He watched her watching him as he gathered his briefcase and his jacket, could see the discomfort her confusion caused her. All in all, this was not the reaction she’d expected.
Let that be a lesson for you, he thought as he closed the door behind him and leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath in the too bright, fluorescent corridor, amid the rolling, unstoppable roar of the well and the sick. Never expect.
It had been the lesson of his life.
Three
Janie kneeled on the pink tile in her best black dress and tried to quiet her mind. Dirty bathwater oozed across the floor, dampening the knees of her stockings, spotting her velvet hem. She’d always liked the dress because its high waist was sympathetic to her figure, and the velvet gave it a festive, bohemian air, but now, streaked as it was with egg yolk and bubbly patches of shampoo that shone like spittle, it had transformed into her most opulent rag.
She pulled herself to her feet, glanced in the mirror.
She was a mess, all right. Her mascara blackened the area under her eyes like a football player; her eye shadow left sparkly bronze streaks across her temples; and her left ear was bleeding. Her hair still looked good, though, billowing and curling around her face as if it hadn’t gotten the message.
Serves her right for thinking she could take a night off from Noah.
And she had been so excited, too.
Janie had known it was probably irrational to get worked up about a date with someone she hadn’t actually met. But she liked Bob’s photo, his open face and kind, squinting eyes, and she liked his humorous voice on the phone, the way it vibrated deep within her body, waking it up. They had talked for over an hour, delighted to discover so many things in common: they had both grown up in the Midwest and made their way to New York after college; they were the only offspring of formidable mothers; they were decent-looking socially competent people, surprised to find themselves single in the city they loved. They couldn’t help but wonder (they didn’t say it but it was there, in the reverberation of their voices, in their easy laughs) if all that yearning might be ending very soon.
And they were going to dinner! Dinner was unambiguously auspicious.
All she had to do was get through the day. It was a trying morning, more couples therapy than architecture, as Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand dithered about whether the third bedroom was an exercise room or a man cave, and the Williamses confessed at the last moment that they wanted to cut the baby’s room in half since, actually, they’d need two master bedrooms instead of one, which was fine; she didn’t care if they slept together or not, only why couldn’t they have told her before she’d finalized the plans? Throughout the day, in between these meetings, she’d found herself checking her phone as Bob texted her in thrilling bursts “Can’t wait!” She imagined him (Was he tall or short? Probably tall…) sitting in his cubicle (or wherever programmers worked) perking up when his phone buzzed with her response “Me 2!”—the two of them texting away like a couple of teenagers, getting through their day like this, for everybody needed something, didn’t they, to pull them through?
And, to be honest, she was looking forward to a night away from Noah. She hadn’t had a date in almost a year. The dinner with Bob had inspired her, reminding her that she was not living the life she’d planned.
The sacrifices of the single mom had been her mother’s refrain throughout her childhood, delivered always with the same ever-so-slightly rueful smile, as if giving up the rest of your life was the price you had to pay for the only thing that mattered. Try as she might, it was impossible for Janie to imagine her mother other than she was: her nurse’s uniform neatly pressed and tightly belted, her white shoes and bobbed pewter hair, her sharp, knowing blue eyes untouched by time or makeup or any palpable regret (she didn’t believe in it).
You didn’t mess with Ruthie Zimmerman. Even the surgeons she worked with seemed a little afraid of her, wincing nervously when she and Janie ran into them in the supermarket and Ruth’s eyes followed an unmistakable path from her own vegetable-and-tofu-laden cart to their six-packs of beer and packages of bacon and chips. Nor could you ever envision her going on a date or sleeping in anything besides her plaid flannel pj’s.