The Nest(69)

“Matilda.” He bit the word hard, as if there were something illegal about lingering too long on each syllable. His unwillingness to hold her name in his mouth made Stephanie mad.

“What was that?” she said.

Leo straightened and spoke more clearly. “Her name is Matilda Rodriguez.”

“And she was nineteen? She was a teenager?”

“Yeah, well.” Leo pictured Matilda’s fingers and remembered how she’d nervously licked her palm before taking him in her hand. He shook his head, trying to block the image, which had already caused a regrettable hardening in his pants. “She was old enough,” he said.

That was the thing he would take back, the words that evoked the tiny but perceptible flinch from Stephanie. She walked over to the table and picked up Bea’s story.

“What are you doing with those?” Leo said.

“What are you going to do with them?” Stephanie gripped the pages in her hands.

“You see why it can’t be published. Forget about me,” Leo said. The heat radiating from Stephanie alarmed him. “What if Matilda reads it?”

“Matilda’s a big reader of literary fiction?” Stephanie said. “You were able to figure that out during your brief car ride?”

“Okay, forget about Matilda,” Leo said. “I’m trying to re-create a life here. Rebuild some kind of business. Bea publishes a new Archie story? Come on. That’s news. She publishes this story—it’s even bigger news and everyone finds out what happened and that’s it. I’m f*cked. Who’s going to work with me?”

Stephanie felt dizzy and nauseated. She had to eat. She was afraid she was going to vomit.

“You know I’m right,” Leo said, pacing the kitchen now. “You know if this story is published, people are going to know it’s really about me. She can call the guy Archie or Marcus or Barack Obama, it’s about ME.”

“Even if it is about you, Leo,” Stephanie said, shoving a cracker in her mouth, trying to steady the room, soothe her gullet, quell her anger, and ignore her fear. “Even if it is about you, and even if Bea gets the thing published, and even if someone reads it and connects it to you—” Stephanie took a long sip of water. Exhaled. “Even if all those things happen, who is going to care?”

It was that last sentence she would call back if she could. That was the one where she saw the shift, the slightest narrowing of his gaze, the moment when she had—inadvertently and slightly, but clearly in Leo’s eyes, concisely in his mind—positioned herself on the wrong side of a dividing line.

That was the thing she would take back.





CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE


Early morning on the Brooklyn waterfront. The sheer number of people out on a brilliantly sunny but bitingly cold February day surprised Leo. The chill of the wooden bench beneath his legs seeped through his wool trousers and heavy coat. The blue sky felt like a harbinger of spring, but the water was still a dire wintry gray. The leather satchel containing Bea’s story was on his lap. It had only been days since he read it but it felt like weeks. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, suppress his rising anxiety, but instead he found himself picturing Matilda’s right foot in what would be its waning minutes. Before they got into the car and when she was slipping on her silver shoe, he’d noticed how her toenails were painted bright pink, how the pink glowed against her golden skin, how the elegant arch of her foot sat against the shoe and how, when she stood and looked at him and tugged at her shirt, she was perfectly steady on her two intact feet. Quite possibly the worst thing for him about Bea’s new story was this, how it conjured Matilda and everything about Matilda from where he’d buried her deep, deep in a tiny box in some remote corner of his brain.

He reached in his coat pocket for the pack of American Spirit cigarettes he’d bought on a whim but hadn’t opened yet, not wanting to further irritate Stephanie by smelling like tobacco. He opened the pack, withdrew a cigarette, and, leaving Bea’s leather satchel on the bench, walked over to the railing on the water. He felt sheepish about smoking, which also irritated him. And then he was irritated to feel irritation. Irritation was pretty much his primary sentiment lately, when it wasn’t anxiety.

Things were not good inside the little jewel of a brownstone that was Stephanie’s. From the street, the rooms behind the new but historically accurate windows glowed with an amber-infused warmth, inviting and cheerful. From the outside, the house looked like the perfect place to take shelter from any variety of storms, but inside? Inside, he and Stephanie were barely maintaining a civil politeness. The softness that had taken root between them since the night of the snowstorm and slowly blossomed into something expansive and occasionally exuberant had collapsed—not a slow leak either, but a sudden deflation, like a sad, sunken soufflé.

They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s why addicts stayed addicts. Why he’d walked away from buying cocaine before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar but now had a neat glassine envelope in his pocket. Why he was fingering an unlit cigarette in his hand and wondering what to do about Stephanie as he had countless times before.