“Go on.”
“Well, underground or not, he was brilliant. May still be brilliant. That’s how you and your sister started your gallery: sold some prime pieces of his, established a reputation in the art world, and made your connections with old collectors in your very first show. You guys opened about six years ago—Rory was basically straight out of college at UVM.”
“And what do you mean, can you elaborate on…recluse?”
“Like…recluse,” he says, bewildered that he’s the one to fill me in on this gaping branch in my family tree. “Like, fell off the map when you were a teenager—thirteenish, I believe. J. D. Salinger–like.” He pauses. “Wait, that probably doesn’t help you.”
“No, it doesn’t really,” I answer.
I think of that big-haired, braced-teeth teenager in her polka-dotted prom dress, and the pity in my core nearly slices my guts open. That she—that I—had to deal with such nuclear emotional fallout of my father abandoning us right when I may have needed him the most, to come into my own. But I offer none of this to Jamie. It’s too much too soon to share with him, despite how much I want to, how much I want him to solve everything, put the bow on the package for me.
I say, “Don’t you need notes for this or something?”
“Not really.” His cheeks turn pink now. “Like I said, this is the big story for me. I’m pretty well versed on it.”
“Okay, continue.” I clamp down on the open-ended questions that this news has brought, too interested, like a masochist, in what else Jamie might unspool.
“Graduated third in your class in high school. Rumor had it that you were your father’s musical equivalent, but opted to focus on tennis in high school instead.”
“What does that mean?” I interrupt.
“That his thing was painting, your thing was music, but that it all blended together in your genes.” He hesitates, the reporter in him alarmed that he may have overlooked a fact. “I don’t know much about that angle, to be honest.”
I nod. “Keep going.”
“Earned a tennis scholarship to Lehigh but went to school in Binghamton. Dropped out of NYU law. Married Peter Horner five
years ago, started your gallery with your sister shortly before that. Now recently separated from Peter Horner. Boarded plane that crashed in Iowa, and that’s where we’re at.”
Recently separated from Peter Horner? What?
“Wait, what? I’m separated from Peter?” I sit up, trying to get closer to him, as if that might clarify what he just said.
“Oh, shit. You didn’t know?” His already pink cheeks burn red, and yes, there it is, I trust him—he’s human in his mistakes, human in his empathy—a good reporter but still amateur enough to lower his guard. “Oh my god, you didn’t know? Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god. I didn’t know that you didn’t know.” He stands and starts pacing. “Shit. I thought you’d have known this! How can you not have known this?” He inhales and stares and reminds me of what I imagine he looked like at eight. “Please don’t have a heart attack.”
“You mean a literal heart attack, don’t you?” I say, and his head bounces. “No, Jamie, I’m not going to have a heart attack.”
But I might fucking maim my family for not telling me!
First my dad, then this? What else? Who else? What else is tucked in darkened corners that they know I can’t get to in my present state?
“Shit, shit, shit. I shouldn’t have said anything—Dr. Macht was very clear about not upsetting you, that you’re not ready for jarring conversations or emotional news.” He sits back on the edge of the bed. “Christ, I’m sorry.”
I chew the inside of my lip, assessing how pissed off I am, how devastated I am by the realization of my broken marriage. The answer: not so much. Probably not as much as if I remembered why I should be devastated in the first place.
“Why did we separate?” I ask simply.
“I’m not sure I should tell you,” he says.
“Look, Jamie, I like you. I have no idea why, but I like you. I trust
you. Evidently, you’re the only one around here who is willing to tell me the facts of my life, facts that I cannot
goddamn
remember. So please. Level with me.”
He exhales, then runs his palms over and down his cheeks.
“I have significant doubts about this.”
I eye him, mulling how I can best deconstruct the situation to my advantage. It comes naturally, the idea, the manipulation to get him on my side for good. Like an old sweatshirt, too long tucked into the back of my closet. I slide it on and
oh, yes, that feels just about right.
“Jamie, do you want to be part of Operation Free Nell Slattery?” I’d heard a similar such phrase on the news. It had a nice ring to it. Inspiring, I think.
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you want to be part of Operation Free Nell Slattery—you know, like, free me from the hospital?”
Free me from this void of blackness.
“I do,” he says, taking it too seriously.
“Relax,” I say aloud. “You’re not selling me your soul. Besides, I thought journalists didn’t have souls to begin with.”
Ha ha,
we say together.
“I have a soul,” he assures me. “That’s why I didn’t want to upset you in the first place.”
You do.
I nod.
He does,
I think. Which is exactly why I went to him to begin with. My gut instinct. I might not be armed with much, but at least I can listen to that. How it’s imploring me to start over, be different, tell him my story. All of the above.
“You’re not upsetting me, you’re educating me. Telling me things that for reasons unknown, no one else is.” He bobs his head. He gets it. He’s a journalist after all—wise enough to know how both the medium and the message can change things. “Look. You know
as well as I that there’s a wall of reporters out there, waiting to talk to me, to get some information. I hear them call the nurses’ station, I see them jockeying next to you when you go live. But I chose you. I
choose
you. So let’s do this: you tell me what I need to know, what I
want
to know, and I promise you exclusive access.”
“Exclusive access?”
“Yes, to me, to my story, to my family. You can use me for all you need to get, as you said, the hell out of Iowa. I just want you to keep me on the straight and narrow, be sure that I’m getting the whole truth and nothing but it.”
He swallows, and I can tell that I have him, that he’s taken the bait.
He wants this, more than he wants to be kind to me. It’s human nature after all. Self-preservation.
“So tell me,” I say. “If we have a deal, if you’re going to be part of Operation Free Nell Slattery, explain to me why Peter and I separated. Just tell me quickly, like pulling off the Band-Aid.”
He watches me for a beat, gauging my strength and my sincerity, and deems them both to be hearty. Then he says, “Okay, we have a deal.” He goes still for a moment, a newscaster once more. “He was cheating on you.”
“Huh,” I say, and stare at my cuticles—they’re tattered, the nail beds fraying, white crescent moons butting up from the skin. I check my internal pulse. I should feel sicker over this, I know that I should feel sicker over this.
Get mad, goddammit! Get so goddamned pissed off that you think you’ll never speak to that asshole again!
“With whom?”
“Some woman he works with,” he says, his head moving almost undetectably. “I didn’t want to exploit it, so I didn’t dig too deeply—that’s why you never heard it on the air. I just knew that he’d moved out, that you kicked him out, actually. Four months ago or so.”
“But I was eight weeks pregnant.”
“I don’t know the intimate details just yet.” He stutters, human again. “I mean, if you want me to, I can ask some questions, I just…well, there’s a line that I didn’t want to cross. It didn’t seem fair, after what you’d been through.”
My eyes purge themselves with a quick rash of tears, not for Peter, but for Jamie’s kindness. Or maybe they are for Peter, maybe this is my true visceral reaction, but I just can’t remember how I should be reacting in the first place. Jamie freezes, uncertain what to do next, so I run my hands over my cheeks and push away the lump of emotion that’s boring down on my chest.
“You’re too moral to be a journalist,” I say after a few minutes have passed, almost half-smiling.
“It’s nothing like that.” He half smiles in return. “Trust me. But they’re tearing through Anderson’s past—old girlfriends emerging to give sound bites, one-night stands who are cashing in on their fifteen minutes, neighbors who can’t get to the
Enquirer
fast enough—it didn’t seem right to do it to you, who didn’t ask for any of this. I just wanted—despite my journalistic instincts—to let this one go for now.” He clears his throat. “The affair, the pregnancy, that is. The rest of it, obviously, I’ve been covering.”
I lean back and stare out the window into the cloudless Iowa summer sky. The sun will sink lower soon enough, turning the fields into open black space, ushering another day out, another day in—one after the next, all the same for me: a void, a crater.
“In everything you’ve read about me, everything you’ve seen, do you think I was happy?” I say, finally.
“Oh, gosh, Nell, I’m not the person to ask that.” He averts his eyes. “Surely, there’s someone better to ask.”
I close my eyes as a way of answering. Because the thing is, the
thing that we both already know, is that it is now all too clear that there’s not.
When I wake again,
the sky is dark, my room silent, and my body feels exhausted in a way that it hasn’t for a few days.
“Nell.” Peter is sitting in the corner.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I say. I shut my eyes and wish he’d vanish like a real apparition might. “You should have told me.” My voice bounces around the room, cutting through the solitude.
Of course you should have told me! If not you, then Rory. If not Rory, then my mother! How many layers do I have to unpeel to get to the core of my life?
But I don’t say this, don’t act on my indignation. I’m not sure whom I can trust now, why I should trust them, even when they tell me otherwise.
“I know. I know I should have.” His own voice cracks, and instead of pity, I feel revulsion. That after everything I’m dealing with, now I have to bear his pain, his selfishness, too. “They told me not to. They didn’t want to stress you. We were given instructions not to do anything upsetting. So…” His hands flop by his sides. “So I didn’t.”
A barely quantifiable excuse.
“Fine,” I say. “I know now.”
“I’m sorry,” he answers and starts to sob. “I mean, I told you that a thousand times before, but…you can’t remember. But I am. So sorry.”
“I’m too tired for this. If this is what I can’t remember, then that’s fine. Who wants to remember how her husband slept with someone else?”
“Let me tell you what happened,” he pleads. “Maybe it will help.”
“Help me or you?” I want to press the call button and get him the hell out of here.
“Both of us,” he says. “Maybe it can help both of us.” He sputters. “More than anything in the world, I need you to let me fix us.” He adjusts his baseball cap, clutching it in his hand for a beat too long before replacing it. His unwashed hair is matted to his forehead, the grief of these past two weeks erasing any hint of healthfulness in his cheeks. I imagine what the
fabulous me,
the one who would never have needed to pledge herself to a second chance, might have seen in him: even through the scrim, I can see how he is good-looking, how maybe I should be appreciative that he is here, penitent, open, begging for a reprieve.
“Before…was I letting you fix us?” I’m hovering over the murky divide that separates numbness and anger.
“Kind of. I mean, I was doing everything I could…” His voice cracks again, and I want to slug him right across the chin.
“Well, you know that I have no recollection of that.”
“I know.” He nods, a pitiful concession that he is powerless here.
Aren’t we all powerless here?
I want to scream at him.
Why the hell does it matter what you want so badly, anyway? What about what I want? Like how I want to remember my prom date, remember that last picture of my father at my eighth-grade graduation.
“And this baby? What of that?”
He breaks here, and as his shoulders start to shake, his meaty torso trembling, I stare up at the ceiling and wait for his contrition to pass. Finally, he sutures himself up.
“I didn’t know,” he says, meeting my eyes. “Okay? I didn’t know. Didn’t know about the baby. You never told me.” He mats his damp face with the back of his hand. “But it, the baby, was mine. We…we
had reconciled.” His voice shakes here but he presses on. “So knowing now—knowing what I lost for the both of us—I will do anything,
anything,
for a second chance.”
“Why should I give you that?” I say, listening to the steady hum of the medical machinery, wishing it could drown out all this other noise.
“Because I want to fill in the blank spaces, remind you of how you loved me, how we loved each other. I think I can do that. I want to remind you of your memories of us, of who we were.” He clears his throat, almost back together now. “Of who we are.”
I don’t say that I’ve already employed Jamie to do this. I want to say this, but somewhere tucked very, very deep inside of me, a surprising voice urges me not to. That the heartbreak has been enough for now and that maybe he knows this without my saying so. That I can still be furious and disgusted, and yet also let it go, if only for this hour. The new me. Softened, with her slightly rose-tinted glasses.
“Please,” he says, sensing my hesitation. “Nell. I’ll do anything.”
I sigh and notice the clock in the corner. It’s only 8:35 p.m. Jamie won’t be on TV until morning and Anderson has gone to rehab and I need the nurse to reload the next
Friends
DVD anyway and I’ve listened to my iPod so many times today that the battery is depleted beyond a quick recharge. So what else do I have to do with my time?
I close my eyes and envision picking up my distrust, my rage, and setting it aside, like a tumor carved out by a surgeon.