She loves all three of her children, of course she loves them. But she is not always the best for them. And they are not always the best for her.
Jacob calls her from London, her focus on the spreadsheet interrupted again. It’s 3:00 p.m. there, but that won’t matter to him because he never adjusts to local time when he travels. She puts the phone on speaker. He sounds stressed, again. He’s been away for work a lot this year, and these trips overseas make him anxious. He tells her about the art he was shown that afternoon, and she is listening in the way she does, which is to be multitasking, to be answering the emails that require only brief replies while she feeds him advice that he has not asked for.
“Can I just interrupt, honey? For a sec? Did you bring up exclusivity, at least?”
He is an art dealer. But he does not have all the qualities of a successful art dealer. He is in London for four days to scout pieces for his clients, who are wealthy individuals without the time or interest or inclination to find their own art. They like Jacob because he is an intellectual, the son of two Yale humanities professors. He will, reluctantly, stand in their opulent homes and drink their finely aged wines while he teaches them everything they ought to know about the contemporary art world, his PhD distilled into ninety generous and well-spoken minutes, in exchange for the one piece they might bite on over the next five years.
But the money in art dealing is not based on knowing about value and trends like he does, or being able to recite every record-breaking sale at the New York auction houses like he can. It’s about the volume of sales and the commissions on those sales, and Jacob is uncomfortable with exploiting either of these measures, despite Whitney’s loving and voluntary coaching.
He knows this. He doesn’t care about this. They both understand that he mostly humors her need to interfere. As much as it galls her, he doesn’t have the same hunger for success and money and status that she does. He hasn’t been working and investing since he was fifteen years old like she has, he doesn’t have the MBA she has earned on nights and weekends while excelling in an executive role, and yet he is the proximate one to the real wealth. She envies how naturally he fits that echelon of society, how bred he was for a world he doesn’t want much to do with. He has the privilege of having nothing to prove. In that same kind of room, she would be acting. And more self-conscious than she would ever admit.
“You know what I’ll say, Jacob. You can’t undersell and overdeliver in your world, it’s too finicky. It’s about hype, right? You’ve got to do a harder pitch up front, or you’ll lose his interest from the get-go.”
But she’s not threatened by Jacob’s intellect, because there’s no power in holding court over a glass of wine. There is power in her own income. In her own financial security. In a padded investment portfolio and a growing business with eight-figure revenue. It is her ambition that has given their family the life they have, that allows him to stroll the grounds of an international art fair for four days and return with nothing to show but inspiration. She has afforded them the three children, the house on a double lot, the multiple vacations a year, the on-demand nanny, the sought-after art he has chosen for their own walls. There’s nothing ordinary about any of it, thanks to her. Still. She’d like him to contribute more. To take some of the pressure off her for once.
She knows most people recoil at the idea of women like her pursuing wealth with the same vigor men do all the time. Even if they don’t admit it. That it’s off-putting for a woman to want more money than society thinks she’s worth.
“My advice is to get the commitment from Pearse on the thirty percent first. You’ve gotta be firm. Much firmer,” she tells him.
Her assistant, Grace, is in her office now, mouthing something as she puts bound copies of the presentation on her desk. She sticks a note beside it.
“I’ve got to go, but call me tomorrow, okay? If you want to talk anything through? The pitch should be done by noon.”
The pitch, he says, of course, he hasn’t forgotten about it. He can’t wait to hear how it goes. He knows she will nail it.
But sometimes she wonders if he’s as happy for her success as he wants to be. If he’s ever hoped, in a weak moment, for her to fail, just once. There’s a tautness to his words sometimes, although they are exactly the words he’s supposed to say.
Try to leave at a decent time tonight, he tells her.
She doesn’t say anything.
Maybe I shouldn’t have gone, he says.
She stiffens, turns her back to the open office door.
“Why would you say that? What do you mean?”
He is quiet.
He doesn’t know. He feels far away. He misses the kids, he’s tired. Never mind.
She doesn’t like him this way, wishy-washy and anxious. She looks at the sticky note from Grace. The name and phone number of Xavier’s teacher. She doesn’t mention it. She folds the paper and slips it into her breast pocket. She doesn’t want it lingering in her periphery.
She tells him not to be silly. That everything is fine. The kids will be fine.
She waits for him to say he knows she’s right. But instead he’s quiet. And then he says something about a taxi, he’s got to run. She tells him she loves him. He says nothing, and then a car door closes, and he’s gone.
There’s a text on the screen of her iPhone when she hangs up.
Hey Still good for tonight? 11pm?
She sits back in her chair and undoes the gold button on her milky white blazer. She tries to make sense of Jacob’s uneasiness. She doesn’t like how it feels. She taps the phone against her chin. She breathes in sharply before she replies, and then swipes to delete the conversation.
14
Rebecca
She’s just entered the stairwell when the code blue is paged overhead. Third floor. Room 3103. She’s not on the response team, so she continues scanning her emails while she takes the stairs slowly, careful not to trip without her eyes on the steps, but then it registers—third floor.
Room 3103.
She tries to remember what room Xavier is in, it’s 31, 31-something, 3108, 3111? She’s pumping her arms as she runs up the stairs, one more flight to the exit on the third floor. Room 3103, it’s too familiar, it must be him. She nearly cuts off the crash cart in the hallway, but then jumps back to let them through, and follows the team’s steady march to the corridor at the right of the nursing station. Xavier’s hallway.
No, no, no. She wills them to stop, his room is nearly three quarters down that hall, but they’re jogging too quickly already, they’re nearly at his door and she can see it’s open now. She imagines Whitney in the corner of the room, being told to leave, to get out while they try to restart his heart. Two doctors rush past her, an elbow knocks her hip, and she stops.
It’s the room next to his.
She folds, her hands on her knees. Her throat is tight. She steels herself. She should clear the area if she’s not helping. She’ll come back to check on Xavier later.
She isn’t herself.
She needs to get a few hours of sleep before she makes a costly mistake.
* * *
? ? ?
She’s usually driving against traffic when she comes and goes from Hospital Row downtown. Her life flows in a different direction than most people’s and she has felt this her whole life. She likes watching the cars build in the opposite lane. She likes going home to bed when everyone else’s day is already under way. She doesn’t need to take these long on-call shifts as often as she does, but it’s a way of separating herself from the routines she can’t have. This way, she doesn’t have to walk through her own front door to a quiet dinner with only Ben, on a bench that is upholstered with washable, stain-resistant fabric. The kind made for families with sticky fingers.
The children at the hospital are different. Those children need her, and she can, usually, fix them. It is the not being needed when she leaves the building that she has come to find so difficult.
The way Ben needs her has changed in the past few years. It might only be the march of marriage, the way early love melts slowly into a form less nectarous. But she has felt less precious to him ever since the losses began to feel like something other than bad luck. Since they learned they’ve been dealt a definitive mechanical failure. That she, the machine, is broken.