I’d been given unimpeded access to her domestic perversions, her agonizing fears and deliberations as the umbilical cord went taut across too many miles. She’d shown me that good luck wasn’t necessarily good, money couldn’t replace the veins in a child’s head, that a parent’s worst nightmare might still come true. I’d sent heaps of love letters, presided over the realm of her body, an apparently invulnerable place of wet and warm, of cool and sorrow, of subdermal pulses and deep red blood. Gave her eighteen orgasms, loved and cared for her in a way no one ever had, and in return I’d been graced with her attention, a thing of value beyond the mechanism of her wealth. All I’d wanted was someone strange and new, to restore some wonder to the reason we exist. Amy had given me that.
She’d been emailing a Sotheby’s agent just this morning, about the house for sale next door to hers, “Pheasant Ridge, a significant Georgian manor on seven acres.” Meandering meadows, three-thousand-bottle wine cellar. Asking price: $28 million. She wondered about the highest bidder’s escalation clause. But why? Was she planning to outbid him? So she could move across the driveway under the cover of darkness? To split from Mike without the public humiliation? In letters to me she’d floated several scenarios, including his possible relocation to the Frankfurt office or a more permanent move to their digs in New York. She wondered whether their kids would even notice. She’d also discussed blowing out their pool house or adding another floor to their already massive pad, to get him out of her sight. She seemed to think it could be done without telling anyone, not even him.
Or maybe she wanted to buy Pheasant Ridge for me.
I sat at the kitchen table, staring at her phone, listening to her walk up the stairs. She went to the bed, moving stiffly, picked up the T-shirt she’d worn to sleep, and shook it one-handed. “They wouldn’t give me anything,” she said. “Except this.” A blue sling suspended her arm on a strap around her neck. She turned to me with slanted eyes of Irish sorrow. “I don’t remember taking all six pills.”
Her hair had a bump on the side and a jagged part. The pain went through her shoulder, she said, up the side of her head. She hunched, not smiling, distracted, looking worn, her face gaunt.
I’d loved her just this morning. I’d loved her as much as I could. I suggested that maybe her pain threshold wasn’t as high as she’d thought. She searched my face. It was a wistful, bitter acceptance.
“My doctor called in the refill, but the guy at the pharmacy said it’s illegal to prescribe that stuff over the phone. He said if he gets audited he’ll lose his license. He said a ten-milligram pill has a street value of twenty dollars.” The sarcasm seemed to relieve the pain. “That’s a thirteen-dollar net.”
She dropped the T-shirt on the bed and came toward the table, blinking wildly, her jaw opening, testing the ache. Her purse lay on its side. Some of her stuff had fallen on the floor again. She lifted one half of her eyeglasses to her face, then dropped it.
“I almost forgot,” I said. “Thanks for the shirt. You didn’t have to do that.”
She looked at me strangely. In return, a forced smile plastered itself under my nose. I tried to change it but couldn’t, so I arranged my face to say that these meager offerings were too pitiful to acknowledge beyond a few insincere words. She picked up the shirt and tie and carried them to the couch.
“This stuff is for Mike,” she said. She moved in a kind of modified creep, then came back and got the boxers. If she kept moving, she said, she could distract her body from the pain. She began folding her own clothes on the bed, breathing loudly, carefully packing them into her bag, with a throbbing energy that barely hid a suppressed spiritual agony. She held it in, cold and resigned.
She stuffed her sandals down into her bag one-handed, and threw the bag on the kitchen chair. Then she hurled herself onto the bed, rubbing her feet against the old cotton bedspread in a writhing motion as if to soothe herself.
“You missed your meeting in New York.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Send them a check.” She ignored me, wincing, adjusting her arm. “How much did you give the people you were on the phone with yesterday?”
“None of your beeswax.”
“Your assistant needs to enter it into the spreadsheet.”
She turned back, a little astonished, squinting at me, then noticed her playing cards on the floor and her phone in my hand.
“Was there anything else you wanted to know?”
“Why are you bidding on Pheasant Ridge?”
“I’m not.” She looked away sourly. “Quit looking at my fucking phone.”
“But why were you talking to the agent?”
She fell back on the pillow. Her expression gave way to something dark and remote. “Because I was sad.”
“Sad?”
“I thought I could donate it to St. Anne’s, my church, as a home for adolescent mothers and their babies.”
“And that would make you happy?”
“Yes. Or a lab to study the effects of overdevelopment on the local water table. But a real lab, part of the university.”
“I don’t think it’s zoned for that.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why are you giving money to those goatfuckers?”
“What?”
“Are you a Republican?”
She let her head fall back. “No.” She closed her eyes. “I’m nothing.”
“How are you nothing?”
“Although I do believe that in some situations, private enterprise can succeed where big government fails—”
I grabbed my head and yelled. She stopped talking. We waited. Then she asked quietly, “You’re talking about my campaign donations?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Mike’s list.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“He wants a united front,” she said. “Because it looks better that way.”
“You do this stuff and then you blame him.”
“No.” Her eyes were closed. “It’s not mine.” She winced in pain and shifted her arm. “Nothing is mine. Not my kids or my work or my own body, or even my own name. If he wants it, it gets taken. If he does something disgusting, I have to live with it. If I do something good, something I support that he likes, education reform or my projects in the Baltic states, he takes it, he makes a call or writes a check and somehow my name gets cut from the press release and no one can tell me how that happened.” She looked at me. “The only person I want to help I can’t,” she said. “You don’t need my help, do you?”
I could’ve told her about our debts and loans, back taxes and whatnot, my endangered job at the magazine. I said no. She smiled. I think she knew. “Do you want the bracelet back?”
“No.”
“Because you could return it.” She flicked her wrist around so the pearls moved. “It’s the nicest thing anyone ever gave me.”
“Keep it.”
“You know I’d do anything for you.”
“I know.”
“You’re not an environmental cause or a school with two thousand kids. You’re just some dude with nice lips.”
“Thanks.”
“I wanted to help you but I never figured out how.”
This was merely one unfortunate thing among many, most of which did work out, on a miraculous scale, all over the world, and in return she received sincere gratitude, plaques and speeches in carpeted ballrooms over white linen with heavy hors d’oeuvres.
“Can you understand that?” I said yes. She could’ve fixed my life. She’d fix her dog’s knees instead. I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Borrowing money from the billionaire you’ve been screwing is tacky, and looks like blackmail, and turns you into a bimbo. A breeze caught the papers on the kitchen table. They fluttered.