Vladimir(27)

She nodded and I slid next to her, holding her in my arms as she sobbed into my chest.

“Tell me what happened.” I smoothed the falling strands of hair away from her face. A different waitress daughter came and put Sidney’s milkshake down. I mouthed the word breakup and winked at her and her face drooped into a little puffy-lipped frown of sympathy.

Sidney told me about how Alexis, whom she had been in a relationship with for three years and living with for one, had, in the spring, broached the topic of having a baby. Alexis was thirty-five and had recently learned the term geriatric pregnancy, which made her want to start discussions about a plan, if not the plan itself. Sidney, in the meantime, was reeling from the news about her father, and from the shattering of her perception of her parents’ perfect love. She had always clung fast to images and beliefs and traditions. At ten she had been inordinately devastated by the news that Santa Claus didn’t exist. She felt as though she couldn’t possibly discuss the making of a new family while hers was crumbling to the ground.

Alexis, a self-described Urban Black Woman who was raised in Queens by a single mother, with a father who had long ago moved to Florida and become the head of a family that she had no place within, had little sympathy for her. “You were given everything,” she said to her. “They love you. They’re grown-up people. Let them live their lives.”

They were both lawyers. Alexis worked for a large firm at an average of sixty-five hours a week. It was drudgery, but very well remunerated. Every time I visited their lovely, high-ceilinged apartment I saw the evidence of reckless online-shopping benders piled in cardboard columns in the doorway. The money to buy the stuff without the time to even unwrap it. Sidney’s job was more rewarding but paid half as much with nearly as many hours. The last thing they wanted to do during their precious Saturday-night dinners or Sunday brunches was to talk about their problems. So, like the two only children they were, they retreated from the discussions, with the silent understanding between them that when things “calmed down,” they might see a therapist.

Two burly men came into the diner. One of them leered at Sidney and me, sitting on the same side of the booth. Did he think we were a couple? I met his eyes and held them until he turned and sat on a counter stool, his pants pulling down and his shirt pulling up to reveal a hairy plumber’s crack.

“What is it?” Sidney asked, sensing that my attention was elsewhere. I shook my head, and she continued: “So at work there was a big case that came up for us, a lawsuit about wrongful termination, and I was given some support staff to help me. It was summer so I had this law student from NYU, and, well, she was very, um—”

She paused and drank her milkshake.

“Beautiful, very tall and, um, fun to be around and passionate and smart, and we were working very long hours—”

She trailed off.

“And somehow Alexis found out,” I finished for her.

“She had a summer Friday and was bringing dinner by for me as a surprise. There was nobody else in the office and we were—” She hesitated, and I held up my hand to let her know that she didn’t need to elaborate on any further details. She rubbed her eyes roughly, as if to wipe off the memory. “So we talked through it, and I said I would end it, and then our team won the case and went out for drinks and it happened again, and I was trying to be good so I told her, and she said, three strikes, you know, and then one night—this woman, you see, I couldn’t, it was like a spell, she was so beautiful and so tall and so—”

“Young?”

“No. No, she was my age. Before she went to law school she was an actress. A real one, commercials and Broadway. I don’t know. Being with her was like shooting something into my veins. I tried to resist, and then one night it was two in the morning and she texted me that she was at a bar outside our apartment and I just—left. Just hoped Alexis wouldn’t notice I was gone. But of course she did notice I was gone, she’s—I don’t know what I was thinking—I don’t think Alexis has slept through the night since middle school. So I ruined it. She’ll never take me back now.”

She rested her head in her palms again and sobbed. Our plates arrived and I moved back to my seat. I felt cold. Sid shoveled food into her face, hardly chewing, choking down her milkshake between bites.

“Now you’re judging me.”

“I like Alexis.”

“You of all people should not be judging me.”

“I might argue I am exactly the person who should be judging you. I’m your mother.”

“Look at what you and Dad did.”

“We had an understanding.”

“You had an understanding about him power raping women?”

She was loud, with an ugly, stretched look on her face. The man with the butt crack and his buddy looked over toward us with amused expressions. I was reminded of Dante’s Inferno, when Virgil rebukes Dante for watching two souls argue with each other, telling him it is wrong to ogle two beings who are embroiled in their own suffering. I told her to quiet down. She looked at me like she wished me dead, though when she next spoke, her voice was lowered.

“How could you not be sympathetic to me?”

“Of course I’m sympathetic to you.”

“I messed up. She should give me another chance.”

“She might.”