The Ten-Year Nap (41 page)

“So why did you say we could go?”

“Because I knew you really wanted to. And basically you take care of everything outside work, and I felt bad, and wanted to give you this. You wanted me to say yes; you left it wide open so I could say yes. But I am just working so much, and it’s never enough.”

“Someone could find out about the receipts, couldn’t they?” she asked.

Leo shrugged. “It’s possible, not likely. But yes, it’s happened at other firms.”

“So those receipts are just floating around in somebody’s file somewhere? Was it the first time?” Leo didn’t say anything, and Amy said, “What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with
you
?” he said. “You want to be in this marriage, but you also want to be this child. Not knowing things, except every once in a while when you absolutely have to.” He looked away from her, then looked back sharply. “We could not afford that trip,” said Leo. “We really cannot afford our life. Those receipts do nothing, do you get it? They are my pathetic way of trying to be resourceful, when in fact there
is
no way.” Then Leo’s mouth rearranged itself into a grim little line. “I can barely support you and Mason,” he said. “I can barely do what I’m supposed to do.”

Amy’s heart was fast now. “We can put Mason in public school,” she said. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing. And it would help a lot, right?” Leo didn’t say anything; he just kept looking at her. “All right, then. I’ll go back to work,” Amy finally said. “Not just a volunteer job, like I was thinking about. A law job. I’ll do T&E somewhere, if I can.”

Leo nodded, as if he knew she would say this. “It’s not so bad,” he said gently. “You’ve wanted to work. You’ve been ambivalent about still staying home. You always talk about it, and then you don’t do it, and I figured that one day you really would.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice starting to waver, “but I didn’t want it to be like this. Under duress. I don’t know how to get back into things. I don’t even know how to use Juxtapose BriefScan!”

Leo appeared confused. “Why would you? It was discontinued two years ago. We use Comprehend Corporate Litigator now. CCL.”

So much time had passed that the dazzling new software from that job interview was now
old hat.
She herself was so old hat that it was absurd to think she could just come back. But she would have to. She’d sit with Leo in the tiny study at the Sven desk, and he would show her how to use Comprehend Corporate Litigator, and how to interpret the monthly statements that were jammed crudely into their mailbox like ransom notes. She would read their credit card statements in detail, including the penalties that gathered, and she would see just how deeply in debt they were and would understand what they were up against. Looking at the numbers at the bottom of the bills, she’d know that they weren’t abstract figures but were real and unmanageable.

Amy would sit in that study—finally the word “study” would have meaning as a name for this room—and she would start to read her old legal textbooks and some of the law journals that Leo kept bound on the shelves, and after a while she would have remembered enough from her previous life as a lawyer so that, although she wouldn’t be at all caught up with everyone else, she would at least be somewhere in the crowd, struggling, taking the subway during rush hour, lying in bed at night with clients in her mind, all of them dancing in a circle and keeping her awake. God, she would have to wear panty hose again every day, she realized.

“Do you think anyone will hire me?” she asked Leo in a small voice.

“Ah, probably. Not for a lot of money, and not somewhere that’s so-called good. But there are a lot of firms.”

She nodded, accepting this. “At the dinner tonight,” Amy said, “when you were dancing with Corinna Berry, I have to say that really depressed me.” Then she asked, “Why don’t you want to sleep with me anymore? Am I completely unappealing to you sexually? Am I like a crone? Like a cow? Just the mother of your child, and so I’m desexualized?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Leo said. “It hasn’t got anything to do with you. We’ve just gone off a little,” he tried, kindly.

“It’s more than that.”

He paused. “All right, sure, it’s a lot of things, I guess. It happens all the time, and it’s as common as anything. As common as those receipts,” he felt he had to add. “But there’s another part too: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Amy, but I have put on twenty-one pounds this year. I’m like a whale.”

“You are not.” But she thought about the cookies he ate each night before he went to bed; recently, he had purchased a box of shaggy coconut Girl Scout cookies from the daughter of a colleague. Amy recalled the “chocko” Bing-Bongs he had brought home from St. Doe’s and had placed on a plate by the bed the night before, and the pastries that were laid out on platters at his office in the mornings.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “And the idea of having sex and of you seeing this stomach rising up above you like the sun, well, it makes me want to die. I look like my father,” he said. “I’m a middle-aged guy who looks like Murray Buckner, who ran the magazine stand in the Strode Building. Now how did that happen to me?”

“It happens to everyone.”

“It doesn’t happen to you,” he said. “You get to stay home and take care of everyone and everything, including yourself. You’re basically holding back time.”

“Oh, is that what I’m doing?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

It was the longest conversation they had had in a while. There would be further conversations about all of this; they would carry Amy and Leo through the weeks and months. Much of what they said would be repetitive. At times Leo would be interested in the conversation, and often he would not. When she spoke about Mason’s school or about how much she missed Jill or about how Roberta was moving to Harlem and they would see each other far less frequently, she saw that he did listen but that there was effort involved. He couldn’t help the fact that he was only partly compelled by the world she had fashioned over the past ten years since she had left work and Mason had been born. That world could be absorbing yet was also pulled along by a current of tedium, and everybody knew it.

Children had a lot to do with it; they were the most fascinating part of it all, but mostly only to their own parents or, depending on the particular aspect, sometimes only to their mothers or only to their fathers. You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

“I have to go to sleep now,” Leo said finally. Then he added, “If I was able to stay home all day, I’d lose weight.”

“But you would go out of your mind.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. Then he said, “I really don’t mind my job, you know. I actually like it a whole lot more than you think. I like the days when I get to go to court. I like talking to the judges. It’s always really interesting there.”

“I know,” she said.

“If I stayed home, I’d read a lot of Thomas Mann. I’d read the one that I never got around to reading. The very long one.”

“They’re all long.”

“How did Thomas Mann find the time to write such long books?” Leo asked. “Nobody has that kind of time now. The entire world is so impatient.”

He moved close against her and she could feel the convexity of his stomach. He was right, it was bigger than usual. “I could help you lose weight,” Amy offered.

“Thank you.” He kissed her head. “If it works,” said Leo, “and I stop hating my physical self so much, I think we can resume as planned.”

“So you’re not thinking of having an affair with Corinna Berry?”

“Corinna Berry is sleeping with Lisa Silvestri.”

“Lisa?
Really?
” She was amazed at this secret shift. Leo nodded. But then Amy realized that she hadn’t received one of those evening calls from Lisa recently, and she also remembered how Lisa had sat watching Leo dance with Corinna tonight. Lisa, she understood now, had not been watching Leo at all.

“But even if that weren’t the case,” Leo said, “of course I wouldn’t sleep with her. Why, would you have an affair? You mean you’re like Penny Ramsey?”

“No,” said Amy hotly. “I am not.”

“Good,” said Leo, and he pulled her on top of him in the way that he sometimes used to, so that at first she seemed as light and flexible as a paper airplane, and then, as she arranged herself on him, she became heavier, forceful, weighting him down.

Something would happen; it was imperative that it happen now, if only to create a line of demarcation between not-sex and sex. They were both full of food and drink, and the air seemed kitcheny, overly warm. She could smell wine on him and lifting off herself too, and it was as though they belonged together in their slightly ruined and filled-up state. As a teenaged girl, Amy had loved boys who were similar to her: unthreatening, slight, and narrow; she could imagine kissing them forever. She’d eventually exchanged all of that, but she’d never known she would exchange it for a middle-aged man who lay helpless, his body part bear, part man, part air mattress. She lay on him softly, and he kissed her in the full way he did back when they were young coworkers, co-conspirators. He kissed her without distraction but with the concentration that was required now in order to show that you were not distracted. This was middle-aged sex, married sex. Maybe it wasn’t the last hurrah of the body. There would be more of those, but how misguided they’d been to think that what had come before would last for the duration.

In the middle of your life you should have as much sex as you could, Amy Lamb knew, and do it now, don’t wait. It was an emergency disguised as a luxury. Leo kissed her faster now, and the wolfish sounds he made were like the ones he sometimes made in his sleep, dreaming. She buried her mouth under his arm, where the pheromones situated among the soft wires of hair inexplicably drew her in.

Love was stronger than reluctance, or at least you had to make it be. You had to do everything you could to return the husband to the wife, and the wife to the husband; to pull her on top of him with mouths open and the door locked, and a child sleeping somewhere on the other side of it. Nothing was connected anymore to the urgency of young love or to the possibility of sex flowering into family. Leo did what he knew she wanted him to do, his head lowering between her legs in the way a husband recalls what a wife likes, and then does it, bringing her those flowers or that certain kind of chocolate. She got up on her elbows and watched him briefly.

They had given up on sex in the same way they had partly given up on marriage, but here it was again in all its shifting weight and preferences. Amy lay back. She held on to his hair, as she had sometimes done in such a moment over the years. “I’ll need Rogaine,” he had once said, early on, after she had pulled so hard that he had felt a sickening follicular tug. But of course his hair had stayed intact. Even his retired father had a full head of hair, though its shoeblack color had turned to gray. Amy held fast to Leo’s hair, and she thought how tenacious they both were. “I’m going to come!” she said in a slightly operatic voice, as though he wouldn’t know this was the case. He always knew, just as she knew the same about him a few moments later. It was as if, in sex, they were forever describing all the action to a third party who could not see or feel anything. For some unknown and perhaps evolutionary reason, they often announced themselves in this primitive and warning way.

Then, at the end, they were both thirsty; he padded out to bring them water, knowing the path through the apartment in the darkness. The cup he brought her was an old plastic one that had belonged to Mason years ago. Amy saw the words
Ahoy, Mateys,
which were now half worn off like a rub-on tattoo. This had been married sex, followed by a drink from the old, fading chalice of their little boy, whose own essence was even now in his sleep rubbing off and changing, and was no longer what it had been.
Why Mommy crying?
Mason had asked her when he was very little.

Husband and wife lay in their bed high up in The Rivermere in the middle of the night, their party clothes still cobwebbing the two chairs in the room. It was a weeknight, much too late for them to be awake, but they were awake anyway. The plastic cup was warm from the dishwasher, but the water they drank was cold and delicious.

S
PRING ARRIVED,
though the snow stayed on the ground longer than it should have, and the streets of the city were strategically spread with puddles and pools. The boys jumped into them, annoying their mothers, and an old woman in The Rivermere skidded on the curb outside the building and broke her hip. Slowly the days lengthened and lightened.

Out in Holly Hills, the township awakened into the new season. The air was highly pollinated, and watery-eyed mothers watched their children run around the backyards and up and down the wide streets. Jacob’s Path exhibited its particular beauty, and the realtors cruised through the neighborhoods with potential buyers, offering patter and pointing. All the lawns had been tended and the bushes sculpted, and Donald took Nadia around their property with a pair of electric clippers, letting her try them herself. “She’ll cut her hand off,” Jill said as she watched them go. “She can’t use electric clippers.”

“She’ll be fine,” said Donald with certainty, not even looking back. Nadia ran ahead of him into the grass.

In May, Nadia performed at a small recital in the city that included the voice students of Anna Milofsky. It was held on a Saturday in a borrowed classroom at the Juilliard School. The other students were all teenagers: boys in jacket and tie, and lithe girls in strapless dresses, their hair drawn back off their emerging women’s faces. Nadia wore a sashed green velvet dress that she had chosen herself at a children’s store in the Holly Hills Shopping Plaza, though her mother was slightly perplexed by the choice, the insistence on
green,
until Nadia started to sing the unannounced second of two songs: