Within the month, Tommy had gone into the city for dinner with Dani and Jane. Jane was so unlike Dani’s previous girlfriends—so much more, in a way, like Tommy—that their conversation progressed in fits and starts, as if it were a job interview. And maybe, for Tommy, it was. Maybe she felt as if she were inspecting not just a future sister-in-law but a standin for their long-lost mother. Maybe Jane was looking for a genetic affirmation of Dani’s fitness to become a fellow grown-up—though Tommy could hardly picture him as a husband or father.
The bike shop became a reality. Dani seemed at last to be settled, to have found the perfect urban vocation. Tommy attended the opening, a boisterous gathering of Dani’s, Jane’s, and Gareth’s friends that spilled out onto the far-from-glamorous sidewalk of Eleventh Avenue, adjacent to the West Side Highway crush. The shop was a virtual forest of shiny, tropically colored bicycles hanging from elaborate racks that lined the ceiling. Tommy enjoyed herself, but she stood mostly apart, watching. She knew none of her brother’s friends (though had she ever?).
If Tommy hardly heard from Dani once the shop was up and running, she made the no-news-good-news assumption, glad that the only family member she had to worry about was Dad. Once in a while, she spoke to Jane, who told her how hard they were working, both of them. She was paying off her student loans; Dani and his partner were gaining a foothold in a neighborhood whose luxury value seemed to rise by the minute.
But a few years into the venture, something went wrong—not that he told her, no. If he had told her, she might have helped him. That he didn’t ask for her help was, she came to realize, far more hurtful than his stealing, or trying to steal, that book.
—
Merry stands in her dim kitchen, peeling off her sodden clothes while trying to appease poor Linus, left alone far longer than she expected. Through the window, a perfect June twilight deepens toward night, the hour-long tempest forgotten…except by those caught in its fury.
“Hold on just a little more, my all-suffering friend.”
She is stark naked, barefoot on the cold linoleum, bleary from the glass of wine she had at that bar to wait out the rain (so crowded, thank God, that nobody noticed her unshod state), when she sees the blinking 2 on her wall phone. With a sense of defiant foreboding, she pushes PLAY.
“Hi, Merry.”
Oh, Benjamin. When it rains, it pours.
“I was wondering if you’d give me a call. I’m sure you’re not dying to speak with me, but maybe there’s a way we can be, like, not totally out of touch. I was hoping to tell you some news in person or, okay, at least over the phone. Which these days I guess is the new ‘in person.’ Anyway. If you could call. Thanks, Merry. Take care.”
What, does he think she’s an idiot? She knows the news without his telling her. He’s getting married again. Or he’s dashed right around the game board, express to GO, collected his two hundred dollars without having to pay rent on any of the expensive pastel-colored properties. (How she loved the colors of those little property deeds when she was a girl.) Except that the payout isn’t two hundred dollars; it’s a baby! Or a baby in progress.
The second voice is Sol’s. “Meredith. Sorry about that fiasco at the park. I wanted to catch you at the end, with Stu. He’s been conferring with me and a few of the other directors. He has an interesting proposal. Would you give me a call this evening if you can? I’m in meetings all day tomorrow.”
This cannot be good. There is no way this can be good. Not that Stu’s work isn’t vital to Merry’s overall mission, but whenever she’s with him, she knows she’s dealing with one of the most bullish egos ever to intersect with the writing of books for children (or children who think they’re adults). Six months ago, Stu snake-charmed half the board simply by setting foot in the tiny conference room—though she cannot deny that giving him the audience was her own idea. At the time, Merry understood how important his “modern” persona would be to the fiscal interests of the new museum—in crude terms, milking money from the hipster elite—but she also calculated that Sol’s conservative distaste for the Shine Phenomenon was a fortunate shield against an aesthetic takeover. If not for Sol, Stu might have had a say in the choice of architect. (He wanted them to hire Bodley Brigand, a dystopian soul mate whose buildings look like glorified coastal surveillance towers from World War II: acres of concrete, long slits for windows, an allegiance to unforgiving angles.) As Merry’s mother might say, the man is getting too big for his biker britches.
Wearing no britches whatsoever, she heads to the bedroom and opens her underwear drawer. Linus follows her, whining.
“Sorry, shmoo. I’m getting there.”
The day the divorce came through, she ransacked her drawers and closet and discarded every piece of clothing that Benjamin had given her—or that she had bought with him in mind: a garter belt from the days he called her his hot date (a garment that had, perhaps prophetically, already lost its elastic zing), a dozen lace camisoles (in festive Monopoly-board colors), the zipperless red dress that made her feel, every time it dropped over her body, as if she were being washed in silk (and, every time Benjamin took it off, as if she were receiving absolution).
Her wedding gown, preserved in a specially sealed box to keep it from discoloring, lives in her mother’s suburban attic. Neither of them mentions it. It will go to charity whenever her mother leaves that house. Merry cannot bear the thought of seeing it again.
Nor does she ever want to return to the South of France, least of all to that tiny timbered inn, surrounded by wanton explosions of yellow broom, where the two of them so blithely assumed they were conceiving the first of their children (the first of at least two, maybe three). They lay in bed till noon one day, sparring over which of the suburban options they would choose, knowing they could never afford to buy a Manhattan apartment large enough for a family.
“Maplewood.”
“Oh God, not Jersey. Hastings.”
“You are a snob. And Hastings is already too expensive.”
“Yonkers.”
“Yonkers? Be serious.”
“Okay. Forest Hills.”
“Have you ever lived on the F train? You might as well move to Moscow.”
“Dobbs Ferry.”
“At this rate, how about Nova Scotia?”
“Christ, can you tell we live in New York?”
“We can find something in Brooklyn. We are not that desperate.”
“Let’s just drill for oil in the building airshaft.”
Their assumptions were so bourgeois, so smug.
None of that matters now, of course. The problem is, Merry never fell out of love with Benjamin—even after they came to dread touching each other, to dread looking at the calendar she kept inside her closet door. At the end, they even, or especially, came to dread the couples counselor. Merry still shuts her eyes when the Lexington Express hurtles through that station.
But dread is not the opposite of love.