Sleepless Nights (21 page)

Fay: Huh?

Me: Um…

Fay: What did you say?

Me: When?

Fay: Just now?

Me: About what?

Fay (taking a deep breath): Q, what did you say two minutes ago when you sat down, please? You spoke so fast I couldn’t catch a word of it.

Me: Ah. Yes. Well.

Ten minutes later we more or less understood each other, although there was a glint in her eye that suggested she understood rather more than I necessarily wanted her to understand. We agreed I’d put together a letter for the partners, explaining my request for
two more months of leave (“It won’t be on full pay, you know, Q, but I’ll see what I can manage.”). “And that’s
all
you’re asking for, is it? You’ve been an extremely productive associate. This isn’t a preliminary to a resignation, I assume?” My heart was pounding; I gulped and dragged a smile onto my face. Of course not, I said brightly, knowing that if I said it was, the whole game would be over.

Walking out through the building felt strange. After my meeting with Fay I took the flight of steps down to my office, expecting to find everything changed: Fay told me they had to let a couple of summer associates share it last month, but neither of them seemed to have left much imprint of their personalities on the room. In fact, I found things almost as I’d left them the day I went on bed rest, five months earlier. On a pad of fluorescent-green Post-it notes I discovered a doodle I suddenly remembered working on, a series of interlocking curls with what looked like a hamster at the bottom (I think it was actually a self-portrait: me at twenty-six weeks pregnant). My screen-saver—an old photograph of our garden back home in Kent—faded in and out, in and out, eerily reminding an empty room of my childhood. The plants on the windowsill were unexpectedly thriving: Jayne, a new secretary, stopped by and shyly told me she’d been feeding and watering them. I felt oddly touched, as if someone had been looking after me all this time, and I hadn’t even known about it. Of course the desk was tidied, the chaos ruthlessly rearranged by some unknown hand, and all the file notes for ongoing cases were sifted, sorted, and refiled. It struck me, as I gently pulled the door closed, that the office looked as if it belonged to me, but a
better
me. An organized, hardworking me with a workable filing system, a neat array of highlighter pens, and an excellent supply of Miracle-Gro.

I exchanged greetings with my colleagues as I walked along the floor and then down in the elevator (“Hey, Q, how ya doing? You look—uh, great!” they enthused, not entirely convincingly. “Did you hear about Ed and Delilah?”). Then, just as I reached the heavy revolving doors—almost safe!—I bumped into Caroline in the hall. Just
my luck. She was with a client. He was clad in a formal gray suit, Caroline in spotless, pitilessly tailored black. “What are
you
doing here, Quinn?” she asked sharply.

“I came in to meet with Fay,” I explained, smiling politely.

She looked expectant.

“You’ll be getting a letter from me asking for extended leave,” I added reluctantly. “I need to take a couple more months.”

“I see.” Her lip curled.

No, you don’t, I thought to myself, you don’t see anything unless it’s directly related to your professional reputation, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I shook hands with the client—he was someone I’d met before and, remembering that one of his children had cerebral palsy, I asked after his health. The man looked slightly surprised, I thought, but he was friendly, and even asked after Samuel. Caroline, who was obviously not listening, was tapping a glassy foot on the great marble floor. I caught sight of her checking her slim silver watch.

“Give me a call the week before you come back, Quinn,” she said abruptly, turning toward the elevator, when the client and I had finished speaking. “We must talk.”

“Of course, Caroline, I’ll be happy to.” The elevator doors smartly shut them from sight.

I left the building feeling unsettled. I had a job I should love. I had a job I’d spent half my life trying to get. But I hated it. I hated the office politics, the sly backstabbing, the atmosphere of distrust. I hated the awful superiority of people like Caroline. I hated the exhaustion, the intensity, the unstated expectation that the firm owned your existence. What I want (I thought, as I scooped my son lovingly into my arms, when I finally got home) is to be in charge of my own life.

37

Jeanie

J
ust my luck, my train was delayed; I arrived at Tom and Q’s flat dripping with sweat, hair starting from my head like Medusa serpents, a bare two minutes before Paul swung into the sitting room in a pressed Armani suit, cool and poised as always, with a very expensive bottle of chilled white wine under his arm. He then produced, from a pristine paper bag, an expansive collection of takeout boxes from a place called Jo’s Shanghai in Chinatown: “Best soup dumplings in the city!”

At first I tried to use Samuel as an excuse to avoid him, but my nephew seemed to have forgotten me and struggled skittishly in my arms. Q worked extremely hard to persuade me that he’d actually been missing me these past four days. “I think he only really began to get over you yesterday, and then he probably thought he wouldn’t see you again, so it was a sort of
coping mechanism
to forget you…” she told me anxiously.

Paul, it must be said, was a model of politeness throughout the evening. The food was scrumptious, he kept our glasses topped up with wine, and he even cleared away most of the mess, pushing a laughing, faintly resisting Q back into her seat. I went into the kitchen to help him. “Hold open the trash bag for a second, Jeanie, let me get this in—okay, great. And—” he cast his eyes quickly around the room—“I think that’s it. So why did you stay in Connecticut by
yourself, then?” he asked curiously, as we strolled back together into the sitting room. “Why didn’t you come down to New York with Q and Tom?”

This was the moment I’d been waiting for. “I couldn’t leave my work at the Home,” I said airily. “You know how it is. The old people expect me now, I wouldn’t want to disappoint them…” Paul looked—surprised, but then Tom, who was pouring the scotch, jumped in.

“And
she was spending time with her boyfriend,” he explained chirpily. “Nice guy. Name of Dave. Only she dumped him, just when we finally got to thinking he was okay…” Q kicked him, and he turned to look at her, eyes wide-open with surprise. “Wha—? But didn’t you…” Q kicked him again. Hard.

I felt myself flush. “Yes, well. Things didn’t go—er, very well,” I said uncomfortably, feeling exposed before Paul’s suddenly penetrating gaze. “We—er—decided it would be better to—um—part,” I said foolishly, sounding like something out of a 1940s radio play. I flushed even deeper. Where did that come from?

Paul looked away, brown eyes faintly embarrassed. “I’m sorry. None of my business, of course.”

But now an awkward silence fell, and for some reason I felt absolutely compelled to fill it. “Mmm. It was time to move on,” I suggested, dragging a few more clichés into the mix. “Er, call it a day, you know. Quit while we were ahead. Give it a rest, finish the deal.” I realized some woman was gabbling pointlessly on, and since I appeared to have control over her mouth, I shut it.

There was another, even more awkward silence. Then, to my complete astonishment, Paul, who was now sitting on the window bench, started talking instead—and, in a quiet, measured voice, he told us all about his breakup with Tina last week, and he wasn’t using the language of clichés, he was actually
telling
us, in detail, what really happened. Tina, he explained, was lovely and talented, and clearly a catch, but somehow, to him, brain-deadeningly dull. He’d kept it going for months, he continued, hoping they’d click; he’d
taken her off for romantic breaks in Paris and Prague until she was half off her head with love for him but he’d only proved to himself that he couldn’t, in fact, care for her. But by this point her mother was making discreet inquiries into the availability of certain high-class hotels on Saturdays in June and she (he had it on good authority) had actually tried on a Vera Wang.

As he talked and talked about the awful mess he’d found himself in, where a perfectly nice woman was thinking thoughts he himself thought she had a perfect right to think, I couldn’t help saying,
I know exactly what you mean,
and
yes, I felt that way too.
Then we moved on to the failings of our former partners, the justification for our need to ditch them; and, gingerly stepping over the barrier, and coming to sit beside him on the bench, I told him about the time Dave broke off, while we were kissing, to scrawl “Portsmouth 2, Spurs 1” on the cover of a paperback on the bedside table. And instead of looking shocked or disgusted at the disclosure, Paul laughed, then told me about the time he saw Tina checking her hair in the mirror at a similarly intimate juncture. An hour later we’d talked ourselves to a standstill—at which point we looked up to discover that Tom and Q were passed out cold on the sofa, snoring slightly. And I swear to God, I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly Paul’s lips were on mine, and he was kissing me.

Dave’s kisses are brief and cold, a short match-opener before the real thing begins—hand moves down, underwear off, and the whole thing’s done in a few short minutes. With Paul, something else happened entirely, a sort of suspension of consciousness. I know we moved out of the sitting room into the hallway, just out of sight of my sister and Tom, and I have a strong mental picture of my banana-yellow top lying, cast off, on the floor. But when or how those things happened, I can’t really say. Time passed in a haze. I remember he told me (fingers wound in my hair) that I was beautiful, that he hadn’t thought about anyone else, about anything else, since the first moment we met. I remember I told him that he was quite im
possible, and I didn’t like him at all. But I didn’t stop kissing him.

Then suddenly Samuel squawked. We heard Q start off the sofa like a race horse at the sound of a gun.

The woman only sees her child, thank God. Paul and I, laughing foolishly in the darkness of the hallway, righted ourselves hastily, I locating and dragging on the battle-torn top, he fastening his shirt with (I flatter myself) still-shaking fingers while Q flurried about anxiously in Samuel’s basket. The two of us then assumed casual, we-were-just-fetching-this-new-bottle-of-scotch poses and sauntered into the room. When Samuel was calm, Q sighed thankfully, glanced at Tom (who was still sleeping), then over at Paul and—just perceptibly—above his head at the clock on the wall behind. He immediately took the point. “I’m so sorry, Q, I must be going now,” he said hastily, spotting his polished wallet on the floor, and sliding it into his pocket. “Say good-night to Tom for me, okay?” he added, looking down at my brother-in-law’s recumbent form. “And I’ll—um—call you,” he added to the air in the middle of the room as he walked out of the door.

Q turned to smile at me, wearily. “Sorry we fell asleep on you, love, and you must be tired yourself. I hope you didn’t mind keeping Paul entertained for us,” she said. I looked at her face closely, trying to see if she was being discreet, but there was nothing knowing in her expression at all.

“No problem, anything I can do to help you both out,” I said with an air of great virtuousness, as I padded off to the bathroom through the hall. “Really, anything at all.”

38

Q

W
e heard from a secretary in the office of Dr. Sykes (the gastric specialist) on Monday, offering us a cancellation spot for the next afternoon. “Thank God,” I said to Jeanie fervently as I put down the phone. “Maybe he can give us some answers, you know?”

My sister, who was radiant on Saturday morning, had turned inconceivably grumpy on Sunday. She groused about everything from the bread in the local bakery—too many cranberries, apparently—to the thinness of our toilet paper. ‘What is this stuff, tracing paper?” she said scathingly, appearing in the sitting room with one sheet suspended disdainfully between thumb and forefinger. “We got rid of this in Britain in the 1970s!” Tom, who had been getting increasingly irritated with her, said some things at this point that he later regretted. Or at least, I hope he did.

“I don’t know how much longer we can keep going. I wish I knew what was wrong with Samuel—if there
is
something wrong, that is,” I continued fervently. “I can’t tell you how much I hope this Dr. Sykes can help us. Maybe there’s some medicine that will help him, even a painkiller, who knows…”

Jeanie, dressed in my robe, was preoccupied and bleary-eyed. “Mmm,” she offered vaguely, clasping her coffee to her chest. She looked shattered, wrapped up in herself.

“I mean, I love Samuel,” I went on, sliding onto a seat beside her, “but sometimes I think my head is going to explode. All that crying is destroying my brain cells. And sometimes—” I dropped my voice anxiously—“sometimes I can’t help worrying that he isn’t developing
normally.
I have a book about child development, and it tells you what a child of his age should be doing. It talks about tracking, you see, which means—”

“Following an object with his eyes; I know.” Jeanie’s tone was irritable; she put her fingers tenderly to her forehead. “I didn’t sleep too well last night, Q. Things on my mind…”

I ignored this, since
I
was up half the night with a screaming child. “Actually, he’s not tracking well
at all,
Jeanie, to be honest. I’m quite worried. I’ve been trying with a red pencil the last few mornings, the way it tells you in a book, skimming it in front of his gaze, and his eyes only follow the object for
twelve,
not
eighteen
inches in an arc. I worry—”

“You got the ruler out, did you?” Jeanie’s voice was now frankly acerbic. “Twelve, not eighteen inches? Christ. You’d better sign the child up for special schooling straight away, Q.”

I stared at her. “There’s no need to be so catty,” I said, wondering what on earth had gotten into her. “Is there something wrong?”