“No, no, it’s okay. I just—” He paused. “I liked him a lot. Your dad. He was a good guy.”
“He liked you too,” Lizzie said, and it was true. Joseph had been so disappointed when they broke up. She fought to keep her tears at bay.
She and Ben had met in law school, and moved in together after graduation; both landed jobs as associates at big, white-shoe law firms. It was as exhausting and all-encompassing as everyone had warned her it would be—there was nothing in her life but work—but she kept her head down; she was good at working. And she was pulling in so much money—she had gone from making zero to $175,000 a year. (She stared at that first paycheck, the march of digits incomprehensible.) Over her second year at the firm, though, something shifted. Her exhaustion metastasized into something darker, an anxiety that became her most voluble companion. Her senior partner now yelled at a new associate, and even this Lizzie took as a sign of failure. “Maybe you’d be happier at a smaller firm,” Ben said. She made a face. What? Like she couldn’t handle the work?
Their sex life sputtered out. They fought about the most superficial things. The way he would sometimes empty only the bottom half of the dishwasher made her want to scream. But they got engaged. She neared thirty-four. (As her grandmother loved to remind Lizzie, “When your mother was your age, she already had two children.” Lizzie considered it a triumph that she didn’t respond: “Yes, but she was also on the cusp of divorcing.”) Then one sticky August night when Ben was out of town for a friend’s bachelor party, she exited a bar through the back door and made out with a cocky summer associate in an alley off Baxter Street redolent of warm asphalt and garlic. She left his third-floor walk-up before dawn, feeling as if she had to vomit. Who had she become?
After Ben moved out, she walked around their apartment in a fog, feeling stunned and ashamed and small. How did she let this happen? She wasn’t a dramatic person. She wasn’t messy. Until she was.
Now Ben was talking about the time her dad insisted on taking him to the L.A. Auto Show, despite Ben’s lack of interest in cars, and the spectacular dinner he took him to afterward in a tiny, eight-seat sushi bar that lacked a name on the thirty-seventh floor of a downtown office building. There Joseph held forth on the artistry of Vin Scully and his profound disappointment that Ben did not know him. “How can you not know who he is? How is that possible?” Ben bellowed, imitating Joseph. “He is not ‘just a baseball announcer.’ He is a master storyteller. He is a master of life.”
The lights in her apartment were low. “Where was I during this dinner?” she asked. What she meant was: Please keep talking. Ben knew her father. No one would ever know him like Ben did.
“Oh, I don’t know; gossiping with your sister, scowling at me.”
A heaviness descended upon Lizzie. “I didn’t scowl at you all the time, did I?” she asked softly.
“No, you didn’t. I’m sorry I said that,” he said, but he hesitated— Lizzie was certain—God, she had been awful to him.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “About everything.”
“Listen, I did some scowling too. Stealthily, but I did.”
“I fucked everything up, didn’t I?”
“Oh, Lizzie.”
She should stop. She didn’t trust what she was feeling. But the more intensely she felt, the more convinced she became. She had messed up one of the only good things in her life. “I miss you,” she finally said, alone on the couch that she and Ben used to share. “I probably shouldn’t say that, but I do.”
He didn’t answer, and his lack of a response fed her conviction. “Come over,” she whispered.
“Lizzie,” he said, a plea airlifted with regret.
“I’m sorry,” she said, speaking toward the ceiling. “I’m sorry for so much.”
“It’s okay. I’m sorry too.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Not true.” He let out an odd warble of a laugh.
“Let’s both not be sorry,” she heard herself say with sudden conviction.
“Okay,” he whispered.
She closed her eyes. “Come over.”
He didn’t answer. She was too agitated to fill the silence.
“Okay, then,” he finally said.
His hair was thicker than she had remembered and he was wearing that orange T-shirt that she loved, and the combination of new and old, rawness and comfort, felt so inevitable and right. When he fumbled with a condom, she said, “No, just let it be,” because she could easily imagine it happening; she wanted it to happen. But he flashed her a hard, desperate look. “No,” he said, and he tugged it on.
Afterward, they lay together, still. He was brushing her hair back from her face with a tenderness that made her ache when he said, “You know, I have to tell you something.”
“What do you have to tell me?” she said teasingly, thinking, He’s a good man, a kind man.
He shook his head. His gaze was fixed beyond her: on what? Did it bring him comfort to see that the window blind was still broken? Did he look at her clothes strewn on the wingback chair and think with satisfaction that she wasn’t as neat as she liked to claim? Or was he thinking of the times he had pulled her into his lap on that chair? They had been happy then, hadn’t they?
“I’m seeing someone. But you knew that, right?”
She closed her eyes. Even the air felt heavy, a trap.
“I should have said,” Ben continued, “but, I—well, I didn’t. But you had heard that, hadn’t you? You knew.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I know.” And now she did.
On one of the many nights that Lizzie couldn’t sleep, as the delivery trucks rumbled down Broadway and the sky lightened to the streaky, cement-colored dawn, she watched bundled-up figures hurrying down the street, and she thought about Rose Downes.
Lizzie could remember asking her father all kinds of things about The Bellhop when she was a kid: Was he famous? Was the man who painted him famous? Who picked out the frame? (You’re a funny kid, she could remember Joseph saying; what kind of kid wonders about frames?) But she couldn’t remember asking him why he’d bought it. Why hadn’t she asked him? And she couldn’t recall ever thinking about the other people who might have owned it before.
She decided to write Rose a note. She found a card she had bought at the Frick aeons ago, featuring an Italian Renaissance portrait of a young man against a sumptuous green background. It was easy enough to locate Rose’s street address online. She wrote: “It’s not our Bellhop but I’ve always liked him. I hope you do too. It was lovely to meet you. I’ll be in L.A. in three weeks; coffee then?” She signed it with her name, her e-mail address, and all three numbers—cell, work, and home.