How Could She Read online

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a thing going on with Lallie,” Sunny said, naming the first actress to come to mind. “Look, Peter loves you. You should see the way he touches your hair when you’re at parties. And the way other people watch. Everyone wants what you have.”

  Geraldine’s shoulders had eased at that bit. “Really?”

  Sunny had given Geraldine what she thought she wanted to hear: permission to do nothing. It was easier than exacerbating her friend’s doubts, and it got her out of the café faster. There was no point in contributing her own footnotes about Peter, who often managed to place his hand on her arm or the small of her back when they were going over layouts. Sunny didn’t particularly mind when he did this. Geraldine was smart; surely she knew what she was signing on for when she’d started dating Peter Ricker. He had a vintage two-seater, for Christ’s sake. Sunny had her own problems to deal with, like plotting her move to New York. Her job here was to listen.

  As it still was. If Geraldine wanted to return to Peter, so long as she was happy, or happy enough, they might actually build an interesting life together. Stranger things had happened. And who was Sunny to interfere? Sunny’s thoughts dimmed down, and she turned her attention to the conversation Sylvie and the comedian were having. They’d moved on to the pleasures of reading Amazon reviews. “God bless the people who take the time to write three paragraphs about a nail clip—” Sylvie started to say.

  Sunny tugged the wires out of her ears and kept strolling through the neighborhood, which felt exotically American to her, the way for-profit walk-in medical clinics and hair-dry bars did. A Japanese-influenced beer garden called Orange Tango had a Dog-Friendly sign. Sunny found herself seated at a table in the back of the garden, near a margarita machine that cast a chartreuse glow. She ordered the salmon special, a grapefruit juice, and a bowl of water for Stanley, who was splayed out on the brick floor by her feet.

  The crowd was noisy, but flatly so. No matter whose lips Sunny focused on, she was unable to make out the words being said or access the emotion behind them. The only exception was a girl who was walking around the grounds with a tray of tiny white paper cups. She wore a T-shirt printed with a pug eating an ice-cream cone and had an expression of upbeat violation. Sunny caught herself staring and quickly averted her eyes when the girl turned her way. She looked down at her phone and studied the texts that had rolled in over the last couple of days. She still hadn’t told Jesse anything, hadn’t even reached out to say hi since she’d canceled their Thursday-night plan, on supposed account of her pinkeye. He’d written twice today, and she’d been missing him. She wanted to find him and curl into him, but her morals wouldn’t stand for it. Not before she told Nick she’d left him.

  Sunny felt a familiar discomfort in her lower back and grimaced. She had been getting her period long enough to know exactly what was happening. So much for her fantasy of running away from everybody with a baby to keep her company. She felt tears prick her eyes. At least this was better for Jesse. She liked him in a way that sometimes felt maternal. With a steadying inhale, she typed a response to Jesse: You around for a call?

  In 10, Jesse wrote back instantly.

  Sunny’s dinner materialized. The salmon was a shade of pink too close to flamingo to be something that belonged in her body. She ate half of it anyway and slipped a few bites under the table to Stanley.

  Sunny felt a spasm in her heart when the phone vibrated. “Can you hear me?” she said.

  “Where are you?” Jesse asked. “Where have you been?”

  She guessed he could sense that something had shifted, and she gripped the phone tighter.

  “I left Nick.” The only sound that came back was the echo of the beer garden. “Don’t worry, I didn’t do it for you.” Her words came out sharper than she’d meant them to.

  “I know.” He sounded tentative. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.” She ringed the edge of her glass with her right index finger. Her wedding band was still on her other hand.

  “Can I see you?” Jesse asked, and Sunny glanced around the beer garden. The noise of the crowd was becoming louder and duller. She felt a bottoming-out.

  “Not till I talk to Nick,” she replied. “He gets back tomorrow night.”

  “Wait—so you did or didn’t leave him?”

  “I needed some space first. I’m still . . . taking it. Preparing myself for the shitshow.” Trying to envision what the next few days would be like, her mind went blank and she felt overwhelmingly sleepy. When she got stressed as a child, she would retreat to bed. “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “Does that really matter?” She could hear him sigh. “Let me know how it goes. Or, you know, if you need anything. It doesn’t have to be scandalous. I can also be a friend.”

  “You are my friend. You might be my best friend.”

  “Same,” Jesse said, and Sunny bit down a smile. When she hung up, the pug girl walked over to her.

  “This is Do-Yo. It’s small-batch frozen yogurt, created for dogs.” The girl extended the tray. “Take as much as you want. And please use our hashtag.”

  Sunny reached out to accept the offering, if only to be left alone. A moment later her phone buzzed on her lap. It was a blank text from Nick, which used to be their code for all the love they couldn’t articulate. Now it was just convenient for the times when they were too lazy to think of anything cute to say. Sunny looked around for her server. She was still waiting when she saw that the Do-Yo had melted and taken on the consistency of marshmallow fluff. She dipped her pinkie finger in the paper cup and brought the substance to her mouth. It tasted like sweet nothingness. A couple helped themselves to a nearby bench and began kissing. A sense of claustrophobia closed in as she watched the guy’s Adam’s apple move like an automated valve. She tossed sixty dollars on the table and yanked at Stanley’s leash.

  28

  So what can I tell you?” Rebecca Sattenstein flashed Geraldine an uncomfortable grin and bridged her hands on the thick white tablecloth. They were at the Water Grill, a corporate-geared restaurant near Ffife’s office known for its good taste and tasteless salads.

  “You can tell me where you could most use some more support,” Geraldine said.

  Rebecca did not immediately respond. Stacks of rings glittered over her fingers and obscured her marital status. Geraldine knew from Elinda that Rebecca and her husband, Charlie, a stay-at-home dad who fancied himself a music producer, had separated not long ago. Their youngest child was in high school, and Charlie spent most of the time at their weekend home in Rhinebeck.

  This was Geraldine’s third stop on her “listening tour.” She had yet to meet an editor in chief who didn’t have an internal clock that dinged four minutes into their meeting, signaling the end of the chitchat portion. To Rebecca’s credit she’d waited until they’d placed their lunch orders (crispy Thai chicken salad for Geraldine, tuna burger sans bun, side of sautéed spinach for Rebecca) to get down to business.

  “I’m excited to hear about your plans,” Geraldine said. “I’ve read Smart since before you took over. You’ve made it so much sharper.”

  Rebecca was, if not a legend, close to it. She’d started out as a hard-hitting journalist and made waves a decade ago with Awake, her literary insomnia memoir. Rebecca was the kind of woman who used to send Geraldine into paroxysms of inarticulateness. Now Geraldine simply felt embarrassed about what Elinda had put her up to and what Elinda had said about Rebecca, which was that she’d fire her save that she was the breadwinner and it would just about kill Rebecca and her children. This job was awkward from every angle. If only Geraldine and Sylvie’s show, now on a weekly recording schedule, were enough to justify her visa. Yet Geraldine could do no wrong by Elinda, who was convinced that Geraldine had the fresh perspective to save Ffife. “You’ve seen things while you were lost at sea, and that’s going to help us discover new lands,�
� Elinda had told her.

  “My plans,” Rebecca said, and cleared her throat. “We should have met in the office. I could have walked you through the planning room and shown you the boards for the next issue.”

  “I don’t think I need to see the issue at this stage,” Geraldine said.

  Rebecca looked up. “This is going to be a stages thing?”

  Geraldine smiled meekly. Elinda had appointed her creative director of audio, yet Geraldine didn’t consider herself a creative, and she definitely wasn’t directorial. Had she possessed these qualities, she might have been able to come up with a corporate role for which she was better suited, or at least one that didn’t require her being here, doing her best to appear tolerant while Rebecca stared her down. It didn’t help that Geraldine was overdone, with her hair blown out and her nails painted a rich emerald green for Peter’s fund-raiser, whose theme was Enchanted Forest. A car was picking her up after lunch and taking her directly to La Guardia.

  “I’m more interested in the larger direction,” Geraldine said. “Elinda thought a positive first step would be my meeting key team members and hearing about your greatest challenges and thoughts about the coming year before we firm up the audio strategy.”

  “Why do we need one? My readers are in their forties and early fifties. They are readers. We already did a podcast, and nobody cared.”

  Geraldine nodded. “I heard a few episodes. We can do something great.”

  A feral look came to Rebecca’s face. “I believe what you mean is you can do something great, and I’m supposed to act as if I’m enthusiastic about this shift away from the printed word?” Rebecca twisted her napkin. “Imagine if you’d been in charge of a magazine for six years and then your boss told you to clear your Thursday afternoon so a charming girl from Toronto could come in and rearrange your goddamn life.”

  The rest of the lunch was no less strained, and Geraldine had never been so happy to hear somebody turn down coffee or tea. At last she was able to lean into the cool backseat of her car as it lumbered through heavy midtown traffic. She checked her email and calendar, now tended to by someone called Katie. Her agenda for tomorrow afternoon looked more packed than she remembered, with two hour-long “touch bases,” as Elinda liked to label meetings, and a five thirty drink with somebody she’d never heard of named Sam Lloyd. Geraldine definitely would have remembered saying yes to that. She needed to talk to Katie.

  Geraldine’s flight landed a little after five, which gave her enough time to take a cab to the Y. Her membership was still valid through February, and she needed a place to freshen up. She hadn’t told anybody in Toronto that she was coming to town, not even her mother, who was making noises about visiting Geraldine in New York. She hadn’t said anything to Peter either. She was coming up to see him, but she wasn’t coming for him, and there was a difference.

  In the locker room’s hair-drying station, she studied herself in the mirror. She’d slightly filled out since she used to come to the gym regularly, her cheeks less hollow, the lattice of bones on her chest contained deeper within her body. In her long jade gown and glittery lip gloss, Geraldine felt less beautiful than Disney Princess–like, a suspicion that was confirmed when a little girl in a sopping-wet bathing suit and goggles stopped to stare. The girl’s mother called her over and wrapped her up in a towel. Geraldine felt a softening within and could almost remember the feeling of hugging herself in her favorite dolphin towel while her mother knelt down and rubbed lotion onto her body.

  At the gala Geraldine steadied her nerves with food. Trays groaned under the weight of enormous risotto balls and dumplings filled with hot onion soup that Geraldine witnessed squirt all over more than one guest’s shirt. Champagne proved a more wieldy source of calories, and she sipped on her second glass of bubbly while leaning against a column, one of many that had been draped in brown burlap and adorned with real branches. Peter was all too easy to locate, chatting and gesticulating grandly across the crowd. When he finally noticed Geraldine, his face lit up, but she could tell he wasn’t completely surprised.

  He paused for a moment, as if deciding whether to run to her, then motioned for her to join his group. Fair enough, Geraldine thought. She’d told him that if she ended up coming—and it was a big if—he had to behave platonically. She took her time, saying hello to the few familiar faces and trying to ignore the tightening in her chest as she made her approach. A couple of people asked what she was doing there, and she blushed. There was no real answer. She had gotten into a fight with Sylvie after Sylvie had pried out that she was planning on attending Peter’s party. “Hello? Do the words ‘Harvey Weinstein’ not mean anything to you? How are you possibly going to visit a boss who harassed you?” Sylvie said.

  “It wasn’t harassment. We were engaged,” Geraldine replied quietly. She’d had a crush on Peter long before he started to see her as a romantic prospect.

  “It was; you just didn’t know it,” Sylvie informed her. Geraldine tried to keep Sylvie’s words from replaying in her head as Peter wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

  “Geraldine, meet Boyd and Sandra Dunfield. We’re discussing Sandra’s work with Trudeau on marijuana legalization,” he told her.

  “You have my vote,” Geraldine said, and everyone laughed. She tried to laugh with them, but Peter was leaning into her and he’d pressed the pad of his thumb into her skin. She felt a shiver of confusion, as if her muscles didn’t remember what it felt like to belong to somebody else.

  “Boyd’s a sculptor. He’s one of the greats,” Peter said when Boyd and Sandra had excused themselves to circulate. “I can tell he took a shine to you.”

  “What? I hardly said a word,” Geraldine told him.

  “You didn’t have to.” Peter gave a crooked smile and fingered the strap of Geraldine’s dress. He looked across the room. “Christ! Michael Ondaatje came after all. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “K,” Geraldine said, and wished she hadn’t kept her word, when a man with a beetlelike body stepped up to her.

  “I’ve been asking myself all night, who is that nymph?” he said, staring directly at her neckline.

  It took her a second to place the face. “Tom?” she said. “Geraldine Despont. We met in New York. . . . We talked about podcasting.”

  Tom Newlin went slightly pink and stood straighter. Geraldine recalled how smug he’d been at their meetings, taking phone calls and making her wait.

  “How are you?” he said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t bring you aboard. I loved your ideas. It’s just so hard to make anything actually happen. You know how it is.”

  “I understand.” Geraldine peered into the distance and saw Peter dancing with the ideas editor of the Globe and Mail. Peter was crouched down and making happy zigzags with his bottom.

  “So you’ve given New York the middle finger and repatriated, too?” Tom asked.

  Geraldine shook her head. “I’m here for the night. I found a job down there.”

  Tom looked slightly incredulous. “I hope it’s far from the hell of media.”

  “I’m in the inferno,” Geraldine said. “I’m working on all the podcasts at Ffife Media and cohosting one of my own.” Tom’s excess fat resided higher on his torso than the bellies of most men. This gave him the aspect of a disgruntled chicken, especially now that he was flustered.

  “Good for you,” he said. “And you can thank me for doing nothing for you. Seems I did you a favor.” He waited for Geraldine to agree, but she remained silent. “How long are you in town for?” he asked. “You should come into the office and meet with the team.”

  Geraldine bit back a smile. Men really were vultures, homing in when they were no longer needed. She opened her purse and fished out her card. “I’m going back in the morning,” she said. “Let me know if you come back down to the city, and we can meet. I’ll show you the studios we’re building.”

  When she made
her escape, Geraldine kept busy studying the National Parks art on the walls and watching Peter chat up donors from afar. He sustained Geraldine with occasional glances that warmed her belly, and he sidled up to her a little before nine.

  “I can see you’re wilting,” he told her.

  “Not at all,” she lied. “Take your time.”

  “I need to stay, but why don’t you get out of here? I’ll find you later.”

  “You want me to go?” Geraldine felt a stab of hurt and glanced around the party, searching for the woman whose attention had inspired Peter to release her. There was nobody who came close to Peter’s taste.

  “Do you know how distracting it’s been having you here?” he said.

  “You invited me,” she reminded him. “Like a thousand times.”

  “And I meant it. I just didn’t think about how nervous it would make me.” Peter paused. “You have no idea how beautiful you are.”

  Geraldine felt herself go soft.

  “Meet me at home?” he suggested. “George will let you in, and you can lie down. I’ll be there soon.”

  “Okay, but I have to leave super early tomorrow.”

  Peter smiled. “The hell you do.”

  “Oh, I definitely do. There’s this big meeting.”

  “Somebody can give you the notes.” Peter stroked her wrist, and she flushed with adrenaline. When she looked into his eyes, though, shame trickled in.

  The wind hit Geraldine’s face as she flagged down a taxi. She gave her old address to the driver, surprising herself with how easily it came to her. They drove through downtown, which felt apocalyptically lifeless, and into the Annex, a more colorful area with old Victorians and leafy streets. Soon enough the car was outside the massive converted warehouse block that had been her home for four years.