Making It, page 16
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend
—Trident
Belying his name, Clay is always in motion—jerking his head to fling hair away from his face; drumming his fingers on tables at meetings; launching pushpins into the air until they implant on acoustic tiles in ceilings; constantly calling attention to his diminutive stature—which, Audrey theorizes, attracts no attention when he is at rest.
Here he comes, bobbing on the balls of his feet, rounding a corner of the elevator bank, pausing abruptly as he encounters Audrey, who has chosen this moment to want an elevator too. His brow twitches with the force of the mental exertion required to find an excuse to avoid her.
Seeing his approach, Audrey tightens her grip on the strap of her Kate Spade bag, as if pulling on a line that could save her from him. The prospect of sharing an elevator with Clay (so many floors!) adds to the maelstrom churning within her—the indignity of trying to manage those who refuse to be managed; the frustration of doing work that requires the collaboration of disparate minds; the misogyny embedded in the very walls of the workplace; that stupid, stupid kiss with Kabal that may have incurred consequences beyond her remorse. She rears her tongue to feel it again: hard and unyielding and indisputable. But she smooths her expression to conceal this commotion.
“Surprised you have time for the outside world, what with all the work you guys have to do,” she says, appropriating the banter of a good-natured boss prevailing gently on a subordinate. But whatever illusion of dominion she has over him is dispelled by the impertinence of his retort. It conveys an absence of fear, that essential ingredient by which one’s subordinates are identifiable.
“Where you off to?” Clay glances irritably at his watch, as if disapproving the hour she has chosen for departure. It is an unconventional hour, just after three, stranded in that desert of time that separates seas of coming and going populations.
“Health club,” she lies, stepping into the empty car. She is loath to reveal her true destination. Emergency dental work is the province of the aged.
“Which club?” He takes possession of a distant corner.
She says the name of a place that Oren used to refer to as their local charity, to which she mailed regular, exorbitant payments for years until she finally started working with a trainer there this fall.
“Me too! I just joined!” He turns to face her, hair lashing his cheeks. “I haven’t seen you there.”
“I’ve seen you,” Audrey lies, unintentionally sounding sardonic. She must look into terminating that gym contract immediately, switch to one that is closer to home. She cringes to imagine Clay seeing her on the treadmill: jiggling buttocks contained by a leotard.
Clay adjusts the shoulder strap of a knapsack: his gym bag, she realizes. She sees him take in the fact that she doesn’t have one. His Adam’s apple bobs as he digests this evidence that she can afford extra for a locker and laundry service.
“Seen Gunter’s reel?” he asks, looking away.
“There are other directors besides Gunter,” she says.
“Not one Kabal will approve,” Clay says, taking cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and tapping one from the pack. He puts it in his mouth, strikes a match, and lights it before stepping out of the car, an act so defiant that Audrey does not protest.
Lying supine, with a bib tucked under her chin, Audrey feels infantile, as she always does in Dr. Leanheart’s chair. She closes her eyes and presses her palms against the warm vinyl cushion, bracing herself to receive his pronouncement. She catches a faint trace of curry as he leans toward her. She doesn’t mind the scent but suspects others might. She is momentarily glad not to work in a profession that would impose constrictive dietary restraints. She senses the heat of the lamp, the nearness of skin. Opening her mouth feels like an admission.
Let it be nothing.
Please god—she does not believe in god—let it be nothing.
If it is nothing, I will become a perfect mother, an exemplary wife. I’ll take time for Paley, lavish Oren with attention. I’ll resist expensive purses, empty my pockets to beggars on subways. I’ll never look at Kabal that way again.
She half expects Leanheart to emit a grunt of disapproval or horror, but he is silent until he draws back and pulls down his mask. The wheels of his chair squeak as he says, “Looks like you burned yourself.”
She is deaf to all but the sound of crashing within her.
The bump isn’t the result of indiscretion. It’s from Oren’s kale-mango soup on Sunday night. The crashing recedes, and she reenters a world in which Leanheart is talking about something, though exactly what it is she can’t yet fathom. By the tone of his voice, he is asking something of her.
“It is a common and painless procedure,” he says. “It takes about ten years off most of my patients.”
He is talking about tooth whitening, something he’s been trying to get her to do. Not seeing all that he has restored to her—future talks with her son, the unbroken trust of a husband, a certain luminousness in the beige walls around her—he elaborates on the advantages of a procedure he has pitched to her twice a year for five years. Now he pinkens with pleasure to hear she will do it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Someone, somewhere, wants a letter from YOU.
—U.S. Post Office
“It came,” Audrey announces as soon as she’s through the front door.
“What?” Oren calls from the kitchen. Now that it’s mid-December, the warmth of their apartment comforts her immeasurably. The ancient cast-iron heat registers in their building dispense either too little or too much heat to apartments. She’s slimmer now, and feels chilled more easily. She is glad the apartments on their side are overheated.
She kicks off her wet boots, hangs up her coat, and walks down the hall to join Oren in the kitchen. Or half kitchen. It should have been finished by now but isn’t—a four-week job that started three months ago. “Renovation in the city,” Greta had warned her. “Double the time and quadruple the price.” Greta was right, as she is about almost everything. But the Sub-Zero is back from its exile in the living room and the shiny new Garland stove is in place, with its plethora of burners and lavish red detailing. Pipes poke out of the wall where the sink and dishwasher should be. They still do the dishes in their bathtub.
“Letter from Cornell,” she says, waving it at him. “Remember? Early admissions responses are due on the fifteenth.” How do colleges time mail so precisely? Given the power of college admissions, it wouldn’t surprise her to hear they’re in cahoots with the post office.
“I forgot,” he confesses, looking up from a large pot of boiling water.
Once more, she wishes he took the college process as seriously as she does. But she can’t be mad at him. How can she be? He ought to be mad at her (but of course he doesn’t know that).
A sweetness fills the air—the scent of honey. Another mead recipe he is trying, she knows. Oren, who doesn’t do anything in moderation, is now a dedicated mead maker. Their kitchen resembles a laboratory, its counter crowded with siphons and thermometers and glass vials stained with red rings. His concoctions are growing ever more marvelous: deep, dark draughts redolent of spices and medieval romance.
He counts star anise (one, two, three) and throws them into the roiling water.
Since the dentist, Audrey has felt inordinately grateful for a husband like Oren: how accommodating he is and how willing to shoulder most household duties. She wonders, Is gratitude enough to sustain a marriage?
“What does the letter say?” Oren asks, lidding the pot and wiping his hands on his apron.
Audrey consoles herself with the knowledge she’s giving Oren something spectacular for Christmas: mead pots custom-made in a castle in Inishmore. He’ll be surprised. She’ll return the generosity he demonstrated with the ring he gave her on their anniversary. She stares at the weighty band glinting with stones on her hand. What Oren doesn’t know is that she tucks it into the change purse of her wallet when she goes to work. It’s not the kind of ring that would fit in downtown. Besides, she rationalizes, it’s too expensive looking to wear on the subway. She takes the ring on and off when she leaves the house, as she used to do years ago when she was a girl and her mother insisted she wear leggings under her school uniform skirt. She’d take them off and wad them in a corner of the garage in the morning, then pull them on again before she walked in the door in the afternoon.
“I didn’t open it, Oren. It’s addressed to Paley!”
Her heart squeezes as she holds the envelope up to the light.
“But I think it’s bad news. Good news would be a fatter envelope, wouldn’t it?”
Oren shrugs. “Maybe it says something like Packet to follow.”
Oren tends to hang on to optimism long past the point it is warranted. Years ago, they’d lost thousands on penny stock when a childhood friend went into Italian ices.
Audrey guesses there is no disputing what the thinness of the envelope means. Damn Hornbeck. Of course, she had warned there were no guarantees, but Audrey had been disinclined to believe her.
Now Paley will have to start the application process all over again. She wonders if she’d been wrong to push him into Cornell. If she’d let him apply early to Grafton as he’d wanted to do, they’d surely be holding a heftier package now. She dreads Paley’s face as he reads the rejection, feels the hurt in her chest he is sure to feel. She rehearses her words of support, commiseration: There are plenty of good schools. Cornell doesn’t know what they’re missing.
The pot lid rattles on the red burner, and tendrils of white curl from its silvery sides. It occurs to Audrey: they could steam the envelope open. But she would have to think carefully about how to suggest this to Oren; she knows tampering is not something he’d easily agree to.
The front door opens. Paley is back from film club. Audrey drops the envelope as if it’s a hot potato, throwing it on the kitchen table. As his steps approach from the hall, Oren returns to his post at the stove and Audrey slides into a kitchen chair, taking up a Cook’s Illustrated magazine, trying to look as if she’s engrossed in an article about how to truss a chicken.
“Hey,” grunts Paley, coming into the room. He shrugs off his jacket and hangs it on the back of a chair. It is his lightweight jacket, not heavy enough to protect him against the cold, but Audrey doesn’t remind him of this. His cheeks are red, his eyes are watery, and he is rubbing his hands, now purple and chapped. He refuses to wear gloves or a hat. He views them, for some reason, as impingements on manhood, as if real men need no shelter from cold. Oren doesn’t interfere, and though it takes much restraint on Audrey’s part, she, recalling her leggings, has stopped insisting that he dress for the weather. He’ll be on his own next year. She hopes.
Audrey sees him glance at the envelope, then look away.
Instead of opening it, he opens the refrigerator, stands transfixed by its luminous shelves.
“Aren’t you curious?” Audrey asks, handing the envelope to Paley. But Paley waves it away.
“I’m deferred,” he says, taking a half-gallon of orange juice from the shelf. “They e-mailed me a couple of days ago.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Audrey asks, astonished. She looks at Oren. Did he know? The slight shake of his head indicates that he hadn’t and also warns her not to pursue the issue with Paley.
How sanguine Paley seems as he gulps from the carton, something he knows Audrey hates him to do. But she isn’t annoyed by it as she usually is.
Deferred. Not rejected. Audrey’s hope reignites.
He is not scarred by the rebuff. She is glad for the even temper he’s inherited from Oren, the ability to meet adversity without complaint. It’s a trait that will serve him well all his life, she thinks, and she swells with sudden gratitude for Oren.
“I think we should be more part of the college process from now on,” Audrey says to Oren that night as they’re getting ready for bed.
“We should let Paley continue to handle it,” disagrees Oren, pulling on the Indian kameez he wears as pajamas. Without the pants, it looks like a nightgown. “Too many cooks,” he says, folding back the sheets. “Between Hornbeck and Shoemail, he’s probably got it covered.”
Probably. That’s what rankles Audrey as she brushes her now-glistening teeth. She does not trust probably, does not trust chance, which she thinks of as a small, wild cur that could turn on them at any moment.
“It’s trusting your kid’s future to a teenager,” she says, coming out of the bathroom.
When she presents to clients, she never trusts herself to think on her feet. She prepares speeches designed to sound spontaneous, murmuring them into a mirror, so the words temporarily become part of her, imbuing her with confidence: when she stands in a room, all eyes on her, she seems to speak easily, exuding poise and confidence.
That’s one thing that made Kabal’s winning speech to Su Wu so remarkable: she knew it had been unrehearsed. His astonishing ability to command a room without preparation is doubtless one of the benefits of his tony education.
She crawls into bed, too exhausted to read, and switches off the light on her side, turning her back to Oren who, half-glasses perched crookedly on his nose, is engrossed in Mead-ieval Magic for Modern Times.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Happiness is egg-shaped.
—British Egg Marketing Board
Audrey must get Kabal’s approval on a mechanical for a print ad due to the engraver that night. Traffic should have done this, but the traffic coordinator is still away, still off the grid in a cave in Missouri, having gone there out of fear of fallout from Y2K.
Newspapers were full of Y2K fears for weeks leading up to the dawn of the new millennium, printing emergency numbers and checklists of items to stock up on in case there was a run on them: batteries and candles and matches and blankets and old-fashioned telephones that don’t need electricity to work—but the new millennium dawned without a glitch, despite billions spent to prepare for the moment that would crash computers mistaking 2000 for 1900.
She and Oren spent New Year’s Eve in the country with Paley after finally convincing him to come with them, just in case something happened. She was relatively sure that nothing would happen but had withdrawn the maximum amount of cash allowed from ATMs and packed up files of important papers in a portable safe before leaving town. They’d gone to a neighbor’s Y2K party, where gift bags were survival kits of flashlights and bottled water, and drove home before midnight to be on the safe side. But the digital coffeemaker worked the next morning as it always had, and they were relieved that the hoopla had all been for nothing.
She finds Kabal in the room he has appropriated as his office, perched on a heating register under a window, gazing out at the square tops of buildings.
Audrey sounds a warning knock on the wall and holds out the board in her outstretched arms. It’s been weeks since their kiss, which seems to have occurred in some other universe. Sometimes Audrey wonders if it happened at all.
“Just need to run this by you before we go to engraving.”
As Kabal stands abruptly, his face darkens to the color of eggplant and his eyes shift to the other side of the room. He is not alone: a woman in a sari sits on the low sofa. She holds a large black shoulder bag pressed to her body, as if she is worried that Audrey might snatch it. The bag isn’t leather; it is vinyl and shiny and sewn together with fat, outside stitches, the mark of cheap imitations hawked by street vendors.
“Nadima, this is Audrey. Audrey . . . my wife.”
The few times Audrey has pictured Kabal’s wife, she’s envisioned a regal woman with slender brown arms and slim, braceleted ankles. But the woman leaning forward to press Audrey’s hand looks to be some sort of a servant.
“Nice to meet you, Audrey,” she says with a lilt. Her face is round and her eyes bug out a little. Off-brand white sneakers interrupt the drape of her sari pants.
“You, too, Nadima.” Audrey hopes she is pronouncing her name correctly. Nadima wobbles her head the same strange way Kabal does sometimes. It is as if she is saying “yes” and “no” simultaneously.
Kabal gestures for Audrey to hand him the mechanical and, after an uncharacteristically cursory glance, takes a pen from his shirt pocket and signs with a flourish in his signature green.
As he hands the board back, their fingers touch, and the sudden contact sends a charge through her body. If he feels it too, he gives no sign.
“So I will see you at home, then,” Nadima says to Kabal. A tiny diamond flashes at the side of her nose. Audrey marvels at the size of her earrings: bloodred rubies in the shapes of huge tears.
“I’ll walk you out,” he says to Nadima, and as she gets up to follow him, Audrey sees that she’s pregnant. Every curve of her figure is emphasized by the fall of blue synthetic fabric that billows where it ought to embrace, grasps at her body where it ought to hang free.
She is far along. So his wife was pregnant when they kissed weeks ago! A lump closes her throat. Watching him steer Nadima out of the room, his hand proprietarily at his wife’s elbow, Audrey is struck by how vast her separateness is from the two of them.
She sees him as if on a Bollywood set. Behind a facade of ivied stone and ornate columns, an unseen world seethes with kings on white elephants, monkeys in temples, veiled widows hurling themselves onto funeral pyres. It is a world she can never enter. And because of this, a little click of permission releases in her. Whatever she and Kabal do together couldn’t possibly matter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
