That’s as close as she could get, thus far, to a unifying theme. Her life and the lives of those she’d most memorably encountered seemed marked by a state of never quite taking root. Of floating. Of spiraling helplessly toward the void.
That morning, she wrote a few pages about her days with the Globe, but it felt dry and, worse, rote, so she cashed in early and took a long shower and got dressed for her lunch date with Melissa.
She crossed the Back Bay in the steady rain—the endless rain, the omnipresent rain, “Biblical rain,” Brian had said last night, “Noah rain.” It wasn’t quite that bad, but it had been wet for eight days now. Lakes and ponds upstate were overflowing into roadways, turning some streets into tributaries. In two cases, cars had been carried off. Over the weekend, a commercial jet had slid off a runway. No injuries reported. Those in a ten-car pileup on 95 hadn’t been so lucky.
She needn’t worry as much as some—she didn’t fly, she rarely drove (it had been two years since the last time), and she and Brian lived high above street level. Brian flew, though, all the time. Brian drove.
She met Melissa at the Oak Room in the Copley Plaza Hotel. The Oak Room wasn’t called the Oak Room anymore. Since Rachel’s meltdown, it’d had a facelift and, after decades as the Oak Room, became OAK Long Bar + Kitchen, but Rachel, Melissa, and pretty much everyone they knew still called it the Oak Room.
She hadn’t been to Copley Square by herself in a couple of years. At the onset of her last prolonged spate of panic attacks, the buildings that surrounded the square—the Old South Church, the Boston Public Library Main Branch, Trinity Church, the Fairmont, the Westin, and the towering Hancock with its mirrored blue windows reflecting the square back on itself—had one day given her the impression they were leaning in, not buildings anymore so much as walls, great walls built to pen her in. This was doubly unfortunate because she’d always admired Copley for its role as a representative hybrid of old and new Boston, the old represented by the beaux-arts classicism and lustrous limestone of the BPL and the Fairmont and, of course, Trinity Church, with its clay roof and heavy arches, the new by the icy functionality and hard, sleek lines of the Westin and the Hancock Tower, structures that gave the impression of aggressive indifference to both history and its sob sister, nostalgia. But for almost two years, she’d walked around it, not through it.
Walking into the square for the first time since her wedding day, Rachel had expected palpitations, accelerant in the blood. Yet as she walked up the burgundy carpet under the Fairmont awning, she felt only the slightest uptick in her heart rate before it reset itself almost immediately to normal. Maybe it was the rain that calmed her. With an umbrella over her head, she was just another near-spectral being in dark clothes hidden beneath a cowl of plastic moving through a city of near-spectral beings in dark clothes hidden beneath cowls of plastic. In this kind of rain and murk, she imagined murders were likelier to go unsolved and affairs unpunished.
“Mmmm,” Melissa said when she mentioned this to her. “Thinking of an affair, are we?”
“God no. I can barely get out of the house.”
“Bullshit. You’re here. You took the T around town this weekend, gallivanted through a mall.” She reached out and pinched Rachel’s cheek. “Such a big girl now, aren’t we?”
Rachel swatted her hand and Melissa sat back and laughed a hair too loud. Rachel had eaten a large salad and slow-sipped a glass of white wine, but Melissa, on her day off, barely touched her meal and was downing Bellinis as if prosecco would be outlawed at the stroke of midnight. It made her sharper, funnier, but louder too, and Rachel knew from past experience how quick the humor could turn into self-loathing, the sharpness could dim, but the loud would just get louder. A couple of times, Rachel had noticed other patrons looking their way, though that could have nothing to do with Melissa’s volume and everything to do with Rachel.
Melissa took a sip of her drink, Rachel noting with some relief that the sips were smaller now. Melissa had been Rachel’s producer on dozens of stories at 6 but not, as luck would have it, on any of the Haiti stories. When Rachel suffered her meltdown in Cité Soleil, Melissa was on her honeymoon on Maui. The marriage had lasted less than two years, but Melissa still had her job, which she’d always loved far more than Ted. So, as she’d say with a bright, bitter smile and two thumbs-up, win-win.
“So if you were to have an affair with someone in this room, who would it be?”
Rachel gave the room a quick sweep. “No one.”
Melissa craned her head, staring openly at the room. “It is pretty grim pickings. But, wait, not even that guy in the corner?”
Rachel said, “With the half-fedora and the soul patch?”
“Yeah. He’s all right.”
“I don’t want to have an affair with ‘all right.’ I don’t want to have an affair at all. But if I did, it would be with the be-all and end-all.”
“And what would he look like?”
“Beats me. I’m not the one looking for a man.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the tall dark stranger. You’re already married to him.”
Rachel cocked her head at that.
Melissa mimicked the gesture. “I don’t know the guy.” She splayed her fingers against her chest. “Whenever I talk to your admittedly handsome, admittedly charming, admittedly funny and intelligent groom there, I always get the feeling after he walks away that he said absolutely nothing.”
“I’ve seen you guys talk for half an hour.”
“And yet . . . I know nothing about him.”
“He’s from British Columbia. He’s—”
“I know his bio,” Melissa said. “I just don’t know Brian. All that charm and eye contact and questions about me and my hopes and dreams is so beautifully packaged, I’m continually surprised to wake up the next day and realize he made sure all I did was talk about myself.”
“But you like talking about yourself.”
“I love talking about myself, but that’s not the point.”
“Oh, you have one?”
“Bitch, I do.”
“Bitch, spit it out.”
They smiled across the table at each other. It was like working together again.
“I just wonder if anyone knows Brian.”
“Me included?” Rachel laughed.
“Forget it.”
“That’s your implication.”
“I said forget it.”
“And I asked if you’re including me in the list of people who don’t know my husband.”
Melissa shook her head and asked Rachel about the book she was writing.
“I’m having trouble giving it shape.”
“What shape?” Melissa asked with a breezy dismissiveness. “There was an earthquake in Haiti, then a cholera outbreak, then a hurricane. And you were there for all of it.”
“When you put it that way,” Rachel said, “it sounds exactly like disaster porn. Which is what I fear most.”