How Could She Read online

  Sunny reached both arms across the table and took hold of Nick. He had good, big hands. Nick’s shirt, which he’d had made for him by his Singaporean tailor, was nearly as rumpled as his face. Sunny wore oversize black glasses that she’d chosen because they reminded her of one of her most beloved fellow Canadians, Rick Moranis. That they also made her nose look dainty didn’t hurt. Her thick black hair was in a high bun that had taken her a solid five minutes to arrange into an adequate mess.

  “You think I’m a lousy friend,” Sunny told Nick.

  “You want to know what I really think?” Nick chuckled. “That your friend is batshit to be trying to move down here.”

  “Why?” Sunny said, though she completely agreed. “You did it. I did it.”

  Nick, who’d come over from Johannesburg so long ago that he bore only the barest trace of an accent, shook his head. “Not now we didn’t. Must I remind you she’s a foreigner, she’s a woman, and she’s broke? Does she know anything about health insurance? Why would anyone want to become an illegal immigrant?”

  “Stop,” Sunny tutted. “This is New York, not—”

  “It’s still America,” Nick said. “And right now it feels like garbage. I half wish I’d stayed put.”

  “Thanks a lot, honey.”

  “That’s why I said ‘half,’” Nick told her.

  Sunny bit her lip and surveyed her surroundings. “America” was not the first word to spring to mind. Nero’s was best known as the place where Vanity Fair threw book parties for its staff writers. It was mobbed at night but quiet in the mornings, with tone-deaf prices and a no-laptop policy that drove away most people who needed to spend typical working hours doing work. Nick had taken Sunny there the morning after their fourth date. During the six years they’d been together, Nero’s had always been their place. Now that they were in the habit of having coffee at home, often separately, they came when they needed some sense of grounding. The only other time they spent together before dark was when they walked Stanley, their aging Scottish terrier, to the dog run in Washington Square Park. Stanley had originally been Sunny’s, rescued from a shelter in Long Island City, but Nick had come to love him like his own.

  Sunny looked over at Nick, who was peering into his phone. She reached for hers and then stopped. She didn’t want to be like every other couple, silent at the table, connected only by a shared Wi-Fi signal. Nick was leaving for a work trip in four hours, and even though he had only a couple days of site visits and meetings in Germany, by the time he made it there and back, they would have been apart for a week.

  Low-grade anxiety pulsed through Sunny. She had meant to spend the day working on her watercolors for her show at the Brooklyn Public Library. It was nearly a month away, but she needed to make the pictures great. Her determination to throw herself into a group show that included who-knew-who-else in a back room of a public library rather than take the simpler route of having a solo exhibition at the Drawing Center was what made her quirky and impossible to predict. She knew that, though she never let herself get engaged with thinking that way, so at the same time she did not know that. She sighed. What was the difference between coming off as calculating and doing exactly what you wanted to, all the time? She’d long ago lost access to that answer. Now, though, everything felt loose, which made her so nervous she’d put on two pounds in the past week. She’d heard someone talking about the Trump Fifteen. Perhaps that’s what was going on. Maybe she’d come up with a project based on bathroom scales. Projects, that’s what Sunny did. Her dreams of becoming a proper artist had given way to the satisfaction of earning affection as a simulacrum of one. Besides, fewer and fewer people seemed able to tell the difference.

  Her cookbook memoir project, due at the end of the summer, was still in heavy research phase, which was just a fancy way of saying she was endlessly shopping for vintage Canadian volumes on Biblio.com. She was also contracted to design the labels for a range of candles to be sold at the boutiques of a fashiony hotel group designed by a Brooklyn restaurateur and backed by a dashing Colombian. The pitch had been to base the artwork on the animal wallpaper so prevalent in bathrooms when she was growing up in Hamilton, Ontario. And her Cassette column was due by the end of the week. She hadn’t gotten started, let alone come up with a topic. Each month she was supposed to share her “latest inspiration” and supply a short essay along with images of her favorite real-life examples and a couple of original watercolors. The one time Sunny had asked for help planning future columns, her editor, Miriam, had laughed. “But that’s what we’ve brought you in for—our readers want to know what Sunny MacLeod is thinking about. It’s not my taste they’re after!” When Sunny had muttered something about baked beans and toast, Miriam had told her it was brilliant and scheduled it for a fall issue. Sunny had found a French-Canadian recipe, a Brighton-based artist who painted Heinz cans, and a trio of Mexican beaded necklaces that looked as if they were constructed from silver beans. By the time she was done with the column, she couldn’t help agreeing with Miriam. It was sharp. Sunny lived in fear of Miriam’s leaving the magazine and being told her new editor would be Rachel Ziff. Rachel was one of the most judgmental people Sunny had ever met, and she made no secret of her dislike of Sunny, who saw no point in trying to win her over. When the two found themselves at work events, Sunny simply stared through Rachel as if she weren’t there.

  “That’s it.” Sunny drew out her phone. “I’m going to tell Geraldine she’s more than welcome to stay with us,” she said.

  Nick looked up and took a long sip of what had to be cold cappuccino. “You’ve earned yourself an Amnesty International tote bag.”

  “Oh, come off it,” Sunny said. She started typing and paused in mid-message. She loved Geraldine like a little sister. But when it came down to the prospect of actually opening her home to her, seeing Geraldine in the morning before she’d had adequate quiet time, having to chitchat about Geraldine’s dreams while setting up the toaster oven and an array of condiments, Sunny’s bigness of spirit calcified into a brick of obligation. Who was Sunny kidding, offering use of the guest room? Toast with homemade preserves wasn’t going to solve Geraldine’s problems. She needed real talk that Sunny couldn’t possibly provide.

  “I have a bad feeling,” Sunny said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Peter Ricker’s been sending me strange emails. His mother just died, and he’s a wreck, going on and on about the past.” Peter was losing his bearings. He’d bought a plot of land off Algonquin Park and built a yurt, he’d told Sunny. He’d started seeing a Transcendental Meditation coach. In his last email, he’d dropped the rakish tone. No more calling her “Sunshine,” no more signing off with a row of lowercase x’s. Peter now used words like “humble” and “reckoning.”

  “He’s talking about Geraldine, asking me whether I think she’s completely moved on.”

  Nick looked up at Sunny. “Has she?”

  “Yes, four years later. To her great credit.”

  “She’s still single, right? Maybe there’s hope.”

  “Hope—are you kidding me? She should stay far away from Peter. Not just as punishment for what he did to her but because he’s the worst. Trust me, you don’t know him like I do.”

  “Mum’s passing has opened up a sense of clarity,” Peter had written. “Not marrying Geraldine was the greatest mistake of my life.” Sunny knew that this was nonsense. The greatest error of Peter’s life was his complete inability to see how much damage he brought upon others. Even Sunny, who’d made the mistake of getting a little too close to Peter when she was in his employ, had suffered as a result of his cashmere-clad existence. Most of the unspeakably rich people she and Nick were friends with were self-aware enough to understand that they did not count as good souls. Even if they voted and donated in the right direction, there was no shaking off the shame inextricably bound up in their privilege. Peter, on the other hand,
indulged his tendency for self-torment and melancholy. He had the gall to wear his fucked-upped-ness as a badge of purity. Poor little Ricker boy.

  Sunny had half a mind to tell him to stay in his yurt and leave Geraldine alone. But she worried it would only provoke Peter to stop pontificating on email and go after Geraldine. If he wore her down, Geraldine would never find the happiness that had eluded her. Sunny knew Peter’s kind. He was only going to get more selfish and crazy with age. He would disrespect sweet Geraldine again and again.

  “You should not get tangled up in this mess,” Nick said. “Let them work it out.”

  Sunny scowled. She wished she could tell Nick the whole story, but that was out of the question. Honesty had never been Sunny’s priority. As far as she could see, it just slowed things down. She had come to believe in a supertruth, a version of reality that cut through the fog of other people’s hang-ups and never hurt them. What was she going to do? Geraldine’s one other actual friend who’d been around for the Peter fallout was Rachel, and they had worked so hard to build a wall of non-engagement that it would be a shame to knock it down.

  She’d known Rachel back when Sunny shopped at department stores and had encountered so few Jewish people that she didn’t know better than to wish Rachel a “happy holiday” on Yom Kippur. Sunny went clammy every time she remembered how Rachel had chuckled and explained to her that there was nothing festive about the Day of Atonement—in front of their Jewish editor in chief, Edward Simonov, no less. Rachel still bugged Sunny to no end. It was obvious that Rachel took great pleasure in their class differences, as if there were something wrong with Sunny for liking nice things while Rachel’s decision to live in the borough where she’d grown up and churn out pulp fiction made her some kind of Rosie the Riveter.

  And maybe Geraldine couldn’t be helped. Sunny used to trade long emails with Geraldine, trudging through her friend’s sentences of self-pity and despair, parrying them with whatever comfort and film recommendations she could locate within herself. Geraldine’s boss, Garth, had called Sunny when Geraldine hadn’t shown up to work for three days in the wake of Peter’s leaving her. Garth was considering filing a missing-persons report, and it fell to Sunny to contact her old landlord, Mrs. Wang, and ask her to confirm that her sublessee was spending her days curled up in her bed watching Sherlock on her laptop. Now, though, even if Geraldine wasn’t thriving, she was surviving, talking about making a change. Sunny had no choice but to play along and be supportive, while keeping a healthy distance. Geraldine was a lot of work; even thinking about her was exhausting. Sunny squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I need an April theme,” Sunny said to her husband. “Sailing?”

  “Plums,” he said without looking up from the sports page.

  Sunny considered this. “Aren’t they a fall fruit?” The moment she said it, she knew she needn’t have bothered. There was never any reason to second-guess Nick’s suggestions. Though he had no firsthand experience in media and did not make art, he had a near-perfect understanding of what people wanted next.

  “Plums will be good,” he said. “A homemade tart, mail-order sugarplums, and you can throw in a plummy lipstick.” He raised his eyebrows at Sunny. “The advertising side will love that.”

  Sunny granted her husband a sheepish smile. She knew that he was partly making fun of her, but she didn’t mind. If anything, she wished more people would challenge her, call her out on the ridiculously covetable business of Being Sunny MacLeod. Yes, she was hardworking. But so were a lot of people, and they weren’t here, enjoying the luxury of being expensively yet comfortably dressed and nowhere close to doing anything productive at past ten o’clock on a Thursday morning.

  “That could work. . . .” Sunny’s voice trailed off when she detected the telltale vibration. It was for Nick. While most men had fewer friends the older they got, her fifty-something husband spoke on the phone with a frequency and variety of conversational partners that put Sunny to shame.

  During the great split of 2014, when Sunny was breaking Nick down into a list of flaws in an attempt to get over him, she’d created a small counterlist of his positive attributes. That his phone rang more than hers had made the number-two slot. (His ability to make her laugh and his beautiful hair were numbers one and three, respectively.) And when he came crawling back with a marriage proposal, she was willing to overlook his distracted affect and his ambivalence about having a child—not that Sunny was lobbying for one.

  “Of course I’m on for lunch,” he was saying into the phone. Sunny studied his forehead, which was collapsing deeper into its folds. She could tell that he’d forgotten about the plan until this minute.

  “You have to pack,” she whispered. Nick brought his finger to his lips.

  “Okay, she can come by at twelve thirty,” he said.

  “Who’s coming?” Sunny asked when Nick had hung up.

  “Agnes. That was her mother.” Sunny nodded in understanding. “Aggie’s staying till four, and then Fatimah will come get her. It will be fine. You can make everybody tuna-and-caper sammies and stick around after I split, right?” Nick had a way of wording things that reminded Sunny of Paddington Bear.

  “Doesn’t she have school? Or does Zoya not believe in school this week?”

  Zoya, Nick’s ex-wife, was an architect who worked primarily on Nick’s projects, though she and Nick barely spoke. Zoya seemed to spend an awful lot of her time pulling Agnes out of school and taking her on vacation.

  “It’s some holiday,” Nick said, rolling his eyes. “You know how her school is.”

  “I have work I need to do, remember?” Sunny said weakly. She wasn’t going to foul up Nick’s visitation rights. In addition to the odd lunch, Agnes spent the night on alternating Wednesdays, and though it had gotten off to an awkward start, Sunny had come to no longer mind the sleepovers. Agnes was nine, obsessed with the library books she hoarded, and wonderfully oblivious to her monobrow, which snaked from temple to temple.

  When Sunny and Nick had first gotten together, she’d viewed his three-year-old daughter as a liability in leopard leggings and an ill-fitting tutu. Because of this moppet, Nick was able to go away only on certain weekends. Because of her—or rather his guilt over leaving her—he was opposed to fathering another child. Some women in Sunny’s shoes might have handled this by embracing their stepmother role and consoling themselves with the knowledge that they could have it all—a child, in a part-time way, as well as a career and tight pelvic-floor muscles. What Sunny hadn’t accounted for was how much she would come to love the girl. More and more, when Aggie was munching on pretzel nubs in front of Netflix, Sunny had to fight the urge to bust into the den and smother her with cuddles.

  Nick cocked his head. “You want me to call Zoya back and say that nobody will be around to supervise Aggie on my day? Because she’d love that.”

  “Of course not.” Sunny felt her shoulders slump. She’d take care of Agnes, and when she was done with that, she would get back to Geraldine. Her day had tumbled out of her hands. At least she had her plums.

  4

  The Tuesday-afternoon flight from Toronto Pearson International Airport to New York’s La Guardia was one hour and twenty-five minutes, less time than Geraldine’s Wednesday-night Afro-pop dance workshop at the Y. And yet when all the anticipatory shopping excursions, salon blowouts, and New York magazine reading sessions were totted up, the journey began to feel like the international expedition that it was.

  Geraldine arrived at Rachel’s door feeling exhausted and preemptively irritated with her host before even placing her index finger on the scuffed buzzer. Snow fell from the sky in desultory drifts. It was a little past four in the afternoon, which barely gave Geraldine the time she’d need to wash off the airplane’s barf-bag smell before showing her face at Sunny’s opening. Rachel was going to want to “catch up,” even though they’d been in constant email touch and they had the whol
e five days ahead of them for that. A car drove past, Frank Ocean blasting out of its open windows. Geraldine turned around and smiled as the vehicle sailed toward the corner. People lacked the audacity to do that sort of thing where she lived, and not for the first time since her plane had touched down, she was reminded that her being here, and not in Toronto, made every kind of sense.

  When she’d talked to Barb last month, her former boss had been able to offer encouragement only of the noncommittal variety. Barb had rattled off words like “hamstrung” and “head count” on their call, explaining that she had been promoted to senior vice president and, ironically, no longer had much clout in hiring. Barb offered to introduce Geraldine to the new bureau chief, Tom Newlin, the next time she was passing through New York. “There’s a way to return you to the world of real news. I just have no idea what that way, that path, looks like.”

  But of course Geraldine was able to envision it with a bit more clarity and orchestrated this pass-through just a few weeks later. She emailed Barb about coming in for Sunny’s show, making it sound as if she were a guest of honor rather than just a name on a list. Wonderfully, Barb had stayed true to her word and arranged to bring Geraldine in. “I can’t do any more than put you in the same room as Tom, but I’ll tell him to be nice to you.” Geraldine had a good feeling about Barb. She was too charmless to be a liar. She was more of a jerk, which Geraldine could handle.

  A disconcerting fuzz blared from the intercom. This was Geraldine’s cue to announce herself, slam her weight against the door, and trudge up to the fourth floor. Rachel and her husband, Matt, lived on the eastern edge of Clinton Hill, in one of the last run-down multi-unit buildings on a block of recently renovated frame houses.