Through Thick and Thin (6 page)

“I don’t think,” she says, meeting his gaze, a gaze she thinks she’ll try to remember as steely, “I don’t think
ambivalent
is the exact best word.”

And he doesn’t seem compelled to argue, or at least if he is compelled, he doesn’t. He only nods and he hails her a cab and they say goodbye really quickly like they’ll see each other two, three weeks from now, the next time work just happens to bring him up to New York. Saint Patrick’s Day maybe.

It doesn’t take long at all to get home; it seems actually like it has taken a lot less time than it usually takes to get all the way up, from all the way down in Tribeca. Meredith nods at her doorman, heads up twelve floors in the nondescript elevator, to her nondescript floor. She turns the key in her door, and once she’s inside she smells her hair conditioner, Frederic Fekkai Technician Conditioner for Dry, Damaged, Color-Treated Hair. Her hair isn’t any of these, but she really likes the smell. And the smell, it has a way of lingering in her apartment after she’s washed her hair and she likes that, too. She’d washed her hair tonight, wanting to be sure it looked nice for Bouley, for Josh, right before she left.

Before she even takes her coat off, she fishes her iPod out of her bag, and puts it in its Bose iPod dock. She hits
Play,
and the song she’s been listening to a lot lately, the Perishers’ “Trouble Sleeping,” starts to play.

“I’m having trouble sleeping,” fills the room, and Meredith thinks how, lately, she really has. She listens to a line or two more, just standing there, still in her coat, her keys still in her hand, her eyes on her cuticles, until the line when the Perishers implore whomever it is they are singing to, to leave. She slowly takes off her coat and lays it over the back of her couch: purple velvet, sectional, from the 1960s she thinks, stunning.

For a long time after Josh had left she’d recorded every rerun of
The West Wing
on the Bravo channel—they aired all the time—and she would watch an episode each night before she went to sleep and it was because she missed him, because she’d always felt that on his better days, Josh reminded her of Josh Lyman, White House deputy chief of staff. Not Bradley Whit-ford, the actor who played him, but actual Josh Lyman, as if he really existed, as if he were indeed an actual man. And for perhaps even longer, she thought that it wasn’t really going to happen this way, that really, it couldn’t and that in the end it would all work out. She’d move to Philadelphia, too, and they’d live in a townhouse, and she’d review restaurants there, because there were so many good restaurants in Philadelphia, some of the all-time great ones, even. Le Bec Fin so often popped into her mind.

Meredith turns and heads into her room. She gets undressed in the dark, gets her pajamas from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, and brushes her teeth, quickly, unconscientiously, in the dark, too. She splashes water on her face, and feels a tiny twinge, because she knows she’s just asking for a breakout by not fully washing off her makeup, but she doesn’t want the light on, and she thinks maybe she’s just too tired. And she’s too aware right now that no matter how busy you are, no matter how completely you fill up every day, you can’t fill it all up. There’s always time left at the end of it to feel lonely.

She pulls back her covers, and gets under them. She reminds herself that in the end, what actually happened was that
The West Wing
got canceled, and Le Bec Fin lost its fifth star.

Stephanie is sitting in their office, on her side of their desk. “Our desk” is what they called it. And before that, when they first saw the white brick house on Linwood Avenue, with the beautiful front porch and the open downstairs, they’d referred to the small room in the front as “our office.” “This room, here,” they said smiling, standing in its doorway, “it can be our office.” When they’d found the great partners’ desk at an estate auction in Far Hills, they said, “Look at this fantastic desk, we should get it for our office.” And when their partners desk arrived, at their new house, they’d placed it in their office, right under the window with two matching chairs from Pottery Barn on either side. They added their laptops, their papers, their things.

Even after Stephanie had left her job in PR and no longer had any work to bring home, even after Aubrey carried his laptop down to his workroom, where it remained, with all his papers and God knows what else, on what was turning out to be a permanent basis, Stephanie had continued to think of it as “our desk.” Even now that it is only her laptop, her papers, her things, even now that his side of the partners’ desk looks extremely empty, glaringly so, especially in the mornings when the sun glints across its surface like a spotlight, she still calls the desk “our desk.” She still calls the office “our office.” She thinks that even if it is not reality-based, it is important to continue to call them that. She thinks that maybe somehow it could help.

Stephanie startles slightly, snaps back to attention as she hears the familiar rustling through the baby monitor, the one that precedes Ivy’s waking up. Through the monitor, Stephanie can see Ivy stirring. A fist slides into view over her little face and is just as quickly gone. Ivy. She is so beautiful, even through the baby monitor that lends a green pallor to her skin. The convex angle of the baby monitor makes Ivy look as if she were looking through a peephole, the kinds they have in the doors of apartments, as if Ivy is just a guest visiting, coming to the door of the apartment she and Aubrey had on Seventy-third Street between Columbus and Central Park West. Aubrey loved that apartment, because of the outdoor space (he had a grill) and the close proximity to the park.

And you would think, wouldn’t you, that if those were the things that were among his favorite things about their apartment, that he’d be so happy here in New Jersey. They still have a grill. And what are the suburbs about really other than outdoor space? Are they not just one great land of proximity to the park? But Aubrey is not happy in New Jersey. She wonders if he would have been different, less catatonic, less subterranean, less completely changed, had they moved instead to Connecticut.

Ivy’s fist is back on the baby monitor’s screen. She watches as it waves in the air, side to side like maybe Ivy thinks she’s at a rock concert, the rock concert of her mobile. She looks through the motion of her daughter’s fist at her peephole face, and thinks in a way that’s what happened; Ivy, the promise of Ivy, stopped by. Her promise rang the doorbell of their New York City apartment and they decided it was time to go.

The phone rings, and Stephanie looks at it. She thinks that if she doesn’t answer it, then whoever it is—most likely some New Mommy Group person calling to announce that
her
six-month-old can recite the alphabet—will go away. Or it’s Aubrey calling to monotonously personify disappointment and disillusionment, “Hey, Steph. I’m working late again tonight. I have a client meeting tonight. Uh, actually, it’s not really either of those things, it’s uh, actually, something else that neither of us will acknowledge and maybe if we keep refusing to acknowledge it, then by virtue of that, it’ll all go away. Okay?”

She wonders if it’s entirely possible that she simply no longer has the energy left in her reserves to participate in either of those conversations, regardless of how minimal her participation would actually have to be. She wonders when it was that she stopped applying her Approach Everything With a Positive Attitude philosophy to Aubrey. She thinks it might have been a while ago now. She wills the phone to stop ringing, wills the entire piece of plastic and battery and antenna to magically disappear, go away. Except that she never used to be the kind of person to not want to pick up the phone. And it could be Meredith calling to tell her about last night; she wants to talk to her.

“Hello?”

“Hey.” It’s Meredith, sounding annoyed, though it’s impossible to discern if that’s because of last night with Josh or, rather, because of Meredith’s irrational peevishness about everyone picking up the phone on the first ring.

“How’d it go?” Stephanie asks, because that’s the most important, that’s more important than pointing out, as she sometimes would like to do, that getting annoyed about listening to a ringing phone, about other people’s flip-flop straps being flipped (yes, Meredith had gotten annoyed over this once) is not going to make the world a better place, is not going to do anything actually, other than make her life a bit harder than it really needs to be.

“Okay, just tell me, have you ever once thought of me as not ambitious?” Meredith asks.
Josh
. It’s not ringing phones this time, or even flip-flops, it’s Josh. “I mean, you remember why he broke up with me, right? You remember what he said?” There’s a spark to the question, a flare, and by the light of the flare Stephanie can see clearly that it’s not really the Josh of last night, the one who came up from Philadelphia to take Meredith to dinner at Bouley, but the one who left her.

“Yes,” Stephanie says, of course she remembers why. And even though she says she remembers, Meredith repeats it anyway.

“He broke up with me because I wasn’t smart enough, or ambitious enough, or successful enough,” Meredith says a bit blankly, almost as if she’s reciting it. Stephanie doesn’t try to stop her; she imagines in some way it might help. Though it does strike Stephanie as a bit odd that these are the reasons she’s repeating, because of all the reasons that Josh gave Meredith, three years ago, before he went to Philadelphia, the last one, the only one she isn’t saying, was the only one that was true.

“I mean,” she continues, “I have to say I’m among the more ambitious people I know.”

“You are, Meres. You always have been,” Stephanie agrees. She smiles to herself, remembering a scene from their childhood; one that’s always there in her memory, easily accessible, continually replayed. “Remember how excited you used to get whenever anyone would ask you what you wanted to be when you grew up?”

“I do. Exactly,” Meredith says defiantly, and Stephanie can see it again, so clearly: a seven- or eight-year-old Meres. Whenever anyone would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would always jump up and clap her hands and announce loudly, “I want to be an astronaut! A writer! An actress! A chef! A famous chef! I want to be famous!” The job titles would occasionally change, astronaut was a staple, as was chef, but doctor made an appearance sometimes, too; the President of the United States popped up on occasion, as did scientist, rock star, and Olivia Newton-John. It was always something Meredith felt was very important. Meredith was always excited to be something very important; she always couldn’t wait.

“Remember,” Stephanie says, “you always said chef, and you always said writer, and look at you now.”

“Yeah, but I’m not an astronaut. Or Olivia Newton-John,” Meredith says, but she sounds happier, and Stephanie’s pleased to hear that. “And what would you always say?” Meredith asks, joining in, “you wanted to be an ice-skater, right?”

“Hmm, yeah, I think it was that,” Stephanie says nonchalantly. She thinks of herself as a child of eight or nine, when the grown-ups would look at her and ask her that same question. “And, Stephanie, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And with Stephanie, there wouldn’t ever be the great flurry of jumping and clapping that always accompanied Meredith’s answer. Stephanie would generally stay seated and smile a bit shyly, and her answer would always be one of two things. More frequently, Stephanie would say, “I want to be an ice-skater,” and she really did believe that to be true. But every now and then, if she thought someone was really paying attention, if she thought someone really wanted to know the truth, she would look up and tell them, quite seriously, “I want to be happy.”

“But, Steph?” Meredith asks her.

“Yeah?”

“You remember he also broke up with me because I was fat?”

“I remember,” she says. As unkind and off-base as the other things he said had been, they just didn’t make sense. But the other thing, that Meres was fat, she wondered for a long time how Josh could have said that. It wasn’t really fair, she’d thought, because it wasn’t as if Meredith were any fatter when they broke up than when they had met. Which she thinks in a way made it so much worse.

“Okay, see, what I’ve been mostly thinking about,” Meredith begins “is that if I’m going to be thirty-five and single, then that’s fine. I can handle that. It can be because I haven’t met the right person, it can be because I’m not ever going to meet the right person—”

“Meres, you’re going to meet—”

“No wait, listen. It can be for all sorts of reasons, it can be for no reasons, it can just be. But it can’t be because I’m fat.”

“Okay, okay,” Stephanie says, agreeing, reassuring.

Meredith says, “Okay,” too.

“And, Meres?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not thirty-five and single, you’re thirty-three.”

“You know I like to plan ahead,” Meredith says, and Stephanie laughs, she knows that all too well.

“So I guess you’re not taking him back?” Stephanie says, even though the answer is obvious, and she thinks the obvious answer is the good one. She wants Meres to be happy and she’d like it if Meres could be happy with someone, but Josh is not the guy. And being with the wrong guy isn’t good. Nor, she thinks, is being with the right guy who later turns out to be wrong. She tries not to linger on that.

“No,” Meredith says, “I’m not.”

“Good,” Stephanie says, “And, you know, if you think of all the great breakups, I don’t think they ever end with anyone getting taken back. I just don’t. I mean would Jennifer have taken Brad back? What with Angelina and Maddox and Zahara and Shiloh Nouvel and now Pax Thien? And beautiful Brad carrying their baby bottles around in his jeans for all the world, or at least all the world that reads
US Weekly
, to see?”

“No,” Meredith says.