Early morning on the Brooklyn waterfront. The sheer number of people out on a brilliantly sunny but bitingly cold February day surprised Leo. The chill of the wooden bench beneath his legs seeped through his wool trousers and heavy coat. The blue sky felt like a harbinger of spring, but the water was still a dire wintry gray. The leather satchel containing Bea’s story was on his lap. It had only been days since he read it but it felt like weeks. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, suppress his rising anxiety, but instead he found himself picturing Matilda’s right foot in what would be its waning minutes. Before they got into the car and when she was slipping on her silver shoe, he’d noticed how her toenails were painted bright pink, how the pink glowed against her golden skin, how the elegant arch of her foot sat against the shoe and how, when she stood and looked at him and tugged at her shirt, she was perfectly steady on her two intact feet. Quite possibly the worst thing for him about Bea’s new story was this, how it conjured Matilda and everything about Matilda from where he’d buried her deep, deep in a tiny box in some remote corner of his brain.
He reached in his coat pocket for the pack of American Spirit cigarettes he’d bought on a whim but hadn’t opened yet, not wanting to further irritate Stephanie by smelling like tobacco. He opened the pack, withdrew a cigarette, and, leaving Bea’s leather satchel on the bench, walked over to the railing on the water. He felt sheepish about smoking, which also irritated him. And then he was irritated to feel irritation. Irritation was pretty much his primary sentiment lately, when it wasn’t anxiety.
Things were not good inside the little jewel of a brownstone that was Stephanie’s. From the street, the rooms behind the new but historically accurate windows glowed with an amber-infused warmth, inviting and cheerful. From the outside, the house looked like the perfect place to take shelter from any variety of storms, but inside? Inside, he and Stephanie were barely maintaining a civil politeness. The softness that had taken root between them since the night of the snowstorm and slowly blossomed into something expansive and occasionally exuberant had collapsed—not a slow leak either, but a sudden deflation, like a sad, sunken soufflé.
They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s why addicts stayed addicts. Why he’d walked away from buying cocaine before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar but now had a neat glassine envelope in his pocket. Why he was fingering an unlit cigarette in his hand and wondering what to do about Stephanie as he had countless times before.
Leo could see his future with her and he didn’t like it: He would be one of those people who started to parcel time into “years clean.” He’d build a callus of superiority around his own self-denial and would become, because of the accident and its aftermath, someone with a bifurcated past, all the accomplishments he valued would be relegated to “before,” and his narrative would build around the “after”—the accident, rehab, divorce, how he straightened up, straightened out, rebuilt from the beginning. If he stayed, he’d have to divide up his money. He’d have to get a job, like every other chump. Since his meeting with Nathan he’d e-mailed or called countless old contacts and all his inquiries added up to a big fat nothing. A few polite brush-offs at best; some never bothered to respond. He didn’t know if Nathan had been pissed enough to actually blackball him around town or if he had just gravely miscalculated his own relevance. He didn’t want to figure it out.