Want Not (8 page)

His face was the first thing she saw: impossibly square-jawed, with those hard Clint Eastwood eyes above that slanted overcocky grin, a dimpled half-Windsor knot at the base of that thick, not-quite-loutish neck. He was staring up at her, in grayscale, from a cut-out piece of newsprint more yellowed and crispy than she’d expected it to be: his obituary, if that’s what you called it, from the “Portraits in Grief” series that the
New York
Times
ran after September 11th. “Brian Tooney,” the headline read. “A Winner in Life, and Love.”

Brian Tooney hated to lose. Whatever the game, be it Monopoly or one-on-one basketball or his latest passion, golf, he usually only lost once. “And that was always the first time he played,” said his older brother, Robert. “After that, he’d hunker down somewhere to study and practice until he had everything down cold. Then he’d come back and stomp you.”

That competitive streak made Mr. Tooney, who was 34, a natural fit for Wall Street. He worked as a bond broker for MarketBolt, in the World Trade Center. “He loved the adrenaline, the charge of it,” said his wife, Sara. On their second date, the couple bumped into a not-quite-yet-old flame of Mrs. Tooney at a midtown bar. Mr. Tooney, she later learned, tipped a waiter to “accidentally” spill a drink on the competing suitor, forcing him to beat a quick retreat from the bar.

But Mr. Tooney had a soft side, too. His 11-year-old daughter, Alexis, brought it out in him most. “If she scraped her knee, and cried,” his wife said, “he cried too.” Almost every night, before bedtime, Mr. Tooney and his daughter danced together, usually to a Bruce Springsteen song. “‘Thunder Road,’” Mrs. Tooney said, “was their favorite.”

The family had just moved, in June, to rural Sussex County, N.J., because Mrs. Tooney dreamed of raising horses. “The commute was a killer,” his brother Robert said. “But if Sara wanted to raise penguins, he would’ve commuted from the South Pole. That’s the kind of guy he was.”

For a long time Sara stared at the newspaper, her eyes darting from the text to the photograph and back, as if struggling to reconcile them. She heard the faint creak of her front teeth grinding. Finally, she said, “Fuck you, Brian.”

And then it came back, as she’d feared (when setting that box aside) but not quite expected (when opening it). All of it: the initial splinter of that morning (Liz calling, saying, “turn on the TV”); the way Sara collapsed to the floor, rubbery and boneless, in perfect terrible tandem with the second tower’s collapse; Alexis in pigtails screaming “someone tell me!” while Sara and Brian’s mother clung to one another in the living room, Sara sobbing and Brian’s mother hacking up broiled bits of her lungs, both of them incapable of speech; Brian’s father’s silent, sleepless vigil in front of CNN, a single omnipresent tear trickling down his old prizefighter’s cheek; the four hundred
MISSING
posters they printed at Staples, and the clerk who glanced cautiously about for her manager before telling Sara there was no charge, go; the bobbing sea of yellow candles in Union Square; the smoke from the island’s charred tip that went on and on, forever. All of which felt endurable and even lenient compared to what, for Sara, came afterwards.

Brian’s brother Robert suggested the memorial. He offered to rent out A. J. Byrne’s, the bar on 52nd Street where Brian had taken Sara on their second date and where Brian and Robert had had a standing date, for
Monday Night Football,
during the NFL season. Invite everyone, Bass Ale (Brian’s regular) on the house, maybe a slide show if they could all bear it. “That’s what Bri would’ve wanted,” Robert said, and Sara had agreed. All Robert needed, he said, was an invitation list; he’d do the rest.

Brian’s Outlook address book struck Sara as the natural source. The recipient lists on his constant stream of email forwards—New York Giants scuttlebutt, mostly, but also chain letters (typical Irish, he was superstitious to the point of paranoia)—must have included one hundred or more addresses. It was password-protected but that was easy: Alexis. As Sara scrolled through his inbox, averting her eyes from the text of the emails to avoid conjuring Brian’s voice, she kept seeing one name—Jane L. Becker—over and over and over again. On September 8th, she noticed, there was a solid block of maybe twenty emails from Jane L. Becker. That Saturday, she remembered (because the days leading up to that Tuesday were engraved upon her memory in exquisite, even microscopic detail), she’d taken Alexis to her soccer game and then to West Milford for a matinee of
The Princess Diaries,
and Brian had stayed home to catch up on work. She wasn’t so much suspicious—at that moment, Brian was the winged angel she spoke to in the dark, the vaporous essence suffusing the pillow that she fell asleep spooning every night, that sponged her 4
A.M.
tears—as she was curious about the abundance, so, randomly, she doubleclicked one of Jane L. Becker’s Saturday afternoon emails.

I am completely worthless without your dick inside me,
it read.
I feel like a crackhead.
[A dick-head? ;)] God, I’m addicted. [A-dick-ted? Make me stop!]
Seriously. I can’t eat or sleep or work out or
ANYTHING
. All I’m good for is laying here thinking about you inside me. This is total torture. I’m suffering from withdrawal. What the hell have you
DONE
to me, Brian Tooney?

To say she was stunned, as Sara later told her sister, trivializes the sensation—the overwhelming, airless, corporeal
suck
of it. The effect was like seeing the world turned inside out, and discovering that everything you thought you knew about existence was backwards and upside down. That trees caused pollution and smoking made you live longer and Santa Claus was real but also a well-known pederast: everything. Her stupor was so total that she didn’t even register pain. Fortified by that numbness, though aware she was committing a spectacular mistake, Sara read, then printed out, every last one of Jane L. Becker’s emails to Brian—from the earliest flirty messages (according to her email address, Jane L. Becker worked at Lehman Brothers; they’d met at a High Yield Bond Conference uptown) to the first, awkward postcoital note
(Are you okay? I’m really sorry if things got a little too, um, crazy last night. Call me?)
to the operatic, full-blown declarations that followed
(I had no idea what love was until I met you . . . I feel like Dorothy discovering Oz)
to the subsequent reams of hypersexed e-blather that caused Sara, weeping, and holding back her hair, to vomit into the wastebasket under the desk
(Sitting on your face last night was a whole lot better than sitting here in this CDOs meeting . . . whatever it is you do with your tongue, kiddo, you should patent it).
Precisely why she was printing them, she didn’t know, but she felt a pressing need to marshal hard, physical evidence—multipurpose, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, twenty-pound, ninety-four-brightness evidence, to be collected and examined and analyzed for some unimaginable but imperative prosecution. When Alexis woke up for school the next morning, she found her mother at the desk, never having slept, the overheating printer still whirring out page after page.

As for Brian’s emails to Jane L. Becker, she read perhaps a quarter of them, and printed out none. She didn’t quite recognize the voice of the Brian who’d authored them—his collected love letters to Sara, all of them predating their wedding, would fill five pages, six tops—and for a brief dizzying moment, slipping off the plane of reality as if stumbling off a curb, Sara wondered if this wasn’t
her
Brian who’d written all this—that some intergalactic mixup had occurred, and this was
another
Brian Tooney’s computer she was digging through. Because how could he have possibly written
this
to Jane L. Becker—
When we opened the drapes yesterday, and stood there looking out over Times Square, I wanted to break the window and scream down at everyone, Look at this woman! Look at this beautiful naked beautiful fucking woman! Like a king, right? Jesus, you make me feel like some crazy king
—just seventeen minutes (it was all there, timestamped in his Sent Messages box) before including Sara in a forwarded update, from the
Daily News,
about Tiki Barber’s hamstring? And just forty-three minutes before he emailed Sara—individually, this time:
What did I need to pick up? Milk and what else? Total shitshow day.

Two nights later, emboldened by a bottle of warm chardonnay she emptied after tucking Alexis into bed, she emailed Jane L. Becker. From Brian’s email account: Imagining Jane L. Becker’s expression, when his name appeared in her inbox, churned Sara’s stomach with a toxic mixture of grief and glee. The TV in the study was tuned to CNN, on mute; that single portrait of the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta kept appearing onscreen, in what seemed like an endless loop, the pundits seeking tea leaves in the glower of his expression. Yet somehow the sight of his face didn’t rattle her. She didn’t want to study it, or spit at it. Mohammed Atta had murdered her husband; Jane L. Becker, on the other hand, had murdered her. Sara emailed her a single question:
Why did you do this to me?

At 11:49
P.M
., three nights later, Jane L. Becker replied.
All I can say is that I’m sorry,
she wrote.
I am. He loved you.

That final sentence wounded her worst of all, because it was a lie—even now, with Brian dead, with nothing whatsoever to be lost or gained, Jane L. Becker, this woman she knew only as a febrile swarm of words and emoticons, was lying to her. Because hadn’t Brian written to her, over and over again, in terse but tortured emailese, that he
didn’t
love his wife? (Sara was never Sara in his emails; only
my wife
), that he was no longer in love with her, had conceivably
never
loved her (not if you defined
love
as what he felt for Jane L. Becker)? After another bottle of chardonnay, this one properly chilled, Sara wrote Jane L. Becker one more email. It was a tremendously long note that she honed down to a single cold word:
Die.

“Oh Brian,” she whispered now, after seven years her tone more aggrieved than angry. She hadn’t, as some widows do, rinsed his memory clean over the years. Instead, she’d extinguished it altogether—unable or unwilling to scrub the stains from it, to preserve the salvageable portions, she’d just . . . chucked it. When she and Alexis visited Brian’s parents in Oradell, as they did two or three times a year, it was as if Sara was bringing Alexis to visit fond old neighbors, or relatives so distant it stressed the brain to map the familial ties—whenever Mr. Tooney brought up his lost son, or fetched the old photo albums for Alexis, Sara would flee to the kitchen to remove herself, bodily, from the connection. In Sara’s carefully structured mind—where the fragments of her past were segregated into something like a caste system in which Brian was the sole untouchable and the rest curved parabolically upward from there—Mr. and Mrs. Tooney were not quite Alexis’s grandparents; they were merely old people, vague obligations, suppliers of corned beef and hugs. It demanded some fierce mental acrobatics, this blotting of memory, but Sara had found it necessary. To do otherwise required confronting that inside-out world, or sifting through her twelve years with Brian to pan the truth from the lies without a single means of verifying which was which. He’d died, and then she’d killed him. It was the only way.

With an affected casualness, her body taut and angled, she rifled deeper into the box—but guardedly, with just two fingers of her left hand, as if fearful of an insect attack or some other, less palpable danger. She didn’t like the pull she was feeling—this gravitational force threatening to vacuum away all the dividers she’d so diligently constructed in her mind—but she felt powerless to withstand it. Only after she’d devised a more clinical line of inquiry—what had Liz saved of his?—was she able to balance it, or rather submit to it, and continue in earnest, with both hands.

The organization of the box’s contents was rhymeless, reasonless, reflecting Liz’s haste and her unfamiliarity with what she’d been forced to stockpile: one of Brian’s high school yearbooks (where were the rest?); loose photographs from disparate periods (Brian and Sara on the dancefloor at Megan and Robert’s wedding, Brian voguing some comic disco pose, Sara’s hands clasped, her face elongated with laughter; Brian and Robert as sunburnt teens, sitting in a canoe and making growly-faces at the camera; Brian at the zoo with Alexis on his shoulders, a mushy Popsicle tangled in his hair; Brian in his first office, grinning, his feet on his desk, an unlit cigar between his teeth); a folded, unread copy of the
Times
whose inclusion made no sense until she checked the date (April 18, 1993: Alexis’s birth); two MetroCards and a Giants ticket stub; and, deeper in the box, a clear plastic tube filled with collar stays, a felt box containing all of his cufflinks, and a bottle of 212 by Carolina Herrera, his cologne. She swirled the bottle and stared at it. Why on earth had Liz saved this? Thoughtlessly, Sarah spritzed her inner wrist, then brought it to her nose. Regretting it instantly, she rubbed at her wrist to erase it. She knew why Liz had thought to preserve it, and the realization pricked her. Liz thought she might want him back. “Someday,” as Liz had said, so softly.

Unfolding a manila folder, fished from near the bottom, Sara frowned. Here was the playbill from
Fosse,
the Broadway show they’d seen together, in 1998, when Brian’s mother babysat Alexis and they’d spent the night at a hotel in the city; that evening had been a marital high point, and they’d even made love, again, the next morning, giggling like teens at their childless freedom. This time, with a faint roiling of her stomach, she didn’t wonder about Liz—why had
Brian
saved it? And here was the invitation Brian had designed for Sara’s thirtieth birthday, a surprise party—at the top were six headshots of Sara, carefully scissored out of photos: Sara as a child, as a teen, as a backpacker in Europe, and so on. (She’d found one of the decapitated photos beforehand, and, disturbed, confronted Brian. “Something we need to discuss?” she’d asked dryly.) Here, too, was the room service menu from the hotel in Barbados where they’d spent their honeymoon. And their wedding invitation. And a clipping, nineteen years old, from the
Post
’s lukewarm review of
The Cherry Orchard,
her name—the maiden version—proudly underlined. Confused, and stung by the parallels between this manila folder and her memory of another one—the one she’d filled, with that awful dossier of Jane L. Becker’s emails—Sara dumped the folder back into the box and sloppily resealed its cardboard flaps.
Enough,
she said to herself, and cursed herself for having opened it in the first place. Her pulse rate was incongruously high for a woman of her age and fitness, seated. Scanning the boxes around her, she felt cornered by the blue writing on their sides, the letters seeming to glow and throb with an almost menacing exigence:
BRIAN, TROPHIES; BRIAN, CLOTHES; BRIAN, WORK STUFF
. Everything, she realized: Liz had saved everything. He was all here.