A Thousand Pardons (13 page)

They ordered out for dinner almost every night—it was so easy in the city, and so much better than home cooking, that not ordering out seemed borderline perverse—and after the first several weeks that duty too became Sara’s. They’d eat in front of the TV, and sometime between eight and nine she would peripherally watch her mother’s chin sink down toward her chest, snap up suddenly, and then sink again for good. It was awkward and sad, but, at the same time, Sara had little
desire for things to revert too far in the direction of how they used to be, because she liked being in charge of herself, of what she ate, when she went to bed, where she spent her time. One day she went to the movies right after school let out, by herself, and still got back home before her mom did; when asked how she’d spent the afternoon, Sara replied that she’d gone to a friend’s apartment to study for a test. It was a totally pointless lie—her mother probably would have been pleased, if anything, to know she’d been to see a movie—but in another way it demonstrated perfectly the point that her time was now her own. So many things that used to define her just didn’t signify that much anymore: New York City was full of only children, New York City was full of Asians, New York City was full of adoptees who wore their status on their faces, in their features’ unlikeness to those of their mothers and fathers. There was a Facebook group for her school, and one for her grade as well, but she stayed off of them. She was pretty sure no one was talking about her on there anyway. She was neither hot enough nor weird enough, basically, to spark much social interest from either boys or girls, and on that score too she felt oddly but definitely relieved.

Even to her dad she seemed both there and not there at the same time. He emailed a lot but, for some reason, hadn’t called or even texted for weeks. Maybe he still felt guilty about what he’d done, which, as she understood it, involved him trying to get over on some much younger woman who worked for him, getting his ass kicked by that woman’s boyfriend, and then driving around drunk and bleeding afterward like some kind of maniac. It was pretty embarrassing and disgusting, to be sure, whatever this chick’s age, which Sara didn’t quite see the point of being shocked by—they were both adults. But to her the disappointing thing was that her father seemed to have done this not because he’d fallen in love or for any other logical reason but simply because he had freaked out—his life had seemed intolerable to him—and parents just were not supposed to do that. Apart from the sexual element of it, she felt she understood his state of mind easily enough—this cannot be my life; this cannot be my family; my real life and family must have been left behind somewhere else—because everybody felt that way sometimes, but you were not supposed to give in to that feeling
at his age, at least not if you had agreed earlier on to become some girl’s father.

For a while she got an email from her dad at the same time every day. All he did was ask her questions, as if to make up for the period in which he’d had to feign interest in her, and no detail was too small to escape his anxious attention: if she mentioned playing a basketball game, he wanted to know what the score was, and if she told him it was 24–22, he wanted to know who’d scored the winning basket. Even when the names meant nothing to him. Sometimes she’d text him, but he would never reply. She still hadn’t mentioned any of it to her mom; she had a sense of the panic and fury that would lead to, and as weak as her connection to her father was now, she didn’t want to lose it again. Besides, if her parents could just decide on their own one day that their lives were now separate, who was anyone to tell her that her relationships with them couldn’t be kept separate as well? One night when her mom was out unusually late, Sara called him but just got his voice mail: she left a message, but his email the next day read very much as if he hadn’t heard it. “Did u lose yr phone?” she emailed him. No reply. Finally she sent him an email saying that she understood if he didn’t want to talk about himself because he felt guilty or whatever, but that it was starting to seem weird to her that he wouldn’t even tell her where he was, where he was living, where he was working, etc. Was she ever going to see him again? The next day, same hour as every day, she opened an email from him, this time with the subject line “confession time”:

“The reason I haven’t told you where I am is that I’m ashamed of it. I thought that losing my home and my family would be the price I paid for my behavior over the summer, but it turns out there was more of a price than I thought. I am an inmate in the Mineville minimum security prison, which is about two hours north of Albany. It’s not a rough or dangerous place at all, but we aren’t allowed phones, and I get access to the internet only at a certain time of day, i.e., now. It’s a 28 day sentence and I’ve already served 22 of them. I thought I could keep it from you for 6 more days; I should not have tried to keep it from you at all, but I hope you at least understand why I did. Please forgive me, for this and for everything else. You deserve much better from your father.”

That night there was no food in the apartment, so she met her mother for dinner at Hunan Garden, where the service was fast and they offered bad but complimentary white wine. When their plates were cleared away, and Helen tried unsuccessfully to stifle an expansive yawn, Sara said, “Mom, do you know where Dad is living right now?”

Helen was taken aback. “No,” she said. “Actually, I don’t. I know he’s out of that Stages place. The child support checks come via the lawyer’s office, which makes me think he doesn’t really want any contact with me at this point, which is fine. I don’t really want any with him either. We’re officially divorced, so as long as he fulfills his obligations to you, I’ve pretty much given up my right to keep tabs on where he is and what he does.”

Sara searched her face. There was no way she was lying. She really didn’t know. Her mother had always been a poor liar.

“Do you think there’s any way,” Sara said, “that the two of you would ever get back together?”

Helen’s mouth fell open. It wasn’t an unusual question for a child to ask, of course, but through all the drama and upheaval of the last seven or eight months, Sara had never once asked it. Still, it was a rebuke to Helen that this moment should have caught her with her guard down so completely. Of course, of course she wanted Ben’s and Sara’s relationship to be repaired, but only when the time was right, only when she could feel confident that he was sane enough not to hurt her again: as it stood, she had no idea how much of an unfiltered, impulsive wreck he might still be. She’d resolved never to badmouth him in front of Sara, but that had wound up meaning that she never mentioned him at all. Just be honest, she told herself now: she knows when you’re lying anyway. “No,” Helen said, not harshly. “The way he treated us is something I can’t really forgive. But there’s no law that says it has to be the same for you as for me. Do you want to see him? It’s totally natural that you should. I’ve sort of been waiting for him to make the first move there, but you’re right, I’ve let it go way too long, I can call the lawyer tomorrow and—”

“No,” Sara said quickly. “I mean no thank you. Maybe soon. I was just wondering.”

That Friday she took the crosstown bus to get to basketball, but they were detoured all the way to Ninety-sixth Street just because one block of Amsterdam was cordoned off for what looked like some sort of religious festival. Passengers were swearing and rolling their eyes. The air smelled great, though—like meat, basically—and Sara, on a whim, got off the bus and watched it roll away. She spent the next hour or so wandering by herself on the fringes of the festival, watching a short and inscrutable parade, checking out what was for sale. For a dollar she bought a huge empanada out of a cart; it was so good she went back for another one, but by then the cart was gone and traffic was starting to flow again. She made her way back down to Eighty-sixth and got on the eastbound bus for home, where she changed out of her uniform and then checked her mother’s email every few minutes until a message came in from her coach, not mad at her for ditching, just making sure she was okay. She deleted it. An hour or so later, Helen came home from the office. “How was your game?” she said. Sara told her that her team had won a thriller, 30–29, and that she’d hit the winning shot.

CLIENTS NEVER CAME TO THEIR PLACE, which was just as well, since it was a gloomy, underpopulated setting: just the two women, working side by side in the outer room, while Harvey’s office sat there empty like a particularly dusty shrine, except on the days when his son came in. Those days had grown more frequent as the winter went on, even though the website on which he was nominally working was nowhere in evidence, or even mentioned much anymore. He was clearly a creature of habit, and he seemed to have nowhere else in particular to go. In the afternoons he would walk through the unlocked door, nod uncomfortably to Helen and Mona, go into his father’s office, and close that door behind him. One Monday before he arrived (he never made it there more than an hour or two before the end of business), Mona stood up from her desk and marched purposefully into Harvey’s office to boot up the computer and check its Internet history: a while later she came out looking more confounded than sheepish and reported that he seemed to spend most of his time posting comments on a variety of
music blogs, something he could just as easily have done from his home in Brooklyn. “No porn, at least,” she said with equal parts relief and bemusement.

So other than Michael at three o’clock or so, and the mail delivery about an hour before that, the door to Harvey Aaron Public Relations seldom swung open during business hours, which did at least lower their level of self-consciousness during stretches of the workday in which there was no real work to do. Helen could, for instance, at her desk on a Friday morning at 9:30, allow herself to finish the
Vanity Fair
profile of Hamilton Barth she had started reading on the train. She always read anything about Hamilton that she came across, hoping mostly for some reference to their old school or their old hometown. But he never seemed to want to talk about it, or maybe they just never asked him. He usually had loftier things on his mind.

“Barth, in town for the film festival, had asked to be moved from his hotel because the windows didn’t open,” Helen read. “He wound up instead at an efficiency motel a few miles away, where the windows were indeed open, though the curtains had to be kept closed because of all the photographers in the parking lot. Clearly restless, he suggested we decamp to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where there was an exhibition of Motherwell drawings. I asked him what time he needed to be back for that night’s premiere; ‘I was hoping you knew that,’ he grinned.”

Mona picked up the office phone, as she sometimes did when she was bored, just to see if it was working.

“ ‘I’m not afraid of death,’ he said—apropos of the Motherwell we were looking at, or perhaps apropos of nothing—‘but I resent it. I think it’s unfair and irritating. I know I’m not going to get to all the beautiful places I want to go, I’m not going to read all the books I want to read, or revisit all the beautiful paintings I want to see. There’s a limit.’ He paused. ‘I mean, I understand limits are good for character and all that, but I would rather live forever.’ ”

A soft knock on the office door caused both women to jump in their seats. Helen dropped the
Vanity Fair
facedown on her desk and reflexively pretended to be typing something.

“Come in?” she called out, shrugging at Mona.

In walked a white-haired man in an excellent suit, with fashionably tiny glasses held up by large cheeks. Actually, what enlarged the cheeks was his smile, which was constant, even as he took in, without having to so much as crane his neck, the entirety of the operation—the two women at mismatched, perpendicular desks in the outer office, the inner room, at this hour, open but unoccupied.

“This is Harvey Aaron Public Relations?” he said. Helen nodded. He looked a bit like Harvey, actually, or maybe just of Harvey’s vintage, like someone Harvey would have avoided at his own high school reunion because of the man’s conspicuous aura of success.

“I won’t ask for Harvey himself, because I know he’s sadly no longer with us,” the man said. “I take the liberty of calling him Harvey because we actually met once, probably twenty years ago. More than twenty.” His smile seemed to refresh itself. Helen and Mona were still seated with their fingers over their keyboards. “But may I ask, which of you ladies is Ms. Armstead?”

Helen, absurdly, raised her hand. The white-haired man looked again at Harvey’s empty office, as if he had not noticed it before, and said, “I wonder, if you’re not too busy, if I might have a few moments of your time. That is,” he said, turning his gaze graciously upon Mona, “if you don’t mind.”

Skepticism had flared Mona’s nostrils. “You from the government?” she said. “Because you seem a little bit like somebody from the government.”

Helen shot her a stricken look, even though she too had an instinct that this man was not some prospective client. Too untroubled, maybe. He seemed like he was pretty happy with the public image he was projecting already.

“Not at all,” he said. “My name is Teddy Malloy.” The way he said it, he clearly expected it to make some impression; Helen felt at fault for having no idea who he was. He extended his hand toward Harvey’s office door, graciously and presumptuously at the same time. “Shall we?” he said to Helen.

At least he let her take the seat behind Harvey’s desk, she thought
as he closed the door after them, though he couldn’t have been smart enough to know how wrong and off-balance it made her feel to sit in Harvey’s old swivel chair. “Well!” he said pleasantly as he sat, folding his hands over his stomach. “So you are Helen Armstead.”

Helen smiled weakly. “What can I do for you?” she said.

“You’re the woman who handled Peking Grill, yes? And Amalgamated Supermarkets? We’ve been watching your work for some time now, with greater and greater admiration.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Helen said politely.