In which Angie compares her father’s taste in decor with her own in clothing, and in which she’s briefly—very briefly—reprieved
Angela opened her eyes as she did—pointlessly—every morning at a quarter to six. The first thing she saw was the smoked glass mirror of the wall opposite the black leather sofa she was sleeping on. She closed her eyes. She was already so depressed she knew she couldn’t get up, and the day wasn’t ten seconds old. Her eyes still closed, she collapsed from her side to her back. Well, that could count as her exercise for the day. She pulled the shamrock green afghan over her head. Good. More exercise. Now perhaps the day would go away.
Actually, she wasn’t sure what day this was: her anniversary had been on Tuesday, and it felt like she’d slept for days. Hopefully it was Sunday. If so, her mother would be home from her trip to some seminar or other. She’d once again watched TV till dawn and hadn’t the strength to leave the den to go upstairs. She was camped at her dad’s house, which was decorated in Middle-Aged Suburban Despair. But Angie had no place else to go. Her mother had recently moved into a new apartment and Angela hadn’t ever been there. She couldn’t even sit in her mother’s space and take comfort from her surroundings. So Angela had been holding on, waiting for Natalie Goldfarb, giver of comfort, speaker of wisecracks, to get back so she could pour all of this pain and disappointment into her mother’s ear.
But what good would that do? Angela asked herself now. Under the blanket—in the bra and panties she’d have to wear for two, or possibly three, days—Angela tried to avoid that thought. But she wasn’t a kid with a boo-boo. What good could her mother actually do? Sure, she’d hold Angela while she cried her lungs out, but that was about it. Somehow, till this minute, Angela had felt that her mother could fix things. Not just that she’d comfort her and sympathize, but that she’d actually give Angie the key, the way to stop the relentless pain she was in. No—more than that. She would make the pain disappear, fix the problem, and make it go away. “Oh. The first anniversary I-cheated-on-you announcement. Sure. Daddy did it, too. You just …”
But there was no just. Lying there, feeling as dead and lank as her own hair felt now, Angie realized that what she wanted, more than anything, was to be back with Reid. Back with him, lying in their bed in the bright clean bedroom they had furnished together. She wanted his muscled arm around her, not her mom’s. She wanted to open her eyes and see the Massachusetts light of early morning shining, but softened by the white net of the curtains, falling onto the bare bedroom floor. She felt such a tug of homesickness and longing for all she’d left up north that she actually opened her eyes and groaned. Now there was only the empty Shreve, Crump & Lowe box. She reached out for it and nestled it against her chest. Instead of her white bedroom pillows, she had a lumpy leather throw cushion under her head. Instead of her fluffy quilt, she had this old afghan. Instead of a skylight over her bed she had a ceiling repulsively spackled in figure eights, topped off by a light fixture from hell. Angie sat up, sick and dizzy. Who had done her father’s decorating? That chandelier had to have been bought from a bad Italian restaurant’s second-best dining room.
Angela had never lived her life with a man at the center of it. Since before high school she’d had a good group of girlfriends. In college they’d dispersed, but she’d made new friends and kept them, adding more in law school. She had always made time to see movies, and to Rollerblade, and to consistently volunteer for Meals-On-Wheels. She’d been delivering to some of the same people for years. It wasn’t as if she’d read The Rules and built her life around catching some man. She’d gone to Thailand with her girlfriend Samantha and walked part of the Appalachian Trail with pals from school. So she wasn’t just going to fall apart like some pathetic fool. Reid was not her entire life. At least that’s what she told herself. So how come she felt so bad?
Something moving past the window caught her eye. It was still fairly dark, but two women were trudging by together, both wrapped up against the cold. One had a knitted cap almost covering her blond hair, but the other turned toward her companion—and in the direction of Angie’s window—and Angela was surprised to see the woman was black. Now that was a sight you wouldn’t see in Marblehead. The two women were already past the window and making the turn following the curve of the street. As they disappeared from view, Angie felt a pang of loss. What had happened to all her friends? Scattered across the country, working, married. Out of touch. It was ridiculous, but she wished she could bring them all together, like in a movie. Reality Bites. Well, she’d call her friend Lisa. But it was so early. She’d give Lisa a break.
Of course, she had called Lisa already. Several times last night, for an hour at a time. Wait till her dad got the bill! Angie missed her cellie, but the phone was in her purse, along with everything else. Maybe Lisa could get her wallet for her.
Lisa was an attorney who worked with her up in Needham. When Angela had first met her she’d been repelled by Lisa’s tall, blond perfection and her Harvard Law background. Lisa was two years older, but acted as if it was two decades. Then, after working together, Angela had gotten over her prejudice because Lisa had been so friendly.
After a while, they had lunched together almost every day and Lisa regaled her with every horrible date she’d suffered through in the last eight months. Now it was payback time, and Lisa had been counseling her to keep away from the phone and to stick with her resolve not to speak to Reid. Angie had arranged for a leave of absence and Lisa was handling some of her work. She was a good friend.
She thought about taking a shower. Another day or two and her hair would go Rastafarian, but she didn’t care. God, she hadn’t just lost a husband, she’d lost her hairdresser! Who could do her unmanageable hair like Todd?
She was too tired to stand, and her body felt too limp to be safe in a bathtub. Then again, the idea of rolling under a tub full of water and dying was not an altogether unattractive one. Except for the part about breathing the water in. That would hurt like a bastard. She hated to get water up her nose. If only her father had sleeping pills—lots of them and the good kind, the kind that killed you. None of that over-the-counter Sominex stuff that gave you diarrhea. The only useful thing she’d found in Tony’s medicine cabinet was a half-empty bottle of Nyquil. Hey, Angie told herself, she should stop being so negative—the bottle was half full. Or had been till she got a hold of it.
Angela bent over and reached for her sweatpants—well, they were her father’s sweatpants—and slipped into them. As she pulled the waistband up over her legs and past her thighs she realized those were the thighs that Reid had just stroked the night before. A hot tear, and then another, escaped from under her right eyelid and immediately coursed down her cheek and into the crease beside her nose. She hated Reid. She hated him touching her thighs, and then she wondered who else’s thigh he had been touching. What had he said? An older woman? Someone at work. Could it be Jan Mullins, the only woman partner at Andover Putnam? No. She was a fifty-two-year-old wrinkle bunny. One of the drab paralegals? Unthinkable. Maybe a secretary? Oh, who had he touched, who had he kissed? Had he told her he loved her?
The thought made her so angry that she had enough energy to stand and pick up the Rangers sweatshirt from the floor beside the sofa and slip into it. Her dad, unlike most Italian-Americans, didn’t care about baseball but adored hockey. He’d taken her to dozens of games. This sweatshirt might be from one of those father-daughter trips.
Well, she’d make him important in her life again. She and Tony. And she’d get a pro bono job, something with kids or old people, not just the usually guilty scum at Legal Aid. She’d bust her butt, and she’d … Angela gave up. She’d pull herself together and join Mother Teresa’s order tomorrow.
She started to weave her way through the house to the bathroom. As she passed the living room she couldn’t help but wonder what frame of mind her father had been in when he furnished his house. The chairs were overstuffed and covered in blue velvet. The sofa was leather and one of those modern Italian shapes that looked like a surreal mountain range. Angie got a chill at the thought of having to continually sit on the leather furniture and touch it with her bare skin.
After his divorce from his second wife—a marriage that had been shorter than a normal menstrual cycle—her father had given up on the Park Avenue life he’d briefly attempted and moved to the suburbs. He’d dated a bunch of suburban women but complained that they bored him. So he worked compulsively, and watched a lot of sports on TV. It must be a work day, Angie realized, because if it was Saturday he’d be here, probably sitting on that cheesy sofa. What a life.
It was frightening to realize that it could become her life, too. She hadn’t been here long, but already she was feeling Middle-Aged Suburban Despair. And not just because of the horrible decor. Why was it, she wondered, that after a divorce men decorated so badly while women let their wardrobes go to hell? It was as if each gender blew off an area of good taste in a single legal instant. How long would it be before she was dressing in earth-tone stretch-waist pants and a leatherette jacket, coordinating perfectly with this room? Fuck joining Mother Teresa’s. Her life had ended.
Angela shivered, though the sweatshirt was warm. Yes, her life had ended. There had been the childhood phase, the preteen years, the high school and college coed period, law school, and the brief marriage. Now she would begin the Miss Haversham of Westchester segment, a segment that might—if she was as healthy as her Nana—last for fifty years. She looked down at the Ranger sweatshirt and wondered if it would also last that long. Not as dramatic as a wedding gown, but more practical, she thought. Now all she needed was a rosary.
She fell onto the couch and back asleep, woke long enough to catch the end of the Today show, and then fell asleep yet again. It was almost eleven when she next opened her eyes. It was odd: she had a morbid need to check the time. No place to go, nothing to do. Still, the idea that almost five hours had drifted by since she first woke up frightened her. When the phone rang, she jumped. Should she answer? It could be her dad, who checked in. She picked up and was relieved when Lisa’s voice greeted her.
“Hey, Angie,” she said. “How are you faring?”
Only Lisa would use the word faring. You had to be born in Back Bay Boston to get away with that. “Well, I’ll put it to you this way,” Angie told her friend. “If I were back in first grade right now, Mrs. Rickman would give me an ‘unsatisfactory’ for attitude.” Angie paused. “I really hurt. I miss Reid.”
“Let me tell you what your attitude should be,” Lisa said. “You should be furious and hurt and unforgiving. What Reid did means he doesn’t love you. He probably never did. You were his pet ethnic. Believe me, I know all about it. A little rebellion for the family. You don’t need that. You don’t need to do anything except move on.”
“I know, I know,” Angie agreed. “I’m such a fool. Of course I know it, but I have the weirdest feeling. I have the feeling I just want to hear his voice to ask him one more time whether he really meant to do it.”
“He meant it,” Lisa said, her voice full of certainty and controlled anger. “Look, it was unbelievable the way he did it, and unforgivable in the way he told you.”
Angie was about to agree when the doorbell rang. She started. “Hey, Lisa. Someone’s at the door. I gotta go.”
She hung up and glanced nervously at the front of the house. What was this? Nobody came to a suburban Westchester door—not in this section of Westchester—uninvited in the middle of a weekday morning. Who the hell could it be? Avon ladies? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Door-to-door electrologists? Whoever it was, Angie decided she wasn’t going to respond, until she peeked out the hall window and saw the florist’s truck. Then she flew to the door, threw it open, and had grabbed the two dozen white roses and snatched the note from the cellophane in less than thirty seconds.
It was from Reid! Obviously, it wasn’t in his handwriting, but he had dictated the words. I love you. Don’t punish me for telling the truth. Forgive me, Reid. The fragrance of the roses was faint but sweet. Oh God! He loved her. He’d fucked up—big time—but he loved her. One act of generosity on her part could free her and Reid from this pain. With one stroke, her conversations with her father and Lisa were stripped from her mind.
Yes. Yes! She would forgive Reid. What he had done was horrible, unforgivable, but she would forgive him. She was hot-tempered, like her father and mother. But she’d be big enough to do it. He had learned his lesson. Angie would look at this horror, this incident, as a last fling. Oh, she’d grant that most last flings came before the wedding, but Reid had always been a little slow emotionally. You couldn’t completely blame him. Look at his parents. He would promise to never do it again, he would shower her with more Shreve, Crump & Lowe boxes and they’d go back to their big white bed. She couldn’t restrain a shudder. Well, maybe they wouldn’t go right back to it, Angie realized. Maybe there would be some healing time necessary.
Then, in a single instant, the image of Reid alone, miserable, lying curled in a fetal position on their big white bed came to her. Guilty. Despairing. It had taken him this long to track her down. He had been frightened, then remorseful. She knew that without her he was lost. He needed her energy, her drive, her warmth.
Clutching his card to her Ranger sweatshirt, Angie ran to the phone and punched in their number. She heard the first ring and knew the stretch, the exact arc of his beautiful back as he reached for the phone. She could perfectly imagine that four hundred miles away in Marblehead, his hand was reaching across the sheets to the receiver. He was there, she knew it, too desolate, too sick, to go to work. He had been lying there in a painful pool of guilt and regret worse than her own misery. Because he did love her. Despite his cold parents, despite their disapproval, despite his own limitations, he loved her. The card in her hand said so, and Angie knew it deep in her gut.
When the phone was lifted from the receiver on the second ring Angie smiled in vindication and waited to hear his voice, a voice as deep and clear as the sea off the Marblehead coast.
“Hello,” a high-pitched woman’s voice said in a breathy exhalation. Angie nearly dropped the phone. “Hello?” the voice said again, this time in a questioning tone.
Angie pulled her hand from the receiver as if it were on fire. She dropped it into its cradle. “Oh my God,” she said aloud. “Oh my God.”
She’d called her house. Who had answered? Not a relative or an in-law. She didn’t have any sisters and neither did Reid. The voice certainly wasn’t his mother’s. What is going on? Angie looked down at the phone. She must have misdialed. She’d misdialed or, worse, Reid had already had the phone disconnected. Somebody new had their phone number. It must be one or the other. Angela snatched the receiver up and punched in their old number, but much more carefully this time. Had she remembered to dial the area code? Maybe she hadn’t and it had been a Westchester call.
The phone rang and Angie held her breath. She pictured Reid again, but this time the picture was a little … well, mistier. This time, again on the second ring, the phone was lifted and again the soprano voice said, “Hello.”
It wasn’t a wrong number. Reid had obviously changed numbers. But did they reassign phones so quickly? She should inquire. But her voice box was paralyzed. Maybe it was a cleaning lady. Yes. That was it. Or a stranger making a delivery or reading the meter. It could happen, she told herself. She looked down at the florist’s card she was still clutching to her chest.
“Hello?” the soprano said again. “Hello. Reid? Is that you?”
Since it wasn’t, Angela hung up the phone.