How Could She Page 21

  She inserted the olive into her mouth and glanced at Art. She wondered what she would make of her companion were she not straining to look out at him from under the fog of Peter.

  26

  Rachel tossed a bowl of romaine with lemon-dill dressing and finished the salad with a handful of sprouted sunflower seeds, the super-salty kind that Cleo liked. Jesse, her supposed cohost, remained in the next room with their parents. Joseph and Phyllis Ziff were talking about Rachel’s Uncle Roger, who’d just undergone bariatric surgery.

  Joseph could no longer hear very well in restaurants, which was a shame considering how much time he still spent on Chowhound. Rachel had offered to cook his birthday dinner. She wasn’t going to suggest that her parents host their own party. The one time she’d been to her brother’s apartment, for his housewarming, there’d been nowhere to sit, just a card table groaning with beer bottles and girls slung all over the place.

  Rachel came out of the kitchen and circled the table, depositing salad on everyone’s plate. She pinched a couple of extra avocado cubes out of the serving bowl and dropped them on Cleo’s high-chair tray. “You serve with your fingers?” her father chided. “No wonder the girl sucks her thumb.”

  “I’m not sure I see the connection, Dad,” Rachel said. “Or why it bothers you. Her dentist said not to worry about it until she’s four.”

  “You’re lucky you’re such a cutie patootie,” Joe said to his granddaughter. “You’re going to end up looking like a walrus. And your mama’s going to have to shell out some big bucks for your braces.”

  “Have some salad, Joseph,” Phyllis said. “The dill is wonderful.”

  “Don’t mind your grandfather,” Rachel told Cleo in mock exasperation. “And, Dad, you know how sexist you sound, right?”

  “And I was about to ask you if you baked me a cake.”

  “Just roast chicken, olive orzo, and hors d’oeuvres.” Rachel rolled her eyes. Truth was, she felt comfortably happy in a way she did only when she was with her family. No matter that her father was now sixty-eight, it was just like old times.

  The pistachio-lemon cake was delicious, and they ate in near silence. “All right, tell Matt we say hello,” Joe said, pushing his empty plate away. “Mom and I should get going.” They had tickets to a South African dance concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

  “Matt sends his love,” Rachel said. “He’s sorry he couldn’t be here. I told him to bring back those Nanaimo bars you love.” Her husband was in Toronto, visiting Phillip Lippman for a second time. Phillip’s department was trying to persuade him to take a fellowship for the spring. He’d assured Rachel that he was only going up there to tell Phillip no in person. She wasn’t worried. But he wasn’t home either.

  After she’d said good-bye to her parents for the thousandth time, Rachel peeked into Cleo’s bedroom. Jesse was reading a book about a dog birthday party, and Cleo had already begun to assume child’s pose on top of her sheets.

  Rachel started to clear the dishes, then wandered over to the window. The last light of the day blanketed the block, casting gothic shadows on the sidewalk. She wondered when their rent would go up again and what she and Matt would do when it did. Maybe her novel would work out. Rachel had told Josie that it would be ready before she could actually have it ready, and she was killing herself to deliver it when she’d promised, out of fear that her agent would lose interest in seeing it before she could truly deliver. On top of that, Rachel was killing herself to find supplemental income. She had spent her past three days submerged in what was called “content generation.” She’d written an appreciation of Abraham & Straus, the downtown Brooklyn department store her mom used to take her to, for a package J.Crew was planning on “Lost New York.” Sunny had hooked her up with the gig, which was nice.

  “She’s out,” Jesse said triumphantly when he returned. “I fell asleep for a few minutes, too.” The sky had gone deep blue. Rachel realized she must have been standing there for a good while.

  She entered Cleo’s room and stroked her daughter’s cheek. Something had started to happen to Cleo’s face, or maybe her ears? She looked different from the way she had at the beginning of the summer. Rachel hated nothing more than when people told her that children grow so fast, but it was true. They did. Rachel pulled the blanket over her daughter and tiptoed back into the living room, where her brother was washing dishes. “Dad seemed happy, right?”

  “He loved it,” Jesse said.

  Rachel fished a plastic take-out container out of a drawer and packed it with the remaining chicken and orzo.

  “I was going to eat that,” Jesse said.

  “Matt’s back tomorrow,” she said. “He can have it for lunch.”

  “You pack his lunch?”

  Rachel felt flush with embarrassment. “Your girl gang doesn’t do that for you?”

  Jesse shook his head and wiped the lid of a pot. “Why do you have to typecast me? It could be girl, singular.”

  Rachel felt a little bad. “Sorry. Are you going to tell me you’ve narrowed in on somebody?”

  Jesse’s smile went crooked. “I’m falling for someone, Rachel.”

  “Seriously? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that.”

  “It’s a little delicate.” Her brother was considering his words slowly. “No-judgment zone, right?”

  “Zero.” Rachel felt a glimmering inside. She loved gossip even more than wine.

  “She’s married.”

  Rachel’s head dropped forward. “Do you even know married people?”

  “It’s Sunny.”

  Rachel laughed. “Sorry, sorry. Everyone’s in love with Sunny.”

  Jesse’s face broke into a sad smile. “No, Rach. Sunny and I . . . we’ve been seeing each other.”

  Rachel wanted to respond but couldn’t bring herself to speak. She and Sunny had spoken two days ago, when Rachel had called to tell her about the launch party she’d gone to for Miriam’s newsletter. They’d gossiped about the Cassette veterans, and Rachel had told Sunny what Geraldine had said on her latest podcast, about how she’d spent an afternoon shopping for a dress. She was going to Peter’s fund-raiser, there was no question about it.

  “Like, in a nonplatonic way?” Rachel’s voice croaked and she watched her brother nod. She heard a ringing in her ears. It was dull and unrelenting. “What do you want me to say, Jesse?”

  “You don’t have to say anything.” Jesse fluttered his lips, looked around the room. “I just thought I should tell you. Not telling you seemed wrong somehow.”

  “‘Wrong somehow,’” Rachel repeated, unable to keep the sense of betrayal from rising. Sunny had ended their call saying they needed to have drinks soon. Rachel had suggested Monday or Thursday of the following week, but Sunny wanted to email her dates later. She said she still needed to figure some things out. So this was why Sunny had dropped off, because she was too busy fucking Rachel’s little brother? In the lengthening silence, Rachel felt dizzy, unfit for the world. “What about Nick?” she said. “You know she has a husband—you met him.”

  “Please, don’t get on your high horse,” Jesse said. “You’ve done your share of shady things.”

  Rachel tensed. “What about the fact that Sunny is one of my closest friends?”

  Jesse went still as he tried to read his sister’s face. “You don’t seem that close.” It came out as neither statement nor question.

  Tears sprang to the corners of Rachel’s eyes, and she tipped her head up, as if she could push them back inside. “No, maybe we’re not,” she said slowly. “She never mentioned this to me. Too bad you aren’t rich. Otherwise you just might be her type for the long haul.”

  Jesse stared at his sister with a mixture of incredulity and pity. Rachel was too angry to feel sorry for what she’d said. How could Sunny do this to her? Did she even like Rachel, or had she just been using
her to get to Jesse from the start?

  “I should have kept my mouth shut.” Jesse scooped up his bike helmet and headed toward the door. “I wasn’t trying to upset you. This has nothing to do with you.”

  “I get that,” she said coldly.

  Rachel didn’t wash her face that night. She didn’t change into her pajamas either. She just ripped off her jeans and crawled under the covers in her ratty cashmere sweater and underpants. At 2:23 she was up again, the cogs of her mind whirring. Alone in bed, she lay rigid and awake, thinking about Sunny and her brother. What did they talk about? Did she tell him her secrets? Rachel wondered, but couldn’t begin to imagine, what it was like to be alone with Sunny in the dark.

  27

  When Sunny rolled over in her bed at five in the morning on a Thursday and kissed Nick good-bye, she didn’t know she was about to leave him. Not immediately anyway. What she understood in the predawn darkness, as she lay under the covers listening to her husband zip up his suitcase and slip out the door, was that it was unequivocally over. This wasn’t to do with Jesse, not really. He was just a kid. Sunny’s marriage was no longer alive, and nothing was going to revive it. All she could do was untangle her life from Nick’s and try to figure out what was supposed to happen next.

  Sunny’s plan had been to spend the day working, which meant a morning painting session before shopping for bread and premade salads that she and Jesse would hardly touch. But the second time she woke up, in an empty bed at ten past seven, just when Nick’s flight was boarding, her eyes were sticky and slightly itchy. She’d had pinkeye enough times to recognize the symptoms. Sunny’s ophthalmologist refused to call in a prescription without seeing her. The earliest appointment wasn’t until one thirty, which ruined the day workwise. Figuring she could at least get in some exercise, Sunny put on her track pants and running shoes and set out to walk the forty-odd blocks to the Murray Hill medical complex. As she headed up Park Avenue South, she didn’t see a single building without at least one plaque bearing a doctor’s name. They were unquestionably fabulous, in so many fonts and shapes. Sunny started thinking about a potential series of sketches. She preferred to mull this over rather than think about how she should really be meeting with another kind of medical professional, one who could help tame her feelings.

  The sadness pressing down on her was both familiar and unfamiliar, a hue she was accustomed to in watercolor, never in oil. Maybe she was pregnant. Her period was a couple of days late, but then again it often was. Sunny came to a sudden halt in front of a person suspended a foot above the sidewalk, balancing on the base of a lamppost. If it weren’t for the girl’s Tretorns, just like the ones Sunny had worn in grammar school, Sunny would have walked right by her. Instead she watched the girl tape up a sheet of paper.

  MURRAY HILL STUDIO AVAILABLE FOR SUBLET NOW. NO FURNITURE. SUPER-LOW PRICE. TOO GOOD TO PASS UP.

  “Is it . . . is it your place?” Sunny sputtered haltingly.

  The girl nodded. “I’m moving to the Upper West.”

  Hearing this made Sunny feel old. When she had first arrived in New York, people still took the time to say “Upper West Side.”

  “It’s a perfectly nice apartment,” the girl said. “My boyfriend just got off the waiting list for Columbia Business School. He’s moving here from San Francisco. It’s all happening fast.” The girl had striking kohl-rimmed eyes and looked clean. Sunny imagined her apartment would be, too.

  “Are dogs allowed?”

  The girl grinned. “Do you know any Murray Hill girls who don’t have dogs?”

  Sunny didn’t know a single person who lived in Murray Hill but gave a laugh. The girl hopped onto the sidewalk. “I’m Chloe,” she said, extending her arm.

  “Hey,” Sunny said. It took her a moment to remember to give her own name. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting this.” Chloe was giving her a funny look, as if she were considering whether Sunny were fit for the position. “The other thing I had just fell through,” Sunny told her, and Chloe nodded understandingly. “Can I see it?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Sunny showed up the following afternoon, and the Keetsa mattress truck arrived by evening. Chloe had cleared out all her belongings save for a couple of utensils and a potted fern that Sunny couldn’t stop herself from watering. She had never been in an apartment with so little character for more than a few minutes. She had no desire to dress it up, no interest in injecting the apartment with reminders of her fucked-up self.

  Sunny was ripping the plastic cover off the mattress when her phone twitched across the hardwood floor like an injured insect. She was expecting it to be Jesse, who had insisted he didn’t care if he contracted pinkeye.

  Everything cool? Nick wrote.

  I left you and moved into an empty studio apartment in Murray Hill today, she didn’t type back. Instead she replied as the other Sunny, not the one who’d bundled a week’s worth of clothing, her computer, and some art supplies into four laundry bags and ridden with Stanley in the back of a taxi to the corner of East Thirty-fifth Street and Second Avenue.

  Cool City! Sunny immediately regretted the exclamation mark. She was a promiscuous punctuator, but given the circumstances the symbol struck a chord of immaturity bordering on cruelty. She began a new text.

  I saw a teenage version of you on the street. Tried to take a picture, but his mom was staring me down. Best to let Nick enjoy one last weekend inhabiting the reality he’d worked so hard to build for Sunny and himself. She’d paid for her rent and her new mattress in cash.

  On her first night, Sunny lay down with her computer and watched a couple of episodes of a Netflix series about the murder of an alcoholic veterinarian in the Cotswolds. The double mattress was hard and tight, as was the sleep it afforded her.

  Stanley was eager to get moving early in the morning, as he had every right to be, so Sunny took him on a walk in the park by the United Nations building. On the way back, she picked up an egg sandwich to eat in front of the computer. She had no intention of going outside and found another series with which to anesthetize herself. She finished the final episode a little after eight in the evening. She was famished. Outside, all the bars were packed. So were the restaurants, many of which appeared to have cleared the majority of the chairs and tables and transformed into bars. She walked a bit, looking for a place that wasn’t a meat market. It was Saturday night, after all. She came across a shop called Kozmo’s Treasure Trove. Somebody had arranged vintage elves in a Halloween scene in the window. Sunny couldn’t not go inside, where she found a gingham flannel sheet set and a three-pack of pom-pom ankle socks worth much more than the asking price of six dollars.

  When Sunny came back out, a gaggle of college-age girls teetered past in platform stilettos, their arms wrapped around one another. Sunny felt an ache of loneliness and located her earbuds so she could put on the latest episode of Pod People. She’d already listened to Geraldine’s show a couple of times while working in the studio. She’d liked what she’d heard. It was hard not to feel a little envious.

  Now Sylvie was interviewing Esme Ford, a young comedian who’d just returned from a long weekend at a resort in the Dominican Republic. “I went with this guy I’ve been seeing. It was nice, don’t get me wrong, but traveling with somebody can be . . . intense. I’ve worked in cubicles that are bigger than the room we shared, and every time you need to poop, you have to decide if you want to trek all the way down to the lobby or just go for it.”

  Geraldine let off a shuddering laugh and shared the story about her miserable Jamaican vacation with Peter—she was using his name now. Sunny remembered the story well. She’d still been living in Toronto, in her old apartment, when Peter had taken Geraldine to Round Hill, the resort his family descended on for two weeks every Christmas. Peter and Geraldine had gone without them, in February or March, after a year or so of dating.

  “I was so sure something wa
s wrong with me,” Geraldine was saying on mic. “There I was, in my thousand-dollar-a-night villa, with all the shades pulled down, watching my boyfriend sleep through the afternoon. I wanted to throw myself in the ocean.”

  Esme guffawed. “There’s nothing like a vacation to make you feel like you’re a total failure. You plan everything perfectly, smile all the way down there on the plane, and then you get imprisoned in paradise with somebody you realize you want to kill.”

  As the two continued talking, Sunny was transported back in time. She recalled sitting with Geraldine in Rosebud Café on Dundas Street right after the vacation. They’d sipped herbal tea with José González playing on the speakers while Geraldine confided in her about Peter’s behavior. He’d snuck off a couple of times after Geraldine had fallen asleep and partied on the beach with a group of English music producers. Geraldine had only found out about this at the end, when she’d run into one of the English guys’ girlfriend at the hotel gym. The woman had rolled her eyes at Geraldine and muttered something about “your bloke really knowing how to live on the edge” while pounding away on the elliptical. Afterward, when they were in the locker room, the woman had inquired about Geraldine’s “sleep disorder” that supposedly made her incapable of staying up past nine, and Geraldine had coaxed out of her that Peter had become friendly with the woman’s nineteen-year-old half sister. “Can you imagine how humiliated I felt?” Geraldine asked Sunny. He tried to make me sound like a narcoleptic freak just so he could get serviced on the beach by a bimbo named Petronella.”

  At the time Sunny had felt certain that Geraldine was coming to her for some sort of absolution. And so she had given it, telling Geraldine that Peter was complicated, and worth it, so long as that’s what she wanted. “It goes with being with a powerful man. Look at what Hillary Clinton has to go through,” Sunny had told her. “I’m sure Seamus has his secrets, too.”

  Geraldine had stared at her uncomprehendingly. Sunny’s boyfriend of the moment, Seamus O’Connell, was a big-bellied Irish actor-in-residence at Soulpepper Theatre. “But Seamus is completely smitten with you.”