Best Intentions (2 page)

“You'll see her at Jack's dinner tomorrow night,” I remind him.

“How could I forget? The big birthday celebration.”

“Who's Jack?” Claire asks.

“Someone we went to college with.”

“How come I've never met him?” Any pre-child life is suspect and murky by default; neither of the girls truly believe in its existence.

“He lives in Boston.”

“You're going to Boston?” Phoebe asks, perplexed.

“No. He has a job interview in New York and asked us all out to dinner,” I explain. “We haven't seen each other in years.”

Jack Handel was Deirdre's college boyfriend, a scholarship kid from northern California. From the start, he and I shared a special empathy; we were both outsiders on that hilly, privileged campus, though our reactions were quite different. If I wanted—a little too desperately—to fit in, Jack wore his interloper status defiantly. It's not that he had a chip on his shoulder, but his sense of direction set him apart; he was sharper, faster, more strategic, while the rest of us were still a little soft, unformed, blurry around the edges. I still remember one Christmas vacation, when the four of us met up in the city almost every night. For Deirdre and Sam, who both grew up here, Manhattan was already a checkerboard of memories: There was Trader Vic's at the Plaza, where Deirdre swore they let her drink at sixteen—we got plastered on Scorpions, with their sickeningly
sweet floating gardenias and two-foot-long straws, Deirdre and I in our thrift-shop fifties cocktail dresses wobbling out into the cold night; we went to Sam's favorite jazz club downtown and were scolded for talking during the sets; we ended up at three a.m. at Brasserie, where Deirdre's father had a running tab and we could charge enormous breakfasts, though I asked repeatedly to the point of annoyance if she was sure it was okay. I was barely able to afford a diner on my own and couldn't imagine anyone being that cavalier about money. And there were the places that they avoided. Deirdre wouldn't go to Serendipity because it was where her father used to take her to drown her parents' divorce in Frozen Hot Chocolates; she centered her life downtown as much as possible. Sam had written off all of Park Avenue on principle. The city was a game of Twister to them, and if I would never catch up I would also never risk falling into one of their valleys. That winter break, though, Jack and I were along for the ride, giddy, exuberant, lucky to be chosen. For that brief moment, opportunity, the future itself, felt boundless.

We thought it would always be that way.

Sam turns another page of his newspaper. “Who is Jack interviewing with?”

“He wouldn't tell me. He signed a confidentiality agreement.”

“I can't see him moving to New York.”

“Why not?”

“It's easier to be a big deal in Boston. Is Alice coming?”

“I don't think so. He'll only be here overnight. His actual birthday is next weekend, so I guess they'll do their own thing up there.”

Jack is the first among us to hit forty. Deirdre's birthday is in seven weeks, Sam has six more months, I have eight.

“You'd think Deirdre would be the last person he'd want to spend his birthday with.”

“It was all so long ago,” I remind him.

Claire listens intently. She worships Deirdre, scavenging for clues to a life so much more captivating than anything we could possibly offer.

Sam shrugs without looking up and runs his hands lazily down
his flat stomach—he still runs three miles most mornings, though his knees have lately begun creaking with alarming regularity. At thirty-nine he considers this a decidedly premature development that he plans on ignoring for as long as possible. Like most men he is determined to deny the physical signs of aging to the same degree that women obsess about them. “By the way, I may be late tonight.”

“Late as in don't hold dinner?” For years, Sam and I ate after the girls, but reading numerous dire magazine articles has convinced me they will be hooked on heroin by the age of fourteen if we don't change our evil ways. Lately I've been making a concerted, if erratic, effort for all of us to eat approximately the same thing at approximately the same time. There have been spurts of upstart rebellions from various involved parties ever since.

“I'm not sure. I'll call you as soon as I know. I'm hoping to meet with someone about the Wells profile. I'm waiting to hear back from him.”

I study Sam, weighing my options. It would never occur to me that being late on the first night of school is even a choice. Still, I don't want to fight this morning. And I know how much he needs this profile.

Sam has recently been assigned to write a cover story on Eliot Wells, the founder of Leximark. An early innovator in Web functionality, he is supposedly about to introduce some breakthrough cross-platform first-step artificial intelligence something or other—I don't quite get it, though I pretend I do rather than suffer through one more excruciating explanation. All I know is that the most controversial thing that has been written about Wells in recent years, aside from allusions to his cataclysmic temper, is that he has a proclivity to skip showers—though it seems to me this is said about any number of Internet gurus, as if a lack of personal hygiene is in and of itself a sign of genius. Sam is hoping to uncover something grittier and has convinced himself—though not, as yet, his editor, Simon—that there is dirt lurking in Wells's background. Of course, the great inverse law of journalism is that the further you bring someone down, the higher you raise your own profile.

“All right, let me know.” I get up to dress.

“Lisa?”

I turn partially around. “Yes?”

“There's something I want to talk to you about.” His face, still hatch-marked with indentations from his pillow, is earnest, almost nervous.

I look at him quizzically.

He glances over at the girls. “Later. Tonight.”

“All right.”

As I pass, he reaches over and grazes my forearm with his fingertips.

I will feel it there for the rest of the day, he can still do that to me.

I leave the three of them in the kitchen and go to shower, letting the hot water pour down my face, thinking of the day ahead, what to wear, my schedule at work, wondering, too, what Sam might want to talk to me about and why he thinks he needs to reserve my time. I mean, where else would I be?

When I get out I notice that his cell phone, charging on the night table, is flashing with a message.

I wrap the towel tighter about my chest, shake out my shoulder-length hair, the thick, dark waves not yet expanding from the heat into the total unruliness that had me wearing a ponytail most of the summer. I open the top drawer of my dresser, consider three different versions of a white V-neck top that to the naked eye look identical but which are in fact each completely necessary for varying levels of bloat. I can hear Sam and the girls clearing their plates. I glance at the door, still closed.

I don't know why I pick up the phone. I have never done anything like this before. It would be easy to say it is intuition, but we always claim that in retrospect.

With it still charging, I push “voice mail” and listen to his message.

It is a woman's voice, she does not leave a name, she does not have to, judging by the intimacy lacing through her tone. “I'm going
to be a little late tonight,” she says, the words slightly muffled by the whoosh of traffic in the background. “Can we make it six thirty? Same place.”

I press the button to save the message as new and sit down on the edge of the bed, a cool sweat beading along the back of my neck and trickling slowly down my spine.

T
wenty minutes later, I shepherd the girls out the front door and am surprised, despite the radio, by the warm liquidity of the air. It is the kind of day that can please or hurt or both, bringing an unexpected last chance to get whatever it is you'd had such hopes for at the beginning of the summer, a day for impulse purchases, risky e-mail. Calls to restless married men.

“Can we make it six thirty?”

I shake my head. Surely, there are any number of explanations.

“Same place,” she said. “Same place.”

Perhaps I misheard Sam, perhaps he said the source he was meeting with about the Wells piece was a woman. But…

“Mo-om.”

I am snapped back by Claire's insistent voice.

“What?”

“Can I go to Coach with Lily this afternoon and buy sunglasses? They have these really cute ones with butterflies.”

“It's the first day of school.”

“Exactly. How much homework could we have?”

“Those sunglasses cost one hundred fifty dollars. No.”

Claire pauses, considering this. “How about Dolce then?”

I stare at her as if she has gone insane. “No.” In her defense, Claire is not being sarcastic or even knowingly demanding but is
merely spewing brand names she's heard from friends with no real conception of the cost. As we wait for the Madison Avenue bus, surely the slowest on the East Side, I pull out my MetroCard and try to flatten a dent in it, making a mental note to talk to Sam about reconsidering the public school options.

Claire boards the bus without another word, inserts her iPod's jewel-encrusted earbuds and stares out the window, safely ensconced within her bubble of sound. Every now and then she offers up a brief semi-apologetic smile; at thirteen she is still slightly uncomfortable in the nascent world of rebellion and wavers dizzyingly between affection and affectation. I smile back across the distance and debate with Phoebe the merits of various after-school clubs, from knitting to computer graphics.

The Weston School, determined to live down its reputation as a bastion of old WASP wealth, takes a newly discovered if self-conscious pride in fostering an artistic sensibility unusual for a girls' academy. It is one of the only single-sex schools that no longer requires a uniform, though it took a three-year study and much smoothing of alumni feathers to make such a bold move; it contributes to a plethora of community projects and offers up an impressive array of pseudoexperimental cultural performances at weekly assemblies—all undeniably good and important steps. Still, we are one of the few downtown families. “They consider diversity anyone who lives below Fifty-seventh Street,” Sam observed. A product of private schools himself, he never truly considered an alternative, despite the enormous pressure the tuition is putting on us. He once admitted that he had never actually met anyone who went to public school until he got to college. I have in the past argued for applying to the gifted public-school programs, that single word,
gifted,
bestowing a quasi-acceptable excuse for free education in our admittedly insular world, but I didn't put up too strong a fight. Along with the tiny class size, I had—and sometimes still do—the hope that a girls' school would instill in our daughters a confidence about assuming their rightful place in the world, a lack of apology about the space they take up that would suit them well in later life. It was not simply a matter of wanting the best education
for our daughters, academic or psychological, though. Sending the girls to Weston also suited the image I had of life here, so far removed from how I grew up that it still feels unreal at times. I'm not particularly proud of this, but there it is.

As soon as we get off the bus both girls peel away from me so fast it leaves my head spinning and purposefully lose themselves in the sea of children heading to the various private schools in the neighborhood, a gilded ghetto of Spence girls in pleated skirts rolled up to their crotches, St. Bernard's boys in blazers, their shaggy hair the only thing distinguishing them from little stockbroker Mini-Me's, the ramshackle Dalton kids. I trail after them, catching glimpses of the tops of their heads until they arrive in front of Weston's large brick building and join their friends clustered outside the heavy blue double doors.

The street is clogged with huge shiny black SUVs driven the five or six blocks from home by mothers who wave thin, tanned arms at each other or uniformed drivers discreetly opening the back doors to emit their munchkin passengers. When they are older, many of the children will request that the drivers stop a block or two away so they can appear to have walked, which serves only to move the domino lineup of cars to a different side street, fooling no one. To the left, half-a-dozen nannies in baggy jeans and faded print tops stand in a tight little group, reconnecting after the summer break. Now and then they glance over at a semicircle of mothers a few feet away, Starbucks in hand, their jeans tighter, their tops less worn. They all smile reassurances of goodwill that they hope will hide a nagging mutual suspicion and go back to their own conversations. Because it is the first day, more fathers than usual are present, their faces glowing with self-congratulatory bonhomie above their well-cut suits, knowing that they can use their attendance as evidence of their involved parenting if the need arises at a later date.

“Lisa.”

I turn to see Georgia Hartman calling to me. The lead mother of Phoebe's class just as she was surely the lead girl at her Connecticut boarding school, Georgia stands in the epicenter of a knot of women,
looking expensively dewy without a stitch of makeup, her perfectly streaked hair pulled back into a ponytail. She has three girls at Weston, which, I figure, comes to roughly $96,360 a year in tuition. Of course, I am also quite aware that Georgia does not, like me, have a running-cost calculator in her head.

“It's so good to see you,” she exclaims, with an enthusiasm out of proportion to our actual relationship. She is one of those women who treats everyone with an equal degree of intimacy, a habit quite possibly meant to put others at ease but which carries an unmistakable whiff of noblesse oblige. Then again, I may be overly sensitive on this score. Just the idea of her makes me feel hopelessly clumsy. Terrified that I will say or do something irrevocably gauche, I tend to become weirdly stilted around her, which only makes matters worse. “How was your summer? Did you go someplace fabulous?” she asks.

Fabulous is a relative term, but under any definition I am pretty certain that our vacation wouldn't qualify. Aside from a few long weekends at Sam's brother, Henry's, house in the Hamptons with his new wife, Abbie, a former ballet dancer who, I suspect, remains a borderline anorexic, our main sojourn was five days at a resort in Puerto Rico. We had sold it to the children as a good idea because it would be less crowded (read: cheaper), but it had proven to be almost painfully hot and, as it was close to the rain forest, riddled with mosquitoes. Claire counted eighteen bites the first day, though the resort record was apparently held by a woman we met on the boat ride to the beach who claimed a whopping ninety-two due to a severe allergy to the only repellent the hotel stocked. Phoebe got dehydrated on our second day and, lying in bed, her head spinning, looked up plaintively at me and asked, “What's happening? Am I going to die?” All in all, the glories of the Caribbean off-season are highly overrated.

I quickly dispatch with the trip, leaving out the infestation and Phoebe's existential crisis. “How about you?” I ask, anxious to change the focus. Georgia and her husband famously take their entire brood to a different country every vacation, averaging three a
year. They have already been to India, Russia, France, Kenya, the lesser-known Greek islands and Istanbul. “There's no education like it,” she assured me last year, as they prepared for spring break in Beijing and Shanghai. A Chinese tutor came three days a week to teach them all rudimentary Mandarin. “Don't you agree?” Of course I did, though that wasn't quite the point. Once, I made the mistake of confiding to another mother that I was worried about money and she told me to stop obsessing and just take my nanny and the kids to St. Barth. Seriously. “That's what I always do when I'm feeling anxious,” she confided. There were so many things wrong with that sentence all I could do was nod mutely.

The funny thing is, I don't even think they recognize that we inhabit different universes. Perhaps their imagination doesn't stretch that far—anyone in the Weston community must surely reside in the same stratosphere. Except, of course, for the scholarship girls from the outer boroughs who are treated with determinedly nonchalant yet outsized kindness. I suppose there is the chance that they are simply too polite to acknowledge it; like having a friend with cancer and being uncertain whether it is best to inquire about her health or pretend that everything is normal. I can't blame them, really. The veneer of Sam's and my life is in many ways indistinguishable from theirs. It is only when you dig a little deeper, look at the forensic details, that the variables become apparent. The fact is, we are in their world on a visa.

“We took the kids hiking in Scotland,” Georgia replies. She takes a sip of her latte. The tiniest speck of foam clings to her pale, thin upper lip and slowly evaporates. “The soggiest country I've ever been to but absolutely gorgeous.” I imagine her writing the benediction in a ledger, putting a check mark next to “Scotland” and running her finger down the page to see what country is next on the family to-do list.

There is some discussion of various trips before conversation moves on to the merits of a new Pilates studio that has recently stolen its competitor's best teachers. Everyone agrees that they want to give it a try but are worried that, if discovered, they will be banned
from the original studio and thus risk being homeless. Like breaking up with your hair stylist, it is an extremely dangerous proposition and a course of action has not yet been communally decided upon.

I accompanied Georgia just once to the original studio, where Birkin bags lined the splintery wooden cubbyholes like lunch boxes for Madison Avenue grown-ups. I had never felt so poor, fat and uncoordinated in my life. Luckily, my office is too far from either of the studios and I don't have the time midmorning to work out anyway. There's only so much insecurity I can handle in a single day.

I glance down at my watch. “I should go.” I leave them drinking their coffee and plotting their Pilates exit strategy.

There was a time when I prided myself on how busy I was, rising to vice president of the PR firm I work at. Sometimes I would count the number of phone calls and e-mails I got a day, tangible proof of my place in a world I had fantasized about since I was a teenager. It brought a certain thrill, a verification. At some point, though, the excitement began to wane. Now I can't help but look at the other, wealthier, nonworking mothers at Weston and envy them the gift of time, the afternoons spent with their children, most of all their freedom to choose. Of course, Sam and I are blessed by any standards other than those within Weston's immediate radius. Chances are I wouldn't opt for a different life even if I could. I have everything I've ever wanted, more. I know that. And I'm truly thankful.

It's just that I realize, particularly lately, that it might all collapse in an instant, throwing us into an endless financial free fall with no net beneath us. The prospect, growing ever more likely, terrifies me.

It's not Sam's fault. I knew precisely who he was, what he wanted, when I married him. And I admired him for it. When he first started out he quickly made a name for himself breaking some big investigative pieces. Magazines vied for his allegiance, he gained acclaim for doing something he valued, tearing back corporate curtains to expose the seaminess within, and his choices, while not vastly remunerative, were commendable. I have always loved the stubborn, un-swaying goodness in him.

I know, too, that I went along with the near-disastrous choice six
years ago that landed us in our current predicament. After his early flush of success there came for Sam the inevitable settling in as the excitement of having his name bandied about, his phone calls returned, became rote, and he was left with the ongoingness of simply showing up for work every day. As most of us are. When the initial Internet boomlet began to simmer in lofts throughout the city, he was happy to have a fresh panorama to report on. But as more and more of the people he started out with defected to various dot-coms, he grew restless and, worse, began to suspect that he was a chump for staying in print.

That was the mood he was in—vocally defensive, secretly open to persuasion—when we went out to dinner one night with Deirdre and the man she was dating at the time, Gerard Neiporent, the scion of a once-wealthy, now somewhat frayed, Canadian newspaper family. Gerard, fast-talking, crackling with the kind of energy you only later realize reeks of ADD or cocaine or both, had dreamed up the archetype for a new Web site that would provide instantly updated information to media professionals on the deals being made in television, books, movies, fashion and beauty. New York is a city jet-fueled by an insatiable need to be first; he assumed that companies would pay hundreds of dollars in subscription fees for the privilege. It was close enough to Sam's purview to be intriguing without making him feel like a total Internet whore. We invested most of our savings (worrisome, yes, but all that pre-IPO equity was so very tempting), and Sam left the magazine. Fourteen months later, the venture went bust. The model was flawed, no one was actually willing to pay for information after all. And we were broke. Even our 401(k)s were gone. I don't blame Sam, I don't even blame Gerard. I certainly don't blame Deirdre, who, by the way, did not put any of her own money in and split up with Gerard five months after that dinner. But there it is.

Fortunately, the magazine was happy to take Sam back. Even those who had resented the dot-com defectors were too polite for I-told-you-so's. They considered themselves lucky; they had not made a fortune but neither had they lost one and they were content
to pass their lack of nerve off as prescience. Sam settled back in and we embarked on our fretful course of economic catch-up. We debated pulling the girls out of Weston but in the end we didn't have the heart to take them from a place they loved and felt at home in. After being denied financial aid, we refinanced our apartment and cut back where we could. And then the stock market crashed.