been generous! There were expenses she didn’t know about, surely. The unpaid tabs. The unspoken etiquette of cash put down on a table and then pushed away. The macroeconomics of an entire industry, how to tip and why and when and to whom and how much. Cash passed in envelopes or folded into thick wedges and tucked into shirt pockets. Stacked in a safe deposit box, sure, but also removed in denominations of one inch, two inches. But when she brought home this presentation of facts, he glanced at it exactly once and then told her to just tell him what it said. When she explained, said they’d be in the red within six months, said they’d be up an actual creek if they didn’t make a change—get an investor or sell or come up with a brand-new idea for how to get bodies in a dingy room, buying drinks—he said her work was too binary, what with its columns for profit and loss, success and failure. His world was full of nuance, determined by moods, weather, current events. If the Mets made it to the World Series, the bar would kill it in October. Things like that couldn’t be captured on a spreadsheet, he said, and she said yes it certainly could, she’d done it, all he had to do was look.
On the day that Siobhán called to invite them to the barbeque to meet Neil, Jess and Malcolm hadn’t had sex in almost three months. Afternoon talk shows and morning radio would have her understand that was normal for some couples, but it wasn’t normal for them. She could count exactly how long because the last time was the day she returned from San Francisco, and every day that passed felt like an alarm ringing deep inside her center, keeping her up at night. There was no way he could know what had happened in San Francisco, but part of her wondered. He was eerie like that, the way he could feel in a room if someone was sad, if someone was in a mood to pick a fight. Maybe it was the same way he could detect something not right in her, a wobbling of loyalty, the fraying of a bond. To look at him, no one would think he was thinking about anything at all.
By the time Jess started at Bloom, she and Malcolm both knew that their therapist Dr. Hanley was turning out to be a disaster. She’d sought him out to help them sort through their conflicting feelings about fertility—or rather, to convince Malcolm that he wanted what she wanted—but then there was so much more that she didn’t know bothered her until she spoke in that office. They didn’t tell Dr. Hanley that they’d stopped having sex. Every other week, he asked about intimacy, and every other week they just slid right by it, said that everything was fine. Jess wondered how many of his clients were like her and Malcolm, raised to keep all troubling thoughts to themselves, and then, as soon as they possibly could, to bury them. When Jess said that intimacy was fine, and Malcolm looked anywhere but at either of them, Dr. Hanley said that was good, a sign of health, a sign of a solid foundation.
After hanging up with Siobhán, she saw the time and had to move fast or she’d miss her train. They were supposed to be at Dr. Hanley’s at five o’clock, the latest he was willing to meet at the start of the long weekend. That day felt no different from any other appointment. Jess got to the train in the nick of time, Malcolm was waiting for her at the station, only to sit in the vestibule for five minutes while the previous couple wrapped up and exited through the other door so they wouldn’t encounter each other. Sometimes Dr. Hanley’s white noise machine played ocean sounds and sometimes rain.
“You know he says the same stuff to everyone,” Malcolm said while they waited. He seemed particularly put out to be there that day. Memorial Day weekend could go either way at the bar, could be slow with people away until Monday night, or busier because those who had not gone on vacation would want to go out.