Why did every stupid successful New York woman brood and squawk with the need for a baby, as if that would fulfill her? Why was a baby the final accessory, the thing you needed to go with the big apartment and big career and shiny gift books of your chicks, which apparently sold at Urban Outfitters for $17.99? I didn’t want a baby. Not even an inch of me. I wanted Ian. I wanted a handsome artistic man to be hopelessly devoted to me and listen to me narrate every moment of my every day before making sweet and hot and mildly kinky love to me. For this, I was willing to skip the big ego trip of a mini me.
Now I rifled through Alyssa’s dresses before flopping down on the sofa to eat some of her yogurt. It was thick, tangy, delightfully sour; I let it dissolve on my tongue while I lay propped up on the midcentury couch, then got up and paced the room once more. The chicks! I couldn’t stop looking at the chicks.
Suddenly I thought I’d go to the Met. See some real art. In the past months I’d spent hours and hours on the Upper East Side without ever gracing its doorway, trudging up and down Park and Lex, always thinking I’d fit in a trip soon, but never quite making it. But now I was free. True, I had to get to Albemarle Road before Lacie got home from work, but I had hours and hours before that.
* * *
—
From the wide gray benches surrounding the Temple of Dendur, I watched school kids in uniforms of pressed slacks and navy sweaters spread like liquid through the temple, squealing at the hieroglyphics. They bunched at the entrance, thrilling at its etched codes, but trepidatious of the depths. They had crayons and worksheets to fill out; eventually, their teacher, a mild-looking man in his own navy sweater, got them to sit cross-legged before the ancient rock and draw. A woman in a long calico skirt hovered off to the left, talking to herself, as if reading the flat gesticulating figures.
Most of us were sitting here, in this luminous gray room, lit by glass windows that curved into the ceiling and overlooked the park. Listening to echoing footsteps, and the shouts of kids bouncing off glass and old rock, I waited for magic, for my soul to re-form around beauty. I wanted art to be a private well of meaning, something so incredible that my soul would ignite—for what else are these public institutions for?—but I just kept talking to Lacie in my head.
I composed missives, I explained myself, I saw her slowly nodding and saying she understood. I promised her that what had happened would never happen again. Some fierce knot in me protested: I wanted it to happen again.
A few people walked the length of the hall, studying the grainy black-and-white reproductions of the temple in Egypt, and I joined them. The photographs told the story of how in Egypt there was a canal planned, a valley to be flooded, a holy site in its path. How a Rockefeller stepped in, paid for the temple to be dismantled and shipped, block by block, to this northern island.
Funny how stealing and salvaging can look the same, I thought. How you can call one by the other’s name.
When I looked at my phone again, it was already five thirty. I had spaced, and now Lacie would be home in an hour.
It was still in those halcyon early days of my time in New York, when I was actually surprised that the 4/5/6 was delayed, surprised and then annoyed—yes, in those days I still managed indignation at the MTA. The time clocks predicted trains in 17, 21, 27 minutes, but minutes passed and the numbers did not drop.
When a train finally did arrive it was as if a giant malicious alien had packed a silver tube with a hive of buzzing humans. The windows were steamed. Limbs, suit jackets, babies were pressed up against the glass. The door slid open, and the hostile riders looked out at the pack on the platform with murder eyes. One younger woman wielding a yoga mat stumbled out. Several nannies barreled on. The rest of us were left with our hair fluttering softly in the tailwind of a tardy, unrepentant 4 train.
All this is to say that by the time I transferred at Union Square—the transfer not an indescribable horror like a genocide but an indescribable horror nonetheless—and another cheery silver can had chugged over the Manhattan Bridge and stalled in the tunnel right before DeKalb, I was very late. Saving some train disaster on Lacie’s part, she had definitely beat me home.
* * *
—
They must have heard me turning the lock, for when I came into the living room Lacie was already standing, and Anna and Dylan were furiously studying their plates. On the table, amid goblets of wine and platters of root vegetables, tiny tea lights flickered.
“Oh my God.” I stopped mid-room. “It’s Shabbat. I forgot.”
“Shoes,” said Lacie.
Mechanically I returned to the foyer. Of course these nights would go on without me. Lacie had already moved on, apparently excised Sophie, and cooked up a storm without my help. God, it was hard to untie my shoes. The laces kept knotting up.
When I returned, Dylan was thoughtfully sawing at a hunk of rutabaga, and Anna was breaking off a piece of bread with the kind of concentration usually reserved for heart surgery. Lacie had her arms crossed.
“I’m not, like, here,” I explained. “I’m just going to get some things real quick.”
Spine prickling, I swiveled and strode away, imagining their glances meeting over the lamb, Anna mouthing cunt, Dylan patting Lacie’s hand.
In my room, I sensed it right away. Nothing was out of place, but there was some subtle rearrangement, the smoke trail of her presence. She had snooped.
From the back of my closet I pulled the old green duffel that had been my home, a long floppy, shapeless tube in which I would yet again stuff the small props of my thin life. When I opened my drawers, my clothing looked obscene, like the discarded skin of corpses. Cast-offs from a dead girl, disgustingly suggestive of armpits, breasts, and legs.
I sat back on my heels and looked around the room. What had she moved? What had she taken? Weariness washed over me. Did it matter? This was my old life. My one poster I would leave. The succulent I had bought in a burst of optimism, the copy of As a Friend I had found in a used bookshop, the few other paperbacks bought these past months. My old novel drafts. Let her read them. Recycle them. We were done.
The women were murmuring, but when I darkened the doorway—never has the phrase felt more apt; I was practically a killer with a knife—they fell silent.
“Um, okay.” I lifted up a wobbly hand. “I think that’s it. Have a good dinner.”
For about five seconds I really thought it was going to be that easy. I dropped my duffel to pull on my shoes. There was silence from the table, but not super hostile silence. Maybe they’d just lapse into conversation when I left. Hurl a few insults, then move on to discussing holiday plans.
Then, just as I was pulling on my coat, Lacie slipped across the room, quick and quiet as her cat. “One thing.” Her breath was hot with garlic. “I need the rent.”