The Mermaid of Brooklyn (45 page)

“Yes?”

“Did you ever get those cigarettes?”

“Oh. Nope.”

In a moment the door closed.

It was as though every few minutes I was waking up, and
every waking was accompanied by a throat-lumpy thud, a dull gut-sinking. I was pregnant with pain, like a third baby.

I thought of a notebook I’d kept as a child, full of floor plans and sketches of my future home. I was going to live in a huge Victorian house on a wooded lot with a creek and a rope swing. I snipped furniture out of catalogs. Back then my tastes tended toward the romantic, with a heaping helping of batty old lady: lots of fat chintz sofas and grand pianos and crushed velvet curtains. I was going to have three children—they existed in the notebooks as a girl, a boy, and a sexless eternal baby—and we were all going to sing together every night while my husband played the piano. But people were only hazy presences in this imagined life. It was mostly about the beautiful house, the sense of peace. There was a weeping willow and a field of daffodils in the spring. Actually, it was always spring. I would have a pack of tame cats that followed me across the meadow. Life was nothing like that. I’d known this for a while.

Nor was I living the life I’d expected when I moved to New York, thinking I’d finally found my place. I did not breeze from pitch meeting to Midtown lunch date and then home to cook the dinner
I’d prepped in the morning; I did not have the sexy marriage that was the envy of my friends; I did not have a haircut that flattered my face; I did not have ingeniously organized shelves; I did not have a perfect black dress. I didn’t have a perfect anything. Just me, still the same Jenny I’d always been, transplanted to Brooklyn in the hopes that some coolness or something would soak in by osmosis, propped into some fancy shoes and hoping for the best. I hadn’t even been able to have a torrid affair the way modern people were supposed to. Ugh. Life.

Over the next few days, I let Harry visit the girls in tense, supervised living room playdates—Betty was overjoyed, more like her old bubbly self and less like her recent tantrummy
Exorcist
incarnation—but we never had any sort of adult conversation. Maybe we were just never going to talk about it. Maybe we would never speak to each other again, never meet each other’s eyes except by accident. Maybe this was how a long marriage worked.

All week Sylvia kept her distance from me, as if Harry’s return had eliminated the need for the two of us to speak directly, as if it would be a relief for us to revert to our previous chilly coexistence. Then on Friday she showed up unannounced around nine a.m. When I answered the door, she threw her hands up as if in surrender. “I don’t even know what to say,” she said.

“Me, neither,” I said.

“He looks tired.”

“Yes.”

She shrugged, eyes wide, as if we were commiserating about just another hapless husband mishap, putting the baby’s diaper on backward, maybe, or sending an anniversary card on Mother’s Day. How silly men were! Despite everything, I was happy to see her. “I
hope you’re here to babysit,” I said. Then, because that sounded so demanding, I added, “The girls really miss you.”

“I’m here,” she said. “I’d like to see the girls. You do what you want. I guess you probably have errands or something.” But what I really, really had to do was to go over to Laura’s.

I hadn’t spoken to Laura since Harry’s return, hadn’t seen her since the Sam-and-Karen picnic. It wasn’t until I was on my way to her building that I realized how much I’d missed her, how I couldn’t wait to see her, as if I’d just returned from some long voyage alone.

I strode past an office’s reflective windows, experienced the dislocating jolt of seeing a familiar-seeming lady only to realize it was me. I’d gotten lean from my summer of wandering around in the heat and never cooking grown-up dinners. I could feel that I was stronger and quicker, and I had the strange impression as I trotted along that, left alone, I had begun to transform into some sort of sinewy forest animal. I found myself moving faster and faster. Past the bar and grill that had once been our fallback married-person-date-night locale, past the bakery where Sam and I had flirted so laboriously, past the coffee shop where, in another life, Laura and I had met to soak in the air-conditioning. There was a picture book Betty loved in which the illustrations were made from mosaics of tissue paper and newsprint, and as I hurried through the familiar streets, they, too, seemed composed of translucent layers—scraps of narratives, remembered images—gummed together to create a whole.

Laura looked surprised to see me—I hadn’t called first, knowing I was intersecting with the nap time of organized Emma (who had finally gotten her pink cast off) and so would find them at home—but she welcomed me in with a hug so ferocious, I knew I must have looked aggrieved. “Come in, come in,” she said, presenting me with an iced coffee and a chilled dish of raspberries before I
could even catch my breath. We sat at her dining room table, where a mason jar of sunny ranunculus held court amid a gathering of puzzle pieces. I pressed my hands to the sides of the jar, hoping the goodness of the flowers could heal me.

“So he’s back!” she said, taking obvious pains to sound casual.

I nodded. “What am I going to do?” It wasn’t what I’d meant to say.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t even know. Do I take him back? He’s such a shit.” I plucked an ice cube from my coffee and watched it melt in my palm.

“What did he have to say for himself?”

I bridled at the question, indefensibly defensive. “It’s a long story. You know, he was troubled.” I explained as simply as I could.

“How do you feel? What do you want to do?” she asked.

“I want none of this to ever have happened,” I said. “I want us to be different people.”

Laura smiled. “Listen, I love you. I just want to help.”

“I know,” I said, unable to say any more.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Oh, dear. What.”

“Cute Dad?”

It was funny to hear our old nickname for him. I missed the days at the beginning of the summer when he was just plain Cute Dad, without all the fret and complication of a real person. What a drag people were, in reality. So . . . real. I shook my head. “Yeah. I don’t really want to talk about it. It was bad. I mean, it was good, but in a bad way. We— It went too far. Just—yeah. It was a big mistake.”

“Okay.”

“And it’s all over now.”

“Okay.”

“I think he’s putting the moves on Karen, actually. Who knew he was such a predator? He seemed so innocent!”

Laura allowed a tiny checkmark of a smile. “I think he’s just flirty. I mean, that’s always been my impression.”

“God. I feel so stupid. I just really feel so stupid.”

She stood up. “Can I play something for you?” She went into the other room to get her laptop. We pulled our chairs closer together to huddle in front of the computer screen, like old-timey kids excited for a radio drama.

“I was wondering if you were ever going to play me your midnight recordings,” I said. “You secretive thing.”

“Me, secretive? Ha. Here, I think it’s . . . here?”

The part she wanted to play for me was prefaced by a nutty old man mumbling about how there was a conspiracy between all the bisexuals and the squirrels and you could tell because of the bisexuals’ hairstyles, or something like that. The bisexuals! As if they were an organized force, sexual communists or something. He sounded terribly, terribly sad, and confused, and angry over his nonsensical theory, angry at himself, maybe. It brought to mind my first months in the city, when, like every newcomer, I’d marveled at the gnomic wisdom of subway ramblers and proselytizing hobos, wondering why everyone else was ignoring them. What a smaller New York I inhabited now.

But the next voice on the recording was familiar, so familiar it might have been my own. He didn’t say his name, none of the speakers did. I couldn’t look at Laura. She didn’t say anything, just let it play. Of course he’d been having trouble sleeping. It was a weird thing to hear his voice without him. It sounded lower than in person, or maybe he’d been tired. Or drunk. Or trying to be discreet. “Something’s been weighing on my mind,” he was saying. “And I can’t sleep. So I come here and eat donuts and drink coffee.
I don’t know what my problem is! It’s like I’m on a mission to never sleep again.”

I could hear the recording Laura ask a question softly. Sam took a moment to answer. I pictured him sitting there at a booth, opening and closing his large hands the way he did sometimes. I didn’t even know what kind of donuts he liked. Harry only liked plain, but I was willing to bet Sam went for something like strawberry iced. I swallowed the urge to ask Laura what he’d ordered.

“There’s a woman I know.” As he continued, I stared at the screen’s EKG-like zigzags fluctuating with his vocal patterns and imagined it was a heart monitor tracing my own flipping, flapping muscle. “She’s turning my whole life inside out. I don’t know what she wants from me.” He paused. “That’s not quite true. Of course I do. I’m just afraid to accept, I guess, what I want from her.” He paused again, and we could hear the matter-of-fact clatter of the diner in the background, spoons and coffee cups and a to-go order being screamed from cashier to cook.
No! I said CORNED BEEF! Cut in HALF!
“I don’t even know if I like her that much, I guess, but who doesn’t want a woman throwing herself at you, you know?” At this I felt a terrible pang, as if I’d been stabbed in the stomach. Like so many relationships, ours had been largely theoretical, based on a neediness algorithm. “I mean, I know people do this kind of thing all the time. You hear about it.”

Every time he paused, the diner sounds welled up like water in a hole dug by a child on the beach. You could see how these things needed clever editing to make them listener-friendly. “But
I
don’t do this kind of thing. Except that I am. And—I don’t know—the more unlike-myself things I do, who is the self I’m thinking I’m unlike? Sorry. I’m not making sense. I hope my wife never hears this. She’ll definitely kill me.” He paused. “You know who I’m talking about.” The recording Laura said, almost imperceptibly, “I do.”

Laura clicked the recording off. “It goes on like that for a while.”

“Oh,” I said. I felt feverish. Another revelation: He was
boring
.

“I won’t include it. In the documentary. But I thought you might like to hear it.” She looked guilty. “I hope that didn’t make you feel worse.”

“I don’t know what would make me feel better right now, so no harm done,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted.

Emma’s voice crackled over the baby monitor. I was unused to the sound—we’d never needed such a contraption in our Rubik’s cube of an apartment—and jumped. “Mommmmmy,” she said sleepily. “Hello, Mommmmmyyyyyyy?”

“That’s how she wakes up?” I said, watching Laura close the laptop and stow it away. “She sounds so sweet. Betty always comes out of her naps like a bag lady who thinks someone’s touching her cart.”

Laura reached out to touch my hand. “You’re going to figure this all out, and it’s going to be okay. You’re a really good mom. And a really good person.”

“Oh, please,” I said automatically. I felt like I had when I was nine years old and my best friend informed me, awfully, that no one played with dolls anymore and that we had to stop. I didn’t want anything, no grown-up responsibilities and certainly no men at all, nothing but the small world of this friendship. “Please let’s change the subject,” I said, my eyes welling up. “I’m about to get all
Anne of Green Gables
‘bosom friend’ on you, and then we’ll throw up from the saccharine, and what a mess it’ll make.” Then I said, trying harder, “But, uh, thanks. I mean it. Thank you.” I stood up, my mind already shifting back to mother mode, tracking through the things I needed to pick up on my way home. “I should go. Give Emma a big hug for me.”

“Raissssinnnnns,” Emma was quietly requesting over the monitor. “Emma want some raissssinnsss.”

“Hey, guess what else,” Laura said before I reached the door. I turned around. “I’m pregnant.”

“What! Laura! Why didn’t you say that to begin with? Oh, congratulations! Oh, good, good, good.” I hugged her, sure I could hear the little minnow humming inside her, sure I’d known all along.