She did the quick calculations in her head. Their apartment was on Park, but where? Close to Grand Central, maybe. East Fifties. She should have known this would happen, why was she even walking to Grand Central in the first place? You wanted this, she thought, you wanted this agony, you walked right down this street like a little kid pushing at a loose tooth with his tongue until he feels the pop, the salt bloom of blood.
Mr. D’Amico hadn’t seen her yet, so she didn’t move. She stood still, and that’s when someone just beyond him moved into focus, and she realized that there was a woman standing with her back to him, that he was talking to this woman. She was wearing a baby pink exercise top and skin-snug yoga pants, a Greenwich uniform if ever there was one, but Amanda didn’t think she recognized the face. The outfit seemed so incongruous, every aspect of the woman’s body language made it seem so unlikely that she was on her way to a yoga class, that the whole scene took on the outlandish cast of fantasy, of performance. These were their assumed identities, donned in a hurry so they could speak to each other on Lexington Avenue without anyone noticing. No one had; people continued to flow around them like they were two ordinary city obstacles left on the sidewalk. He was standing with his back to the street now, and she was facing away from Amanda, toward downtown.
And then he lifted his hand in the air and reached toward her right shoulder and let it hover there, not touching her, not wrapping his fingers around the bony curve of her shoulder, just letting his fingers hang in the air above her body. There was something protective and yet menacing to the gesture. Like he wanted to crush her with his fist but also wanted to keep her from harm, and so barely held himself at some equilibrium by refusing to spoil her, touch her at all.
Amanda watched them begin to walk down the street together, watched him take the woman’s elbow and steer her onto the side street. She didn’t watch them because she wanted to but because she couldn’t move. She felt a tide of something undefined cramping her stomach, and she stood perfectly still for a moment more. As though her body were a water glass balanced on a delicate tray, and she did not want to splash its contents all over Lexington Avenue. Eventually, she kept walking and made it to Grand Central Station, to the scattered clamor of the main terminal.
All around her people gawked, stood unselfconsciously with their necks craned to stare at the ceiling, embraced one another and shouted. There was endless enjoyment and yet no fondness, not one display of warmth for anyone else. None of them cared what the others were doing. No hamburgers served to strangers, no one holding an unfamiliar hand.
The person Amanda wanted to call, really, was her father, but he was at Yale for office hours and besides, she couldn’t call him. She had a piece of information now that he’d want, she had an insider tip. But she couldn’t trust him, anymore, could she? She stood in Grand Central, listening to the ignorant buzz of the people all around her, and she did not want to board the train, did not want to go home.
TWELVE
Mina wasn’t even hungry, not really. It was Tom who insisted they stop for dinner on the way up to Andover.
It was the first Friday in October, and he was furious that this was how they were spending the first night in weeks he could have spent at home. And then Mina hadn’t said a word in the car, had denied him even the tiniest opening through which to shove the blunt force of his anger.
When she’d called that morning, to see what time she should arrange for a car, he barked at her. He was slammed. Jaime would understand, for God’s sake, if they skipped her recital. If they dropped in on her the next afternoon, instead, and took her off campus for a celebratory brunch.
“I’ll buy her a Bloody Mary if she wants,” Tom said. “I’ll buy the kid off. I swear to God, Min, it’ll be worth it.”
She tried not to dwell on the all-too-easily summoned picture of her daughter guzzling a thick, salty red drink, chomping the celery stalk between her front teeth, while the waiter looked on with distaste and Tom sat mute, his eyes tracking the parade of e-mails filling his BlackBerry screen.
Instead, she asked her husband if she could bring anything—his antacids, the papers. One of the crime novels he consumed at top speed on their vacations, novels he handled so aggressively that by the time he cast them off they looked pummeled, as if they’d been thrown from the window of a car speeding down the Merritt.
But then he’d surprised her, after his immediate and febrile initial protest, by insisting that they take the Jag out of the garage for the trip.
“Sweetheart,” she began. “Tom. You must be exhausted. And we’ve got the room at the Andover Inn—you can go right to sleep. The recital isn’t until ten o’clock tomorrow. So you’ll really get a full night’s rest. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take a car?”
“We aren’t taking the fucking car service. I already called the garage, they’ll have the car ready for us by six.”
Then and there, she swallowed what she knew would be four hours of Tom threading through Friday-afternoon traffic on I-95, tailgating any car that wasn’t as nimble as the Jag, cursing under his breath. She swallowed a vision she’d had of a drive spent in companionable silence, Tom perhaps dozing on her shoulder, Mina sliding the rocks glass from his slackening fingers just before he might have let it tumble to his lap.
She swallowed all of it, her fragile hope for how this evening might unfold, and she swallowed it because she’d visited Jaime exactly twice last year. Once for the parents’ weekend in the fall and once to pack her up for the summer. Tom hadn’t come up with her for either visit. They were going to this recital, whatever abuses she might be forced to draw down on her own head.
He was punishing her, of course. That was why he hadn’t been to Andover yet. When Jaime was first accepted, he’d insisted that they look at houses up there, in Massachusetts. So they wouldn’t have to stay at any of the local hotels. The drive will be bad enough, he’d said. Might as well have it be a pleasant experience once we’re up there.
She hadn’t objected. It certainly didn’t seem necessary, and it had only been a few years since they’d bought the house in Southampton. But she hadn’t said a word. She’d even been, a little bit, excited. Decorating the beach place had been fun, if nerve-wracking—it had the potential to be their most public house, after all—but now she could do something cozy, a place where she’d always be alone with Tom. She hadn’t said anything to indicate to him that she thought there was anything wrong with his idea. But Tom was always sure she was policing him, always sure the girl from the other part of Long Island was going to peer out from behind his wife and suck her teeth at him, roll her eyes as he slid his credit card across the table. When he was upset, when he was on a bad run of weeks at work, it was always one of two things: either she was a killjoy who begrudged him any spending for himself, or else she’d married him for his money. That both probably couldn’t be true did not seem to concern him.