Her mother, driving her home from ballet. Her mother, stopping to help a stranger.
Her father was a famous scholar, tenured young at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and everything about that suited him. He never remarried, and Lucy and her older sister, Anna, grew up like feral cats. Every year, he hired graduate students to help with household tasks like shopping and organizing, cleaning and cooking, always women, always B-plus students who were thrilled to get to spend so much time in his orbit even if it meant scrubbing his toilets and changing his sheets. Not the superstars, never the superstars, and never, not once, a man. That was the lowest thing you could be in the world Lucy’s father had made for himself: a woman who was not a superstar. A woman who changed the sheets.
He was warm, though. He was kind and he was loving and mostly, well, he was around. He was there, literally, spending nearly all of his time inside the house—a stately Victorian with a wraparound porch and a widow’s walk even though it was fifteen hundred miles to the nearest ocean. He held office hours in the parlor and did his reading in his study, and twice a week he walked the three blocks to campus and gave a lecture to two hundred and fifty students who treated him like a god. Other than that, he brought the college to him, hosting potluck dinners several nights a week with his grad students, and Thursday sherry hours, a tip of the hat to the four years he’d spent at Oxford in the sixties.
Lucy’s father wasn’t good with things like remembering to sign permission slips and buying hair bows and putting on tights, but he had a lap he would let her sit on for hours, both of them reading, in front of the fire. That’s what Lucy thought of when she thought of life after her mother died, reading on her father’s lap and, later, curled up next to him on his ancient Chesterfield couch, the one with the silver duct tape slapped over the cracking parts.
He died quickly, of pancreatic cancer, when Lucy was four months pregnant with Wyatt. His life’s great work was a European history textbook that was still popular, one that had been in use for three decades and was now digitized and enhanced and changed around a bit every few years by the publisher to ensure continuing sales. Inheriting her share of its copyright was like being gifted with a very small and yet extremely reliable money machine. It generated enough revenue that Lucy didn’t have to feel guilty about not working. It paid for Wyatt’s extra therapies, the special horseback riding and the vision therapy, the ones that weren’t covered by the generosity of the taxpayers of New York State. Not riches, not by a long shot, but breathing room.
Lucy’s therapist, back when she had one, during the worst six months of her infertility treatments, had commended her on her resilience. There she was, saddled with a dead mother and an extremely traditional, intellectual father, and yet: A good marriage, a satisfying career. No addictions or phobias or neuroses to speak of. A desire for children so strong that she was willing to go through a great deal of pain and disappointment and expense in order to have one of her own.
But Lucy was unmothered, as unmothered as it was possible to be, and the thing that therapist never told her, the six-months you’re-so-very-resilient therapist, was that it was hard to be a mother when you had never been mothered yourself. Your children’s needs remind you of your needs. Their pain reminds you of your pain. All of it reminds you of how bad it felt, how hard it was, how much you wanted and needed and didn’t get.
It’s very hard.
The elevator opened and Lucy stepped into the hall. Ben was standing in his doorway, smiling a small yet undeniable smile. Lucy walked toward him, knowing what was next, knowing exactly why she was there, again, ready this time, ready to lose herself in whatever was to come.
Ben put her purse on the table and locked the door behind her. Then he took her by the shoulders and turned her away from him. He pressed her against the wall, pulled her hair up with one hand, and kissed the nape of her neck.
This.
The kisses did not stop. She felt his body, solid, behind her. She closed her eyes.
This.
He pulled her skirt up. He slipped his hand between her legs, and she gasped.
This. This. This.
Nine
If your wife, approaching midlife, found herself vivified by a passing infidelity, if after years of quiet desperation she woke up one morning and felt glad to be on this planet, if she once again felt the wind on her cheek, on what rational basis would you object?
—Constance Waverly The Man Summit, New York City
Gordon Allen was pretending to be sick.
He’d chosen this day carefully, with the strategic help of a flotilla of attorneys. He needed a day when Rocco would be home from school. He needed his wife, Kelly, and Judith Ann, their weekday daytime nanny, both in the same room at the same time. He could have done it on a weekend, but the weekend nannies were Jamaican and Hispanic. Maybe one was Guatemalan. Hell, he didn’t know; he didn’t even know their names. But Judith Ann was British, middle-aged and dignified, and she would do well during a deposition if it ever came to that. So he’d been hanging around the house all day, feigning illness, waiting for an opportunity.
Kelly doesn’t spend a goddamn second with our son, Gordon thought, and not for the first time. All day long he had been lurking around the house in his forest-green bathrobe, peeking around corners, trying to catch Kelly and Rocco together and, by extension, Judith Ann, because Judith Ann never let Rocco out of her sight.
Finally, around three thirty in the afternoon, Kelly wandered into the kitchen wearing her yoga pants and happened upon Judith Ann giving Rocco his afternoon snack. Gordon watched from the hallway as Kelly poured herself a big glass of wine and sat down at the kitchen counter.
Gordon tightened the sash on his bathrobe and ambled into the kitchen, coughing for effect. He had a thick stack of papers tucked under his arm. He went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of orange juice.
“Hi, Rocco.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
“I can’t get too close to you because I’m sick.”
“Okay.”
“Hi, Gordon,” said Kelly.
“Oh. Kelly. Glad you’re here. I need a signature,” Gordon said oh so casually. He slid the stack of papers along the smooth, cold marble and handed her a pen.
“What is this?”
“It’s something the lawyers drew up. It’s about our estate. Sign right here.”
It’s about our estate. That’s what the lawyers said he should say. That, and nothing more. And all within earshot of Judith Ann.
“I’ll do it later.”
“It’ll take two seconds. I told Hugh I’d get these back to him by tomorrow.”
“I want to read it first,” said Kelly. “I don’t believe in just signing things.”