Emily & Einstein (2 page)

It is a well-documented fact that most males of the species long to be great. Isn’t that why we admire superheroes when we are boys and moguls when we are men?

I was no different.

When I was young I wanted to be a basketball player, but while no one would accuse me of being short, I didn’t have the tall, lean build of a real player. If I was destined to sit on the bench, why bother? A few years later, I decided on rowing. I was smart and strong, and was being groomed by my prep school coach for the important position of stroke. But after a few months of trudging uptown to practice, I decided rowing was more trouble than it was worth.

Later, during college, I decided to be an artist, someone great like Picasso or Salvador Dali, larger-than-life men with voracious appetites. But this time my mother, a woman known as a great purveyor of all things art, said Portmans sponsored artists; we didn’t become them.

What most people didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t remember, was that my mother hadn’t always been a wealthy patron of the arts. The truth was, Althea Portman was an enigma to most people who knew her, a puzzle people had tried to piece together for years. But eventually the questions had been forgotten, and I knew my mother intended for it to stay that way. I rarely gave it any thought; the disconnected pieces of her were something I took in stride.

Though every once in a while our eyes would meet and I could see the question.
Do you remember,
I knew she wanted to ask.

But I was no fool. I always turned away, as did she, the question left hanging in the air, unspoken.

Unfortunately, my mother wasn’t one to hold her tongue on much of anything else, and on that unfortunate snowy February night when I left my office at Regal Bay, the night it all began, she and I had exchanged words. This time about my wife.

Frustrated in a way that only my mother could make me, I sat in the back of a Mercedes sedan, one of the firm’s hired drivers taking me up Eighth Avenue in the swirling sleet and snow to meet Emily.

The drive took forever, the five lanes of traffic a sea of cabs, hired sedans, and people in SUVs from New Jersey heading north, the snowy street lined by the remnants of less glamorous Manhattan real estate now being encroached upon by the gleaming glass and steel of the midtown business district. An hour after leaving the firm, we finally arrived at the animal clinic on West Seventy-sixth, the narrow length lined with parked cars. The driver double-parked across the street, behind a utility van.

When I didn’t immediately get out, he glanced at me over the seat back. “Isn’t this the address you gave me, sir?”

“Yes, yes. It is.”

Generally I wasn’t a distracted person, but that night I felt something I didn’t understand. I wrote it off as simple frustration after a long, snowy drive. I realize now that it was more than that, something more complex, less defined, a defiant and callous posturing in front of … what, the gods? Whatever the case, I was charging forward, full speed ahead, to my own undoing. And Emily’s.

I got out of the car and buttoned my overcoat against the elements. Stepping around the front of the Mercedes, I was startled by a little wiry white-furred dog that leapt out and stood as if intentionally blocking my way. I tried to step around him but slipped on a patch of ice.

Steadying myself on the hood of the car, I shooed the dog away and kept going, snow and sleet coming down harder, the wind blowing, ice hitting my face. When I got to the right front edge of the Mercedes, a car turned onto the street, its headlights bouncing as the tires hit ruts in the freezing slush.

As the car roared closer, I saw that it was a taxi driven by someone who had lost all concern for the perils of driving in the snow. I took a step back, irritated that the cabbie planned to hurtle through the narrow space between the double-parked cars. Then just before the cab reached the Mercedes it happened. The little white dog reappeared and stepped into the street.

The cab driver hit the brakes and swerved, fishtailing back and forth, sliding this way, overcorrecting that way, until the yellow taxi careened into the back of the Mercedes. The thick, falling snow muffled the crash, making the impact feel less destructive. Then silence. There was a moment when I was certain I could hear the snow falling, feel a strange sort of peace.

All in all, the accident wouldn’t have caused too much of a problem if I hadn’t been standing at the front of one vehicle and an unfortunate five or so feet behind another. Something about thrust and velocity, mixed with angle of trajectory, even over relatively slow speeds and short distances, can make for a very dangerous combination. The long and short being that the cab hit the back of the Mercedes, jamming it forward into me, thrusting me down with such velocity and at such an angle that I crashed over like a domino, no time to break my fall. My head slammed against the fender of the van, traumatizing my brain so intensely and fracturing my spine so deeply that there was never a chance to recover. In seconds I was standing next to my body, no longer cold, merely stunned that the mess on the ground was actually me.

I watched in stunned paralysis as the driver dialed 911, tried to resuscitate my body, then called his dispatch who called the firm. No one called my wife.

I had never been one to panic, though I had never stood on a snowy street before watching someone work to revive my body. But when I tried to move and couldn’t, panic spiked through me. I gasped for air, but couldn’t do that either.

They say that when your life hangs in the balance, your past flashes before you. But it wasn’t friends or events from my childhood I remembered. I didn’t think of my parents. I only thought of one thing.

“Emily!”

Her name burst out of me, burst out of my mind, as if somehow she could fix this, could solve this problem. But there was no sound, nothing, as if nothing of substance was left of me to save.

I hadn’t known Emily for more than a week the first time I pulled her close. With our lips nearly touching, I whispered,
“Fall in love with me. I dare you.”

She did fall for me, though since then I have wondered if it was the dare that set
me
up to fall.

emily

My mother used to tell me that life could change in an instant, a line drawn in the sand separating before from after, altering you completely. Was that really true? Could a person be changed in an instant? Or did a crack already have to exist in the ice, the beginnings of a change we simply refused to see?

—
EXCERPT FROM
My Mother’s Daughter

chapter one

Everyone has a story but I was never interested in telling my own. I was an editor of books, not a writer. I loved to find sense in someone else’s chaos, uncover the intent of a sentence or paragraph that only hinted at a truth. At least that was how I felt until I met Sandy Portman.

The first time I saw him my world tilted. Ridiculous, I know, but seeing him that first time jarred me so deeply that I had to turn away, like turning away from looking directly at the sun, and pretend I hadn’t noticed him at all.

It had nothing to do with the fact that he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. His face was a strike against him. I fell in love because there was something in his eyes that was at odds with his physical beauty. Sandy Portman drew me in, like the draft of a manuscript where perfectly constructed sentences hinted at but didn’t yet reveal a deeper truth. And when he pulled me close and smiled at me the first time, a crooked smile on his perfect face, hinting at a bit more of his truth? Well, I was lost.

*   *   *

My name is Emily Barlow, and I had never been good at sensing trouble. I didn’t need to be. I made lists, mapped out plans, then moved forward with a calm certainty that everything would work out. Unshakable faith. Bone-deep belief. Call it what you will. I stepped into any situation with the calm conviction that no matter what, I would survive.

Perhaps that was my mistake. Then again, perhaps that’s what would save me.

That morning, the day everything began, I woke with what I now can only call a premonition that my world was about to shift. But I didn’t recognize the feeling for what it was. I ignored it.

It had been snowing all night, snow on top of snow during one of the worst winters New York City had seen in a decade. It was Friday, and when I got to work at Caldecote Press almost no one was there, kept away by the storm, safe in houses reached only through bridges and tunnels, or in apartments on the island of Manhattan that climbed up floor after floor into the mottled gray clouds until the buildings disappeared.

At noon, I headed home. The animal clinic had closed due to the weather, and I tried calling Sandy to let him know I would meet him at the apartment. He didn’t answer, and his voice mail was full. I’d left a message with his secretary for him to call me, but I never heard back.

We lived in the Dakota, a hundred-and-twenty-year-old building on the Upper West Side, and when I got home I worked, first on a manuscript that had come in early, then on the guest room I had been redoing for several weeks. I had painted the walls a pale yellow, with white crown molding, and a border of lavender, green, and blue flowers that I was painting myself, each delicate stroke like a line of a psalm as I sat at the top of the ladder, the impossibly high ceilings seeming to reach up to God.

For the last two years, I had put every extra cent I had into the apartment. While my husband had a great deal of money, I did not. But I gave that no thought, pouring my heart and soul into the old but enchanted residence that had been little more than a dusty museum when Sandy lived there alone.

I had ripped down ancient wallpaper, torn up broken bathroom tile, replaced outdated appliances, entwining myself in a place that represented everything I had been working toward my entire life. A home with a husband and children, Sunday dinners and friends. A life of work and family, the lines filled in with love, colored by years steadily passing. A life so different from the one I led with my mother where we moved from one apartment to the next, uptown, downtown, Alphabet City. We even did a stint in Chinatown, where plucked chickens and ducks hung in steamy shop windows like ornaments on a tree.

Over the years I learned to guard my heart, didn’t let myself become attached to people or places despite my dream of having both. But the day I met Sandy in the Caldecote conference room, something inside me opened up. As everyone was leaving the meeting, Sandy stopped me. He didn’t notice, or perhaps didn’t care about, the glances others gave us. He looked only at me, his lips hiking up at one corner, turning what would have been a wicked smile into something boyish and playful. “Come away with me,” he said. “Right now, before everyone gets wise to us and reminds me of schedules and broken legs and all the things you make me forget.”

I must have given him a strange look because his smile widened and he added, “At least let me take you someplace for a drink. Then you can tell me all about why you downplay your amazing looks, and I’ll tell you all the reasons why I’m falling for you.”

He startled me, but I didn’t show it. “Do lines like that really work in your world?”

He laughed out loud. “They do.” Then that smile again, this time bordering on sheepish, his hazel green eyes flashing. “Hard to believe, huh?”

My guess was that it wasn’t the lines that worked, but his looks, his easy charm. This was a man used to getting his way without having to bargain or even ask.

I smiled despite myself. “One, I have nothing to tell, and two, you don’t know half the reasons why I’m worth falling for.”

This time he was surprised, but he recovered quickly. “Then I’ll take notes; you can dictate. It will give me an excuse to keep you out all afternoon and turn a drink into dinner.”

I just shook my head and stepped around him. But at the door I turned back. “Dinner.
After
work. My choice of restaurant.”

He cocked his head. “Ever the negotiator. But fine, I’ll meet you in the lobby at seven.”

“Make it seven-thirty.” I started to leave.

“Emily.”

I hesitated.

“Do you always win?”

My smile softened. “Does anyone?”

He studied me for a second, then told me I should have been named Diana after the Huntress or Helen after the woman from Troy. “Emily is too soft, too much like that boring cream dress you’re wearing. Neither does you justice.”

I raised a brow. “For someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me, you have a lot of opinions.”

What I didn’t say was that in every woman there is an Emily just as in every woman there’s a Helen of Troy. It depends on which part is nurtured. I’d had no choice but to be strong. And didn’t the hardness of strength come when the softness underneath was a threat?

I would have written him off as yet another good-looking guy who used his charm to get what he wanted. But then his brow furrowed. “On second thought, I bet there’s an Emily in there somewhere. You just keep her hidden.”

My breathing grew shallow. Somehow this seemingly all-surface guy understood.

He walked past me through the doorway, stopping just long enough to tuck a single errant strand of hair behind my ear. “See you at seven-thirty,” he said.

*   *   *

I had just finished putting the final touches on the painted border when my BlackBerry rang.

I clattered down the ladder, paintbrush still in hand, lavender paint splattered on the old shirt I wore to protect my clothes. When I glanced at the clock I was surprised to see how late it was. I’d have to hurry to get cleaned up before Sandy got home.

“Hello,” I said on the fourth ring.

But it wasn’t Sandy. It was Birdie Baleau, a woman who had recently moved to New York from Texas, and was like no New Yorker I had ever met. We had become fast friends almost instantly.

“Congratulations!” Birdie squealed on the phone, like we were still in middle school. “I just heard about your promotion to senior editor!”