Sex deprivation had made me desperate, half-blind, and irrationally prone to fantasy, impulse, isolation, and cruelty. The parenting and homeownership, the borrowing, the debt, the load-bearing walls, packed inside that steady, anxious flow of days, nurturing, soldiering, corralling, building a monument to a lifestyle, to be preserved, resold, passed down, passed on. I lived in a sticky web of communal adaptations, minimizations, moderations. It made me cuckoo.
She prayed the rosary and sent money to Rome. I hated that smug superficial authority. I couldn’t stand it, how sure she was. Never reckless. Tried to leave. What better time to be reckless than now? She had all the wrong instincts, took her cues from all the wrong people, from a clergy of predators and an old Nazi pope in a crown. Nothing weird about that, nothing wrong with liberation theology in a banking context in a late-capitalist nightmare in the midst of an environmental meltdown. Arcane legislation written in secret by industry cronies on obscure financial practices and windfalls for carried interest had made her rich. She’d been formed by her parents’ immigrant struggle, a smoldering blue-collar rage, and the last two bull markets. Socially progressive, fiscally conservative, except the second part canceled out the first. She backed the NRDC, PETA, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, but also believed in trickle-down and thought lazy people who sat in drum circles on private property complaining about corporate greed weren’t helping.
Amy had a sense that she’d willed herself up from nothing, the inevitable result of grit, market trends, and globalization. She wanted that for everyone—some version of the American dream. She’d sold bonds—for some companies I’d heard of, multinationals, big pharma, a marauding Russian lumber operation hacking down the rain forest, a Chinese oil corporation building private armies in the Niger delta. Then she moved to private equity, to leverage solvent companies into ruin, strip the assets of the businesses she’d targeted, rationalize their labor forces, and shove them off a cliff. It had all worked out beautifully. Sometimes she mentioned stuff in passing, a lavish thing at Lincoln Center or a birthday celebration for Mike’s pal, with Coldplay helicoptering in for a fifty-minute set at fifty grand a song plus gas for the copter. The pal was some chemical manufacturer who I could google and hate, whose pet issues were ending corporate taxes and private space exploration. Then I’d stop speaking to her for a few hours, to let her feel my wrath.
She didn’t care what I thought, never saw herself as a leech, said she’d only worked in finance as a means to an end, told me about everything she had to put up with, the locker room atmosphere on a trading floor of mostly men who talked as though she weren’t there about who they’d like to screw, bosses who summoned her to dinner at strange hours and pinned her against the wall and slobbered on her face, younger guys who worked under her and stopped by her desk to complain about their sweaty balls, commenting on her blouse, height, legs, while she did her darnedest to get along, laugh it off. Got married so they’d stop harassing her at work. Got pregnant so he’d stop harassing her at home.
She thought of herself as a mom now, pious and demure, lonely as a nun, shooing away her staff so she could interact with her children, drive them to school, stopping by the gym for an hour to see Leon, her hot heterosexual trainer, then conference calls and meetings—sending new equipment to a hospital in Senegal, a check to a women’s shelter in Croatia—parent-teacher conferences, bedtime stories, nightly parties. She had a former athlete’s can-do spirit, a hankering for immediate and tangible results.
There were twenty-four nieces and nephews and more on the way, and tons more over in Ireland. She paid their dental and hospital bills, and had already sent half of them to college. Picked up the tab for her sister’s two knee jobs, owned four or five houses of her siblings and cousins, acting as the bank, had the best rate, zero interest, and forgave them any payments they missed. The list of people benefitting from her went on and on.
I couldn’t toss Robin for some libertarian wing nut. My wife, whose negligence had nearly wiped out the next generation, whose panty shields always ended up stuck inside the dryer, who’d stayed by my side not three days earlier as we’d listened together when, for whatever reason, the dishwasher made a noise like a goat eating a tin can. Then it suddenly resumed normal operations. At that very moment we’d been sitting at the kitchen table, waiting to register Kaya for fall pre-K at the Unitarian church, staring intently at the screen like we were about to drone somebody’s ass in Kabul. A box started blinking, and at the appointed hour, online registration began. Robin clicked the button once and shrieked in agony. With many more applicants than spots, we were given a number in the low three digits. There were tense moments until we got Kaya’s slot. After registration was done, we calmly strode around the downstairs of our domicile, secure in our place in the world, her $3,000 preschool being the cheapest around by two grand, most of that money having been painstakingly set aside in our checking account—until I’d blown it earlier today, and then accidentally gave away the bracelet I couldn’t afford to someone who already had all the junk in the world.
I didn’t think these things in exactly this formulation, although I should have, but I was too wobbly, hot and smeary from too much kissing, a muscular ache in my head from using my tongue in too many directions, my crotch all sticky and stuck to my clothes. What I’d done was horrible and disgusting. Heaven would take note.
I went to the Barn and showered, and tried to forget the whole thing. I shaved in the mirror, my head wedged against the ceiling, then spent an hour on my painting of Chinese factory workers. The OxyContin left me calm and contemplative and barely able to draw. After retrieving my clothes from the dresser, I crawled backward on my hands and knees, standing slowly, dodging low-hanging beams. I figured I’d seen the last of Amy O’Donnell, that in the morning she’d head back to her dream house, close the gate, and live out her days as a stooge for a right-wing nutcase.
At seven I went back to the flagpole and tried the house. Then I tried Robin’s cell. After a dozen attempts I gave up and left a desperate message, begging her to call. I was stunned by the most excruciatingly beautiful sunset, towering, visionary, in pink-and-orange sherbet, and commiserated with other conference-goers over the inconsistency of the signal, rumors of cellular hot spots, outdated local equipment, and different networks not functioning properly because of incoming weather.