She managed to make it into the city, and it felt like she was getting away with something because she shouldn’t have been on the road, not feeling this vulnerable, this hysterical. But she made it. And no one was the wiser. She left the garage and walked across the street and appeared at the appointed time at Suffolk Probate and Family Court on New Chardon Street.
The proceedings were a lot like the marriage and a lot like Sebastian—perfunctory and bloodless. After it was over and their union was, as far as the Commonwealth was concerned, legally dissolved, she turned to share a look with her newly minted ex-husband, a look if not of two soldiers who’d found a modicum of victory in walking off the battlefield with their limbs intact at least one of common decency. But Sebastian wasn’t across the aisle any longer. He was already halfway out of the courtroom, his back to her, head up, strides long and purposeful. And once he was through the doors, the rest of the people in the courtroom were looking at her with pity or revulsion.
That’s who I’ve become, she thought, a creature below contempt.
Her car was parked in the garage across the street, and from there it was two right turns and a merge onto 93 South to head home. But she thought of all those cars merging and speeding, tapping their brakes and switching lanes with violent jerks of the wheel, and she turned west into the city instead and drove over Beacon Hill, through Back Bay and farther on until she reached the South End. She felt okay during the drive. Only once, when she thought a Nissan was going to pass her on the right as she approached an intersection, did her palms sweat. After a few minutes of driving around, she found the rarest of all things for this neighborhood, a parking spot, and pulled into it. She sat there and reminded herself to breathe. She waved on two cars that mistook her for someone who was about to depart, not someone who’d just arrived.
“Turn off your fucking engine, then,” the driver of the second car yelled, and left a burnt-rubber vapor in his wake that smelled like a smoker’s burp.
She left her car and wandered the neighborhood, not entirely aimless but close, remembering that somewhere around here was a bar where she’d once spent a happy night. That was when she was still in print journalism with the Globe. Rumors had circulated that the series she’d written on the Mary Ellen McCormack housing project might be nominated for a Pulitzer. It wasn’t (though she did win the Horace Greeley Award and the PEN/Winship for excellence in investigative journalism), but she didn’t care in the end; she knew she’d done good work, and back then, that was enough. It was an old-man bar with a red door called Kenneally’s Tap, tucked on one of the last ungentrified blocks in the neighborhood, if she remembered correctly, the name itself a throwback to a time before all Irish bars had to sound vaguely literary, like St. James’s Gate, Elysian Fields, the Isle of Statues.
She eventually found the red door on a block she hadn’t initially recognized because its Toyotas and Volvos had been replaced with Benzes and Range Rover Sports, and the functional bars on the windows had been replaced by filigreed ones with more substantial aesthetic appeal. Kenneally’s was still there, but its menu was posted out front now, and they’d gotten rid of the mozzarella sticks and the deep-fried chicken poppers and replaced them with pork cheeks and braised kale.
She walked straight to a free chair in the far corner near the waitstaff station, and when the bartender found her, she ordered a vodka-rocks and asked if he had the day’s paper lying around. She wore a gray hoodie over a white V-neck T-shirt and dark blue jeans. The flats on her feet were black, scuffed, and as forgettable as the rest of her ensemble. It didn’t matter. For all the talk of progress, of equal footing, of a post-sexist generation, a woman still couldn’t sit alone at a bar and have a drink without drawing stares. She kept her head down and read the Globe and sipped her vodka and tried to keep the addled sparrow in her chest from flapping its wings.
The bar wasn’t more than a quarter full, which was good, but the clientele was a lot younger than she’d counted on, which wasn’t. The old-timers she’d expected to find had been reduced to a quartet of geezers who sat at a scarred table near the back room and slipped out for frequent smoke breaks. It had been na?ve to think that here, in the trendiest of all Boston neighborhoods, the shot-’n’-a-beer crowd could have held the line against the single-malt cohort.
Old-timers who embraced day drinking and swilled PBRs and ’Gansett tall boys without an irony chaser rarely watched the six o’clock news. The younger crowd didn’t watch it either, at least not in real time, but they might DVR it or stream it through their laptops later. And they certainly accessed YouTube on a regular basis. When the clip of Rachel’s meltdown went viral last fall, there were eighty thousand hits in the first twelve hours. Within twenty-four, there were seven memes and a video mash-up of Rachel blinking, sweating, stuttering, and hyperventilating, backed by a remix of Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love.” That’s how it had played out—a drunk reporter loses control during a live report from a Port-au-Prince ghetto. Within thirty-six hours of the incident, the video had two hundred and seventy thousand hits.
Her few friends told Rachel she likely overestimated the number of people who recognized her in public. They assured her that the very nature of the viral age, its need for constant replenishment of content, ensured that the video, while watched by many, was remembered by few.
It was fair to assume, however, that half the people in the bar under thirty-five had seen it. They may have been stoned or drunk at the time, which raised the possibility they’d see the single woman at the bar in the baseball cap reading the newspaper and make no connection. But then again, maybe a few of them had been sober and possessed strong memories.