The Ten-Year Nap (40 page)

T
HE MOVING VAN
was parked on the street in front of The Rivermere at a quarter to eight one morning in early February, with various men in matching red T-shirts swarming it; briefly, there was no way to tell whether the furniture was going to go in or out, and then it became clear. Nearby in the driveway stood a young mother in her thirties in a down vest with a couple of small kids nearby, trying to direct the traffic of their belongings. “Moving out?” Amy asked automatically. The woman nodded. This was the widow in 14H, an ordinary, pale ash blonde with the beginnings of dark roots. What had Amy imagined: that the woman would be dressed in black all these months later, that she’d be wearing a mantilla, that she would wear her grief so openly that anyone could recognize it right away?

The other mothers in the building had been right; she hadn’t been able to stay here all that long and would probably now have to go somewhere smaller, less expensive, maybe a suburb or town, even briefly staying with a sister or parent. The widow in 14H stood in front of the building on moving day in the way that a husband usually would, trying to deal with the very busy, indifferent movers who spoke only Hebrew. “That box is upside down,” she told them, but no one seemed to hear her. “Joshua,” she called to a child. “Come away from there. You’ll see all your stuff when we get there.”

“Good luck,” Amy told her. “Wherever you go.” The woman smiled distractedly, nodded, then turned back to the deep opening of the enormous truck.

“That’s the one whose husband died, isn’t it?” asked Mason as he and Amy turned the corner onto the street.

“I think so.”

The building, she had heard one of the other mothers say in the elevator last week, now had its own defibrillator, which of course would make the rent go up even more, the mother had added.

“Maybe she’s getting remarried,” said Mason. “Like Jackson Pershing’s mother.”

“I doubt it, honey. It’s kind of soon.”

“You would never get remarried, right?” he asked. For him there was only Amy and Leo, forever and ever, bound into marriage and family and immortality. Then, when she said nothing, he said, a little less surely, and almost to himself, “I know you wouldn’t.”

A month had gone by since Amy had found Leo’s faked receipts, and still she had not told him she’d seen them. One day, a few weeks earlier, he had taken them from his desk. She’d let the silences between them lengthen more than usual, but it was unclear to her if he even knew this. Amy hadn’t been able to stand Greg Ramsey for his insistence upon grabbing everything in sight, when really, as Karen had implied once, men like Greg were just doing what they were meant to do. But Leo had never seemed to have that kind of arrogance; he was decent, a worker bee, devoted to his family, and yet in an accidental moment in the study she had seen evidence of another part of him that she’d somehow never noticed before.

Tonight, though, there would be oppressive, enforced togetherness for Amy and Leo at the Kenley Shuber dinner-dance at the Waldorf-Astoria. Once upon a time, when she and Leo were both lawyers at the firm, this had been an annual event she actually looked forward to, if only because they got to put on evening clothes and drink a better quality of wine than they were used to. Then, when they went home at the end of the evening, she and Leo would undress and lie in bed, deconstructing what the other lawyers had said and how everyone had looked. They would make fun of a few of the overtly sucking-up associates, and Amy would be critical of a couple of the wives who had seemed, from the vantage point of one’s late twenties, nice but dull.

Amy remembered finding herself in a brief conversation during the cocktail hour one year with Rita Pfarrer, the wife of one of the partners, and she recalled how Rita had talked at brutal length about a golf vacation she and her husband had taken to a castle in Ireland. Amy had looked past this wife to the other lawyers who stood tantalizingly in the distance. As soon as she could escape her she did, and she knocked back ice-cold Cosmopolitans in big martini glasses with her friend Lisa Silvestri, then stood with Lisa and Leo and the other associates she liked.

Rita Pfarrer was dead of colon cancer now, and Stewart Pfarrer had retired. The old guard was mostly gone, and the newer guard, which included senior salaried associates like Leo and his friend Corinna and some others, had begun its ascendancy. Lisa Silvestri had hung on, and unlike Leo had been made partner. She’d never married or had children; she’d made a series of choices, or work had claimed all her time, for at age forty she seemed on her own, occasionally calling Amy at the height of a weeknight, a school night, wanting to chat.

She was the first person Amy saw tonight when she and Leo entered the banquet room. There was Lisa, a tall, big-breasted, formidable woman in a black cocktail dress, standing with a few other partners and their spouses. Leo steered Amy over, and soon she was in the circle too, where she didn’t really want to be. Now the men and a few of the women leaned in to one another and talked shop. The dance floor was dark and polished, and the band played the same echoey, listless songs she had danced to in college, while the lawyers and their spouses located their name cards and sat down. The large round tables created a wedding atmosphere, and Amy found herself between two lawyers she had seen at Kenley Shuber functions before but had never spoken to. One, Ron Devenish, was in his forties, thickset, bald, and distracted, and the other, Mark Canterburg, was young and courtly, or at least he behaved that way during the appetizer course, a small tureen of butternut squash soup.

From all around the room came the gabble of conversation, the clanking of spoons against china, the tentative sucking-in of too-hot soup. Amy noticed a young woman sitting a few seats over—the wife of one of the youngest associates, who had a baby at home—and she looked neither overly unhappy nor uncomfortable to be here. This evening was for her husband, she was probably thinking. Oh yes, it was extraordinarily boring, perhaps one of the most boring ways possible for humans to spend an evening, but it wasn’t meant for
her,
it was meant for him. The young wife had nothing to prove, and so she took a long hit of her drink, pressed a waled curl of iced butter into her sourdough roll with a blunt knife, and then sat back calmly to drink and eat and look around the room. Far across the table Leo sat between one of the most senior partners, a man with wild, untended eyebrows, and his friend and colleague Corinna Berry, young, black, pretty, her body like a blade inside a night-blue sheath. Leo’s head was moving back and forth, as though each of the lawyers satisfied a different need in him. He turned to the old partner and appeared boyish and sonlike, and then he turned to Corinna Berry and just appeared happy. Even through the blockade of the floral centerpiece, with all its shoots and tendrils and oversized blooms, Amy could recognize her husband’s momentary pleasure.

But over here, on the other side of the flowers, Amy sat between two lawyers in a kind of funk. Devenish took it upon himself to speak to her first. After it was established that she was married to Leo, there was a brief, dull volley with a dead ball about the status of recent litigation, and how the Pittsburgh case—“the salmonella defense”—was going. Then, when it was revealed that Amy too used to work at Kenley Shuber, the lawyer regarded her with sudden mild interest.

“So where do you work now?” Devenish asked.

“Nowhere,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. His eyes dashed past her, then quickly dashed back, as if realizing he had been reflexively rude and trying to cover it. But she’d seen the eye dash, just as she had seen it many times before in the city. If you had a career here, then you were given a chance to stump for yourself. People were relieved when you were able to say that you did something. Without the cloak of a profession, there was no way to judge you and come to some hasty decision. If you said you did nothing, though, the person’s eyes might dash past you, over to someone who did something and who could be assessed and talked to with ease. Here and in L.A. and perhaps in London and wherever else there were important jobs and the feeling of a stirring economy, utility often beat quietly inside friendship, and you quickly assessed the way that the other person might be helpful to you, even at a distant point in the future.

Now, at dinner, Canterburg hadn’t heard Devenish’s question, and a moment later, after Devenish returned to the robotic eating of his dinner, Canterburg tried his own version. “So what do
you
do, Amy?” he asked heartily, as though it was an original question.

“I eat bonbons all day,” she said.

Canterburg looked at her for a long moment. “Oh my God,” he said. “I would do that in a minute.”

“You would?” She was confused by what he’d said; no one had ever expressed such a desire to her.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I am so burned out, you have no idea.”

“I was kidding.”

“I know,” he said. “But I wasn’t.” He smiled, and she, surprised, smiled too, and they started to settle into talking, but all of a sudden Amy looked up and saw that Corinna Berry had grabbed Leo’s hand and was taking him onto the dance floor. He seemed incapable of refusing her this, and he looked helplessly at Amy and shrugged.

She dispassionately watched Leo dance with this slender young woman; he was an inadequate dancer, and Amy had learned this on one of their earliest dates. His skill had never improved, and so dancing was not a part of their life together. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to try to get him to dance with her tonight; she didn’t want to stand close to him or talk much to him. But she saw that he didn’t look unhappy at all as he moved around on the floor like a bear with a young woman trapped in his paws. He looked awkward but content, he and Corinna leaning into each other, laughing and whispering. Lisa Silvestri was watching them too, and Amy knew her old friend must feel sorry for her.

By the time the plates of prime rib had been cleared away, Canterburg and Devenish had moved their chairs slightly back from the table and were talking only to each other behind her head. A woman from an adjacent table joined them. Amy listened a little, understanding virtually all of what they said, but realizing that, though sometimes the conversation seemed to gather itself up and become lively, there were many tired, end-of-workday, generic moments. The three corporate lawyers sitting together seemed intermittently engaged and bored by their own talk. Mostly they didn’t speak about the subtleties of the law, the beauty and specificity of legal language, the intricacy of a case that kept them up at night. They talked about the upcoming weekend retreat and about billing clients. The woman said she had become a billing
machine,
and that soon she was going to start billing her children for the time she spent playing Clue and Boggle with them.

Amy remembered going for the job interview at which she was asked about that legal software, Juxtapose BriefScan, and how hopeless she’d felt when it became clear that she knew nothing about it. She’d long lost her old debater’s bravado, too. Instead, like so many people she knew, she’d sought satisfaction around the edges, and time had slid past, and until recently she rarely had been idle and often in fact had been very busy. That life could be so
boring,
of course, she thought, not unlike the way a job could easily be boring. It seemed to her now, looking around this huge ballroom of corporate lawyers and their spouses, that work did not make you interesting; interesting work made you interesting. She realized only that she came down on the side of purpose.

That night in bed, stripped of their dress-up clothes, Amy and Leo lay on their backs in their pajamas, side by side. He belched slightly and touched his stomach. “That prime rib is just sitting there,” he said. “And I feel like I drank too much.”

“You could have told them not to refill your glass,” she said with mild disgust.

Leo was already turning away on his side. He might have been Devenish, she thought. Leo was indifferent to her too, by virtue of having a fixed place in the world, a good answer to the question of what he “did.” But he wasn’t superior. She might be limited, but he, in his small and maddening and ordinary way, was immoral. It was unplanned, but Amy put a finger on his shoulder and said, “I have to ask you something.”

Leo turned around in bed. She waited a second and then she just said it. “What was the story with those receipts?”

“What?” asked Leo.

“The receipts in the desk last month. The ones from St. Doe’s—the paperweight I bought my mother, which you called a ‘client gift,’ and I think the bar bill from the island, and a receipt from that Tuscan place we went to.”

“Amy,” he said, “you haven’t worked in a really long time, so you don’t know.”

“Tell me, then.”

“It’s not a big deal. And that client gift—it was a couple of hundred dollars.”

“Yes.
‘Two hundred tirty-tree
dollars.’”

“What?”

“Among everyone we know,” she said, “you were the moral one. At the Japanese restaurant on curriculum night,
you’re
the one who invites Geralynn Freund to join us. You just do these things. It’s you. But then you go and do
this,
and what am I supposed to think?”

“Everyone does what they need to,” said Leo. “I’m like the last one to know this. Otherwise, it’s just too hard to get by. We are so deeply in debt, and you want so many things.”

“
I
want?”

“Yes! You want! A weekend spa trip with Jill. Sending Mason to private school. And, of course, that ridiculous trip to St. Doe’s, where you spent thousands of dollars of our money. Including that paperweight.”

“You said the trip was fine. And we used mileage and credit card points,” said Amy.

“Mileage, yes. Credit card points, no. What did you think, this elite place that nobody’s supposed to know about takes credit card points?”