How to Be a Grown-up (31 page)

“. . . and then I waited until midnight for you to call me back. And it’s just really, really disrespectful. You act like you’re this nice woman, but you did that. You did that to me. My time is valuable, too, you know. And the thing is that you need to think about what you’re modeling. Or, like, not, okay? On top of this internship I work at Cluck U
and
at the library. I live with seven other people in a two bedroom in Bushwick where I have been mugged—twice. My loans kick in next January—twelve hundred dollars a month. And all you care about is gold bunnies for, like, evil,
evil
people. I did not spend two weeks in a tent on Wall Street for this.”

“Uh . . . thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome. Good-bye.”

Maya, thank God, rose with a voracious hunger and song in her step, as only a four-year-old can. Claire took her to school and accepted my eternal gratitude.

Wynn was so groggy that he slept all the way back to the city while I held his hand as he hadn’t let me since he was seven. It was the first blindingly sunny spring day after the April rains had lingered, and I hadn’t thought to bring my sunglasses. Eyes closed, I found myself thinking about Ruth and my own twenties. Although it wasn’t Bushwick, I was living in a walk-up with a toilet that never stopped running. And I battled perpetual terror that my part-time gigs, short-term leases, and three-week boyfriends might never gel into a Life. Ruth was doing the best she could at a time when every box is nauseatingly unchecked. Some women find that freedom exhilarating, but for the ambitious, like me—like Ruth—it feels like waiting for your parachute to open.

I couldn’t help but wrestle with her indictment.

Two decades later, was I trying to be a model? And for whom?

My kids. Just my kids.

And how was that working out? What exactly was Maya supposed to take from my example these days?

I’d just wanted them to have everything I didn’t. Culture, diversity, food trucks. I thought of our friends who’d decamped years earlier for the husband’s midwestern hometown. The wife, a banker and mother of three, said to me, “If you have a plate full of meatballs and you keep adding meatballs, at some point meatballs are going to start falling off the plate. My meatballs are falling off my plate.”

My meatballs were falling off my plate.

I wanted easier. Blake wanted easier.

Wynn lolled his head to rest against my shoulder. His other hand hooked around my arm. Nothing was more important than this. I didn’t need to show the Ruths of the world how to grow up. Maybe I didn’t even have to figure it out myself. Maybe I just had to move with Blake somewhere that didn’t require an app package for survival—where, whatever it lacked, life would at long last be manageable and we’d be living it together.

Blake’s suite overlooking Central Park South was a far cry from Westchester General. Val helped me tuck Wynn beneath a billowing duvet and then saw me to the door. “Blake should be back in an hour or two. I
was
in the middle of a silent retreat,” she muttered. But not even Val’s narcissism could wind me.

Glimpsing the king bed in the master, I was inspired. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m done with my shoot,” I offered. “I’ll bring Maya and we’ll surprise Blake.” I kissed her on the cheek and pulled the door shut before she could dissuade me.

The car then took me straight to the studio. I could have just not shown up. Taylor certainly had it coming. But I was forty-one. I didn’t need to set things on fire or educate anyone. I needed to finish the project as I’d started it—without any assistance or assistants—and then get us the hell out.

We were done by five. Eager to get home so I could shower before picking up Maya and taking her to the hotel, I flagged a cab. My phone rang as we pulled in front of my building.

“Have you heard?” Jessica asked.

“Can I call you back, actually?”

“No, you need to hear this. I can’t even do it justice, I’m putting on our entertainment reporter. Johnny! Come in here. Tell my friend what just went down at the Up Fronts.” There was a shuffle as the phone was passed. I paid the driver and got out.

“Uh, hey, it’s Johnny.”

“Hi, Johnny.” I tried not to sound impatient.

“Tell her,” I heard Jessica prompt in the background.

“Yeah, so the J. J. Abrams presentation was a bit of a shit show—”

“Mrs. Turner, you cannot go in there,” the doorman said over him.

“What?” I asked.

“Mr. Turner upstairs. Said you cannot go up.”

“Oh, is he surprising me?” I kept walking, thinking whatever romance Blake had in store could wait until I got out of these gold-leaf-speckled clothes. “What do you mean a shit show?” I asked as I pressed for the elevator while the doorman looked on helplessly.

“Since that guy died last night,” Johnny said.

“What guy?” I asked.

“One of the Russians in the malfunctioning building on Fifty-Seventh. Haven’t you been following this?”

“A little?”

“The security system freaked out and trapped everyone in their apartments—no food, no water, no septic system, no air, it was like, well over a hundred degrees in there. Apparently feces were literally leaking through the walls. So this guy finally tried to make a dash for the stairwell, but he got sprayed with toxic foam and his airways shut down.” Johnny’s voice crackled as I rose to my floor. “Anyway, when ABC played the clip from
High Fall,
the audience was horrified. Not one bid for the advertising, and ABC immediately pulled the show with an apology to the family.”

As I fished out my keys, I wasn’t even fully processing it.
Blake’s show pulled? What did that mean?

The elevator door opened, and the answer was immediate.

There were no rose petals, no Al Green playing from beyond the door. Nowhere to even insert my key. Where my simple lock had been there was now a meatloaf-sized bronze key pad and a little pyramid of metal dust on the floor beneath it.

He had locked me out.

Chapter Eighteen

I leaned hard into the bell. “Blake?”

The door swung open and Val greeted me with her finger to her lips. Then she pointed to the couch, where Wynn was dozing under the afghan. “He had some Jell-O at the hotel,” Val whispered as I followed her into the dining room, like this was any other day. “And pineapple because the bromelain is good for ligaments and red meat to rebuild his qi. I had my herbalist make him a formula.” She started rummaging through her totes. “You can send me a check.”

“Val, why is the lock changed?”

“Blake was kicked out of the hotel today. So rude.” She found her bag of herbs. “Tea?” She walked away into the kitchen, forcing me to limp after her.

“What does that have to do with me?”

“My therapist explained it all to me. When your tax returns are filed, the rent control board will see your income is too high and we’ll lose my apartment.”

“Your apartment?” The room was starting to spin like Ichabod Crane having a panic attack.

“The plan was always when I get too old to drive, I’d move back here and you’d take care of me.” Had Blake told me that six months ago, I’d have granted him a divorce on the spot.

“This is ridiculous.” I didn’t know why I was even talking to her. I called Blake.

And heard his phone ringing in our bedroom.

I ran back there on my crap ankle and found him curled in a ball in the middle of our bed. “Blake?”

He just stared at the wall with flattened eyes.

“Withdrawing,” Val said in a stage whisper from the doorway.

“Blake,” I said, bending to try to get him to look at me. I’d never seen him like this. “I’m so sorry this happened. I understand you’re devastated, but your mom is trying to evict me. I need you to sit up.”

He reached up, grabbed a pillow, and pulled it over his head.

“Blake.”

He began to moan.

“Rory, there’s no point talking to him when he gets like this.”

“Your son is in a ball,” I said to her, emphasizing each word as if translating. “Crying into a pillow.” No impact.

Blake was heaving silently, looking headless. Oh my God, this was happening. It was really happening. “Blake, you have to do something,” I tried one last time. “Blake?” My mind raced through every worst-case scenario Benjamin Stern had thrown at me. “Okay, fine. But I’m not setting one foot outside until Blake’s lawyer agrees, in writing, that my departure in no way affects the custody discussion.”

Thirty minutes later, I’d numbly lined the vestibule hallway with duffel bags and was waiting for an affidavit from the lawyer while literally holding one foot in my front door. My cell rang.

“We good?” Val asked from the foyer. “That everything?”

“It’s the lawyer. Hold on.” I pivoted for a second to answer it, and the door shut.

“Val!” I called. “Hello?”

She cracked it open with the chain on.

“Rory, hi,” the lawyer greeted me with his gravely voice. “I have your affidavit all ready to e-mail over. As per your request, I’m confirming that your moving out tonight in no way implies that you are relinquishing custody.”

“Thank you.”

“And that you are agreeing to pay Blake a lump sum of eighty-thousand dollars.”

“What?!” I looked through the gap at Val’s rainbow-rimmed bifocals.

“Eighty-thousand dollars,” the lawyer said again as Claire and Jessica got off the elevator, slightly out of breath from running over from their respective offices.

“American?” I asked.

“Yes,” he confirmed hesitantly, probably quickly calculating if accepting the payment in Australian dollars would yield Blake a profit.

“Where on earth do you think I am going to pull eighty-thousand dollars from?!”

“Blake wants eighty-thousand dollars?”
Jessica asked incredulously over my shoulder.

Claire’s eyes went black. “I’m going to kill him. I am going to fucking kill him.”

Val shut the door. I put the lawyer on speakerphone as he continued: “The option of paying him alimony indefinitely is still on the table.”

“How can you live with yourselves?” I shouted at the peeling door. “This is
pathetic
.”

The lawyer made a little cough he probably used to stretch billable hours. He’d probably racked up hundreds of thousands with that cough. “The legal industry has been doing a lot to combat reverse sexism.” My blood was vibrating. “I strongly advise you to accept his terms or face a protracted legal battle—”