The Ten-Year Nap (3 page)

In the late morning, after the world had settled itself down, the room was steamed and spiced behind its glass front, and the women stayed put for a long time. The owner and the waiters knew their habits and never bothered them or hustled them from the booth. “Do you find yourself shouting at Nadia like some kind of drill sergeant,” Amy asked, “even though you hate the sound of yourself, and you don’t really know why you’re doing it?”

Jill looked up, startled. “Yes, I do. I say to her, ‘Nadia, move it.’ Or, ‘Let’s get cracking.’ I’ve been given this entire, terrible vocabulary.”

“Me too. What have we
become
?”

“Whenever really young women meet either of us they probably look at our lives and think to themselves that they never, ever want to have kids,” said Jill. “We’re like a cautionary tale. Why would they possibly want to give up their fun, erotic life of freedom for this bossy, scheduled thing?”

“Ah, fuck them, those hypothetical really young women,” said Amy. “They know nothing about anything.” They both laughed a little and then were briefly silent as they poked at the eggs on their shining plates.

Out in the world with your child, you were only occasionally complimented or rewarded. Amy remembered how once, years earlier, before Mason was even in preschool, it had rained for days, the city saturated and desolate, all the unworking mothers and young children and nannies forced indoors. She and Mason had been penned into the apartment and the carpeted playroom on the top floor of their building. One morning, desperate, Amy said, “You know what, kiddo? I am taking us to a museum,” even though at the time he was the kind of boy who would need to be chased through galleries and clattered after down fire stairs.

But there was a Magritte show there that day, and she loved Magritte. To her surprise Mason had stood and actually stared without moving at
The Son of Man,
the painting of the man with the green apple in front of his face. Fleetingly, insanely, she worried that Mason was autistic. But no, he was just
interested,
so she had started lightly explaining about Surrealism, and Mason had listened closely and asked questions. An old woman who stood nearby came closer and said to Amy, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but overhear you and your little boy. He is wonderful, and you are wonderful with him. What pleasure you must take in each other.” Then, the bonus: “You both look so happy.”

It had made Amy’s day. No, it had made her life. She had carried these remarks around all these years like an amulet. And now, this morning, standing in her bedroom and calling to her son across the length of the apartment, she tried to remember them all over again, for such moments were rare. She had no office environment in which everyone saw everything and gave commentary and backslaps. Instead, she and Mason were always off on their own, and except for the stray remarks of strangers or friends or even, once in a while, the pediatrician, Dr. Andrea Wishstein—“Mason, you were excellent with that strep test. Lots of kids practically break my wrist when I try to get a swab”—mostly they had to take pleasure in the moments that no one else would ever witness.

Amy quietly appreciated her child, not during the precocious moments, for those seemed prepackaged for anecdote and narcissistic gratification, but during the small, almost unnoticeable ones. She observed the way he suddenly stopped near a homeless man on the street and whispered forcefully to Amy, “We have to give him money, Mom. We
have
to.”

So Amy, who had become more and more inured to the tableaus of poverty and mental illness that appeared on the glittering streets of the city and who over time had given less to the homeless until essentially she gave no handouts at all but instead grimly walked on and just wrote a modest check each year, was uneasily made more human by her son. He made her give out money, person to person, and so she gave it. She had no idea whether there was something awful and knee-jerk reflexive in the act of stopping, giving a small amount, and then walking on, but she couldn’t think it through; with her son’s coaxing, she and Mason just gave out dollar bills to the men who sat smoking on the grate outside the newsstand by the subway, and no one saw. Their life together, which had its distinct rhythms and drama, was generally invisible to everyone else; sometimes she thought they were like performers in a flea circus between shows, doing their microscopic tricks only for each other.

“MASON!” Amy called now from her bedroom. “ARE YOU UP? YOUR CLOTHES ARE FOLDED OVER YOUR DESK CHAIR! PUT THEM ON!” There was a pause, a serene silence. “ARE YOU PUTTING THEM ON?”

Mason was certainly not dressed yet. He was probably still inert, his skin roasted warm from sleep, the sheets and his torso and his long feet all the same elevated temperature. “MASON, YOU HAD BETTER GET GOING THIS MINUTE!” Amy cried.

While his mother called to him and his father sat in his office and talked to corporate clients in Pittsburgh and gathered up receipts from his travel expenses, Mason slept on in his faraway room. Amy slipped a shirt over her head and pulled on some pants and went to wake him up in person. She walked out of the dark bedroom and down the hallway where the walls, tipped in shadow, held photographs of herself and Leo dazed and pink on their honeymoon. Beside them were pictures of Mason at various ages, and then there was a photo of Amy’s parents and one of Leo’s parents. Finally there was a photo of brown-haired, sweet-faced, average-looking Amy and tall, blonde, patrician Jill on a spa weekend three years earlier at a place called Wildwood Spur, which had had a last-minute Internet special, and so Leo had said sure, sure, you both should definitely go.

She had been so excited to get away with Jill; it would be like college again, they said. They hadn’t known that soon enough Jill would move out of the city and that they would no longer see each other a few times a week. When Jill finally moved, Amy felt the loss in a sickened way that she didn’t like to express, because at age forty it was commonly held that as long as you had your family beside you, all would be fine. A family was like a little frontier cabin tossed through the world, caught up in its storms and ravages; but if you all stayed inside together, you would be safe, and contented.

At night at the spa that weekend, in their separate double beds, the two women had lain on their backs and told each other significant details from their lives of long ago that they had somehow neglected to reveal before. Jill told her that once, as a teenager, she had come upon her depressed mother at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, sobbing, and had simply turned and walked out of the room without asking what was wrong or ever referring to it again. Amy said, “You can’t blame yourself. It was probably always chemical, but they just didn’t have the information back then.”

“I know. I just have this image of her. I can’t get rid of it; it’s always going to be in my brain.”

“Maybe it should be,” said Amy. “It was who she was. At least, it was part of it.”

“You would have really liked my mother,” Jill said finally. “I know she was fragile, but she was such a nice person.” Then she wiped at her eyes with her fingertips, and said, “Tell me your thing now.”

So Amy told her about how she’d once sat in the corner of a party when they were both freshmen at Penn, and a beautiful woman had come over to her, and they’d started talking. Somehow, the woman had ended up sitting on the arm of the chair, and a little while later, she’d leaned down and kissed Amy on the mouth, and Amy had kissed back. The woman was a lesbian who was androgynous and stylish in a man’s tuxedo shirt and studs, the sleeves rolled up to reveal long slender wrists, and her hair cut short in back and falling across her eyes in front, making her look a little like James Dean.

“You mean that girl who lived in French House?” Jill asked, astonished.
“Aptly?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“Well, yes,” Amy said. “It was exciting, actually.”

“I can’t believe you never told me this.”

“I guess I was confused by it then. I didn’t know that you could be excited by something you’d never desired before.”

“At least not consciously desired.”

“I don’t think I’m much of a lesbian,” said Amy. “But I did like the idea of trying on a life.”

“I’d like to do that too,” said Jill. “Just try on another life for a few days. Although I guess you could say that that’s what we’re doing now. And I could get used to it.”

But they both knew that this wasn’t really true; the siren song of their own lives already quietly urged them back. They had taken their BlackBerries with them up here to this small spa in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and both of them had received text and voice messages from husbands and children, asking rudimentary household questions and sending electronic bursts of love and need. The weekend was a relief, but it also began to seem a little long. They had sat at a table in the balsam-paneled dining room, with the mountains visible like a sketch through the windows and the din of other women’s voices all around them. Sparse leaves of salad were strewn across plates as though blown there accidentally. A couple of women at a table in the corner were on a juice fast, sitting stoically before a decanter of sea-green fluid.

“There are times,” said Jill from her bed that night, “when I feel as though Donald and Nadia are completely helpless. I know it’s mostly my fantasy, but I feel as if they can barely survive in my absence. That it’s like I’m leaving newborns.”

Amy had nodded. In the span of ten years, this was actually the first time that Leo and Mason had ever been alone together for an entire weekend. Whenever they were supposed to go off for a few hours without her, she always dutifully sent them with the things they needed. They had come to understand that whatever they required would just magically appear before them. So when they became thirsty on an outing to the park, they reached into the cooler she had given them and pulled out a bottle of lurid blue or orange sports drink she had placed there. If Mason skidded on the ground and opened a window of skin on a knee, Leo could ferret around in the room-temperature compartment of the cooler and dig out the Band-Aids and the tube of antibiotic ointment that Amy had provided. She would pack provisions for an entire brutal winter if she had to. Always, her husband and her son would find them and use them, and always they would expect to find them.

Now, in the apartment in the morning, the darkness of the hallway ran like a tributary into the living room, becoming a glazed pool of light at this early hour. The apartment was too expensive, but Amy took her cues from Leo, who attended to their finances in the tiny study, the place where her mother would sleep when she came to visit in the winter for her women’s conference. Leo often sat at the rudimentary desk that the catalogue called Sven, which housed all the bills and invoices in its pigeonholes. As long as Leo didn’t throw his hands up, saying, “We’re fucked,” then they could keep going on like this. Amy didn’t want to know all the specifics about their financial situation, or at least she preferred to clothe herself in a loose understanding of what they could and could not afford. The apartment was “a nightmare,” Leo sometimes said, and yet they managed. The spa weekend, however, had been “doable.” She often turned to him for such cryptic pronouncements and vague reassurances.

Once she started looking with any depth at their money, she became anxious and quickly backed away from her own curiosity. She knew this was childlike and irresponsible, but it had become a habit. Money was one of the topics that had been quietly worked out over time in their marriage, just the way their sexual life had been too. In the beginning, they had been commendably open with each other, listing all the people they’d ever slept with. “Give me their names, I’ll kill them one by one,” Leo had told her, and to Amy’s surprise this had pleased her. They said what they liked and did not like in bed. Humiliated but brave, he had admitted that he liked his nipples “you know, sucked a little,” for starters. “I cannot believe I just used the word ‘nipples’ and ‘sucked’ to describe
myself
,” he had then said, laughing with a honk of anxiety.

Leo Buckner was a big, blunt, thickset man, a commercial litigator with curling black hair and a slightly flattened, dazed face like a boxer. Right away in the beginning, after they met at the law firm, when they lay together after sex in the wet fluency of love and unalloyed joy, they sometimes wandered into rudimentary conversations about money: how much they each made and how much they hoped to make eventually. Neither came from a family with a great deal of money. Leo’s father had run a magazine stand in the lobby of an office building, and his mother had been a housewife. Though this was very different from Amy’s own childhood, spent with her sisters and their novelist mother and economics professor father, financially it wasn’t really that different at all. There had never been much money in evidence in the Lambs’ house, or at least what there had been was buried in plain sight, allowing the family to take annual trips to France, where they stayed in bad hotels and rented a Citroën that Henry Lamb, in a madras shirt, drove tensely along twisting mountain roads. The Lambs had been neither rich nor poor, and their money had quietly moved across their life.

But that was back during a reasonable time. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the cost of everything was high and the relative worth of everyone had become public information. Money, unlike in the past, always showed itself in full. Amy Lamb and Leo Buckner lived with their son in this huge, homely rental building with a high turnover rate on the east side of the city. The awning read “The Rivermere,” though their avenue was situated near no river. The names of her friends’ buildings—the ones whose owners or management companies had had the vanity or energy to name them—mostly made no sense, either. One friend lived in The Cardiff, another in The Chanticleer. The lobby of The Rivermere was a virtual wind tunnel, so that the elevators occasionally had to be pried open, and the apartments were marbled and bright, ringed by big square windows that looked out upon the expanse of the city. The top floor of the building held the playroom where, when Mason was younger, he used to waddle through the carpeted space that, no matter how many air fresheners had been slapped onto the walls, retained an ambient diaper stink. Mothers and nannies sat on the carpeted window ledges, bored, calm, flipping through magazines or children’s clothing catalogues from Vermont, or else lightly chatting and trying not to inhale too deeply.