Learning to Stay (29 page)

What about Brad?
the voice in my head asks.

What about him? I haven’t called him, but Brad hasn’t called me, either. He chose a stray mutt over me on his birthday. He hasn’t said that he wants to come home. He’s safe up north. He might even be happy there—or happier than here, with me.

I stop in my office and standing over the computer, pull up Sondra’s e-mail with the attached picture of the seaside cottage. I hit “reply,” type,
Do I get my own room?
and hit “send” without ever sitting down. Then I power off my computer, put on my coat, and check the time on my cell phone—5:08 p.m.—as I march, unabashedly, past Susan’s office.

I have more than an hour before I have to meet Zach for dinner, and it’s an hour I don’t want to spend in the office. Instead, I wander down to the bike path that loops around the shore of Lake Monona.

If there’s one thing you can say about Madison—or, I’m sure, any city in the Midwest for that matter—it’s that the people here really know how to welcome the change of seasons. Though it’s now more dark than light outside, they whiz by me on foot and bike, invigorated by nothing more than a few extra degrees on the thermometer and the promise of warmer days to come.

As I follow the lakeshore path, just before I reach the intersection with Broom Street, I see a man who, from the back, looks a whole lot like Brad. He’s bent over a boy who looks all of three years old, dressed in overalls and a red short-sleeved shirt and wearing a little baseball cap that’s riding a little higher than it should on his head. The man’s hands are over the boy’s, which are wrapped around a miniature fishing pole. I watch as the man guides the boy’s arms back, back, back and then snaps them forward, the fishing line streaming out toward the water. The boy beams up at the man, at a job well done, and the man tussles the boy’s hat and hair.

But when I let real-life Brad stand in for the Brad look-alike at the water’s edge, the whole scene breaks down. In the best scenario, Brad is a younger version of Mert, yelling at the boy with an impatience he didn’t used to possess, telling him he’s not doing it right. In the worst scenario, Brad isn’t there at all. He’s sitting on our back steps, glass of Jack in his hand and eyes as black and vacant as two deep holes.

Without warning, the Brad in this mirage morphs into Zach—Zach’s slighter build, his floppy hair, the quilted jacket he tends to wear to work on the weekends, the way he laughs with his whole body, throwing his head back almost as though he’s howling. And I’m back to thinking about the trail of warmth left by his hand on my knee a few weeks ago, or on my shoulders this afternoon.

Warmth and promise.

My feet find the pavement and I start walking again, away from the man and that boy. But my mind is still with them. An image, a scene, that won’t—can’t—come to pass. Not with Brad.

Not with Brad.

But with someone else?

I don’t want to think about it. I can’t. And so, I walk. I walk until the air chills and the sky fades to gray and then to a dark charcoal. I walk past balconies full of college students gathering for the first time
outside since the previous fall, the smells wafting from their grills undoubtedly better than the taste of meat cooking on them, but making my stomach rumble nonetheless. I walk back up to and around the Capitol, past sidewalk cafés that have sprung up like flowers overnight and patrons shivering against the chill that’s crept into the air since the sun set. I walk until I end up, at six thirty almost on the dot, outside the doors of Osteria Papavero. When I enter, Zach waves to me over a sea of tealight candles from the back corner.

Even though this restaurant feels more like a café than a fine-dining establishment, and even though he himself said this isn’t a date, Zach pulls my chair out for me and, once we’re seated, orders a bottle of red wine, the name of which I can’t pronounce, without asking me what I’d like, which would be to try an Italian 75—a scrumptious-looking concoction of Campari, house-made orangecello, and Prosecco. While we’re waiting for the arrival of the wine I didn’t want, I try to update him on
Rowland
.

“Elise, let’s talk work tomorrow,” he says. “Plenty of time for that.” He reaches across the table and hooks his pinky with mine. But unlike when he placed his hand on my knee at Brocach all those weeks ago, I feel no fantastic jolt of warm excitement. Quite the opposite, in fact. I pull my hand back and lace its fingers with my opposite hand, placing them squarely in front of me. I am suddenly uncomfortable—and confused. That one simple gesture would have left me reeling and giddy only days ago. Was it Zach’s use of my first name? Seeing my pinky locked with someone else’s besides Brad’s? The absence of our usual banter that felt much more intimate than this forced interaction we’re having tonight? It’s hard to tell.

Zach is prattling on about the project Gordon Janssen tapped him for help on—a state Supreme Court appeal to overturn the state’s medical malpractice caps—but I’m barely paying attention. I want to ask him why this doesn’t qualify as work talk, but as we munch our
way through an antipasto plate of cured Italian meats and cheeses with melt-in-your-mouth homemade fried bread, I try to decide how to deliver my news.

The waitress has just sent down our entrées—orecchiette with broccoli for me and a wild boar ragout over pappardelle for Zach—and is topping off the wine in each of our glasses when I blurt it out: “I quit today.”

Zach gives me a quizzical look and asks, “Quit what?”

I study his face. Surely, he can’t be serious. Quit what? “The firm, Zach. I quit. I had just given Susan my notice when you saw me.”

Zach sets his fork down, and it clatters against the edge of the bowl. A few heads from surrounding tables turn toward us. Zach opens his mouth and closes it, then opens and closes it again. He looks like a guppy. The thought makes me giggle.

“Is this some sort of joke?” he asks.

“No.”

“This isn’t funny, Sabatto. And why would you quit? You know how many people would kill to be in your shoes. You know there’s a line, right?”

This was not the reaction that I expected from Zach. He’d always been so supportive, so encouraging of my career. Though it’s a career I’ve essentially tossed aside this afternoon in one relatively rash moment.

“I need to get my bearings, Zach. That’s all. It’s not a big deal,” I say, stabbing a piece of broccolini with my fork. Before I bring it to my mouth, I try out a smile on Zach, but it doesn’t work. He looks shell-shocked, and irritated. Angry, even.

“No,” he says, waving a finger in the air, “what you need is to fix this. And I think it’s doable. Here’s how we’re going to—”

“
We
are not going to do anything,” I say. “Zach,
listen
to me.” I reach across to pat his hand, which is lying cold and immobile in
front of him. “I’ve thought about this. I can’t keep myself chained to that place, day in and day out. Susan has made up her mind about me. They all have. You’re the only one who doesn’t think I’m a flake, and even that I’m not sure of sometimes.” I smile up at him, but the joke falls flat. He is staring at me without registering a hint of emotion, without an inkling of a smile. “Come on, Zach. Don’t sit there and act like I’m not right. You’ve seen the Rainmakers. And don’t you remember that junior a few years back who made the mistake of asking for time off so she could get married—the one Early complained about for months?”

“But you’re doing great work on
Rowland
. Susan will see that. A few more big projects like that one and you’ll—”

“I’ll be a dried-out, brittle shell of myself, Zach. I’m doing great work on
Rowland
now, sure. But I haven’t slept in weeks. And then”—I inhale sharply—“there’s Brad to consider.”

“Brad’s gone,” Zach says, and my eyes snap from my bowl of pasta to lock with his.

“How did you—” I hadn’t told Zach that. I hadn’t told anyone except Darcy and Sondra.

“Overheard you on the phone a while back,” he says. “And if you ask me, you should let him go. He’s been holding you back. Christ, just look at you. A year ago you were being fast-tracked for partner. Now you’re quitting because of a little extra scrutiny?”

“Wouldn’t that be convenient,” I say.

“Oh, come on,” Zach says. “Smarten up, Sabatto. Do I want to date you? Absofuckinglutely. I wouldn’t break up your marriage, but your marriage has been doing a fine job of that all on its own, and I don’t think it’s any big secret here”—he motions back and forth between the two of us—“that this isn’t just a collegial work thing. But that doesn’t have a single, goddamn thing to do with the fact that your career is in a tailspin.”

“I don’t think quitting
one
job to make a fresh start constitutes a tailspin,” I say.

“And that’s where you’d be wrong.” Zach is smug and angry, a bad combination that raises my hackles. I try to lighten the mood.

“What’s your dream vacation?” I ask him.

“Vacation?” he asks.

“Yeah. I’m going to have a little time on my hands. I need some ideas.”

Brad and I would play this game often over a dinner of pasta and vegetables from a bag, jazzed up with a grilled chicken breast, back when I was in law school. We dreamed of the day we’d be a two-income household that could take its pick of proper vacations instead of getaways that consisted of staying at Super 8 motels within driving distance—Minneapolis, Kansas City, Toledo, Louisville.

Zach is looking at me as though he’s wholly unsure what I’m talking about. He shrugs. “I guess I’ve never been a big vacation guy,” he says.

“You’re kidding, right?” I ask. How can one not be “big” on vacations? Gardening? Sure. Cycling? I get that—it’s expensive and I myself have an unhealthy fear of being run off the road by a truck with monster wheels and a rebel flag in the back window. I see how a person might not like a certain type of vacation. But “vacations” in the general sense? “You really don’t like
vacations
?” I ask him.

He shrugs again. “They’re a lot of ado about nothing, when you get right down to it. There are all the choices, and the planning. And most of the time it turns out to be one headache after another.”

“Headaches?”

“Yeah. Flight delays, taking your shoes off at security. That sort of thing.”

“Okay, so no planes. But what about trains or automobiles?”

“Just not for me,” he says. “I get antsy. It takes too long.”

“Boats?” I try.

“Can’t swim. Hate the water.”

I see my daydreams of scuba diving in the Cayman Islands or learning to surf in Bora Bora evaporating before my eyes.

“Renting a cottage up north?” I ask.

“Water,” Zach says.

“So no vacationing?” I ask.

“I work,” he says. “I love what I do. That’s not so bad, is it? To love what you do?”

I sense a hint of accusation in his voice, but I don’t bite. “What about after?” I ask.

Zach’s face is blank.

“After,” I say. “After you stop working ? You know—retirement?”

“Don’t plan to. Why would I?”

Zach’s tone has changed. It’s reserved, flat, and forceful—a half note off angry.

“You know, I’m a big girl, Zach. I’ve done pretty well in life, making decisions I thought were in my best interest. I trust what I’m doing.”

“And I don’t,” Zach says.

It dawns on me then, why he’s taking this—my quitting the firm—as something directed toward him. I see me from his point of view, as he sees me: someone with a carefree, figure-it-out-as-it-comes attitude, instead of the type-A, driven, and cutthroat attorney I used to be. This new me—the Elise who would rather cut her losses than grovel her way through years and years of scrutiny at the hands of a panel of people waiting for and expecting her to fail—doesn’t fit neatly in the box that Zach has created for me. I haven’t shifted his expectations; I’ve blown them to teeny, tiny bits. I don’t know how to feel about the way Zach now sees me. I don’t know how to feel, period. It’s like a multiple-choice question where, depending on how you look at it, none of the answers is correct or all of them are correct.

“Well,” I say, “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.”

Zach hands the waitress a credit card before she even drops the guest-check holder on our table. I make a feeble attempt to pay. He waves me off.

I study Zach’s face as he tallies the tip and signs his name—his dark curls dipping onto his forehead, his icy blue eyes flashing, his strong jaw outlined with a five o’clock shadow that makes him look rugged instead of unkempt. I think of what his skin, freshly shaven, might feel like against mine. I wonder how good it must smell, right up close. But the air around us has shifted, and I suddenly see this scene differently, as if someone has switched the lens I’m viewing it through. This isn’t about Zach—not really. I don’t think I’m misreading the chemistry between us, but all this daydreaming, this searching elsewhere, is because of Zach only insofar as he’s the embodiment of what could be. He represents my options—the fact that I have some.

We get up from the table and Zach retrieves our jackets from the rack near the door in silence, though not an uncomfortable one. All the tension that’s been building between us for all of these years resembles a balloon having been filled with air and it’s now been punctured. We’re still here, but that
something
between us has disappeared. Deflated.

I notice that outside it has started to drizzle.

Zach is holding my coat for me, and I shrug into it. Then I march out into the fine mist of rain, turning my face up to the cool drops. Zach hangs back, the overhang shielding him. “Maybe we should have a drink,” he says. “Wait this out.”

I turn to him and laugh. And then I realize that he’s serious. “Really?”

“I told you, I don’t like water.”

“Even water you can’t drown in?” I ask.

Zach half shrugs. I can tell by his face, his stooped posture, that
he’s embarrassed. This guy who isn’t afraid of wielding the law to take on bad guys in all their forms is uncomfortable with a heavy mist.

I think back to an afternoon a couple of summers ago. Brad decided to go for a run, and the weather shifted not long after he stepped out the front door and started his usual route out toward Picnic Point and back. I was washing dishes in the kitchen when I felt the temperature drop and the breeze, originally a whisper, turn into an insistent keening against the back door—a wind of serious storms, not simply showers. When the rain started—big intermittent drops that registered a splat when each hit the sidewalk—I jumped in our car to go in search of Brad. By the time I found him on University Bay Drive, my windshield wipers were working at full speed and still hardly keeping up, and Brad was still running. I pulled up alongside him and honked a couple of times in quick succession. Instead of being grateful, he looked surprised to see me. I cracked the passenger side window open and shouted for him to get in. I added a frantic waving of my hand to emphasize why I had come. He stopped running and smiled at me, mimicking my hand gesture.