The Real Liddy James (3 page)

“Would you like to marry again?” I ask her as we sit in the back of the car.

“Who would risk it?” she replies, laughing. “Anyway, it's not on my radar at the moment. I am a single mother of two children, and the father of my younger son is not in our lives, so I don't have a minute of spare time.
Literally
.” Before I can ask another question, she says firmly, “Cal was very wanted but not planned,” and I know better than to pursue the subject.

The snow is falling heavily now and James opens her bag and pulls out a light-as-a-feather I Pezzi Dipinti shawl, which she wraps elegantly around her neck. “You must have read the interview with President Obama when he said he had to limit the number of decisions he had to make in one day, so his suits are all the same color. I share his philosophy. My capsule wardrobe is black and white—although every season I buy one key piece, like this dress, in a color—but the bottom line is, in my life I don't want to think too much about anything I don't have to.”

I am struck by how rarely one meets a woman so
bien dans sa peau
, a woman at the top of her profession, who so successfully juggles a complicated domestic situation with the extraordinary demands of her career. As someone who struggles most mornings to run a brush through her
hair before the school run, I wonder: What is the secret to her superproductive existence?

“My irreplaceable nanny, Lucia, no personal life, and working late at night!” She laughs before continuing. “I accept I can't do everything and I don't try. I won't ever be one of those frazzled women in dirty sweatpants, making brownies at midnight for a bake sale. I like order, because I am a Virgo. And I guess I don't do guilt.”

Rose Donato had a secret that made her happier than other women: she was an atheist who knew miracles could happen. This unshakable belief was born from the formative experience of her childhood, when her older brother Michael had fallen headfirst off a rope ladder, and in the six seconds he lay crumpled and motionless on the playground tarmac, her mother had fallen to her knees for the brief moments before he blinked awake again. Afterward Rose, aged seven, turned to her mother and asked what she had been doing. “I prayed for a miracle,” her mother said, before running off to holler at Michael, who was now balancing one-legged on top of a slide.

Rose was an unusually thoughtful and wise child, so once she knew that such things could happen, she decided to harness the power. She imagined that a person might be allotted only so many miracles in one lifetime, but in teenage desperation she squandered two in rapid succession; first, when she prayed that the line
of pimples that studded her forehead like red pushpins would disappear (which they did, by magic, two weeks later), and second, when she
had
to get two tickets to the Jacksons Victory Tour, and in the line for returns a kindly woman gave her the front-row seats her son was about to throw away. She would regret this when, aged thirty-two, at a time when she was not so secretly obsessing about rings and reproduction, Frank Pearson, who had been her room- and bedmate for ten years, casually left her for a woman he had met on the 6 train. The miracle of her rent-controlled apartment in the West Village and the senior lectureship she loved seemed like nothing after this, and when, three years later, she fell irrevocably in love at the first sight of Peter James, newly appointed professor of English and American literature, only to then meet his wife, the incomparable Liddy, she became convinced that she had used up her allocation.

For five years she and Peter worked side by side, sharing milk cartons and ideas on semiotic literary criticism, as Rose discreetly avoided promotion and other suitable men. She reread
Great Expectations
and cherished her unrequited passion, until one day Peter appeared in the common room, gray-faced from sleeplessness, and told her that he and Liddy had separated. Rose reached out her right hand to touch his, the first time she had dared to be so intimate, and he looked at her as if for the very first time.

She was forty years old that day; it took a year for him to want her, and so, when she moved into the town house in Carroll Gardens with the fig tree in the garden, and after three miscarriages in rapid succession, she abandoned her dream of a child and accepted it would be just the two of them. And soon it did not
matter, at last she had him, it was the
enough
miracle—and of course there was his child too, Matty, whom she had first met as a tall and winning seven-year-old boy, and whom she had decided to love as if he were her own. And while their relationship had never become the one she had fantasized about, she dutifully cooked and cleaned and cared for him, which, from her outsider's perspective, seemed at least ninety percent of what parenting was really about.

“What are you reading?” said Peter. It was a bright February morning and he had walked into the kitchen to kiss the top of her head, but stopped at the sight of her, her hand leaning against her cheek, her soft beauty framed in the winter light of the French windows as if she were posing for Vermeer. “You look completely absorbed.”

Rose gulped. She had woken early and, unable to lie still, had half dressed and crept down the stairs, kidding herself she would get a head start on a paper about Shakespeare's
Coriolanus.
But in fact, after an hour or so, she had stopped, too eager to read the Style section of the
Times
, which she had bought yesterday evening and had not yet had a moment alone to peruse. Cup of coffee in hand, Rose had crept across the room to the innocuous brown bag, slung across a wooden chair, whose contents seemed to be summoning her with an insistent
read me,
read me
until she gave in and pulled the newspaper out, although as she did this she knew she should have waited until the apartment was empty. Liddy James, one of
New York
magazine's top ten divorce attorneys, stared out at her from the front page, sitting, legs crossed, on a desk, hands by her sides, her face tilted up in a smile just the right edge of rictus but still ever-so-slightly fake. Rose began to
read in case there was anything she needed to know about, and it had indeed been so absorbing, she had not heard Peter's arrival, his socked footsteps on the stairs, the thump of his elbow against the warped wood of the kitchen door they had resolved to fix three years ago.

She stood up, attempting to stuff the newspaper nonchalantly into the table drawer. It was no good. She was being furtive and he knew it.

“What is it?” he said, walking toward her, curious now. Rose was the least furtive person in his acquaintance and she could never not tell the truth, even when she probably should.

“It's Liddy's article in the
Times
yesterday. D'you remember? She warned us about it before Christmas.”

Peter reminded himself that his determination to ignore Liddy's self-promoting interviews (which inevitably portrayed a version of their marriage designed to fit whatever she was selling) had served him well in the past, and as she had recently reminded him with typical candor, the royalties from her book were paying Matty's school fees and might even cover college. But there was something in Rose's face this morning, a different brushstroke across her forehead.

“What did she say?” he asked as he sat down, resolutely pouring his cereal and forgetting to kiss the top of her head.

“Oh, more or less the usual.” Rose paused. “She compares herself to Obama. . . .”

Peter groaned and rolled his eyes, anticipating what humorous aperçus his colleagues might be practicing on their way to work.

“And apparently she was a terrible wife.”

Peter looked up.
“Is that all?”

Rose shook her head. “And she says she broke your heart.”

He was silent in an unusual way, so Rose felt the need to keep talking. “I don't know why she has to do this.”

“Yes, you do. Because it makes her feel powerful. It's a good line, a good story, and people want to read it. People like you, I might add. Where's Matty?” Sudden anger had consumed his appetite. “It's quarter of eight. I can't be late this morning.
Matty! Get down here. Now!
” And he marched into the hallway.

Rose hoped Matty was dressed. Though Peter might say his sudden bad mood was all her fault, it was really Liddy's yet again, and when confronted with his son, the living, breathing embodiment of Liddy, down to the shape of his eyes and the music of his rare laugh, you didn't have to be a therapist to guess what might happen.

“You go, then,” Rose said, calling after him. “I'll walk with Matty. It's a beautiful morning. And I've got an appointment at the doctor's at nine thirty.”

Peter picked up his bag and coat and left with a sharp double bang of the front door. Rose sighed and stood up, wincing slightly as her knee twinged, and hauled it up the stairs, where she knocked on Matty's door.

“It's time to get up, Matty,” she called.

“No!”
came the muffled shout from inside the room, so she opened the door, braving the intense odor of growing boy and stale shoes, and switched the light on, cruelly pulling the duvet off him with a flourish.

“Up! Now!”
she barked, marveling at how their interactions,
once so fluid and fulsome, were now reduced to words of one syllable. Liddy had remarked on the phone to her just last week that it seemed Matty had been invaded by an alien body snatcher who had only one expression, sullen, and only one word of English,
no
, and while Rose laughed politely, she wished Liddy and Peter would talk about it. She saw how they both mourned the passing of their perfect little boy and how hard they found this teenage stranger, full of new hairs and hormones, to deal with. By contrast, Rose had come to learn that her ability not to lose her temper with Matty might be directly to do with her not having given birth to him. She did not take his outbursts personally because she did not see his behavior as any reflection on her own.

“C'mon! Hurry! I packed your school bag, I charged your phone. Don't forget to tell Miss Walsh you need an afternoon slot for your piano lesson next week, and you've lost your library book so I've stuck twenty dollars in your jacket pocket to cover it.”

He shook his head and grunted something unintelligible before picking the duvet up off the floor, rolling onto his side, and curling into a ball underneath it.

“Matty!” she said, exasperated.

“Can Dylan and Jack come over tonight?” came his muffled response.

“Yes, if their parents text me.
You have to get up now!
”

Suddenly, from downstairs, the front door swung open.

“Rose!”

At his father's voice, Matty leapt out of bed, picked his clothes off the floor, and hurried into the bathroom, not quite so teenage
yet as to brave paternal wrath first thing. Rose came down the stairs once more. Peter was standing in the doorway, hangdog. Rose smiled.

“You didn't have to come back,” she said.

“I wanted to say I'm sorry.”

“No. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have been reading it. It was insensitive—”

“I can't believe she said that. It's so
personal
. And in the
Times . . .”

But it was the truth and they both knew it. They just wanted it unsaid. Liddy had not just blithely broken Peter's heart, she had shattered it; but Rose had spent a year picking up the tiny pieces so the two of them could stick it back together.

“She makes me look like a
shmuck. . . .”

“She thinks I'm wonderful,” Rose dared, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Something must have happened,” said Peter. “It doesn't sound like her.”

“What are you talking about?” said Matty from the bathroom door, a toothbrush sticking out the side of his white frothy mouth.

“Your mother gave an interview that upset me and I overreacted,” Peter announced. Rose smiled forgivingly and hoped Matty would appreciate what a fine example of taking responsibility for negative emotions his father was giving him.

“Is it the ‘broke your heart' thing? Mom told me about that. She said she was sorry. She was in a funny mood that day and she probably made a complicated situation look simple.”

He went back to the sink. This was followed by the exuberant gargling and spitting noises he had been told innumerable times to avoid, but Rose and Peter were too intrigued by his comment to admonish him.

“I love you,” said Rose to Peter. “Go, or you'll be late.”

In the background now, the sound of Matty pissing, like a horse onto a metal gate.

“Close the door, for Chrissake!”
shouted Peter, then whispered, “How do you put up with us, Rose? And why are you seeing the doctor?” He pulled her close. His hand rested gently on her hip.

“Annual physical. My age. My knee.”

“Is it the change of life, Rosey?” said Matty, emerging, a slick of hair gel plastering his fringe to his forehead. “Melinda's mom's having that and she's turned into a monster.”