Everybody Has Everything (23 page)

As he slid his torso into a blue shirt, the crease along his elbow like a margin, he remembered a party a decade ago in a different bar in a different tower. Ana was a new associate, and James showed up wearing a concert T-shirt—Jesus Lizard—under a black blazer. He was lighter then. He walked fast and everywhere, never taking buses or taxis or driving, held to the ground only by army boots under his black jeans. It was only when he set foot in the bar, glanced around at the feet of the
guests, all high heels and dad shoes, buffed and barely worn, that he realized how badly he had misjudged. It was one of the first times his youth had been revealed to him as crass, rather than a badge of honor. In the cool, crisp spaces between people, placed in elegant groups of two and three, James recognized new worlds that required other currencies, worlds in which his father moved back and forth with ease. He thought of his father, standing outside James’s bedroom door, his diagonally striped, navy blue tie in a full Windsor, his overcoat on, glancing bewildered at the posters on the wall, the guitar amp humming. And James in his white underwear on the carpet, having fallen asleep, deeply stoned and sixteen.

Finn appeared, holding Moo.

“Where you go?” he asked.

James scooped him up, pulled him close on the bed, breathing in his limbs, his small pumping chest, the worn comfort of the blanket.

“We’re going to a party. There’s a babysitter coming. She’s really nice. You guys will play and you’ll go to sleep, and when you’re asleep, we’ll come home and kiss you on the cheek,” said James. Finn looked unconvinced.

“Ana!” called James. She appeared quickly, as though she had been lingering in the hall.

“We better get going. Ethel’s here,” she said.

“Ethel?” said James, incredulous, and then, to Finn: “The babysitter’s name is Ethel.”

“She’s from the Philippines.”

“Oh, God. This is someone’s nanny?” He spoke in a hushed voice.

“Elspeth, from work. I told you that,” said Ana. “She’s her night nanny.”

“Her night nanny? How many are there? Is there a dusk nanny? A dawn nanny? A midafternoon snack nanny?”

It was quite likely true that Ana did tell him about the evening, and he couldn’t remember or hadn’t found it worth noting. But now, suddenly, the thought of this Ethel alone with Finn—

“What do we know about her? Did you check her references?” Again, his career backed up on him: He recalled interviews with police officers, macho men of the law who appeared before him red-eyed and destroyed, choking out stories about child slavery rings; pedophiles masquerading as caregivers. All the experts he had sat across from, dumbly and humbled, and now all James could remember from those conversations was:
Don’t trust anyone
.

“I just told you. She lives with Elspeth and her family. She’s been here for almost two years. She has a whole family back there. It’s quite sad.”

James took Finn by the hand and walked toward the living room. Unexpectedly, Ethel turned out to be a boyish young woman with short hair. James wondered if the hair was a nod to her new modern life, if such a cut would fly back home.

Sensing a nervousness in her—she seemed to be shaking giggles out of her mouth like a swimmer shaking off water—James began to be James, spilling over with curiosity. Within a moment, she had a glass of juice in her hand, and Finn was sitting next to her playing with the clasp on her purse, and James had learned that she had two daughters in the Philippines, in a town he had never heard of. Still, he nodded with an insider’s understanding when she said the name: “Oh, yes, of course.” And Ana, putting on her coat in the hallway, heard her husband and recognized in his response the smallest lie.

At the door, waving good-bye, both Ana and James were flung backward into their childhoods, each separately watching a marching band of babysitters who had walked through their parents’ doors over the years: the gum chewer, the sour old woman, the preadolescent with the babysitter course card. For James, the doorways were always the same, and his parents’ assurances the same, and his excitement the same. For Ana, the memories arrived in an aureole of confusion. Everyone was faceless, and the doors led to apartments and houses she’d lived in for only months at a time, some of which she wouldn’t recognize if she walked by them today.

“We’ll see you soon, buddy,” said James, preening a little for Ethel. He crouched down to give Finn a hug.

Ana made rustling noises, noting that James had never called Finn “buddy” in his life. Finn laid out Ethel’s makeup kit on the coffee table. Ethel seemed unfazed.

“Good-bye,” said Ana, who bent down and delivered an awkward kiss atop Finn’s head. She felt a million eyeballs rolling over her as she did it.

They left him like that, lining up lipstick next to ChapStick next to hair clips. James wondered lightly if Finn lifted his head or felt any kind of sadness when they shut the door, if the boy’s unease in any way echoed his. He pictured Marcus’s ashes in the basement and felt a panicky certainty that Finn needed more comfort. For a moment, he thought of turning to Ana and saying: “This is insane. We have to go back.” And pushing through the door to scoop up the boy and bury his face in his honey hair, feel his small cat paw hands around his neck. Ana would send Ethel home and lock the door behind
her, keeping the three of them in and the cold October evening at bay.

He stopped walking.

“What is it?” asked Ana. She looked grave, as if anticipating exactly what he was thinking, but terrified to hear it said out loud.
He won’t be able to leave him
. His wife, bundled and moving slightly to keep warm, her hands in her leather gloves anxiously swinging by her side.

“Nothing,” he said. And then he lunged at her, grabbed her from the waist, and pulled her to his mouth, lips smashing.

“James …” She pulled away, ran her fingers through her hair.

“Let’s go in an alley and fuck.”

“Jesus.” He reached for her again, tried to get his hand through the buttons of her jacket, but there wasn’t enough space. “You’re going to rip it—” said Ana before he closed his mouth over hers.

“Let’s get ugly,” whispered James. “Let’s get a hotel room.” He was panting now, shaking her lightly from the shoulders.

Ana shoved him back. “James. It’s not like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It’s not—We’re not—”

“Animals?” he said, and he let out a dog bark. Ana stared, and James felt all the lust draining from him as his wife frantically pushed down her short hair, which was perfect, entirely in place.

He breathed in the cold and made a declaration: “Let’s take a cab.”

Rick Saliman had spent thousands of dollars bonding his teeth, and the result, when he pulled back the curtains of his lips, was
a strange erasure of the lines between each tooth. Something smooth and terrifying, resembling a long, narrow bar of soap, sat where his smile should have been.

“James,” he said, and gripped James’s hand like they were jumping from a cliff together. This was Rick’s greeting: No hello, just the loud singular recitation of a name. On the strength of this fantastic memory, and three decades of practice, the Saliman name was second on the firm’s stationery, right after the dead McGruger.

“Rick,” said James. Ana swooped over the waitress walking by and grabbed a glass of white for her, red for James.

“She does everything for you, is that right, James? Even gets the drinks these days?”

Ana tried a laugh.

“Only the things that matter,” said James, raising his glass for emphasis.

Ana left his side, beckoned by a wave from Elspeth, who stood with two young associates, new hires. One was blond, breakably thin beneath feathery hair; she reminded Ana of Woodstock, Snoopy’s friend. The other was tall, taller even than Ana, and less pretty, but she exuded a kind of burned anger—her eyes narrowed when offered Ana’s hand.

“Jeanine is working with Steven’s group,” said Elspeth, and the tall one gave an exhausted sigh topped by a world-weary smile that Ana found falsely mature for her face.

The blond one gazed sleepily around the room as if looking for a place to nap.

Ana felt a pull in the back of her head, an interior whisper—
How’s Finn? Who’s in my home?
—and she wondered if it was like that for Elspeth all day every day. Elspeth had three children, boy-girl twins and a boy. Ana discovered these children
only after the two women had worked together for a year, when she saw Elspeth waiting for a descending elevator at 9:30 in the morning, her eyes teary, her jacket on, clearly hovering in the shadows hoping to be unseen.

“What’s wrong?” asked Ana, who hadn’t sought out this moment but was merely on her way to the bathroom.

“My son’s sick,” said Elspeth.

Taken aback, Ana said: “You have a son?” And the son was sick, which could mean a cancer boy, bald in a ward somewhere being entertained by a volunteer clown. “Is he all right? What do you mean, sick?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine. But the school sent him home, and my day nanny is having day surgery, and of course Tom can’t take a morning off. I tried to get our night nanny to come early, but she sees our number on the phone and doesn’t pick up. And I have a conference call at eleven.…” And off she went in a gnarled, furious voice entirely unlike her calm, measured self at meetings. Ana stepped back a foot or so, overwhelmed by a mixture of sympathy and disgust. Ana had taken to heart the two tenets she learned early on from a female professor in law school: “Never cry, and always take credit.” And at the same time, Ana was mortified to recognize in front of her exactly the situation she, who considered herself a feminist (Right? Didn’t she? Had it really been that long?), knew was disastrous, unfair, a shivering, pathetic creature of inequality flushed out into the light.

She put her hand on Elspeth’s arm and offered a Kleenex from her pocket. She rode down in the elevator with her and put her in a cab. The look of sheer gratitude on Elspeth’s face when she glanced back through the glass filled Ana with self-loathing. Why was there so little altruism in her? She thought
about those workplace surveys that get published in national magazines and newspapers once or twice a year:
Is this a good place for women to work?
In truth, the firm was not, but Ana liked the idea of working in a place that was and decided this was a moment in which to pretend otherwise.

Since that day, Elspeth had confided in Ana from time to time. Shutting Ana’s door behind her, she gingerly showed her photographs of the kids. Ana nodded and murmured, and Elspeth relaxed into it eventually, growing more familiar, bitching about this and that family matter, presenting Ana with a picture of a life that was torturous in many ways, all drop-offs and pickups and nanny extortions and infected mosquito bites and exorbitant hockey fees. But sometimes, once in a while, great pride over somebody’s triumph at school. A picture painted. A report of a surprise cuddle from the eldest late one night.

One time, she forwarded Ana a family photo from a weekend vacation to an amusement park. The kids tumbling off Elspeth’s lap in front of a fiendish cartoon mascot, and Tom, Elspeth’s husband, at the edge of the picture with half his body sliced away. This was the image Ana saw in her mind’s eye whenever Elspeth spoke of her family, whom Ana had never actually met.

No one else at work spoke of Elspeth’s outside life. She was sober and efficient, stayed until nine or ten at least two nights a week, took the bare minimum holidays, and moved up fast. And Ana would be next, everyone said, the next woman to make partner. Soon.

Ana heard the low laughing of the men growing more boisterous; drink three had been drunk, the volume was increasing. She grabbed a second glass of wine from the tray, dropping
down her empty glass and taking a long, deep sip. Ana looked across at James, nodding as Rick gesticulated. These parties were one of the few places in the world where Ana saw James being deferential. She took this for love.

Ana recalled that Rick’s desk contained a photograph of two children, sunburned on a boat, but he hadn’t spoken of them in years, or not to Ana. Perhaps only Elspeth dared confide in the hollow crone. She thought of the word “childless,” spreading like a fungus across her, infecting everyone:
She is less a child, so don’t dangle yours in front of her or she might snatch it away
.

Ana was overcome with the sensation that she needed to speak. “Where are your kids tonight?” she asked Elspeth. The young women glanced about, surprised.

“Tom—my husband,” said Elspeth, for the benefit of the juniors. “He has them, of course. He would never come to one of these things.”

“One of your nannies is at my house,” said Ana, finishing her second glass of wine, feeling it rise to the top of her head.

Elspeth smiled. “That’s right. How strange.”

The blond one inquired politely of Ana: “How many children do you have?”

“Oh, none. I just borrowed one from a sick friend.” The three women shifted. Elspeth tried to intervene.

“Ana’s a godmother to a little boy whose mother is in the hospital. He’s staying with her.”

“Godmother? Oh, Elspeth. That makes it sound so profound. Fabulous. Can I start using that phrase?”

Ana knew that this bitchy streak was awakened only with alcohol, yet she replaced her empty wineglass with a full one as the young waitress walked by. She took another sip.

The blond one took a swallow of her drink, as if steeling herself for what she was dying to ask.

“So it’s possible, then, to have children and work here? I never hear anyone talk about that. The statistics about women lawyers …” Ana noticed a huge ring on her finger, an eyeball-sized diamond.
She won’t be working in a year
, thought Ana.

“Of course it’s possible. You don’t have to sacrifice every feminine experience to be successful,” said Elspeth in a hectoring voice. Ana dwelled on the word “feminine,” picturing her childless self mustachioed, wearing a hard hat. “I’m surprised someone from your generation would subscribe to such a retrograde notion.”

The blond woman colored pink.