Love Saves the Day (14 page)

Laura had always struggled to suppress an inner conviction that she was an imposter in this life she’d built for herself. A long time ago, when she’d still lived with Sarah, things had happened to them that would be unthinkable to the people she knew now. Things like the nearly unbearable humiliation and heartbreak of being fourteen and watching your mother pick through a waterlogged mountain of personal belongings flung into the street for the world to gawk at, in the hope of finding
something
, anything—a pair of underwear, a shredded childhood diary—that had been yours and private only the day before. Was it possible that anything like that could ever happen to Perry? Or to the other fifth-years at her firm? Or even to Mrs. Reeves, the woman who sat behind the firm’s mahogany reception desk where she’d answered phones and
greeted clients in undisputed authority for the past thirty-four years?

Sometimes Laura imagined what Sarah’s life would eventually become, shuffling alone among the flotsam and jetsam of her former life crammed into that small, overheated apartment. The sadness she saw in Sarah’s face, whenever she brought herself to make one of her increasingly rare visits, made her feel both guilty and terrified. She felt like yelling at Sarah,
It’s not my fault that you’re sad now, that you’re lonely. You made your choices. It took both of us to make our relationship what it is
.

But the things Laura imagined might someday happen to herself, or to Sarah, were things that would never happen to Josh. One only had to look at him, to spend five minutes in his presence, to know that he was one of the anointed—him and all those belonging to him. Meeting Josh’s parents and sister for the first time in New Jersey over Sunday brunch, Laura had said politely,
It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Broder
. And Zelda Broder, formidable in chunky diamonds and frosted hair, had grasped Laura’s hand and exclaimed in her raspy voice,
Josh, she’s lovely!
Laura had looked around at the comfortable faces, listened to the loud conversations about work or eager exchanges of gossip that weren’t about the quixotic sorts of things that had formed the background of her early life with Sarah—discussions about the meaning of art in music, or painting banners for rallies that proclaimed
HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT
—and she’d thought,
This is where I belong
.

Josh was simply a person who enjoyed his life and his work. He was passionate about music and books, the way Sarah had been, but he viewed them as smaller gifts that made everything else better rather than ends in themselves. He could make something as minor as a spontaneous afternoon movie or midnight pizza order seem like a holiday, a treat they’d earned by working so hard. For Laura, the idea of hard work being rewarded with anything other than money and the security of knowing more work and money would follow was so foreign as to come as a revelation.

She would think about him all day, imagining Josh’s hands and
Josh’s legs wrapped around her own, and her knees would tremble beneath her desk. Innocuous office talk, like,
Laura, could you please come in here?
or,
The meeting is starting now
, reminded her of the urgency of a
please
or
now
whispered in the dark. In her bed alone on the nights when she didn’t see Josh, her legs contracted and kicked restlessly, keeping her up for hours, as if they were desperate to walk away with or without her, desperate to walk back to him.

To fall in love in New York is to walk, and she and Josh spent hours walking all over the city, although when they were downtown Laura made sure they never went any farther east than Soho or the Village. Their long legs naturally took rapid strides, but they deliberately slowed their pace to save their breath for the conversations that went back and forth and around and around, never ceasing, like an endless game of tetherball.

Once, only a few months into their relationship, they’d walked past a store on the Upper East Side, one of those tiny boutiques whose window mannequins wore heartbreakingly lovely, stunningly expensive gowns. One of the dresses in the window, a floor-length spaghetti-strapped number, was made of silk the exact color of the soft inside of a peach. Laura had stood contemplating it for a moment and said musingly, “I’ve always wanted to wear a dress like this.”

“Then we should go in so you can try it on,” Josh had replied.

Laura had glanced down at her faded jeans and light sweater—her typical nonwork uniform—and laughed. “What’s the point? Where would I even wear something like that?”

“Trying on isn’t buying,” Josh had pointed out, and so the two of them went into the shop.

Looking at herself in the dress in front of the store’s three-way mirror, Laura had felt transformed. Her pale skin looked creamy and rose-tinged next to the soft peach of the dress, and her hair gleamed against the delicate fabric like jewels in a velvet case. She
didn’t look like a lawyer with 150 pages of contracts to read through that night before returning to work in the morning, trudging to the subway with a shoulder bag so heavy that she was already developing back problems. She looked like someone who went whirling across polished floors before collapsing gracefully into a delicate chair with a glass of champagne and perhaps the smallest finger sandwich for refreshment.

“You should buy it,” said Josh’s voice, behind her.

“Are you crazy?” Laura whirled to face him. “Do you know how expensive …?” But her protest trailed off when she saw Josh’s face.

He looked at her as if seeing some version of herself she hadn’t met. It was a look Laura had seen sometimes on Mr. Mandelbaum’s face as he’d watched Mrs. Mandelbaum do the simplest things, like stand on her toes to pull a book from a high shelf, or pour boiling water from a kettle into a teacup. It was a half smile, stronger in the eyes than it was around the mouth. And even though Laura was very young when she’d seen it, even then she’d thought it was a smile that contained a lifetime of books and teacups, of sleepless nights next to a feverish son’s bedside and clasped hands years later at that same son’s graduation, months when the checkbook refused to balance and years of holiday dinners that were festive nonetheless. But, always, there had been this. This room. This woman.

“Marry me,” Josh said. “Will you marry me?”

He reached out to take her hand, but Laura took an instinctive step back. “Are you serious?” She felt perspiration collect beneath her arms and thought,
Well, now I guess I
have
to buy this dress
. “Do we even know each other well enough to get married?”

“I know how I feel,” Josh replied. “This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

His voice was firm, his eyes clear as they looked into her own.
He really has been thinking about it
, Laura realized. A wisp of an idea curled around the edges of thought: That you never knew, truly could never know, what another person was thinking. And
yet what was love if not the possibility—the promise, even—of perfect understanding?

“I’ve never been this happy with anybody else,” Josh continued, “and I can’t imagine ever
being
this happy with anybody else. Can you?” His hand remained outstretched. “If you can, then I have nothing else to say.”

Laura had always known that the world was made up of two types of people. There were those, like Josh (and Sarah, for that matter), who felt that life existed to be enjoyed for its own sake. It wasn’t that such people were necessarily irresponsible (Laura again thought of Sarah), but that the point of the responsibility and hard work and worrying over bills and all the rest of it was so that, in the end, you could enjoy your life. If all those things didn’t get you to the joy, then all those things didn’t matter.

And then there were those who knew that life was something to be battled and survived. If you were very careful, and if you worked very hard, you could get through it without anything truly terrible happening to you. That was the most it was reasonable to hope for.

Laura was the second type of person, but she hadn’t always been. She had been happy these few months of dating Josh, had remembered what it had felt like when she was young and any small thing—like the promise of visiting the Mandelbaums and spending long, uninterrupted hours with Honey the cat purring in her lap—had made ordinary days alive with the promise of joy to come. But she’d never really expected it to last. She’d been shoring up the happy days against the inevitable time when all she’d have left of them was the memory of what it had felt like, and the reality of struggling forward regardless.

Laura felt a stab of guilt now at the thought of saddling Josh with somebody like her for the rest of his life. But the thought, the half-suggested promise that maybe, just maybe, she could get it back somehow—that the silly songs Sarah had always listened to and sung about love and happiness and all the rest of it could be true, not just for a moment, but forever—was too much for her.

“Yes,” she’d said. She let Josh take her hand, and as he pulled her into his arms she repeated against his ear, “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Sarah had finally met Josh, not long after their engagement, over lunch in a small East Village sandwich place. If the suddenness of their courtship had alarmed her, she’d hidden it well. She and Josh had talked music for a solid hour, and Sarah’s eyes shone in a way Laura hadn’t seen in years. For the span of that hour, Laura had seen the Sarah she remembered from childhood, the Sarah who spoke confidently and had interesting things to say. Not the Sarah of recent years, who chattered at Laura so relentlessly that calling her or going to visit felt like being taken hostage. After so many years of keeping her distance, Laura would think resentfully, it hardly seemed fair.

She had worried what Josh would think when he saw how strained her relationship with Sarah was. (Because how could anyone fail to notice how uncomfortable they were in each other’s presence?) Would he think there was something wrong with Laura? Reconsider the wisdom of entangling himself with someone whose family wasn’t as healthy as his own?

But Josh had been enthralled. “Your mom is the
best
,” he’d enthused afterward. “You have no idea how lucky you were, growing up with a mother who knew so much about music and
cared
about so many things.”

Laura had always imagined that someday, at some hazy point in the future, after she and her mother had forgiven each other for all the unforgiven things that stood between them, they would sit in Sarah’s apartment and talk across the battered kitchen table about Josh. Laura would say how falling for him had reminded her of the community pools Sarah had taken her to in the summers of her childhood, when Laura would allow herself to fall backward into the water and sink weightlessly to the bottom, the circle of sunlight reflected on the water’s surface above her expanding as she sank. That was how love felt, like sinking into light.

Sarah would smile ruefully and say something like,
That’s just how it was with your father and me
. And then Sarah would tell her what had gone wrong with Laura’s father. She had wanted Sarah to offer some tangible explanation that could be logically applied to Laura’s relationship with Josh, so Laura could say,
Well, that’s something that would never happen to us
. Sarah used to say that Laura tried to wear logic like an armor, but Laura knew that everything that had gone wrong for Sarah, and therefore for Laura, had been the result of bad logic, a willful ignorance of the basic laws of cause and effect.

She’d thought about having a discussion like this with Sarah, but whenever she’d tried opening her mouth to begin it, it had seemed to her that the inevitable pain and exhaustion, the excruciating dredging-up of things long dormant (what an attorney might call the “opportunity cost”), couldn’t possibly be worth it. Someday, perhaps, the right moment would present itself naturally.

Except that now, of course, that moment would never come.

Still, it was of some comfort to Laura that her mother had lived long enough to see her wedding. She and Josh had been married on a Thursday morning in the middle of September, in a Tribeca restaurant with only a handful of friends and family looking on. Laura was grateful they’d kept things small, as she wasn’t sure who she would have invited beyond a few co-workers. Perry in his suit and yarmulke, properly restrained and joyful for the occasion, had made her think of Mr. Mandelbaum. How he would have loved to have been at her wedding!
My little
ketsele
a grown-up lady!
he would have said.

Sarah, now forty-nine, had been as beautiful as Laura had ever seen her, still tall and elegantly slim, the lilac silk dress she wore turning her eyes a vivid shade of indigo. Laura and Josh had both been walked down the aisle by their parents, in the Jewish tradition. While they were waiting for their cue, Sarah had pulled Laura’s arm through her own. Laura could feel it tremble. Sarah looked as though she were about to say something, but instead she looked down at Laura’s bouquet.

“I carried lilies at my wedding, too,” was all she said.