Emily & Einstein (18 page)

“Don’t talk that way about my sister.”

I shook myself. Jordan was right. I was talking to a dog like he was human.

“You’re making me crazy,” I said.

He grabbed the late notice in his mouth and shook it.

Whether Einstein understood me or not, the fact remained that the maintenance fee problem was a dark cloud hanging over my head. I knew Sandy’s parents were using the mounting debt as a way to pry me out of the apartment, but I refused to give in. If I walked away, if I let the Portmans have my home, somehow it proved that everything about Sandy and me was a lie.

Now that I had accepted the reality of the journals, and even the other women, I had come back to the place I had been when I married him. I might be furious with him for his lies, but I believed he had cared for me, loved me in a way that was deeper than the surface feelings he was used to. A man who hadn’t felt something intense for me would never have held me like he was afraid of what would happen if he let go. End of story. I refused to believe anything else. His promise to give me the apartment represented the truth of the connection we’d had from the beginning.

But sitting there, I couldn’t deny that in all the time we had been together, he had said he wanted me, needed me. He had never said he loved me.

I felt the cracks in my foundation widen as I realized that I needed Sandy’s promise to be true because I needed to believe that I hadn’t given up so much—the home my mother gave me, my love, my pride—for a man who hadn’t really loved me in return.

I told myself that I hadn’t believed blindly. My strength wasn’t an illusion. I wasn’t weak. I had believed in something real. To prove that, nobody was going to take Sandy’s gift away from me. Which meant I had to come up with the maintenance fee, if only to buy some time.

I tipped my head back and pressed my eyes closed. “I need a miracle.”

Einstein barked.

When I didn’t immediately turn to him he barked again.

“What is it, E?”

He trotted to the stairs leading up to the suite, then looked back. When he saw that I was still standing there, he barked again.

Hesitantly, I followed him to the suite, and once inside Einstein walked over to the beautiful old desk. He growled under his breath, then nudged a bottom drawer.

“What?” I asked carefully.

He barked again, nudging a second time.

It was the strangest thing. For a second I felt something I could only call otherworldly. But then it was gone and I pulled the drawer open and looked inside.

“Nothing here.”

He growled his frustration before he used his muzzle to point toward the back of the drawer.

My heart started to race and I looked at the dog. Half shaking, I reached inside. At first I didn’t feel anything. But then I felt a tiny groove in the wood.

Einstein came up to me holding a sharp pencil between his teeth. Feeling strangely disconnected from the real world, I took the pencil and worked it into the groove, prying until the back panel of the drawer came free. When I emptied the contents I found a savings account book.

“How did you know this was here?” I whispered.

He just barked, nudging me on.

I flipped open the leather cover, then fell back onto the floor when I saw that it was a joint account with both Sandy’s and my names at the top. The account balance nearly made me pass out. There was enough money to pay the maintenance for several months and then some. If I used the money I could buy myself a temporary reprieve.

chapter eighteen

Despite my mother’s feminist beliefs, and her absolute conviction that a woman should always support herself, she had a thing for men. Old ones, young ones, it didn’t matter, as long as they adored her.

The summer I was eight, she took me with her to the Hamptons on Long Island. We stayed in a big cedar shingle house on the beach, a two-story fairyland owned by one of the long line of men she teased with her affection. He was letting her use the place for a month, and during that time the parties never stopped.

The Professor came out with us, along with Mother’s other friends from the city. Most nights a darkly handsome man showed up for my mother’s parties. He was from Italy and spoke with an accent that made familiar words sound like poetry. I knew my mother well enough to know she had found her new toy, despite the Professor, despite the fact that she was staying in a house that belonged to another man.

Mother and her group of hangers-on talked politics and glass ceilings, Karl Marx and corner offices. It was the usual suspects discussing the usual topics. One night I was half asleep on the sofa when the Italian leaned forward, taking the tips of my mother’s fingers.

“You speak of a pragmatic world,” he commented, “where who succeeds and who fails is determined by a finite set of rules established by opinions that are not necessarily held by all. What about the power of something beyond what you can see?” He turned her palm over and traced the very center, the others watching. I watched too, feeling hot, embarrassed. “Where I am from,” he added, “we believe God looks deep inside us and determines who is worth saving.”

The group was silent. My mother sat there, her martini held forgotten in her other hand.

Her friend Willa laughed uncomfortably. “That’s ridiculous.”

The Professor sat back and considered.

After a second, my mother smiled boldly at the Italian. “Who are you and how did you get invited to my party?”

“You invited me,” he said with an undercurrent I didn’t understand.

Mother laughed then. “So I did. Well, fine, God it is. Though if you’re sure there is a God, then you’d do well to tell him to stop looking deep inside anyone around here and get busy working on far bigger problems than me.”

I uncurled myself from the sofa, unused to talk about God. I expected everyone to laugh, tell my mother how clever she was, then move back to the kind of conversation they were used to.

The man wouldn’t let it go. “But if He did look, what would He see, Lillian?”

Lillian,
spoken like a one-word poem.

Mother shifted uncomfortably. Her friends murmured until Willa broke the strained moment. “Emily, sweetie, hand me that bottle of wine.”

My mother blinked. “This is a ridiculous conversation. Emily, it’s past midnight. Why aren’t you in bed?”

She didn’t look at me; she stared at the man. It was the Professor, seemingly amused, who broke the charged silence. Years later I searched until I found the exact quote he used.

For as bats’ eyes are to daylight so is our

intellectual eye to those truths which are, in their

own nature, the most obvious of all.

—Aristotle,
Metaphysics,
I (Brevior) i.

As a child I hadn’t understood the words, but I could tell my mother had. She set her drink down and met the Italian’s eye.

“If this
God
of yours looked deep inside me, or if you did, or if even
I
looked deep inside myself, all we’d find would be me, nothing more, nothing less. I’ve never pretended to be anything other than who I am.”

The Italian smiled then, picking up her drink and handing it back. “To a maddeningly wonderful woman who is as intelligent as she is beautiful.”

All these years later, I understood that Lillian Barlow had never been a woman interested in self-reflection. Was she afraid of what she would find? Or did she already know, and didn’t like what she saw?

*   *   *

For the month-long stay on Long Island, I had brought a stack of books to keep me company since none of the other adults who came and went had children. While the whole looking-deep thing had caught my attention, nothing else they talked about interested me.

I sat in the room where I was staying with its white eyelet canopy bed and miniature vanity, the ocean just beyond the dunes, sounds of water lulling me while I read. I felt like a princess, serving fake tea to the stuffed animals in someone else’s room. Such a child’s game when on most Saturdays at home in the city I made real tea for my mother, who remained in bed until her friends showed up in the afternoons.

I would stay in the cedar shingle house forever, I promised myself. I would sink my toes in the warm sand, build castles, and hide among the stuffed animals and dolls when my mother and her friends returned to the city.

After breakfast each morning, my mother and I went to the beach. She laid in a lounge chair, outlining an article or writing letters to editors around the country with her current list of complaints. While she worked, I read or stood at the edge of the water, looking out but never going in.

One night toward the end of the month while a party raged on, I found myself alone in my room, bored and hot. I had gotten tired of fake teas with childish toys. I had read all my books, everything from
Eloise
to a Young Reader on the ocean that my mother had bought me. Lillian Barlow thought I should learn about currents and tsunamis, but she hadn’t thought to teach me how to swim.

When I left my room that night, I didn’t intend to go to the beach. Dressed in my nightgown I walked downstairs, past the adults amused at “Lillian’s little woman,” and out the back door to get away from the noise.

The moon was high, the black sky dotted with stars. I made my way over the dunes, the still-warm sand sifting between my toes. The beach was empty, the ocean spread out before me. I looked up at the sky, thinking about the Italian’s words. Lying back in the sand I wondered if God really was watching, and if He was, what did He see deep inside me.

*   *   *

When I became an editor, I was drawn toward manuscripts that stretched the mind. In college I had learned that through reading, difficult ideas and even unpalatable truths could be digested in manageable bites. When I thought about Jordan’s pitch of
My Mother’s Daughter,
I felt certain that no matter how she doled out the pages, they would not be manageable bites, at least for me.

Jordan and I had barely spoken since she pitched her proposal. I couldn’t put into words what I felt. Threatened. Or maybe jealous. I knew her version of life with Mother would be different from mine. I loved my sister, but I didn’t want to read about how great she and Mother got along.

Jordan was still asleep when I headed for work. I had the savings account book Einstein had guided me to in my purse, but I was still unsure what I was going to do with it.

On the subway I barely noticed the crush of bodies. On the street I was oblivious to how people pushed and jostled their way to work. When I arrived at Caldecote I felt disoriented, as if I hadn’t slept. The dreams had returned leaving me exhausted.

When I got off the elevator, I found the office buzzing with excitement.

“What’s going on?” I asked Birdie.

“I don’t know. But I hear it’s good news.”

I followed Birdie toward the conference room, arriving just as Tatiana walked up to the head of the long table. Victoria raced in and practically threw herself in the chair next to Nate just before someone else sat down.

“Sorry,” she said with that fake smile.

When Tatiana reached the front, the staff quieted. “I wanted to bring everyone together to announce a first for Caldecote Press.”

The crowd’s interest was piqued.

“I had dinner with a friend who works at
People
magazine. She mentioned a book to me that she received along with, of all things, a candy bar.”

I went still.

“She was so intrigued by the old-fashioned means of getting attention that she actually read the book herself. As it turns out, it’s one of our books. And she loved it.” Tatiana paused, her sharp gaze traveling across the room. “She loved it so much, in fact, that not only is the magazine going to review the book, but they want to do a front-page feature on the author and the young son she saved as well.”

The crowd cheered, even the old hands who hated all things popular.

“Which book?” someone asked.

“The title is
Ruth’s Intention.
”

A silent beat passed while I took in the news. I couldn’t believe it. This was amazing. But my brain staggered when Victoria leaped out of her seat and cried, “Oh my God! That’s my book!”

Stunned, I swiveled to face her. “Victoria—”

“Of course, Emily helped by doing some mailings and things for me. But I can’t tell you what a joy it was when I was able to call the author myself and offer to buy her manuscript.
Ruth’s Intention
is a book I knew we had to publish!”

Words escaped me. Shock, denial, and bone-sucking grief were gone. But nothing useful filled the space as Victoria launched into a short synopsis of the story, then went on about how we really needed to get behind the book in a big way, about her commitment to put
Ruth
on the
New York Times
Best Sellers list. I barely heard, only saw her mouth moving, the others in the room caught between rapt attention and simmering resentment. Mercy Gray from sales looked confused. Nate had his eyes fixed on his notepad, as if too busy to take notice of what was going on. But I saw that he wasn’t writing anything at all.

Then there was Tatiana. She sat back in her seat, as always watching me. I had recently read an article by a former big-name New York editor who claimed that publishing’s dirty little secret was that in this day and age of bottom lines and corporate conglomerates, there was no longer a collegial “team” of editors, only competition. Was Tatiana watching my reaction to someone else’s success? Or was there something else below the cloudy murk of her hard gaze?

*   *   *

In the ocean, when you open your eyes underwater at night, it’s impossible to see through the cloudy murk.

From the Young Reader my mother bought me, I learned that the ocean covers approximately seventy percent of the earth’s surface, circling the globe in currents that travel for thousands of miles. Water that crashes onto the shores of Long Island could previously have been to Africa or South America, or possibly even Spain. Lying on the beach just beyond the cedar shingle house on Long Island, with the black sky above me, African water or maybe South American water rushed up the sand and touched my feet. Sitting, I tucked my knees inside my little girl’s nightgown.