Through the Heart (5 page)

I didn’t like the idea of him knowing anything about my life. “How do you know about that?” I asked.

“Nora, come on. It’s not exactly a big town here. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I said, thinking of all the times over the years I’d seen the dented blue Camry in the parking lot of the Price Chopper, parked in front of the video store, idling outside the hardware store, and I’d kept on driving past what had been my destination.

As if reading my mind, he said, “I don’t understand how I haven’t seen you more. I think about you. I think about us. What we could have had. I feel like nothing in my life has gone right since we broke up.”

How many times had I imagined this moment? I had imagined what hearing those words would give me—not that it would take all the pain away, but I thought it might give me back a sense of not having been so completely and disastrously wrong.

All of a sudden, something in his face tugged out the echo of an old memory—the memory of what I used to feel when I looked at him.

“And?” I asked.

“And I want to spend time with you,” he said earnestly. “Could we do that? I miss having you in my life.”

Then the baby stirred on his chest—a visible reminder of the intervening years, the betrayal, the hurt: the ocean of hurt.

“What’s her name?” I asked him.

“Courtney.” He looked down at the baby, and he smiled. It was involuntary, genuine, real. It was a smile I realized I’d never seen on his face. And without knowing why, my heart started to ache.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Six weeks.” Dan caught one of her tiny hands between his fingers. He was still in full confessional mode. “Stacey found out she was pregnant . . . and we thought . . . well, things hadn’t been going so well, and we thought it might help. It was so good at the beginning, when we had Dan Junior.”

The ache intensified, I observed, almost dispassionately. Now it had an object; it hurt to hear that he’d been happy when I’d been so miserable.

He went on, “But it didn’t. I mean, it hasn’t . . . helped. At all. Not between me and Stacey. If anything, it’s worse now.”

“When did you decide that you were going to leave Stacey?” I asked.

The moment I said it, I knew something was wrong.

He shifted from one foot to the other and smiled—but it was about as different a smile as you could get from the one I’d just seen when he looked at his baby. This one was nervous, uncomfortable, apologetic.

“I . . . well . . . the thing is, Courtney’s so young. I couldn’t leave. Not just yet anyway. When she gets a little older . . .”

I knew what he was saying, but somehow I couldn’t quite believe it.

“So what exactly did you mean when you said you wanted to spend time with me?” I asked. What’s usually said about cheaters is, “If they do it with you, they’ll do it to you.” He wanted to turn that around. He’d done it to me, and now he wanted to do it with me. He had nerve—that was for sure. And when we were together, I thought it was the one thing he lacked.

“Well . . . I mean . . . I miss you. My marriage is basically over, even if I can’t leave. And I guess I thought you might be lonely too. I haven’t heard that you’ve been dating anyone. It’s been a long time. Maybe you’ve been thinking about me too? I thought maybe you never really got over us.”

“You mean you thought that if I couldn’t be with you, I wouldn’t want to be with anyone?” There should have been emotion in that question. But the emotion had been missing from my life for so long that maybe it was just cleaned out—like someone had taken a big vacuum and sucked it all away.

He said, “I don’t know. Not exactly. But . . . well, you’re not with anyone else, are you?” Then he added, “I think you know that it doesn’t get better than we had.”

This was so ridiculous, that I couldn’t help it—I laughed. Right in his face. And the words just slipped out. I said, “Oh, Lord, I hope to God you’re not right about that. That would be terrible.”

He looked incredibly offended. Finally, something had gotten through to him.

For one moment I could see clearly. I’d spent so much time imagining him as the one who had it all together—who had a wife and a family and a good job and a life—but there in the store it seemed very clear to me that even though he appeared to have everything, he in fact had no more than I did. And maybe less.

It was one of those rare moments when all the trappings of life drop away and you see the person standing in front of you, almost, it seems, from the inside out rather than the outside in. If only we could all look at each other in that way. The outside wouldn’t even exist. It doesn’t anyway. It’s just a trick of the mind. Like the illusion created by a magician.

I said firmly, but not unkindly, “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you, Dan.”

The ginger ale was just past him, down the aisle. So I slid by, found a bottle, and put it in my basket. Then I circled around and went back to the freezer to put back the pint of ice cream I’d gotten, and which had already started to melt, to change it for a new one. (My mother loved ice cream frozen so hard you practically had to chip it out of the carton. She always kept our freezer on the coldest setting, and it looked like an arctic ice cap with a thick layer of frost and stalactites dripping from the ceiling.) After exchanging the ice cream, I went up to the counter to buy the two items I’d come for. I thought Dan had left the store by then, but I wasn’t sure.

The clerk was a woman in her fifties, with hair that had been badly dyed so the gray somehow showed through the too-bright red. I thought she was looking at me funny as she rang up the two items and put them in a bag. And then, when she gave me back my change, she patted my hand and said, “You did real good.”

I probably should have been horrified that this woman had overheard the conversation. But her words were clearly heartfelt, and in that moment they seemed to be one of those kindnesses—so small, so real, so unnecessary, and at the same time so genuine—like my mother’s painted toenails.

“Thank you,” I said.

Then I took the ice cream and ginger ale home to my mother, and we ate it in front of the television while watching someone win $800,000 on a cable rerun of
Millionaire
. And for an hour or so, even with everything wrong, life seemed perfect.

 

 

 

 

I
left the family dinner ravenous. I know that’s very Freudian, but it almost always happened that way. After a three-course meal, I would leave and feel absolutely empty. Sometimes I went home like that, but then it always took forever to fall asleep. I understood why they keep watchdogs hungry if they want them to be alert.

Edward followed me out after the dinner, and as I stepped to the curb to hail a cab, he said, “You hungry?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Starving.”

“Ray’s?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

We took a cab to one of the dozens of Famous Ray’s pizza places—this one near his apartment in the West Village. I remembered the fit my mother had when Edward decided to move to the West Village. In her opinion, the Upper East Side was the only place to live. But Edward was smart. He’d waited to tell her until the purchase had gone through and he’d signed the contracts on the sale of his old place. Of course, he needed me to keep quiet about it, but I was happy to do it, mostly because I knew how angry it would make our mother.

I escaped the Upper East Side by moving down to Tribeca, but I had the excuse that I wanted to be closer to the financial district. That worked for my mother. The money excuse always did.

When we got to Ray’s, I ordered two plain slices, and Edward got a slice piled with so much crap on top you could barely tell it was a slice of pizza.

“So, what’s the latest?” I asked him as we waited by the counter for our slices to heat up.

“Emily thinks she’s found husband number four,” Edward told me.

“Good luck to her with getting our mother to say yes to that,” I said.

Emily would have to get our mother’s permission if she wanted to stay on the payroll. She—or rather her three ex-husbands—had gone through all her money, and now she was on a monthly allowance doled out by Mother.

“She might not need to. This one is loaded,” Edward said.

“Really?” I was interested. This didn’t sound like my sister’s type of husband. “Mother might even approve of him then.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Edward grinned.

“What’s the catch?”

“He’s Colombian.”

I snorted. That was why I could stand to be around Edward. At least he had a sense of humor, even if it was a dark one.

“Drug money?” I asked.

“No, I’m not sure where the money is from. Probably graft, bribes, that kind of thing. But maybe drugs too. Who knows.” Edward smiled, seemingly delighted at the prospect.

I noticed two women sitting at one of the dirty Formica tables at the back of the restaurant, staring at us.

Edward noticed them a second after I did. His smile got bigger.

“Edward, don’t,” I said.

He just winked at me and sauntered over to them.

“Hello, ladies,” he said.

They giggled as if that was the funniest thing they ever heard. But I knew those two were about to stop laughing, because I knew what was coming next. I’d seen Edward do it before.

He said to the women, “If you ever want to fuck, you can call me,” and he flicked two cards onto the table.

The cards he gave them had a phone number and nothing else. Edward had a special phone for the number on that card, so he always knew that a call to that number was going to be a random woman who he had no serious interest in.

Just as I predicted, they stopped laughing. Their faces kind of froze, as if they weren’t certain he’d actually said what they thought he said.

Edward didn’t wait for a response; he simply turned and walked away. But I noticed they didn’t throw the cards away. That phone of his rang a lot.

When Edward came back, he grinned at me.

I just shook my head at him. “What else is going on with the family?” I asked.

“Andrew’s brats got rejected from that school Mother wants them to go to,” he said.

“But he wrote the school a check for an obscene amount.” Actually, I had been the one to write the check in his name, so I knew, and I knew the obscene amount down to the dollar.

Edward nodded. “And they said thank you very much for the money and no to the nasty little munchkins.”

“That should make for a fun dinner next week.”

“I think he’s waiting until they get them in somewhere else. I say send them to public school. Toughen them up a bit.”

Our slices came out, and we carried them over to a table.

“Anything else?” I asked. I figured I might as well get all the information out of him before he hit me up for the favor I knew was coming.

Edward had just taken a bite of his pizza, and I had to wait for him to finish chewing to get my answer. I didn’t know how he could eat pizza when it was that hot. Whenever I took a bite as fast as he did, I ended up burning the top of my mouth. Maybe all that crap he got on top didn’t get as hot as the cheese.

“Mother got kicked off another board,” Edward offered after he swallowed.

I rolled my eyes. “Anything else
interesting
,” I amended. Our mother was always getting invited on to boards, and then getting kicked off. “The old man?” I asked.

“Who knows. He plays it close to the vest, you know,” Edward said.

I knew.

“Did I dance enough?” Edward asked.

That was the deal. Edward told me the scoop on the family gossip but always in exchange for something. My brother was not one to give away anything that might be potentially valuable for free.

“All right, what do you want?”

“Twenty thousand.”

“Are you going to tell me what it’s for?”

Edward just looked at me.

“All right,” I said. “Stop by the office this week. I’ll tell Marie, and she’ll take care of it.”

“Why Marie?” he started to ask. Then he remembered. “Oh, that’s right. Because you’ll be partying in Nebraska. You get to dole out the money to the rest of us, so it’s only right that you should have to dance to someone’s fiddle.”

I shrugged.

He looked at me for a second. “You don’t care, do you?”

I took a cautious bite. It was the biting that scorched the top of your mouth—when you had to bite down with your front teeth to cut through the crust. You could eat pizza hotter if you used a knife and fork, but no self-respecting New Yorker ate pizza with a knife and fork.

I chewed, washed it down with some soda, then said, “No, not really.”

“That’s your secret, isn’t it? You don’t care about anything or anyone.”