“See him?” I repeated. A memory of that day in the yellow house came back to me. Standing in our parents’ old bedroom. I’d thought it was silly, almost a joke. But Joe had been waiting for our father. Maybe Joe had been waiting his entire life. I remembered what Caroline had told me about the night of the frat party, Joe’s disillusionment with baseball: Dad told him to stop playing.
“Usually it’s when I’m high,” Joe continued. “Really high. Or drunk. When my mind is . . . elsewhere. When it’s relaxed. It’s not a hallucination, it’s not. I’ve been trying to do it without the drugs. To relax enough, like meditation. So I can see him when he’s here.”
“You don’t see him,” I said.
“You’ll see him one day, Fiona. We all will. I told Renee too.”
“You don’t see Dad,” I repeated.
But Joe wasn’t listening to me. He was looking at the floor, appearing to examine the dirt-filled cracks of the linoleum.
“Joe?” I said.
He lifted his head. “What?”
“Should I be worried about you?”
Joe smiled. “Me? No. Don’t worry about me. I’m great. I’m always great.”
* * *
Joe caught a cab downtown to the police station. I took the subway to my office. That morning I edited a press release about the upcoming UN climate-change conference in Buenos Aires and posted some website copy. I ate lunch at the bagel place down the block. I walked back to the office and saw on the way a man without legs scooting himself along the sidewalk on a dolly, his hands black with the filth of the street. I remember these details exactly. Some days continue to exist year after year, decade after decade, as though they are happening inside you concurrent with the present. A persistent, simultaneous life. One that you consider and wish more than anything that you could change.
I returned to the office, and I picked up the phone. I called Sandrine. I said hello and how was your weekend? And then I began.
“Something happened today, and Joe wanted me to call you.”
“Oh,” said Sandrine. “What?”
I told her what Joe had told me: the bad numbers, the partying, the anger, the punch.
“Where’s Joe? Why isn’t he calling me?”
“He had to go to the police station. Kyle is pressing charges. Assault.”
Sandrine began to breathe shallowly into the phone.
“Sandrine, I’m sure it’ll all be okay,” I said. “They’re like brothers, remember?”
“Will Joe get his job back?”
“Job?” I asked, surprised. “I doubt it.”
“But why? What happened?”
I wanted to say it and I didn’t want to. I had never liked Sandrine. I didn’t like the way she appraised and quantified, looking over Joe’s suits, his apartment, the menu at every restaurant. After he proposed—on bended knee, a champagne picnic in Central Park—she’d asked to exchange the ring for diamond earrings, Joe had told me. More carats, he explained. Two instead of one. He’d ended up just buying her the earrings for her birthday later that month.
“There’s been a claim of sexual harassment,” I told Sandrine in a rush. “Against Joe. That’s what Kyle said.”
“What?” Her voice was now a whisper. “Who did he harass?”
I paused. “Sierra. His old secretary.”
“Sierra.” Sandrine breathed the name. “Of course. She’ so pretty. Have you met her? She’s very, very pretty.”
“But he says he didn’t do anything.” I inhaled, exhaled. “I mean, nothing serious. Not recently.”
For a moment there was complete silence from Sandrine. “Fiona, I know we’ve never been friends,” she said slowly. “I know you don’t like me. None of you do. I’m not good enough for your perfect brother, Joe. But what are you trying to tell me?”
The moment stretched forward, branching, lifting, dividing. There were many things I wanted to tell Sandrine: That it was true, she wasn’t good enough for my brother. That I didn’t like her or her friends or her cadaverous mother. That I wished Joe had chosen someone more like us, his sisters. And what did that say about his regard for us, that he had selected the exact kind of person whom each of us would despise equally, but for different reasons? Did he want to push us away?
Yet I said none of these things to Sandrine. I thought about the Joe I’d seen in the deli, the person he’d become at his Alden College fraternity and then at Morgan Capital. Sandrine seemed part of this. The unraveling of Joe Skinner, my brother who had loved Celeste, who had taught me to swim, who would play Battleship late into the night, ignoring his homework and all the phone calls, who could knock a ball straight out of the park as though it were as easy as breathing. What should I tell Sandrine? Was it worth the betrayal? In that moment I believed that it was.
“Something happened with Sierra,” I said. “Something more than a flirtation.”
Sandrine again went silent. I was telling her the truth, just as I did on the blog. I was speaking the truth about all those men, some of them honest, some of them unfaithful, some of them sweet and lovely, others calculating and mean, driven by a need to dominate, to make a woman, any woman, feel inferior. I was telling Sandrine the truth about Joe. I was telling her what she needed to know.
Sandrine said something more, but I can no longer recall what it was. We said our good-byes, the tones less pleasant now, the words crisp and fast. That was the last time I ever spoke to Sandrine Cahill.
* * *
What happened next was predictable, as sentimental tragedy often is. Sandrine left Joe. She began a relationship with Ace McAllister, moving from Joe’s apartment on the Upper East Side into Ace’s on the Upper West. Joe swore they had not been having an affair, and perhaps this was objectively true, but something must have passed between them. Perhaps Ace made the first move. Perhaps Sandrine. It didn’t matter.
“She wanted a certain life,” Joe told me. “It wasn’t really about me. I was incidental. Once I couldn’t give her that life, that was it.”
We were drinking gin and tonics at a noisy bar near his apartment. George W. Bush had won again, and Caroline had decided not to host Thanksgiving at her house, opting instead to visit Nathan’s sister in Vermont, and Renee was suddenly and miraculously in love with Jonathan Frank, an event that caused considerable heartburn for Noni, who now believed it inevitable that Renee would leave her transplant fellowship despite all the years she’d put into her training. Caroline had made Noni gun-shy about what her daughters might give up for a man.
That night with Joe, my stomach ached from my own sense of irreversible disruption. I sat unsteadily on the barstool, sipping my drink. I wasn’t worried about Joe. My worry was that he knew about my conversation with Sandrine. I waited for Joe to raise the topic and had already developed a defense—She would have found out eventually, she had a right to know—but he never did. He simply ordered another round of cocktails, and then I had to get home, and we said our good-byes on the sidewalk.
Kyle, in the end, dropped the assault charges. He was too busy, Joe said. He didn’t have time for the hassle of lawyers and police. And Sierra dropped the harassment claim, if indeed she’d had one in the first place. Perhaps it had been a pretense for Kyle, an easy way to relieve himself of the obligation of Joe Skinner, merely a fraternity brother, the two of them thrown together by chance so many years ago. Who could blame Kyle for not honoring that commitment? He wasn’t married to Joe. Kyle was running a business, and he couldn’t carry around deadweight forever. Joe had been lucky and charming, he looked the part, he talked the right kind of talk, but he was a man in need of something. What? Counseling, drug treatment, a less stressful job, a cheaper lifestyle, a better girlfriend, better friends, a more developed sense of self. Or maybe something entirely different, something that no one could name.