The hotel is the antithesis of our disordered apartment and its unrelenting smell of spilt milk. I feel a one-second guilt pang for being happy to be away from Bruce and our chaos tonight but I push that into some other place.
Opening the door to my room, I see my message light already flashing, but since my family and office have my cell number, I’m not concerned as I listen. Two calls are from Henry, who is also here for tomorrow’s panel, and two are hang-ups.
“Belle, what’s the number for your technology analyst?” he asks in some efficient monotone, as if I’m the means to an end. Since our lunch I’ve been dealing with him curtly. I’ve convinced myself this relationship will be tolerable because it has to be. In his second call I recognize a sweeter voice, a voice I used to know.
“Hey, Belle, it’s getting late here. Would love a chance to talk to both you and your analyst about CeeV-TV. Think I want to do something on the opening bell tomorrow. Okay, hon, when you get a chance, please call or at least text me. By the way, great idea, and why am I not surprised?”
For a minute I try my hardest to remember that I don’t like him. Some muscle memory still won’t release the good stuff about Henry and I have to actively think of our lunch disaster to remember that I despise him. But I don’t and I wonder why I don’t. I want to think of him the way he thought of me at our lunch, just a new business associate and not some guy I’m grateful didn’t wind up torturing me until death parted us.
I don’t return the call.
I glance at the clock—11:20 p.m. The chitchat on the plane, the prep for the panel tomorrow, the weird “Octopus Hands” memo, and the stock-market dinner chatter with Gibbs have worn me out. I’ll call Henry tomorrow when I’ll have more brain cells firing. Instead, I call Bruce’s cell. Even though it’s on, nobody answers. I call again. Not only does he pick up, this time I hear the background sound of energy: high-pitched preschool voices that will not wait.
“What?” he snaps.
“You’re up?” I begin cautiously.
“Owen had a nightmare and has been hollering for an hour. I almost had him asleep until the phone rang . . . and then rang again.”
“Sorry. My dinner ran really late. What happened in the nightmare?” I’m always looking for details of my kids’ dreams, seeking clues about their future adult issues. Which child will hate me the most? Who is feeling the most abandoned?
“Like you care,” Bruce positively snorts at me. “Monsters, malfunctioning superheroes, the usual. Just go conferencing and enjoy the clean sheets,” he says before hanging up, and I remember I didn’t confirm the sheets needed changing when the housekeeping service was in our apartment today. It’s stuff like that, stuff Bruce is very capable of handling himself, that I take on because he simply will not. It’s some pride thing that I know is territory to not unearth. He’s the same with playdates. He told me once he can’t exactly set up playdates with other moms, that it’s weird to be in their apartments all filled with beds and privacy and kids who take naps. If he doesn’t meet the moms on the playground or if it’s a rainy day, he’s on his own. He never talks about his manhood slipping away but I once gave him a New York Times article stating that 40 percent of American households with children now have women being the primary breadwinner and that he really isn’t alone. He bunched it up without reading it and threw it into the basketball hoop hanging on the back of the kitchen door. It lay on the ground afterward with both of us refusing to touch it.
Self-inflicted guilt is one thing, but guilt thrown my way from Bruce is not allowed, and hanging up on each other is something that Bruce and I just don’t do. It’s like swearing: it’s what I do when I’m not articulate enough to say something clever. So instead of feeling hurt or angry, or even guilty, I feel just a little bit sad.