The Hole in the Middle (14 page)

The morning is almost gone when I wake up. I'm alone, and it's not until I bury my face in the pillow next to me and breathe in Will's scent that I'm wholly convinced I haven't been dreaming. The head rush when I sit up is crushing, and I lie back down panting and nauseated, happy that no one is here to see my hangover in full bloom. After several further attempts, I manage to get myself to the bathroom, where I swallow a couple of Advil and step into the shower. I let the hot water course over me and consider my options. Little has been said between us so far, although much has been done, and Will's early exit tells me everything I need to know about his interest in a morning-after analysis. I know that the next few days are critical, and the safest course is to let him set the tone.
You will not be weird about this,
I tell myself.
You will not rehash. You will not scare him off. You will not fuck this up.

I repeat this mantra to myself as I follow the smell of coffee down to the kitchen and prepare to greet Will with a friendly but completely non-stalker-like smile. But I find only A.J., pale and moving slowly, nursing a huge mug of coffee. “Hey, Sophie,” he says, as I pour myself some coffee and join him at the breakfast table. “I'm sorry I left you with the cleanup last night. Things got a little out of hand.”

He looks so ill that it's hard to be angry at him. “Did you get rid of your guests?”

“The guys in the den are gone. There's still a couple upstairs.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Way too much,” he says. “You?”

I feel a blush rising and take a long sip of coffee. “Same,” I say. “Is Will up?”

“Up and gone,” says A.J.

“Gone where?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

“He said he was spending a couple of days at his parents' house. He's getting stressed about his first exams, I guess. He said he wanted to eliminate distractions.”

“He said that?”

“‘Eliminate distractions,'” he repeats. “His exact words.” He takes a long drink. “I've never known him to be so serious about exams before, but maybe the pressure of law school is finally getting to him.” He stands, stretches. “Bacon and eggs?” he asks. “It's the least I can do.”

“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”

Will doesn't come back in a couple of days. The week passes, with no word other than the occasional bulletin from A.J.:
His exams are going well. He says it's easier to focus up there. He's going to stay a few more days.
I go about my business as if nothing is out of the ordinary, but every nerve is on high alert. Every time the phone rings or the front door opens, I prepare a face for him. But he never comes. I convince myself that I need to check a resource at the law library and look for Will there, but there's no sign of him. I lie awake at night trying to concoct a convincing reason to call him at his parents' house and testing theories for his absence. My favorite theory is that Will is rocked to his core by the depth of his feelings for me, previously suppressed but now unlocked, and needs time to come to terms with them. There are other, less desirable theories, of course, which is why I don't give in to my desperate desire to call him. I hand in my last few papers, register for next term's courses, clean the house from top to bottom, do all of my Christmas shopping, and eventually acknowledge that there's nothing left to do but to pack up for Port Alice.

A.J. drops me at the bus station on his way to the airport. He's meeting his family in Barbados—his brother is flying from Los Angeles, where he's at medical school, and his mother and stepfather from New York, where they moved after they got married. “Two weeks in the sun,” I say enviously. “Do you have room for me in your suitcase?”

“I don't know,” he says. “I'm not complaining, but if I could choose?
Two weeks in the house where I grew up, with a Christmas tree, and snow, and turkey leftovers—that's a real Christmas to me.”

I've never thought of A.J. as a sentimentalist, but I still don't know him that well and, in truth, he surprises me more often than he conforms to a stereotype. As if to prove this point, he gets out of the car at the bus depot to help me with my bags. “You don't have to do that,” I say.

“My mother would never forgive me if I didn't,” he says, carrying the heaviest bag into the terminal. He waits while I buy my ticket, and then carries it to the gate.

“You don't have to wait with me, really,” I say. “Your mother will never forgive
me
if you miss your flight.”

He laughs. “That's probably true,” he says. He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a brown paper bag. “This is for you. For Christmas. I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to wrap it.”

“A.J., that's so nice of you,” I say. “I feel terrible. I don't have anything for you.”

He shakes his head. “It's nothing much,” he says. “I just wanted to say . . . it's been great having you in the house. And not just because of the food. Merry Christmas.” He takes a step closer, enfolds me in a bear hug, and then turns and strides off before I can say anything.

It's three hours to Port Alice, and I settle into a window seat with my Walkman. I'm too embarrassed to play Enya in the house where the boys can hear it, but now I indulge, and the lush, romantic layers of sound are an ideal soundtrack to the short film, looping over and over again in my mind, of
My Night with Will.
I barely notice the mostly undistinguished landscape of flat, snow-covered fields, broken by the occasional rest stop and the looming statue of the World's Biggest Woodchuck, one town's failed attempt to create a tourist attraction. Instead I see the planes of Will's chest, the wide slopes of his shoulders, the arch of his back, and the exquisite geometry of his face moving above me.

I wish, more than I have ever wished for anything, that he were here with me now. I want to hold his hand. I want to tell him my secrets. I want to know everything about him—the first girl he ever kissed, and what scares him, and his happiest childhood memory, and
what kind of man he wants to be. I have enough self-awareness to know that I wouldn't be an obvious candidate for a fling with Will even without the intervening issue of cohabitation. Whatever happens between us will be fraught with complications. Naturally, Will wants to be sure of me before we embark on this path together. But he would not have run away so abruptly if he were indifferent to me, if he really believed that what happened between us meant nothing, and this suggests that it means something to him, perhaps even as much as it means to me.

Quiet tears roll down my cheeks and I rummage in my bag for a tissue, unearthing instead the brown paper bag from A.J. I rub at the tears with my sleeve and slide a notebook from the bag. It has lovely, thick, creamy paper, a ribbon to mark the pages, and a hard cover with a delicate pattern of watermarks in alternating shades of blue and purple. I've been meaning to keep a journal for a while now, but until this moment, my life seemed empty of any drama worthy of recording. I uncap a pen, ready to bleed my longing for Will onto the crisp pages, but then I think of A.J. He is a mystery to me, but it feels disrespectful to turn his gift into a monument to my relationship, such as it is, with Will. So I turn back to the window until the bus pulls into the parking lot of the roadside hotel in Port Alice.

And there, standing next to a battered pickup truck that he loves more than he ever loved the luxury cars he owned in the city, stands the man against whom all competitors for my affection will forever be measured. “There's my girl,” says my dad, and he puts an arm around my shoulder. “How was your trip?”

“The roads were clear,” I say, surrendering to the easy routine of our traditional greeting.

“Glad to hear it,” he says, loading my bags into the back of the truck. “Your mother is beside herself. She was expecting you a few days ago.” He pulls out of the parking lot and turns onto the main road.

“I had to finish a couple of papers,” I say. “They took longer than I'd planned.”

“Don't worry,” he says, patting my knee. “She'll settle down when she has you back in the nest for a day or so.”

“Isn't Mike home?”

Dad laughs. “He's driving her crazy, as usual. She wants to bond; he wants to sleep late, watch football, and go out drinking with his buddies. She's pinned all her hopes on you.”

“Yay,” I say.

Dad looks serious. “I'm counting on you, sweetheart. Your mom looks forward to having you home for Christmas all year. It's been lonely for her since you went away to school.”

His tone alarms me. “Is Mom OK?”

“Of course,” he says. “I didn't mean to worry you. She's been a little blue lately, that's all. The wedding business is quieter this time of year, and with you guys gone, the country life is a bit isolating for her. I've been wondering if we should get an apartment in the city so she could spend more time down there.”

This is an unsettling window into a marriage that has always seemed rock-solid in comparison to those of my friends' parents. I look out at the familiar streets and houses, and wish that I could show them to Will; or rather, I wish that Will wanted to know every mundane detail of my history the way I do about his. I wonder what my dad would make of Will. However generous my interpretation of Will's actions, I suspect that my dad isn't the sort of man who runs from consequences; what passes for vulnerability in my eyes would undoubtedly be weakness in his.

“Mom says that she knew the moment she met you that she'd follow you to the ends of the earth,” I say, trying to make both of us feel better.

Dad smiles. “I think Port Alice feels like the end of the earth to her some days,” he says. “It's a good thing she's an incurable romantic.”

“Didn't you know that she was the right person as soon as you met her?” My mother has told me this story so many times that it feels like my own. But suddenly I'm interested in his version of events. Maybe men are slower to perceive that they are in the presence of The One. Maybe the awareness of true love dawns more gradually for them.

“I think that events in the past benefit from hindsight in the retelling,” he says, too judiciously for my liking.

“Which means?”

“Which means, when you know the ending already, it's easier to interpret a series of events in a way that makes the ending seem inevitable, whether or not it actually is.”

Dad may be the lawyer in the family, but he's not the only one who can cross-examine.

“Are you saying that love at first sight doesn't exist?”

Dad pulls into the long driveway, and Mom rushes out of the house, waving frantically, as the truck pulls up. “It may,” he says. “Whether it does or not is largely a function of personality, and your mother has the right personality for falling in love at first sight, or at least believing that she fell in love at first sight.”

“And you?”

“I believe that there is only one major factor that determines whether or not a relationship will succeed, and it's not very romantic.” He puts the car into park and cuts the engine.

“Which is?”

“Timing,” he says. “It's all about timing.”

thursday, december 5, 2013

If I'm honest, the headache that I have on Thursday morning has nothing to do with my cold and everything to do with the fact that I drank three-quarters of a bottle of Chianti by myself last night while the kids and I watched back-to-back episodes of
Go, Diego, Go!
I'm not proud of myself, and in a penitent act of self-flagellation, I call Janelle Moss to talk about the Gala.

When she answers, the background noise is deafening. It sounds as though she is standing in an airplane hangar or a wind tunnel. “Sophie!” she bellows. “I'm in the middle of a blowout. I'll call you back in five!”

I sit at my desk and contemplate my options. I eye my computer and telephone warily; both seem to vibrate with malevolent energy today. I opt for the telephone.

First message.
“Sophie, it's your mother. What happened at yoga last night? Leo said that you quit! Call me.”

Next message.
“Hi, Sophie, it's Dana. Is everything OK? Your mom was worried after you left yoga last night. Give me a call.”

Next message.
“Hi, Sophie, it's Jenny. Funny to run into you last night. We need to chat about an incident with one of your staff
members. And could you send me a note letting me know when you've done all the performance review meetings so I can put it in the file?”

Next message.
“Honey, it's your mother again. I just opened the mail and saw your adorable Christmas letter! It's so nice to see you keeping up our family tradition! I was going to chat with you last night about the Christmas presents for the boys, but you left early so I didn't get the chance. I'm running out of time, so if I don't hear from you by the end of the week, I'm just going to go ahead and buy them whatever I want and you won't have anything to say about it. Deal? And I still want to talk to you about yoga.”

There are additional messages, but I hang up instead and consider my Christmas dilemma. It's tempting to take the passive approach here, and just let my mother loose on the toy store with no restrictions. But inevitably she will hit upon the very thing that Jesse has identified as this year's Santa gift and send him into orbit. Jesse doesn't have a lot of rules about the holidays, and only one of them is iron-clad: no one can outshine Santa. With my dad gone, though, I find it almost unbearable to ruin any small pleasure that my mother gets from doting on my children, especially around the holidays. I groan aloud and feel my hangover gathering in one painful knot in the center of my forehead. I throw back a couple of Advil.

The phone rings. “OK,” says Janelle. “Sorry about that. What's the status? Any progress?”

“Some. My staff and I have been brainstorming some great new ideas. I should be able to share them with you on Monday, and then we can present them to the committee.”

“If you want to get the committee to agree on anything, you'll need to be prepared. Here's the skinny. There are four people you need to worry about: Addie Sims, Katerina Blackwell, Jane Phipps, and me.” She pauses. “Are you writing this down? Addie's husband left her for his twenty-five-year-old dental hygienist last winter, at which point she practically moved into her spinning studio. She is interested in any theme that allows her to expose as much of her body as she can. Katerina has a high-school education and met her husband when she was a flight attendant servicing the first-class cabin. And I do mean servicing. She's extremely
sensitive about her background. We're hearing a lot from her about how the event has to be ‘elegant' and ‘classy.' She and Addie nearly came to blows over the male models in the loincloths. Jane is an accountant, which is a very big deal for her. I swear she mentions it at least once every meeting. She has elected herself our unofficial budget chief. Between us, she's more than a little cheap. She was very down on the pharaoh's tomb and the belly dancers. So there's your challenge, Sophie. If you can think of a theme that will make the three of them happy, you'll win the day.”

“What about you?” I ask.

She laughs in a short, sharp burst. “If I put my name on something, I want it to be the best. I want to throw a party that people are still talking about in five years. I want to raise more money than we've ever raised before. What can I say? I'm competitive.” There is a longish pause, while I try to figure out the appropriate response. Janelle beats me to it. “Still alive there, Sophie? Look on the bright side. At least I'm not making you
guess
how to make me happy.”

“And I appreciate that,” I say.

“So tell me about yourself,” says Janelle, “since we're going to be working so closely together. Do you have kids?”

“Two boys,” I say.

“And you work full-time?”

“That's right.”

“My goodness, how I admire you working mothers,” says Janelle. “I just don't know how you do it! Do your kids miss you?”

“It's what they know,” I say lightly. “They don't complain too much, and they get lots of time with us in the evenings and on weekends.”

“But surely something has to give with the schedule you must keep,” says Janelle sympathetically.

“Well,” I say, deciding that it would violate female conversational norms not to offer up one of my deepest failings to this near stranger, “if I had to choose one thing that I would have to admit has fallen through the cracks, it would be family dinners. With our schedules, we don't get to sit down together for a family dinner too often. But hopefully we'll get around to that when the kids are older and can eat a bit later.”

“You know,” says Janelle. “When my oldest daughter was interviewed for admission to Harvard, she was asked what event in her life had influenced her the most. Quite a question, isn't it? Some kids talked about how their mothers survived breast cancer, or how they had helped to build a school in rural India, but do you know what Chelsea said? She said that the most important influence on her life had been family dinners.”

“Extraordinary,” I say flatly.

“Isn't it? But of course, I made such an effort to make family dinner special every night. I'd always put a candle on the table or some fresh flowers, so that the kids would think of it as a meaningful part of our family life. When I look back, the investment seems so small relative to the rewards. In high school, our kids' teachers were amazed at how well-informed the kids were about current events, but that was because the emphasis was always on the conversation, the exchange of ideas, rather than the food. Of course, this is what all of the studies say—that family dinners are a key ingredient in putting your kids on the road to success.”

“Wow,” I say, largely because I can't think of anything else to say. “What a story. I won't forget it.” I clear my throat to get rid of the twinge that could be either tears or laughter. “Well, Janelle, I look forward to working with you. I'm sure the Gala will be a great success.”

“It better be,” she says with a hint of menace. “No one wants to preside over the
Ishtar
of the Gala season. We're in this together. When will you have a new set of concepts for me?”

“Monday latest,” I say.

“Until then,” she says and rings off.

“Your husband wants you to call him!” Joy yells from her cubicle. I reach him on his cell phone; he's spending a lot of time these days with various groups of people that start with
in
- or
con
-—investors, inspectors, insurance adjusters, contractors, consultants—so he's rarely in his office. “Hi, Soph,” he says, “I've just got a second.”

“You called me,” I point out, I think reasonably.

He sighs audibly. “It's about the dinner party tomorrow.”

“Dinner party,” I echo, racking my brain to figure out what he is
talking about. Are we going to a dinner party? Was I supposed to book a babysitter?

“You didn't forget, did you?”

“Of course not,” I say. And suddenly it comes back to me. We've had this party in the works for ages. We have so many outstanding dinner invitations to return that we decided to get all of them out of the way in one fell swoop, although to our guests we are selling it as an effort to introduce our like-minded friends to each other: “I've been dying to introduce you! You have so much in common!” But the truth is that some seriously interventionist hosting is going to be required to keep the conversational ball rolling. A home-cooked meal for six guests who don't know each other on a Friday night: I've clearly been blocking it out.

“I want to invite Anya. It's been a rough week at the office and her husband is out of town. Is that OK?” I have to give him credit for asking permission instead of resolving to proceed and ask for forgiveness later. And anyway, speaking of permission, his gambit opens the door for me to resolve a problem of my own, namely what to do with Will on Friday night.

“That's fine,” I say. “I'll invite Will Shannon, then. He's in town and wants to see us.”

“Great,” says Jesse, although there is stiffness in his voice that suggests another reaction to the prospect of dinner with Will.

“That's eight, ten including us, Jess. We've got to find some time to sit down and plan the menu. Are you home tonight?”

“I'll try,” he says. “Call you later.”

I do a little math. If I'm going to cook dinner for ten people tomorrow, I'm going to have to leave work early, which is going to be very hard to justify since we are shooting the holiday appeal ad on the weekend. I have until Monday to save the Gala, the ADHD press conference is this afternoon, and I have approximately one hundred and fifty unanswered e-mails in my inbox. There is no way around it: I'm going to have to cancel my lunch date with Zoe. I shoot off an apologetic e-mail and start working my way through the backlog, only to be interrupted by the phone.

“No,” Zoe says.

“No, what?”

“No, I do not accept your cancellation,” says Zoe. “Everyone has to eat, including you. I'll meet you at Carlo's at one.”

“Zoe, I'm sorry. I just don't have time to go to Carlo's today. I'd love to, but I can't. Can we do it next week?”

“Forget Carlo's then. I'll meet you in the food court in your building.” Zoe's voice sounds thick and scratchy. “I need to talk to you. It's important.”

“Are you all right?” I haven't seen Zoe cry since her father's funeral fifteen years ago, but I'm pretty sure I recognize the signs. I suppress viciously the resentful thought that I am tapped out this week; I couldn't possibly be a lousy enough friend to find Zoe's emotional crisis inconvenient—could I?

“I'll be there,” I say. I still have to check in with Erica and make sure that the press conference is on the rails and to return all of the e-mails with big, red exclamation marks next to them. Except for the e-mail from Kelly Robinson, the relentless Parent Council chair who is rocketing up on my nemesis list, and who wants me to organize the teacher gift for Jamie's class. Her e-mail has a red exclamation mark too, but I delete it without responding.

“I have a lunch meeting with a vendor,” I tell Joy as I race out the door. “I'll go straight to the press conference after lunch.” She doesn't believe me, of course, but she won't be able to say that she doesn't know where I am if Barry comes looking for me.

I find Zoe hunched over a plastic table next to the Chinese noodle stand, shredding a napkin into a tiny mountain of white fluff. I order two shiny plates of noodles, slide one in front of Zoe, and sit down across from her. “What's going on?” I ask.

“It's Richard,” she says. “I think he wants to leave me.”

This is much worse than I imagined. It's terrible to say, but I was kind of hoping that Zoe's music-producer brother had taken another overdose, since I know exactly what to say in that situation without getting myself into trouble. Zoe's husband, Richard, is a more complicated subject, one that we have tacitly agreed to avoid over the years. The best that I can say
about Richard is that he is urbane and sophisticated, and a good dinner companion if you are prepared to let him do all the talking. The man never runs out of commentary on the poor quality of the latest season at Bayreuth, or the ubiquity of heavy blackberry notes in the new Australian reds, or the rise of boutique hotels in Iceland, but no one (in our house at least) would call him fun. I dip my toe in, cautiously.

“Is there someone else?”

Zoe shakes her head. “I don't think so. He just keeps saying that we're in a rut, that he needs to spend some time alone. He says that I distract him from pursuing his deeper purpose.”

“Which is?” I try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. Richard has never struck me as someone with a deeper purpose.

Zoe's eyes are red. “I have no idea,” she says. “This all started in the summer, when he said that he wanted to go camping! Richard, camping! And when I asked where this was all coming from, he said that our life was alienating him from his natural world, if you can believe it. Natural world! Richard doesn't even like having flowers in the house. He says they're messy!”