“It’s temporary. Just so I can try out living in the country,” she said. “Decide if I want to go back to commuting from the city or find something of my own out here.”
“Oh, for me there’s no choice,” said John. “I love my job, but I also love waking up to the birds. I’d commute two hours if that’s what it took to have both.” John was a banker. He was thirty-seven and had been married, briefly, no children, in his twenties. He was bald, with an unlined, almost childlike face, but he was also tall, with expressive hands and a habitual, trustworthy smile. His brown eyes filled with tears when Tommy mentioned losing her mother the previous year.
The second time they saw each other, they went out to dinner at a café across from Orne’s village green. When John kissed her good night, in his car, in Morty’s driveway, she loved how the kiss felt half polite, half amorous. “How about a movie next time?” he said. “I know it sounds textbook, but I never get to the movies. Does anybody?” He raised his hands in a gesture of endearing wonder.
Tommy knew that if she told Morty about John, Morty would want to meet him—and would judge him as “too conventional.” So Morty’s week of teaching in the city felt auspicious: a chance for Tommy to begin something—to be courted, as her favorite authors would have said—in private.
In hindsight, however suitable her suitor was, however sweet (and really, did she know him long enough to know him at all?), he was probably more a wish than a real possibility: a wish for the mainstream life she had never led, a life made symmetrical by the gravitas of PNL balance sheets and train schedules and, from what John had told her, a clean modern house on a clean plot of grass. Archetypitis, Morty called it, the longing for relationships without nooks and crannies. But what was so bad about that? “The simple life,” said Tommy’s father, “is woefully underrated.”
As it happened, Tommy never had a chance to find out. The Friday of that week—Morty was to return from his teaching stint on Sunday—John proposed that they meet at the train station when he returned from the city. They could drive from there to the Cineplex halfway between their towns. But when they consulted the schedule and, e-mailing back and forth, couldn’t agree on any of the nine movies playing, Tommy suggested they rent one. If he drove the extra distance to Orne, she would make dinner for them. Hitchcock, she suggested. “You’re on,” replied her suitor.
John met her at the video store. Without a bit of fuss or debate, they chose Vertigo. She had already made a lasagna. He brought a bottle of Bordeaux and a bakery box containing two red-velvet cupcakes.
They ate the cupcakes while kissing. The DVD never left its case. Tommy loved saying John’s plain, old-fashioned name, whispering it, as they lay in her bed, grappling and laughing in the dark of a moonless night. “Blind sex, don’t you love it?” said John when their foreheads collided.
They were both asleep when the phone rang. Tommy woke disoriented and tripped on John’s leg as she got out of bed. The upstairs phone lived on a table in the middle of the hall, halfway between Morty’s bedroom and hers.
“Let it go,” John whispered, reaching for her as she switched on the hall light.
Tommy stood in the open door, aware that John was watching her. The only call she would absolutely need to take would be one from her father or Dani….She waited out the ringing, waited out her own voice telling the caller that no one could come to the phone. After the beep, not so much as a pause.
“Tommy, Tommy…Tommy, are you there? You have to be there. I need you. I messed up. Oh God, I’m a mess.”
Morty’s voice was strange—a growl at first, rising to a whimper.
“Please answer, Tommy. Please…I’m sorry if I—”
She rushed to pick up the receiver.
An hour later, she was driving to the city, glad the roads were empty, glad to find a station that played nothing but jazz, few ads, few words of any kind. By the time she reached the Henry Hudson Parkway, dawn had defined the horizon. To her right, the George Washington Bridge carved its somber geometry into a lavender sky.
Morty was in his hotel room, dressed except for his shoes. Only the bathroom light was on. After answering the door, he collapsed back onto the bed. When Tommy switched on a lamp, she saw him curled in a turbulence of sheets and pillows. The pillows were streaked with blood.
She was speechless with terror. Even caring for him after his surgery, she had not seen him in this much pain. His nose was clearly broken, the visible ear cut and bleeding, and his cheek was bruised from jaw to temple.
She sat on the edge of the bed and rested a hand on one of his calves.
“Just take me home,” he said. “No questions.”
“I say we go to a hospital.”
“They ask questions.”
“Morty.”
But he refused to let her do anything more than drive him home. She drove without breaking her silence, which tasted like fear, then anger, then disgust. His breathing, through his broken nose, was loud and ugly. He went straight to his bedroom and slept till late afternoon, and when he came downstairs to the kitchen, his left eye was swollen shut. It was Saturday, so Tommy left a message with his doctor’s service and took him to an ER in Stamford.
As they drove home in the dark, she said, “You weren’t teaching, were you. All this week.”
“No.”
She sighed. How far should she go? If she had ever needed to think of him as merely her boss, this was the time.
He said, “I went…out a few nights.”
Morty was never this short on words. She knew his jaw hurt, but that wasn’t it. When they got home, she made him scrambled eggs and mashed up an avocado.
She wanted to ask if he was lonely. She now knew, against all previous evasions, that this was true for her. (She also knew she wouldn’t hear from John again. Not that she felt like calling him, either, not after what he’d overheard, not after her abrupt, panicky departure.)
“I just wish you had told me what you were doing.”
He looked at her coldly for a moment. “Tell you I was going to the city to…prowl the streets?”
“Escape, maybe. Lose touch a little. You didn’t need to make something up.”
He shook his head. “You can’t know everything.”
“Right,” she said. “But I can’t be expected to wake up at four a.m. and drive two hours to pick up your pieces from a bar brawl. If that’s even what it was.”
He stared at his food.
“Morty, I’m not your mother. I’m not your wife. I don’t even get to be your lover.” She paused. Why had she put it that way? He looked at her then.
“Tommy, I’m sorry. I don’t treat you fairly. I…keep you here, hold you back from…”
“Leading a normal life? That goes without saying. But I’m not your prisoner, either. I’m here because I like it here. Maybe this is as normal as life gets for me.”
The look he gave her then was tender. “I think I’m going a little mad.”
“I won’t disagree.”
“And I’m not cured.” He shook his head vehemently.