All You Could Ask For: A Novel (4 page)

ALL OF A SUDDEN I felt pain unlike any I can ever remember.

The numbness that at first spread about my body like gushing water was replaced by a searing agony. Suddenly I couldn’t keep up with the number of emotional hammers pounding away at me: stunned disbelief, murderous rage, agonized sadness. And, worst of all: pity. I have never before felt as sorry for anyone as I suddenly felt for myself.

I dove into the bed and buried my head beneath as many pillows as I could stack. I wanted total pitch-black darkness. I wanted never to see again. The pity threatened to consume me completely, and it occurred to me that self-pity is the most devastating of all emotions. Anger can be motivational, sadness can be galvanizing, but pity is crippling. I couldn’t even cry, because I didn’t have the strength. I could hardly take a breath, my chest felt heavy and constricted. I tried to breathe deeply, to gather my thoughts. How had I gotten here? I was twenty-eight years old. I had joined the Peace Corps out of college. Then I was a television producer in New York. Now I was a cheated-on newlywed.

That was when I smelled him. One of the pillows piled atop my head must have been his, and all at once he was all over me. I tried to get away but accidentally I rolled to his side of the bed and found myself in the slight indentation he’d made when he slept, and then my hip touched a wet spot and I shot out of the bed as though it was a cannon. That was
his
wetness on the mattress—we’d made that wetness together—how long ago? It felt like days had passed, but how long had it been really? An hour? Less? I could feel him on me, on my flesh, inside me, and without thinking I stripped off everything and dashed to the shower. I turned the water as hot as I could stand and scrubbed. Once my skin was as pink and clean as I could get it I turned off the water, put on a sports bra and running shorts and sneakers, and then I was outside, steps from the beach. And then I started to run.

I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t even really know where I was, I just knew I needed to run, to recapture myself. The self-pity threatened to stop me, threatened to knock me to the ground, but I pushed on.
I am not someone who feels sorry for herself,
I told myself.
I am not.

I really am not. I feel sorry for so many people but never for myself. I feel sorry for all the same people you do: orphans, circus freaks, single mothers, homeless children, widower fathers, crack babies, drug addicts, blind peddlers, deaf beggars, and anyone missing an arm, a leg, or any other valuable appendage. But for you it likely ends there, while for me it is just the beginning.

I feel terribly sorry for the woman who worked at the drive-thru window at the Dunkin’ Donuts near my father’s house in Connecticut. It could be twenty below zero and there she would be, leaning out that window with no coat, no gloves, making change, handing out coffee, always with a smile on her face. I would marvel at her contentedness, even envy it at times. Once I asked her why she always seemed so happy, and she launched into a life story too horrendous to be believed. It was the story of a husband who beat her and a daughter who died in a car crash and a month of sleeping in the mudroom of her church, and she concluded by saying: “This is the happiest time of my day, being around all these nice people.” I looked around and saw the typical groups of folks you’d expect in a Dunkin’ Donuts; they didn’t all seem so nice to me. But this was the best part of her day, serving inexpensive snacks to ungrateful masses of people. This was her life. And then one day she was gone. I don’t know what happened, she just disappeared. I tried asking everyone I could in the store, but no one knew what happened to her. She just stopped showing up. The manager told me: “Often our people find better jobs and they don’t bother coming back to quit.” But I knew that wasn’t the case; she would never have left that job unless something awful happened to her. And I’ll never know what it was. When I went home that night I realized I didn’t even know her name. And that made me so sad I cried myself to sleep.

I also often feel sorry for people I’ve never met.

For instance, just the other day there was this woman who wept uncontrollably when she was called to “Come on down!” on
The Price Is Right
. It was clearly the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her, and it was completely ruined by some jerk who bid one dollar more than she did on the cost of a lawn mower, and he wound up on stage playing a game with dice while she stood there hoping for another chance. But I could see on my watch it was going to be time for the showcase showdown next, so there would be no more chances for her. And that hopeful look on her face made me cry. That poor woman had waited her whole life to come on down, and that was all she got.

There was another woman on that same episode I also felt sorry for. She
did
make it up on stage and played a game where she would win a car if she could guess how much it cost. The car was a little Mazda. I don’t know that you could have fit two people and two bags of groceries in it, but this woman guessed the price was $78,000. Drew Carey was so taken aback by her guess I thought he was going to have to be carried away. But, bless her heart, this woman felt really good about her answer, and for that one minute she was just as sure as she could be that she was going to win a brand-new car. Of course, everyone in the studio and everyone watching on television knew before she did that she had absolutely no chance, and for those few seconds when she was the only one in the world who still believed, my heart ached for her.

So, there are those moments in my life practically every day. And when you combine them with all the regular ones that get to you as well, like the starving children with distended stomachs, it is basically a full-time job. I think the only person I’ve never felt sorry for in my whole life is me.

Why would I? I was born with every advantage imaginable. My family is wealthy, I am healthy, I’ve always been able to choose whatever path I like. Yes, my father can be petulant and insensitive, and yes, he is now dating a woman only four years older than I am, but that isn’t really
my
issue. I feel sorry for my mother, who died so young, and my younger brother, who always idolized our father and has felt personally betrayed and disillusioned by Dad’s failings, but none of that has kept me from pursuing my interests or living my life. I have never imagined
anyone
would feel sorry for me, much less me feel it myself, until I typed “FuckLarryBird” into my husband’s laptop on the first morning of our honeymoon and found myself staring at a nude photo of a woman it took me a moment to recognize.

The woman was attractive but by no means perfect, nothing you would ever see in
Playboy
, or whatever online site men use for their porn these days. She wasn’t airbrushed or artificially tanned, she wasn’t waxed and enhanced in all the most important places, but she was pretty, and about twenty years older than me. Or nineteen years, actually, to the day, now that I think of it. When I first met her on the campaign, I recalled, we laughed when we figured out we shared a birthday. I remember she said: “Funny, I could have been your babysitter.” It didn’t seem so funny at the time, and even less funny now was the note she’d attached to the photo.

Something to remember me by while you’re in Hawaii with your daughter.

So now I was just running, as hard and as fast as I could. I didn’t know where I was going, but that really didn’t matter. Because when you’re running away from something rather than running toward it, it doesn’t make much difference which way you go.

KATHERINE

THEY SAY IT’S BETTER to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Well, how fucking stupid are
they
?

That expression, or the sentiment behind it, is one of those things we’ve made up to make ourselves feel better. Like when we say it’s good luck if it rains on your wedding day. Of course that isn’t good luck; it is, in fact, the very definition of
bad
luck. But we announce that it is good luck so we don’t have to feel bad about being wet at our own wedding. I remember when my friend Heidi was married, right here in Manhattan, she and her fiancé arranged for a double-decker bus with an open top to transport the guests from the church on the Upper West Side to a social club by Gramercy Park. The trouble was that it poured. I mean,
poured
. My lasting recollections are of Heidi with a garbage bag over her dress and a shower cap over her hair to keep the rain from spoiling all her photos, and all the guests crammed into the lower level of the double-decker bus. I ask you, was that good luck?

Of course it doesn’t mean the marriage is doomed. In fact, Heidi remains happily married and has three little boys whose names currently escape me, but the point remains there was nothing lucky about the rain on her wedding day, and neither is there anything better about loving and losing than never loving at all.

“Oh, fuck him,” I said.

“What’s that, Katherine?”

I had forgotten about Maurice. “Nothing.”

“You keep talking to yourself, I’m gonna need to take you somewhere other than that office,” he said cheerily. “You may need to see a doctor.”

I do love Maurice. He is a genuinely nice man, and in my experience those are not so easy to find. I think if there is such a thing as reincarnation—
and
if there is any justice in the universe—Maurice should come back as a supermodel, or a basketball star, or George Clooney. If Maurice were to be reincarnated as Heidi Klum, I would not for one second begrudge him the legs that never end or the perfect skin or the hair that always returns to the right place in the wind. It would make me happy, in fact, to know that the winners of the genetic lottery actually earned their good fortune through good deeds. Otherwise it’s all just random, luck of the draw, and some people get to be gorgeous and thin and the rest of us don’t, with no rhyme or reason.

If Phillip gets reincarnated, on the other hand, I want justice. And I have found just the perfect sentence, an appropriate comeuppance for a lifetime spent with looks and wealth and no appreciation whatsoever for his good fortune. I came across it just the other night, watching
Dirty Jobs
. (I love that show.) The episode began with scenic shots of what appeared to be a ranch, the sun rising on a picture-perfect morning, and then Mike Rowe came on and said something like “What a perfect day to collect some horse semen!” And that’s what he spent an hour doing. When the episode was over, I went online and read all about the collection of stallion semen, and it was fascinating. Turns out the most common method for collection is with an artificial vagina, but in some cases that doesn’t work, so someone needs to manually extract the specimen from the stallion. That’s right,
manually
. And as I was reading all about it, one thought kept ringing in my mind: If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I hope Phillip comes back as the guy who jerks off the horses.

Does that sound bitchy? I don’t mean it to. It’s just that he was the second man in my life to let me down so dramatically that I was unable to cope. The first was my father and let’s face it, no matter how bitterly disappointed you may be in your father you still never wish upon him a lifetime of giving hand jobs to horses.

But the days when Phillip and I were together do not seem real to me anymore, which is to say I recall a lot of events but I have no recollection of how they felt or tasted or smelled. I remember meeting a shy, brilliant boy in the registration office on our first day at the Harvard Business School. He was older than I, by seven years. He’d been on Wall Street and his firm was paying his tuition in Cambridge. He was a genius, and they all saw it even then, as anybody would have. I remember his bushy black hair, unkempt and curly in the back, which did not suit his face at all. I remember we were both outcasts, to a degree; me because of my father, Phillip because he came from the wrong side of the tracks. Phillip was from Brooklyn, the very definition of self-made. His father, a sweet and charming man, delivered milk. Phillip, on his way to graduating first in our class at HBS, always told me, “They don’t teach us anything in these schools more valuable than what I learned on the streets in Brooklyn.” Phillip was a fighter, and he fought dirty when he had to.