She grew up in Leominster, Mass., the second oldest of six, or seven. A grandmother with a brogue lived down the hall. The family car had holes in the floor. She made sure I knew where she came from, that she’d had it rougher than me, which wasn’t saying much. Her dad stepped off the boat from Ireland, got drafted into the U.S. Army and shipped to Vietnam, and came home a patriot. Her mom missed Ireland, she thought Americans were crass, but loved nothing more than to sit down on a Saturday night to watch Lawrence Welk. Amy’s favorite sister, Katy, two years younger, married a cop. Her older brother sold fighter jets and missile parts to Taiwan. Lots of sidebars about her other sisters’ knee surgeries and blockages of breast-milk flow, their kids and husbands, their crummy office jobs. High school swimmer, track hurdler, vice president of her senior class. She was attacked the summer after high school ended, in a field beside the town pool. She told me how she thought he meant to kill her, and recalled the boy who found her, and wrapped her in his towel, and brought her home, and cleaned her up.
She put off college for a year. Worked in a photo lab, took up painting, dated a guy a few years older, but wouldn’t let him touch her. Went to a state school on a swimming scholarship, worked nights on campus security, wearing the orange windbreaker. Majored in econ, spent three years analyzing reports at an institutional bank, swore she’d never considered banking until she took the job. But hers was a small unit within a bigger bank, growing rapidly, and soon they moved her into sales, making presentations in high-yield. The women in her department were tall and good-looking, the men were retired professional hockey players, and they all did vicious things to try to steal one another’s clients. In place of any sort of imagination for a career path, she’d taken the formulaic route to some abstract idea of success, maybe hoping that one day she’d have security. Or a red Lamborghini. Earnest young people were drawn into an abusive, sexist, money-crazed environment, worked to death to prove themselves, to separate out the weak so that the only ones left were greedy, scrappy, stubborn maniacs.
On the rebound from some long-haired Australian deadbeat, she met whatshisface, Mike. He was tall and dark and strong as an ox. He could work a hundred hours in a row without setting foot outside the building. Even in the short time she knew him, she could see him changing for the worse. She didn’t consider him a friend or a mentor, and he didn’t know how to talk to women. Was he shy? Was he tired? That first Thanksgiving with her family, when he wouldn’t make small talk, she knew it was wrong but went ahead with it anyway. Planned the wedding, got cold feet, refused to back out. Or maybe the Australian guy had mistreated her and Mike was nice at first. I forget. She filled out reams of forms for an annulment, met regularly with her priest that whole first year, trying to figure out how to get out of it, then got knocked up, and was either pregnant or nursing for the next seven.
Last summer, lying on the beach with her classmates, she wore Italian movie star sunglasses and a white wifebeater, tight against her freckled copper skin, over a screaming blue-and-white flowered bikini, the string loops tied behind her neck as if she’d been dressed that way by some larger being who’d stood over her and tied that bow and then pushed her out into the world. After the beach, a few of us went to play putt-putt golf, where she towered over me by half an inch, and I couldn’t stop looking at her legs.
On the final night of the conference we skipped the festivities, went to a fancy restaurant, then drove out to the point. She didn’t hesitate, just stripped and ran right into the big booming ocean in the dark. Her bra and undies were white. When we got out of the water I forced myself not to look, forced my eyes up, above her chin. But then I looked. She was breathing strangely, said she hadn’t kissed anyone else in nine years. I noticed her breathing, and looked at her hands, and then it hit me: Duh, she’s shaking, she’s telling the truth.
This stuff happens in movies all the time, but what’s interesting about real life is that the longer you live, the cornier life becomes, although that corniness, what once seemed corny, now comes from a deeper place. Desperation doesn’t mind corny. Desperation trumps style. We owned the beach, foam breaking around our ankles, delirious and alone in the moonlight.
Her bunkmates had already gone home, and Amy had the room to herself. There were problems with the lighting, curtains, noises in the hall. Over the next several hours she became awkward, worried, antsy, horny, offended, confused, athletically engaged, panting and moaning, weepy and angry, relieved and exhausted, until we passed out like two crazy drunks. Then, last fall in a bar in the West Village, while trying to wrap her legs around me in the booth, she tipped over a candle and set the table on fire.
If I took more than three hours to write back she got mad, then quiet, then started leaking sarcastic and manipulative desperation—“Who needs you when I’ve got the weather report?” If I complained about Robin, she flew to my defense. If I wrote something too sexy, she wrote “Lord!” She had an unironic religious side that I had the urge to violate. She ran the Christmas pageant at her church. They used real animals, she put a diaper on the goat, and sometimes bizarre things came out of her, about meeting me “in the afterlife,” or how she sometimes “worried about my soul,” or that she admired Laura Bush “as a mom,” or that she took classes in Broadway tap.
She wondered if having kids had changed her, made her less tolerant. Maybe she was the problem, not him. She didn’t have patience for someone who wasn’t as small or crazy or helpless, wasn’t as madly in love, who didn’t crawl on the rug and play games or fall apart when she walked out of the room. But then she’d divulge the peculiar terms of her relationship with the guy she referred to in emails as M—who spent half his nights in the city and the rest in the firm’s offices in Frankfurt or Shanghai, or at home behind a locked door at the other end of the house, and made contact with her mostly through his secretary, treating her like an employee, barking orders, or worse, since employees never woke up in the middle of the night with the boss in his underwear standing over their bed—and I couldn’t help thinking that they were both nuts, that money caused it, that rich people had one goal in life, and were creepy and obsessed and not better than anyone.