A Window Opens: A Novel (2 page)

What next, if not this?

But first,
why
?

“Oh, Nicholas. I’m so sorry. I mean, just . . . Really. Wait, I thought the partners’ meeting wasn’t until November. Why are they—”

“It’s not. Until November, I mean. But I had a feeling—”

“You had a
feeling
? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Alice, I don’t know, okay? I’m working with Win Makepeace on this bankruptcy—the one I told you about with those bankers who wanted to go out for karaoke? And he let slip that it’s not going to happen for me. Actually, he said it, flat out, as if I already knew. Should have known.”

I pictured Win in his spindly black chair with its smug Cornell crest, how he would have smoothed a tuft of sandy hair over a bald spot that was permanently tanned from a lifetime of sailing on Little Narragansett Bay. Who names their kid
Win
, anyway? Not Winthrop, Winston, or Winchester, just
Win
. I was proud to come from a family where all the men are named Edward.

Then I snapped back into the moment, shaking my head as if to dislodge a pesky thought. “So, wait, he just
said
, ‘Nicholas Bauer, you are not going to make partner at this law firm’?”

“No, not like that. I made a tiny mistake on a brief—a comma instead of a period—and he said, ‘Bauer, let’s face it, you’re not Sutherland, Courtfield partner material.’ ”

“He did
not
.”

“He did.”

“Nicholas, is this even legal?” I grabbed his hand and pointed us in the direction of home.

“Of course it is. He just stood there in his fucking houndstooth vest and basically told me I had no future there. That, in fact, the partners decided
last
November, and they weren’t going to tell me until a year from now—”

The swings on the playground were empty, swaying lazily in the breeze by their rusted chains. Sadness kicked in at the sight of them. Hadn’t Nicholas given up enough for this law firm? How many times had I watched him knot his tie, lace his dress shoes, and board the train on a Saturday? How many vacations had been interrupted by urgent calls from clients and arbitrary deadlines from partners?

Nicholas kept going, spelling out the logistics of how these decisions are made and the arcane, draconian methods law firms use for meting out information to their unsuspecting workhorse associates. But I already
knew the drill. My dad was a retired partner at another midtown law firm; I grew up hearing about the personality quirks and work ethics of candidates who didn’t quite make the cut. There had been eighty aspiring partners in Nicholas’s so-called class at Sutherland, Courtfield; by the time they were officially eligible for lifelong tenure—the proverbial golden handcuffs—they would be winnowed down to five, at most. Even knowing this, I’d never imagined Nicholas would be part of the reaping.

By this point, we were in our kitchen, where Cornelius wove among our legs, whimpering anxiously as if he sensed the tension. I made a fresh pot of coffee that neither of us would drink. Nicholas and I were rarely home alone without our kids, but my mind didn’t go where it normally would in such a situation.

Only two weeks before, my parents had taken the kids for the weekend, and before their car was even out of the driveway, we’d raced upstairs to our room. Suddenly, Georgie had materialized at the foot of our bed, looking perplexed. “Wait, why are you guys going to
sleep
?”

Nicholas and I leapt apart, and he grabbed a book from the floor and made a show of reading it. I tucked the sheet under each arm and reached for her hand, which was dwarfed by a plastic ring from the treasure chest at the dentist’s office. “Georgie! You’re back so soon?”

“Pop brought me back. I forgot Olivia.” Olivia is a pig in striped tights; she came with a book by the same name, and she’s a key member of Georgie’s bedtime menagerie, which also includes Curious George and a stingray. “What are
you
two doing?”

Nicholas put down the book:
Magic Tree House #31: Summer of the Sea Serpent
. “We’re . . . napping.”

Georgie chewed the end of her scraggly braid, beholding us suspiciously with hazelnut (her word) eyes.

“Okay, well, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” She turned on her heel and ran downstairs. The minute we heard the front door close, we picked up where we’d left off.

•  •  •

Now Nicholas leaned against the counter, absentmindedly peeling the clear packing tape we used to hold our cabinets together. Our kitchen was in dire need of a facelift—the black-and-white checkered floor was so scratched, it looked like the loading dock at a grocery store. We’d been saving up for a renovation.

“But at least you can stay at the firm until you find a new job, right?”

“No, that’s another thing.”

“What?” I envisioned sand pouring through a sieve: vacations, restaurant dinners, movies, a new car, college savings, retirement— every iota of security spilling out and away.

“Alice, I can’t stay there.”

“What do you mean you can’t stay there?”

“Oh, come on. You know how it is. ‘Up or out.’ ” Nicholas’s shoulders slumped and I rubbed his back in wide circles, as I did when one of the kids threw up on the floor in the middle of the night.
It’s okay. It’s okay
. He unbuttoned the top button of his shirt with a defeated air. “Now that I have this information, I really need to move on. It would be humiliating to stay—I’m a dead man walking.”

I pictured Nicholas in an orange prison jumpsuit, shackled at the ankles and cuffed at the wrists. “I get that.”

“So, I’ve been thinking—and this isn’t the first time it’s crossed my mind—now might be the time to hang out a shingle. Bring in my own clients; run my own show.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Nicholas leaned over the sink, turned it on full blast, and threw water at his face in little cupped handfuls. Then he turned back to me with glistening cheeks, shiny droplets clinging to his eyebrows. He looked ashamed instead of refreshed. “Alice, I have to tell you, I didn’t react well to the news.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . .” Now Nicholas opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of beer. After he flicked off the cap, he lifted it by its brown neck and tilted the bottom in my direction in a gesture that telegraphed both “What have
I got to lose?” and “Here’s looking at you.” I raised an invisible bottle of my own, although my mood was anything but celebratory. Even though he was a borderline teetotaler, I didn’t need to be told that this wasn’t Nicholas’s first beer of the morning.

“Yes?”

“I lost it when Win told me I wasn’t going to make partner.”

“Lost it . . . how?”

“I threw my laptop across the room.” He crossed his arms and closed his eyes briefly, as if to block out the reality of what he was saying, which was horrifying and surreal. An angry Nicholas was a silent Nicholas, icily folding laundry or staring straight ahead at the road for hours while driving. In all our years together, I’d never seen him throw anything except a ball and once, when we took a pottery class together, a tragically misshapen bowl.

“Wait . . .
what?
I’m sorry. Did you just say you
threw your laptop across the room
?” My mind flashed on the possibility of having my own beer, but I thought the better of it—the last thing I wanted to do was arrive at school pickup with alcohol on my breath. A spark like that could ignite a firestorm of gossip whose fug would follow me for years; I’d seen it with a mom who was spotted at the Scholastic book fair with a tiny bottle of something in her satchel purse. It could have been hand lotion or hair spray (this being New Jersey, after all), but the die was cast. The woman was never invited to be a class parent again.

Nicholas fiddled with the refrigerator magnets, arranging the unused alphabet letters in a little line at the top of the freezer door.
QPITZLSF.
“Yes, I threw my laptop across the room. But we were in a conference room, and there was a lot of space. And the laptop was closed, so . . . well, I guess that doesn’t make it any better, but at least it didn’t shatter.”

“That’s something.” No mess to clean up, no injuries. Still, I felt a little light-headed. I closed my eyes and pressed my index fingers onto their lids until I saw orange kaleidoscope patterns.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Did it . . . make a lot of noise?”

Nicholas looked sheepish. “Yes.”

“Well. At least . . . you’re going out with a bang?”

We both laughed, halfheartedly. Nicholas tilted his head back and took a long swig from his beer. His neck looked smooth and young; he might have been twenty, pounding a Natty Light in the office of the college newspaper.

“Glen—remember him from my basketball team?”

“Yeah?”

“He has space I can rent in North Caldwell. I think I might have a few clients who would jump ship, and I’ve been coming up with ideas for bringing in new ones. I want to give it a whirl.”

“Wow. Nicholas! You’ve really thought this through.” I didn’t believe this, not for a minute. Nicholas and I are hardly models of perfect communication, but we keep each other in the loop when it comes to major decisions.

“I guess. I won’t miss the commute, or feeling like a minion all the time. But it’ll take a while to get up and running. That’s what scares me.”

“Are you worried that you’ve burned a bridge?” (I really wanted to say: Aren’t you worried these people will think you are
out of your mind
?)

“Maybe? But for me that was a bridge to nowhere.”

We were quiet for a minute, both standing there like characters on a movie set. I knew what my line was and I delivered it without hesitation: “Nicholas, we’ll make it work.”

“I know. I’m sure it will turn out to be a good thing, I just—”

“It’s already a good thing. Nobody should have to stay in a place where they want to throw something across a room. We’re going to figure this out. I’ll find a new job. Full time. We’ll survive.”

I tried to sound cheerful, game for anything, but the truth is, I was petrified. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to up the ante on the work front. Our kids were still little. I loved my part-time job at
You
magazine. I worried that it would take years for Nicholas to start his own firm and that he was now unemployable thanks to this understandable but completely uncharacteristic violent outburst in his past.

Nicholas unthreaded his cufflinks—little elastic knots that he had in every color of the rainbow. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Which part?”

“You working full-time.”

And just like that, the page turned. We were
on to a new chapter.

•  •  •

At bedtime, Georgie picked
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
, which I can read with my eyes closed. Normally, it’s only the two of us for stories; Oliver and Margot like to read to themselves in their own rooms. But tonight they were shoehorning their bodies into Georgie’s single bed by the time I finished the first line: “Sylvester Duncan lived with his mother and father on Acorn Road in Oatsdale.”

If March is the fillet of the calendar, this is the fillet of parenthood: that one, brief part of the day when lunchboxes are unpacked, bickering is suspended, and everyone smells like toothpaste. Margot didn’t move away when my thumb found the cleft in her chin, and I didn’t flinch when Oliver’s bony shoulder wedged painfully into my spleen. Georgie pulled her knees underneath her stretchy Tinker Bell nightgown and sidled further up the bed to make more space.

N
icholas and I have been married for thirteen years. We met when we were freshmen at our tiny arty/crunchy college in Vermont; in fact, he was one of the very first people I met on my first day there. My roommate and I were lugging her baby-blue futon up the stairs to the fifth floor when the door opened on the second-floor landing, and a smart-looking boy with circular wire-rim glasses stepped through. He asked if we needed help. We did.

We didn’t start dating—insofar as people “date” in college—until senior year, when I was an editor of the college newspaper and Nicholas was one of my writers. He stopped by the newspaper offices on a night when we were “putting the issue to bed”— how I loved the urgency and insiderness of this expression—and took me to task for excising the word
elephantine
from an article he’d written about the football team.

“I just didn’t think the players would appreciate being described that way,” I explained. “And for what it’s worth? These changes are at my discretion. Editor trumps writer. Sorry.”

Nicholas rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Hey, Alice, have you seen
Pulp Fiction
yet?”

That Friday night, he borrowed his roommate’s car so we could drive to a megaplex in Burlington to see John Travolta make his comeback. We ended up lingering for so long over Moons Over My Hammy at Denny’s, we never made it to the movie. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I know we were both wearing green corduroy zip-up shirts. The waitress asked if we were twins. At the time, we thought the question was hilarious. Yes, the two of us are Irish and German sides of the same coin: dark hair, green eyes. But I have freckles; Nicholas has dimples. I tan; he burns.

On our way back to school, a deer jumped out in front of the car, and Nicholas swerved to the side of the road to avoid hitting him. We rolled to a stop and he exhaled, loudly. “Did you see how scared he was?”

“I did,” I said, my head full of the quick pulse of blood through my ears. The deer had been so close, I’d seen the wild look in his eyes and the razor-thin grooves in his antlers.

Looking past Nicholas, through the driver’s side window, I noticed three rolls of hay in a field lit by the moon. Along the horizon, the Adirondacks rose and fell in a dark line, looking like a row of women in strapless dresses wearing body glitter made of stars.

We sat there for a minute before pulling back onto the narrow ribbon of Route 7. We were quiet. This wasn’t when he kissed me for the first time; that was later, on a pleather college-issue couch, in the middle of a video of
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
. But that pause in the car was the beginning of something, and I knew it was important.