The Exiles (10 page)

Emily shrank back from the clutter. If people were buying this crap, that meant that not everyone here was down-and-out. Some of them still had cash to burn. Emily no longer believed that someday she’d be one of those people herself. As a child in Cambridge, Emily had fantasized about growing up and owning
a town house in Boston. In her dreams, the urban castle featured a game room, a screening room for movies, and a minifridge full of Grape Crush. She’d since given up that dream (she didn’t
want it all
anymore, she merely wanted enough to remain consistently in the black) along with so many others. What she got, in return, was Nate.

He’d come as a surprise. Five years ago, she hadn’t expected to have any man in her life at all, ever. She was in her early thirties back then and still deeply single and had assumed, with resignation, that a life partner wasn’t in her cards. She ultimately convinced herself that she didn’t need love, that a career in advertising, combined with expensive cocktails and girlfriends who could write prescriptions, would be enough. She grew numbly and nimbly accustomed to living solo, and fooled herself into believing she’d earn the urban castle on her own. Then Nate crawled into her cab and all of that changed. She discovered that being with Nate was like a sort of solitude. Not loneliness, at all, but like being completely within herself, at peace. This was love, she understood. This was love, the essential thing she had, during her decades of unfortunate dating, told herself she’d be happy without.

She’d cheated on Nate once, only one time with one person. It was right after she discovered she was pregnant with Trevor, almost three years into her relationship with Nate, when all of the facts of their lives were finally on the table. It felt, then, as if they knew each other inside and out. The finality scared her. Her life had changed at breakneck speed—what happened to the convincing arguments she’d spent so long crafting, her protofeminist rationalizations that life was better solo? What happened to that once-coveted town house with the elaborate screening room and wood-burning fireplaces? What happened to her larger-than-life dreams? She’d turned into a potato chip
marketer, pregnant by the only pauper on Wall Street. With her anxiety in full swing, she’d called Henry Vartan, whom she used to sleep with frequently when she was single. She hadn’t seen him since she met Nate, and calling him out of the blue after three years was like a dare to herself. She wasn’t even sure that he still had the same phone number. He did. He answered on the first ring and invited Emily to come over. She was two months pregnant and not showing yet and took a cab to his apartment, where she trembled on the elevator ride up and then let him take her clothes off while she ran her hands down his taut, stocky body, nothing like Nate’s. Afterward she felt completely alone, the lonely kind of alone. Sitting naked on the edge of Henry’s bed, in his glass-walled apartment in the Financial District, watching as he pulled his boxers back up: This empty-hearted moment was the image that came to Emily’s mind now each time she thought about being impoverished. That was her worst-case scenario, and she’d survived it. On the rare occasion that this image didn’t stabilize her equilibrium (at least she wasn’t sleeping with Henry Vartan!) she took an Inderal.

Did she feel guilty about Henry? She should, she knew that she should, but she was the one who’d suffered from the dalliance, and it had only made her want Nate more. She understood immediately that she shouldn’t have risked Nate for one night with a nobody from her past. Who cared if Nate was financially undesirable, as economically impaired as she was? After the slip (a slip that only she and Henry and the nascent Trevor-fetus knew about), Emily never questioned her love for Nate again, not until recently. Not until, over this last month, he’d begun pulling away from her. It was just stress, she continued to tell herself. The other new mothers with whom Emily spent time—at the baby gym or music class, women with whom Emily had little in common except for the age of their children—frequently
made jokes about their Wall Street husbands, men they rarely saw. “Either they’re working really hard or they’re all having affairs!” the women would say. They laughed hard about this, the assumption being that becoming fathers had rendered their men impotent.

Nate was neither impotent nor deceitful. He was a straightforward man, honest when it counted. If his distance wasn’t due to stress, Emily worried that its roots were in the way his and her lives had diverged. He went to work every day and interacted with the outside intellectual world—a riveting proposition—while she stayed home, turned her brain off, and mixed baby formula. She cherished Trevor, she did, but as she spent her entire days with him at her side, she felt her interior life starting to wither and die, even more than it had during her career at the ad agency. As she sat across from Nate at dinner, she found that she had little to say that didn’t involve rehashing the baby’s bowel movements and eating habits, details that evoked slight smiles from Nate and polite silences. In her head she’d become a mother from the 1970s and began to fear she was proof that women had made no progress in the decades since. She wanted to rejoin Nate in his full life. She wanted to assert herself as an equal partner again. It’s what she craved: her own intellectual existence outside the house. It was the one thing Emily’s mother had that Emily herself, as an adult, coveted.

What would Emily’s outside life be? She had no interest in returning to the soulless world of advertising and had spent countless hours since Trevor’s birth coming up with new, down-home business schemes (artisanal cheese-making, nicotine-infused water, audio philosophy), dozens of ideas, looking for the one single brainstorm that would satisfy her intellect and, she hoped, bring in a paycheck, too. New mothers complained
about how hard they worked! Yes, Emily was relentlessly tired during those first months with Trevor, when the days and nights bled together, but for so long she’d been subjected to the endless and arbitrary whims of irrational, ego-charged bosses. To suddenly find herself at the mercy of no one but a baby whose impetuous outbursts were age-appropriate? On most days this was a luxury. While Trevor was awake, he was an adorable time-suck, but the minute he went to sleep, or acquiesced to a half hour of
Baby Beethoven,
during those moments of respite Emily’s beta-blockers allowed her to concentrate and devise and plan.

All of her ideas turned out to be insurmountably flawed. Nicotine water was an FDA-approval nightmare. Cheese-making happened to be more science than art—the humidity and temperature had to be monitored to the fraction of a degree. A philosophy audio library was already in the works out in L.A. She gave up on all of these as tenable plans. On a whim one night in bed, though, tired and limp after she and Nate had managed to find the time and desire to make love, she told him about her now-ditched idea to open her own dairy operation—something in soft goat cheeses, maybe, given that the soft cheeses were so much more forgiving than the hard varieties. When spoken aloud, she began to consider the scheme again. It sounded romantic and viable and appealingly hands-on. Still, she laughed as she described it. She let loose a self-deprecating guffaw, which apparently gave Nate the idea that her whole thing had been nothing but folly, and he laughed, too.

“Hilarious,” he’d said. “You could also churn butter. We’d buy one of those colonial bonnets for you to wear. I could develop a bonnet fetish like
that.
” He called her Bessie for the next two days. The name stung. Emily had stopped breast-feeding only a
month earlier and was finally beginning to feel less like a cow and more like a woman again. She thought of her mother, a feminist, yes, but one who’d always loved this kind of joke. It was no surprise that Emily’s mother and Nate had taken to each other so easily.

Since then, Emily hadn’t told Nate about any of her ideas. They hadn’t, honestly, had much time to talk. A few weeks ago, while feeling especially disconnected, for the second night in a row she’d woken up just after midnight to find that Nate wasn’t in bed with her. She could hear him on the other side of the bedroom door, in the living room. She tried to slip back into sleep, but the irregular tap of his fingers on their computer keyboard kept jarring her awake. He had a tendency to pound on the keys with the kind of force most people reserved for slamming the return-change buttons on vending machines. After a few minutes, she called out to him.

“Nate,” she said in a whisper loud enough, she hoped, to be heard in the living room.

“Shh,” he said, walking quickly back to the bed. “You’ll wake Trev.”

“Your typing is going to do that anyway. Can’t you sleep?”

“I’m not tired. It’s okay.” It was pitch-black in their apartment except for the faint blue glow from the computer screen. Their windows looked out over an unlit courtyard, and after the sun went down, unless the moon was full and bright, the only light that came in was from the lamps of the strangers who lived in the apartments across the way. At this hour, none of those neighbors were still awake. The computer beeped from the living room, a generic alert sound. “I was just surfing,” Nate said. He rubbed his eyes, pressing his palms firmly against them.

“Find anything good?” she asked.

After a pause, he said, “I thought it might be cool if I could locate the audio from the old baseball games I listened to when I was a kid, in Cleveland. I thought it might be fun to share those with Trevor someday.”

“I guess.”

“They must have recorded the games. You’d think the radio station would have an archive and put it online, but I can’t find it. All that Internet bandwidth, and you can never find what you need.”

“Unless you’re looking for naked cheerleaders or driving directions,” Emily said, her voice groggy.

“Naked cheerleaders, that’s something I can share with Trevor someday.” Nate said. “I should probably give up. I’ll come back to sleep.”

“Don’t rush for me.” Emily genuinely meant that. She felt spoiled, having the whole bed to herself. She stretched out her limbs and took advantage of the wide expanse of flat, cool sheets.

Nate returned to the computer and Emily lay awake thinking about Nate and his attachment to those baseball games. It was like a smack in the face, his constant pull toward nostalgia just as he and Emily were constructing their joint future. This time, though, he had a valid point. Those games had to be online somewhere.

Emily saw, then, how off-the-mark her life had become. Had she had any foresight, she’d have left the ad agency and used her experience to gain a foothold in the growing tech sector. Instead, she’d honed her skills in the old-economy model. By the time Trevor was grown, she’d be totally unemployable. And if she’d learned anything from watching so many tech start-ups flourish (and later die, as so many of them did) far beyond her reach, it was that the majority of these ventures were less about
the intellectual idea and more about knowing how to raise the cash. Cash was the cog at the center of everything, especially as the country’s brainpower was on the fast road to decay.

“We have eighty-five dollars to our name, and we’re not spending them in here,” Nate whispered into Emily’s ear. She still stood inside the tchotchke shop’s doorway; she hadn’t made it any farther into the hushed, dusty museum of a store. He lay his arm loosely around her shoulder and pointed to the nearby wall, a Newport wall. Newport was safe. It was another, newer world, separate (even now, in the era of cell phones and wireless) from whatever was transpiring to the south, from the misguided, old-fashioned existence she’d left behind. She understood how physical distance might become a form of comfort.

“That framed map of Easton Bay? Twenty-two hundred bucks. It dates back to 1823,” Nate said.

“And it doesn’t offer point-to-point driving directions? A scam.”

“A beautiful, antique, hand-painted scam,” Nate agreed.

“I need some fresh air,” Emily said. “You still have the cash?” Nate had taken charge of their money last night, after they finished counting it out on the bed.

“In my wallet.”

Nate pushed the stroller out of the store and Trevor, deep in the seat, moved his head from side to side, his wide eyes the size of half-dollars. Like his ears, the boy’s eyes were slightly too big for his face, giving him an unnaturally alert look whenever he was awake. Some of his alertness these days was real, though. There was an energy to the boy, simmering under his pale skin. He was on the verge of walking. Each time he pulled himself up on a coffee table or chair leg, he looked ready to let go and take off running.

“Hey.” Emily motioned down the dock, past a yacht insurance office with a yellow life preserver painted on its sign. “Let’s show Trevor the boats. He’s going to have a future on boats if we stay here.”

“I guess he will,” Nate said, as if the idea hadn’t yet occurred to him. “Did you bring sunscreen? I want to get his face covered.”

Emily rifled through her tote. The bag was littered with old credit card receipts and appointment reminder slips from the pediatrician’s office, the wayward pieces of paper mingling with her lipsticks and estranged pen caps and contraband that included the bottles of shampoo she’d stolen from the maid’s cart at the hotel. She reached deep into the main pocket, gripped the tube of children’s Coppertone, and pulled it out—along with two stray scraps that were stuck to the tube’s slick plastic. The first was a coupon, two dollars off a six-pack of flavored Italian seltzer. The second paper was, unbelievably, a crumpled twenty-dollar bill.

“Nate?” She held it out away from her body as if it were otherworldly and dangerous. With the twenty added in, their cash would total more than $100. “Nate…” she tried again, but he was already halfway down the dock, unbuckling Trevor from the Bugaboo and directing the boy’s attention to the water. He couldn’t hear her. She stuffed the bill into her back pocket and strode quickly down the wooden walkway. The stiff creases of the crumpled twenty pressed against her skin through her pants, sharp yet light, like the feeling in her head, the guilt of pocketing the extra cash and the relief of now having an innocent secret, her own money, like an escape hatch. One forgotten bill that was hers to save or spend.