Best Intentions (6 page)

Both girls look at me, waiting for an analysis, a reassurance I can't give them. The only thing that disturbs children more than a crack in the structure of their own lives is even the hint of one in yours. Despite all of their poking and prodding, their testing of limits, they have a stake in their parents' invulnerability.

“Will you have a new boss?” Phoebe asks. She has always been extremely interested in the hierarchy of our jobs—memorizing the names of our bosses and bosses' bosses. Perhaps it gives her satisfaction to know that outside the home we do not have the final word, but I think, too, that she likes the order of it, it calms her in some way, the idea that life has a clearly delineated structure.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I don't know yet.”

“I think it's going to be a good thing, Mom,” Claire says. “It's like going to a bigger school. There will be more options.”

I smile at her, thankful for this keyhole into the kindness and empathy that resides beneath the layer of cool. It is the best of Claire.

After dinner, the girls withdraw to their rooms, their computers, their evening showers and nightly spats and Sam and I withdraw into the minutiae of domesticity—cleaning up the kitchen, going over upcoming schedules, phone calls—that create a landing, a dis
traction. We speak in snippets, but it is mostly flight instructions for the evening—I'll check on the girls, the cable people said we need a new converter box, do you want some tea? It is really just a prelude until we can be alone.

When the girls are finally in bed, we sit down in the living room at opposite ends of the shabby chic couch that is now more shabby than chic, its overwashed canvas slipcover sagging and jowly.

“Did you look at those papers on Merdale?” Sam asks.

“Yes. It was really helpful, thanks,” I lie. The list of officers in the company, their affiliations and accomplishments provoked a fresh groundswell of anxiety that left me nearly breathless. I put it down before I got to the end.

“How was breakfast with Deirdre?”

“All right. Ben was there.”

“Ben? I thought she broke up with him months ago.” Sam has always disapproved of Ben in the disgruntled way men have of sniffing out a cad in their midst. There is nothing more galling than an unapologetic show of indiscretion when you are dutifully playing by the rules. On the few occasions when the four of us have gone out to dinner, they treated each other with a heightened politeness and interest in each other's work—they are both in the media business, after all, and know some of the same people—but I suspect Sam feels like something of a journeyman when faced with Ben's itinerant glamour.

“Maybe they can work it out this time.” I have always been defensive of Deirdre, her choices.

“I doubt that.”

I am about to tell Sam about her arm, the bruises that have flashed in and out of my consciousness all day, but I stop myself. Deirdre and I keep each other's secrets. “So what did you want to talk to me about?” I ask carefully, there is still that.

Sam looks up from his Brooklyn Lager.

“This morning,” I remind him. “You said you wanted to talk to me about something.”

He shakes his head. “It was nothing. Forget it.”

“You sure?”

He nods. “Yes.” He reaches over, puts his hand on my knee and we are both aware of it, this act that has gone unnoticed a thousand times before. “I meant what I said. I know this is really hard on you. And it sucks that Carol didn't give you any warning. She owed you that. But you'll be okay.”

“What if I'm not?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are we going to do if I lose my job? It's a really tough market out there. More people are getting laid off every day. And we have no cushion.”

“First of all, you're not going to lose your job. Even if you did, we'd be all right.”

“For how long?”

“You'll find another job,” Sam says.

I shift my legs but cannot find a comfortable position. I know that he is right, but rather than soothe me, it only kindles an amorphous resentment. There is a universe between “You can take care of yourself” and “I'll take care of you.”

“I'm exhausted,” I say, rising. “I'm going to bed.”

“Okay. I'll be there in a minute.”

I am curled in fetal position, three pillows carefully propping up my head, the only way to relieve the permanent pain in my rotator cuff from years of carrying a bag overstuffed with papers, phones, makeup, saliva-stained children's toys, when Sam climbs in beside me, his weight sinking the mattress until we settle into the familiar valley of our own imprints. He grazes my hip with his fingertips, the pressure light, almost tentative, and kisses me gently on the shoulder. “Lisa, it really will be okay,” he whispers.

I touch his hand with mine and for a couple of minutes we lie side by side, aware of each other's breath, the in and out of our lungs spiraling into the humid stillness of the air.

Slowly I feel him turn on his side, inch in my direction, until he is curled around me, his hand moving up the curve of my waist to my breasts. Desire twinges from my lower belly through my chest, my
throat. I want him suddenly with a force that too often lies dormant beneath the predictability of marital sex, all those efficient couplings when you both know what pleases the other and do it because there is no time or will for risky new enterprises that may not pay off. I want him to wipe away the day, the doubts, I want him because I have always wanted him. Most of all, I want him to want me. I turn over, pull Sam on top of me, open my mouth to him. There is a rare urgency to our lovemaking—ah, we can still feel this, this need, we can still do this to each other—which is in itself a vast relief.

Afterward, Sam falls asleep and for a little while I watch his back rising and falling until I, too, drift off.

I wake with a start just after midnight to a jagged crack of thunder careening into the streets. A white flash of lightning slashes through the bedroom like a searchlight and then vanishes.

The weather is breaking in one great clamorous late-summer storm.

I reach over but Sam isn't beside me. I lie still, listening to the torrential downpour, waiting for him to return from the bathroom, wanting only to curl once more into the perfect hollow of his arm carved as if for my head alone, but he doesn't return.

Finally, I tiptoe out to the living room.

I hover in the doorway. Sam is standing by the rain-smeared window, his back to me, his cell phone pressed tightly to his ear.

“I just couldn't do it,” he says. “Not tonight. I'm sorry.”

I
stand rooted in the doorway, completely still, waiting, listening, but Sam doesn't say anything more.

He flips his phone shut and stares out the window before turning around, his eyes distracted, unfocused. He starts when he sees me.

“I didn't hear you,” he says. The sheets of water battering the window make a speckled shadow across his bare torso.

“Who were you talking to?”

He shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you. I couldn't sleep.”

“Who was that?”

“That woman I met with about the Wells piece. She left five messages.”

“It's past midnight. How can you call someone at this hour?”

“I didn't want to talk to her, that was the whole point. I'm beginning to think she's a total nut job. I thought if I called now I could leave a message without actually having to speak to her.”

“And?”

He pauses. “She picked up.”

He walks over to me, puts his arm around my waist, settling just above the small of my back, he always calls it “his spot,” as if love has its own acreage. “It's late, let's go back to bed.”

“Couldn't do what?”

“Huh?”

“You told her you couldn't do something. What couldn't you do?”

“It's nothing.” His hand hovers, then presses firmly against the silk of my nightgown, guiding me out of the living room. “She wants me to confront Wells and I told her I couldn't without more proof. It would blow up in my face. Let's just forget about it.”

I nod, not quite relenting, not quite sure, and yet.

What choice do I have, really?

We walk quietly down the hallway, our bare feet padding against the wooden floor, and then lie side by side as the rain pounds against the pavement until, finally, we both fall back to sleep.

The next morning I am showered and dressed before Sam stumbles into the kitchen. There are no fresh eggs, no cheerful admonitions about school as the girls finish up and gather their things. Sam and I are polite with each other in a hungover, desultory way, the air dense with that post-argument haze when you haven't quite regained your balance yet and are still eyeing each other, sniffing for clues. The fact that we never really had a fight only makes the space between us harder to navigate. I leave him eating a bowl of high-fiber cereal and flipping through the papers.

Despite the fact that I agreed to let Claire take Phoebe alone on the Madison Avenue bus this year, I'm finding the follow-through a little difficult. This morning at least I have a perfectly valid excuse to accompany them—albeit one my family finds curious, to say the least. In a moment of temporary insanity I signed up to be on the steering committee for the annual Weston fund-raiser. It's not that I haven't volunteered for things before. I've gone on my fair share of class trips to the Museum of Natural History, baked umpteen cupcakes for the never-ending stream of bake sales to benefit the homeless shelter three blocks away, breast cancer research, the middle school dance. But I have always felt more comfortable when these efforts involve being with children. The truth is, I am thoroughly intimidated by the other mothers, with their cliques and their mind-boggling efficiency and their birthday parties for the entire grade of
fifty-six kids at venues I can't afford to go to with my own friends. Nevertheless, when Georgia Hartman suggested it, I found myself agreeing, realizing too late that the request was made only because I had accidentally wandered into a conversation she was having with someone else about it. She never expected me to acquiesce. Why do I always get it wrong with these people?

We head out into the cooler air, the girls registering their protest at my presence by walking a few feet ahead of me. Once on the bus, Phoebe balances her notebook on her lap, doing the math homework she forgot about last night, though she refuses to admit a causal relationship between this and her resistance to writing assignments down. I can already predict the conversation at the first parent-teacher conference, where it will all be framed as a fatal flaw in parenting skills destined to consign my daughter to a second-rate college, a dead-end job, a slacker husband.

Claire, who has been tormented for the last twenty-four hours over whether or not she should get bangs, is tugging at her hair and studying her reflection in the grimy window. She has conducted an overnight poll of all of her friends and, to her consternation, they are evenly divided over whether it would be “super-cute” or “total, like, catastrophe.”

“What do you think, Mom?” she asks, without taking her gaze off of her own diffuse image.

I try not to betray my shock—and pleasure—that my advice is actually being solicited. I think the idea is disastrous but I know better than to go on record in case she decides otherwise. “Your hair's like mine,” I say carefully. “It's going to get poofy if it's too short.”

Claire considers this. “Well, Lily thinks I should.”

I wonder if children ask your opinion with the express purpose of ignoring it, or if, after the glint of vulnerability, they need to regain their pride with a show of stubborn disinterest. I'm clueless about what surreptitiously sinks in, what is sloughed off.

“Whatever,” I say, muttering the outlawed word.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

As soon as we get to Weston the girls meld, guppylike, into their own groups and, stranded, I feel a wave of jealousy for their easy sense of belonging. I head up to the boardroom on the second floor, a sedate wood-paneled oasis more suited to Wall Street than a bustling school. I often try to arrive a little bit late to this type of thing to lessen the time I will have to struggle through awkward chitchat or, worse, sit silently while others talk around me. It is not lost on me, by the way, that it is ludicrous for a professional woman and mother of two to be this insecure about a school meeting. I have not, in the past, had difficulty making friends, but the sense of being an interloper here has never completely dissipated. I had hoped it would be otherwise. Early on, I realized that many of the women I chalked up as trophy wives and fourth-generation former debutantes I would have nothing in common with are actually hardworking lawyers and architects, designers and journalists. I hovered around them at parent nights and socials, anxious to become friends, but they rarely put in appearances at morning drop-offs or committees like this. The women I was most interested in I saw the least. Like me, they had come to cede this territory to the nonworking mothers with a blend of relief and resignation.

Six women, including Georgia, are already seated around the long mahogany table, their bags at their feet, leather-bound notepads at the ready. On the sideboard, there is a platter of minibagels, freshly squeezed orange juice in a glass pitcher from the Museum of Modern Art and a huge polished silver urn of coffee. Needless to say, no one is eating. I settle into a chair and surreptitiously check my BlackBerry before turning it to mute. I wonder briefly if in the entire 110-year history of Weston a single father has ever sat on this committee, but the answer is obvious. I am the only one dressed for a job and I feel hopelessly overdone in my black pencil skirt and top. Then again, the casual-chic-running-around-town thing the other women have going on is actually far harder to pull off. They probably came out of the womb wearing ballet flats.

I try to enter into a conversation about our children's first day of
school and think I might actually be doing okay when the woman at the head of the table calls us ever so gently to attention. “Shall we begin?” she suggests. “For those of you who don't know me, I'm Samantha. Class of ninety-one. As you know, this fund-raiser is the main Weston event of the year and there's a lot of work to be done before February. The auction is our single biggest moneymaker and much of our energy will be spent lining up donations. To start, I thought we could take a look at last year's offerings for inspiration.” Samantha, a whippet-thin brunette in a sleeveless cashmere shell that cunningly shows off her zero-body-fat biceps, hands out the creamy catalogue. As we begin to leaf through it, there are nostalgic murmurs about last year's bids on the week in Provence, the front-row season tickets to the Knicks, the various dinners with famous alumni and parents, the walk-on part on an HBO series, the Oscar de la Renta wardrobe and the spending spree at Ralph Lauren. No one seems particularly concerned that charitable giving has gone down in double digits everywhere.

“Of course, a number of these are perennials but I was hoping for some fresh ideas. Ladies?”

“I could arrange a week at our ski lodge in Beaver Creek,” Tara Jamison, famous for the magnitude of her divorce settlement, offers in a low, flattened voice. Her smooth, luminously bronzed face is impassive as she lowers her cup of coffee and places it with great concentration in the china saucer. Secure, cosseted, she is a woman luxuriating in the knowledge that she will never have to rush anywhere ever again. Either that or she is taking way too much Prozac.

“That would be wonderful,” Samantha remarks approvingly.

Tara nods and slowly brushes aside a lock of her glossy, honey-streaked hair. She is curvier than the others, completely comfortable with her own superbly maintained softness. This alien degree of body confidence elicits a grudging curiosity and barely concealed distrust.

“My husband should be able to get two tickets to the Academy Awards,” Georgia offers.

“And entrée to the parties?” Samantha asks.

“Of course.”

Everyone murmurs assent and happily jots this down.

The donations continue to pile up as each woman digs into her pocket of social connections and effortlessly pulls out a gilded offering.

Samantha turns to me. “Lisa?”

“I can get Rita Mason to come to someone's house and cook a dinner for ten.” I have no idea where this came from and I cannot imagine how I will ever be able to talk her into doing this.

“Good.” Samantha smiles and writes this down as if it is a fait accompli. “Why don't we say for twenty, though?”

“Of course.” Ten extra guests is the least of my problems.

I barely hear the rest of the conversation. As the meeting closes, Samantha sets the time for our session next week. By then Merdale will have taken over and the thought of coming in late so soon into its reign fills me with dread. Too often I feel as if I spend half my life making excuses—at work, at home, here.

Out on the street I hail a cab and as it speeds down the West Side Highway past the few remaining trucker bars and seedy diners stubbornly nestled amid all the brazen construction I get out my cell phone and call Deirdre.

“Did I wake you?” I ask. What I really mean is, Did I interrupt some esoteric pornographic act you are currently engaged in with Ben?

“No. I'm just tired. I had a bit of a rough night.”

“Why doesn't that surprise me?”

“That's not what I mean. Where are you? I can hardly hear you.”

“In a cab. I have to meet with some potential client way downtown. Seems a waste to me, I mean what idiot signs on with a company that was just bought, but I promised Carol.”

“You don't owe her anything.”

“I know. That's not why I called.”

“What's up?”

“I need a reality check.” I give her the details of last night, the sex (perhaps I feel I have something to prove in this department), the
mysterious phone call that Sam failed to explain. “Would you believe him when he said that it was nothing?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“That would be my strategy.”

“There's a difference between belief and strategy.”

“Only if you let there be,” Deirdre replies. “Sam had a perfectly plausible explanation. The worst thing you can do or say is harp on it with him. Sometimes you can push someone so much you propel them right into the thing you're most scared of.”

“Isn't that a ‘blame the victim' mentality?”

“Maybe. But it happens to be true. You've got to stop this,” she adds firmly.

“I'm sorry. I wouldn't want to bore you.”

“That's not what I meant, Lisa.”

“I know,” I reply grudgingly. “Listen, I meant to ask you, you're not bringing Ben to dinner tonight, are you?”

“God no,” she exclaims. “Though now that you mention it, it is an interesting idea.”

“Deirdre.”

“Just kidding. If Jack was bringing his wife, maybe, but I'm glad that it will just be the four of us. Besides, you know Ben is against enforced integration.”

“Meaning?”

“He still resists every attempt I make to get us out of the little box he has us in. He hasn't even told his children he's dating. His ex-wife is practically living with her spinning instructor, for Christ's sake. You know what I was doing when you called? Writing him an e-mail.”

“Why is that so strange?”

“We got into yet another relationship talk last night. Maybe
debate
is a better word. The point is, after all this time, I still seem to have this need to send a long treatise after every date explaining myself to him or, worse, trying to explain him to himself. I always feel like I have to make a case for us.” She sighs. “It's okay, I just
need to be patient. Anyway,” she adds, brightening, “at least it makes tonight easier. I can't wait to see everyone.”

“Everyone meaning Jack?”

“Everyone meaning everyone. And Jack.”

We hang up as the driver stops in front of a great slab of a glass building, a shimmering proclamation of hubris and hope a few hundred yards north of the pit where the Twin Towers once stood.

Inside, the lobby has, despite the high-tech security scanners and “smart” elevators, a tentative feel, like a hostess waiting nervously for her guests to arrive. Half the building remains unoccupied despite the municipal tax breaks offered; the residual fear and mourning have soaked too deeply into this battle-scarred neighborhood. The business world remains divided after all these years between those who believe in putting down a flag and those who see no reason to go looking for trouble, as if safety is a choice and not an accident of fate.