Alternate Side(68)
“Jen, it’s fine,” Nora said. “It’s great. I’m thrilled for you. I’m just a little surprised, is all. Just please don’t ever tell me he’s your best friend.”
“Excuse me, but you’re my best friend. And does anybody actually say that except on television?” She looked down at the ring. “Who gets married for the first time at forty-eight? It’s ridiculous. Whatever you do, don’t give me a shower.”
“I had a dream about a shower the other night, weirdly,” Nora said. “We were here, at your place, and there weren’t enough chairs, so we were all standing.”
“That sounds right,” Jenny said.
“And I realized I didn’t have a gift and I was kind of panicked about that, and then I realized that the shower was for me, that I was pregnant again. Which would be some kind of miracle.” And then, looking into her friend’s face, she saw a deadness, a darkness in her eyes, and automatically reached out her hand. “Jenny, honey,” Nora said. “You’re not—”
“That would be a miracle, Nor,” Jenny said.
“But is that…I’m sorry, I’m being ridiculously incoherent here…it’s just that…”
“Calm down,” Jenny said. “It’s all fine. It’s just one of those things that I realize now I’ll never do. Never have, I guess.”
“Like living in Paris.”
“I could still live in Paris. But not that. I look at all of you and I don’t know, after all those years of thinking it wasn’t something I wanted, I wonder. But who has a baby at forty-eight? Movie stars. Besides, all this is way more than I thought I’d wind up with. No matter what, I really, really, really like being with him. That’s what it comes down to.”
And that was the thing, Nora thought as she lay in bed that night, listening to Charlie moving around upstairs in the guest room, letting his shoes drop to the floor, running the water in the bathroom. You had to really, really, really like being with someone. Yet somehow that was a decision they were all expected to make when they were too young to know very much. They were expected to make all the important decisions then: what to do, where to live, who to live with. But anyone could tell you, looking at the setup dispassionately, that most people would be incapable of making good choices if they had to make that many choices at the same time, at that particular time of their lives. Jenny had waited. They had judged her and joked about her and cautioned her and advised her. But maybe she had been right. A younger Nora would have been appalled that her friend the Theodore Pierce Foster Professor of Anthropology was marrying a cabinetmaker with a sourdough fetish. A younger Charlie had said, “Your sister went to Duke so she could design leggings?” But in the car on the way home, sitting with the estrangement well of the center console between them, they had agreed that Jasper was a pleasure to be with, that Jenny seemed happier than ever before, that Rachel was doing so well working for Christine. The only thing wrong was the two of them. Their hands had brushed in the backseat and they had both edged closer to the windows, bright with the red of brake lights.
They didn’t rush it. From the outside they seemed much as before. They took things in stages, but after a while it became clear that all the stages led to a single end point. One evening, when Nora thought Charlie was napping on the couch, he said, without opening his eyes, “I ran into Dave Bryant on the street yesterday. He’s doing a stint in London and he asked if I knew anyone who might want to sublet his place. I said I knew someone who would take it.”
Charlie moved into the sublet on the East Side, partly furnished. Nora looked at places on the West Side but farther north, on the high floors of high-rise buildings. Ironically, one of the things Charlie had wanted so badly finally came to pass, although not as he had imagined. They agreed to sell the house, and as predicted, made a good deal of money. The windfall was less once divided in half, but a windfall it was. There was nothing else to argue about. The children were gainfully employed. The retirement accounts were already separate. Nora agreed to stay in the house until the new owners moved in. They each changed the beneficiaries on their life insurance to Oliver and Rachel. Someday, Jenny said, when Nora finally told her everything, Charlie’s second wife would be infuriated by that, and Charlie might try to change it. But not yet.
It saddened Nora to realize that the one thing that might have precipitated real hand-to-hand combat between them had overnight ceased to be an issue. Nora had poured a bowlful of kibble one morning and Homer had refused to rise in Pavlovian response to the clatter. She carried the bowl to where he lay and put it right under his nose, but he lifted his head and then put it down again. Charlie pulled their car out of the indoor garage, and the two of them drove together to the vet, Homer’s panting loud in the backseat. As she ran her fingers through his pied coat while he stood shivering on the stainless-steel examining table, Nora realized that there was no flesh between fur and bone. She kept telling herself that she was assuming the worst, but when the vet came in after the exams, the scans, she knew the news was terrible. She and Charlie held each other and cried, for Homer and for all the rest of it, as the vet gently pushed the plunger on the syringe and the dog’s heart ceased to beat beneath their joined hands.
“He was always glad to see me when I came home from work,” Charlie said in the car, and Nora started to say, “So was I,” that way a wife was expected to do, and then she couldn’t and she started to cry again. She was still crying when they ran into Linda Lessman on the pavement, Nora with the leash dangling at her side. “Homer?” Linda asked, and when they nodded wordlessly she threw her hands in the air and said, “Oh, Lord, everything is falling apart.”