—
Tie one on. Where the devil does that expression come from? Tie a what on what? A yellow ribbon on an old oak tree? A bell on a goat? An Easter bonnet on a tiger?
But that is what she’s gone and done: tied one on. All by herself. All by her lonesome. Linus looks concerned. He lies under the kitchen table, flat as a schnitzel, staring up at her dolefully.
Dolefully. Where did that word come from in her soggy brain? What can it mean to be full of dole? To have eaten too much canned pineapple?
Merry chuckles. I am chuckling, she thinks, which makes her chuckle even more. “Not to worry, Linus, not to worry,” she whispers in response to his heightened alarm. She starts to lean over to pet him but straightens up when she feels herself begin to topple.
She peers inside the refrigerator. She’d better have something to eat. Something to sponge up the entire bottle of Grüner Veltliner she’s consumed since talking with Benjamin. But nothing has changed since she last opened the door: not counting a dozen condiments, the buffet spread before her comprises a container of vanilla Greek yogurt, a takeout carton of cold sesame noodles, a slab of shrink-wrapped deli pound cake she wishes she hadn’t bought, and, in the bottom drawer, three withering scallions, half a box of cherry tomatoes, and several curls of molted onion skin.
Noodles and tomatoes it is. After that, she will probably be sick anyway.
He is, of course, getting married. He is, of course, having the baby. Ta-da, the package deal!
The worst part wasn’t the news; it was the delicate, tender tone he assumed to deliver it. He actually tried to spiral toward it, asking her about the museum, about Lear’s death, about Linus; she finally severed the small talk with “Benjamin? Can you please cut to the chase?”
Sigh. Disclosure one. Deep breath. Disclosure two.
“Oh!” Merry exclaimed, as if she could exhale all her self-pity, indignation, and regret in one audible gasp. “A shotgun wedding!”
When he said nothing, she apologized. She said she was glad to hear that he was settling into a new life. She was doing the same, she told him. She had some great leads on apartments in Park Slope (lie number one), she’d joined a book group (lie number two), and she was seeing a guy she’d met at a Bard alumni gathering (whopper of the century; in fact, there was no such thing as a Bard alumni gathering).
“Wow, Merry,” he said. “That’s great news, all of it.”
“And the museum is going up on schedule,” she said. (True!) “I’m going to be out-of-my-mind busy for the next year. In a good way. No complaints.” By then, a membrane of tears covered her entire lower face. She wiped her chin before the tears could fall onto her favorite I-am-both-smart-and-stylish dress, Italian raw silk in what she thought of as Tintoretto blue. She had worn it that day to the board meeting at which the architect and two of his minions had given them a progress report.
“Terrific, Merry. I’m so glad,” Benjamin said.
He asked about her mother, though Merry knew he couldn’t have cared less. By the end of the conversation, which lasted all of maybe seventeen minutes, they had managed to be more dishonest with each other than they’d been throughout the entire seven years of their marriage.
Merry wept openly and plaintively, no longer bothering to spare her dress from salt stains. After she was done crying, she fed Linus his dinner. Then she went to the fridge and took out the bottle of wine. It was a good one, a Sepp Moser in a gracefully tapered bottle. What was she saving it for?
She did take out a very nice piece of stemware. Not a wedding present but one of a pair of handblown purple glasses she’d bought at a craft fair in Tivoli, back when she was in grad school at Bard. She had been involved with that violinist at the conservatory. Fede, from Rome. She reasoned that it would be easy to see him go back there, that it would be impractical, imprudent, to aim toward marriage with someone else in the arts. No, she would wait till she settled in the city and met a man with a much more solid professional future. Like a lawyer. Like Benjamin, whom she would meet a few years later at a dinner party, not on some Internet dating service. All so sensible.
Oh, where was Fede now? How stupid she’d been—and how cruel. Remembering how she had broken his heart was now doubly painful.
She intended to have a single glass of wine, then go around the corner for dinner at the new Vietnamese place. You could eat pho at the long bar. The bartender was young and genuinely kind. His major disappointments, if any, had yet to exert their battering effect on his sweetness.
But she made the mistake of checking her e-mail.
Sol, whose ominous phone message she had accidentally on purpose failed to answer. He’d been too busy at the presentation to take her aside.
I know you’ve been occupied with counsel, untangling the Lear mess. It’s worth a good frontal assault. Scare tactics. But I am skeptical about the c/b ratio. Lear is, in a way, the old guard. He hasn’t made a real splash since that futuristic trilogy. Stuart’s proposal of rededicating the core of the collection to 21st-century children’s books is growing on me, despite my age. Forward thinking, of which I approve. Let’s catch up tomorrow. I’ll have Lez call you to schedule a conference call, maybe pull in Stuart too.
Sol, alas, has a point about Lear. In the dozen years after the third Inseparables volume was published, he was as prolific as ever, and his books always burned up the lists, but he turned more often toward illustrating glossy books (an anthology of modern poetry; a clever historical showcase for teens called Lives of the Secular Saints) and less toward crafting the quirky stories that had made him a star. In brutal terms, he was no longer a maverick. But as much as Merry champions the vanguard, even the avant-garde, she is also a traditionalist; yes, a goddamned romantic. She wants her cake, and she wants her caviar, too.
Now, one soused and very unsensible hour later, she fills a tall glass with water. She takes it, along with her plate of noodles and tomatoes, back into the living room. She turns on the television. She hunts through Netflix for a thriller. “Thrill me,” she says aloud to the screen. “I dare you.”