“Are you mad at me?” Sam asked.
“Oh, Sam,” Susanna said. “I’m thirty-six and eleven-twelfths years old. We’ve been talking about this for two years. I can’t wait for you any longer. You’ve had a life with Andrew for fourteen years. I’ve been alone. I’ve given up on a husband, but not a family.”
Sam complained to his mother. “I think Susanna’s going to have a baby,” he said. “Without me.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said.
“Aren’t you sad? Disappointed?” he asked.
“Are you?” Eleanor said.
“Yes,” he said. “She won’t wait for me to work things out.”
“Sam,” Eleanor said in a voice that made him sit up straighter. “What is the matter with you? You’re married, or the next closest thing, and Andrew doesn’t want a baby.”
“I didn’t know I wanted a baby,” he said.
“That’s your problem, not Susanna’s.”
“She could wait a bit longer,” he said.
“No, she can’t. She’s almost thirty-seven.”
“There’s IVF,” he said.
“When did you become so egoistical? I don’t remember you like this,” she said.
“I was always like this. I seemed a bit nicer than the others because I got my way most of the time. All the time, really,” Sam said. “Oh, I paid attention and I listened without taking sides, but I think that was the gay boy’s wary watchfulness and ingratiating posturing. It also helped me get my way.” He paused. “Ask Andrew. He knows the darker side. He thinks I’m a narcissist and an egoist. So there.”
“And here, we all thought it was Harry taking up all the oxygen in the room,” she said.
“Harry’s got a big personality. All his emotions are big. But he’s really a better, kinder man than I.” Sam laughed. “He’s like Freud, a grandiose inductionist. He thinks everyone thinks the way he does. But he doesn’t hold a grudge.”
“Not so fast there,” Eleanor said. “Lately, he’s been less awful to me but he can’t forgive Dad. He’s rewriting his entire life up until yesterday.” Eleanor paused. “How come the rest of you aren’t mad at Dad?”
“Why should we be, when we can be mad at you?” Sam said. “Kidding. Sort of.” He shook his head. “We don’t know what to believe. We’re all behaving according to script. Will says it doesn’t make a difference to his life. I know Dad loved me. Jack thinks it’s cool Dad had another family. Tom wishes he’d grown up with the Wolinski boys so he wouldn’t have been the youngest. Kidding. Tom refuses to believe it. Harry, of course, is enraged. He didn’t plan it that way.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” Eleanor said. “It was much easier when you all were small.”
—
Sam moved out two weeks later. Without saying anything to Andrew, he paid off the mortgage on the apartment, three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and had his lawyer make over his interest to Andrew. It was a large two-bedroom on West Sixteenth. “If you need support,” he said to Andrew, handing him the deed, “let me know.” To Andrew and almost everyone they knew, Sam had moved with eye-popping speed. Sam didn’t care. If he acted now, he might still persuade Susanna to let him be her baby’s father. His mother and brothers were stunned. Andrew was stunned, wounded, and furious.
“Who are you?” he asked Sam, as Sam was packing his suitcases. “Henry the Eighth?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming,” Sam said. “You’ve made it difficult for me to see Susanna for the last dozen years, turning me into a liar and a sneak. We’ve been arguing about a baby for months. You gave me an ultimatum. You said I had to choose. I’m choosing. I want a baby.”
“You’re giving me no warning,” Andrew said.
“It’s no use, Andrew,” Sam said. “I can’t stay. The apartment’s yours. The furniture’s yours, and the books, plants, pots, everything. You can have the friends too. I’m done here.”
“Where are you going?” Andrew asked. “West Sixty-Seventh?”
“I’ve taken a place on East Twenty-Second, Gramercy, a rental,” Sam said.
“I see,” Andrew said. “A better neighborhood.”
“If you don’t want the apartment,” Sam said, “you can sell it.”
“You’re a bastard, a complete bastard,” Andrew said. “I don’t know you anymore.”
Sam called everyone in the family, resisting the siren song of email.
The first divorce, Eleanor thought. “Just like that?” she said to him.
“Not ‘just,’?” he said. “You must have seen it coming.”
“I’m surprised,” she said.
Eleanor, Will, and Tom called Andrew to say how sorry they were. Harry was indignant.
“We don’t do divorce,” he said to Sam. “We stick it out; we work it out. We fight it out if we have to. We don’t leave.”
“Do you hear my eyes rolling?” Sam said. “You’ve basically disowned Dad, ex-postmortem, making a huge family rift, bigger than the one I’m making. I want a baby and I’m not going to sneak around.”
“You can’t have everything,” Harry said.
“I know,” Sam said. “I made a choice. You don’t like it. I thought maybe you’d especially understand, with your feelings about family. Can’t you understand why I might want children?”
“This is all because of Dad and the Wolinskis,” Harry said.
Eleanor wondered if she’d ever see Andrew again. She realized she didn’t care. She wouldn’t miss him. She had little feeling toward him that wasn’t derivative. Sam had seemed happy with him, or happy enough, until he wasn’t. That was her bottom line with in-laws, and with Andrew, it had been her top line too. She shared the general family feeling that Susanna and not Andrew belonged at family gatherings. Everyone loved Susanna; no one, except Sam, loved Andrew, and even Sam’s attachment to Andrew seemed tepid compared with his love for Susanna. From the beginning, Andrew knew their preference and blamed Susanna. At the family parties they both went to, he would become aggressively withdrawn, flattening everyone’s pleasure, reminding Eleanor of holidays with her parents. She thought he had bad manners. She wished Sam would speak to him. Sam would make excuses for him. “Package deal,” he’d remind his mother. I don’t like anything in that package, she thought. She did not stop inviting Susanna but Susanna often made excuses. When she didn’t show up, they all blamed Andrew.
Andrew hadn’t gone to Princeton for his undergraduate education, only for his PhD. He’d gone to Penn State. He was lucky to have gone to any college. His parents didn’t believe in college any more than they believed in homosexuality. In their minds, the two were linked and they believed Andrew would have been straight if he had stayed home in Pittsburgh and worked construction or some other manly job. At Princeton, Andrew had a chip on his shoulder. Quick to take offense, he gave it even more quickly, setting people right. “I don’t have wingtips. I don’t own a tuxedo. I can’t afford a computer.” He was sensitive to the slightest slights.
“I’d never have gotten into an eating club,” he told Sam.
“Would you have wanted to?” Sam asked.