The Year We Left Home (29 page)

Maybe she hadn’t recognized him. But she’d had his ID. Or maybe she’d forgotten him, but he didn’t believe that. Or had she hoped that he would not remember or recognize her?

Once inside the apartment he managed to peel off his pants, clean up the bruised and shredded skin of his knee, apply ice, take a Vicodin left over from his last injury, get back in bed beside his sleeping wife, and in spite of all the wisdom about concussions, and in spite of all his history of bad sleep, he was asleep almost at once.

His knee swelled up and made walking near impossible. He spent
the rest of the week at home, trying to work at the kitchen table, or navigating around the apartment using a mop as a crutch. His wife didn’t come out and say that it served him right for sneaking out and roaming the streets so imprudently, but it was clear this was what she thought. The weather turned cold again and the three of them stayed inside, an extended period of togetherness. His daughter was delighted to have him home and heaped him with toys and books and baby dolls, all the loot of the recent Christmas, gone slightly stale until they were revived by the wonder of his presence.

“Daddy look! Daddy read!”

He was sought after, importuned, courted. His complete and constant attention was necessary to her happiness. She had silky hair the color of honey that might in time turn into his blond, or his wife’s darker shade. Her eyes were blue, their lashes damp and spiky, her skin a perfect layer of bloom. He had never imagined loving anything as entirely, as violently, as he loved her. And she loved him and her mother because she had no choice except to do so.

But she would grow beyond them and into the wider world, and at some point he would become more and more the background of her life.

Ryan had to sleep with his leg elevated, and if he tried to roll or shift positions, it sometimes woke him up. But although neither his mind nor his body was at ease, he got through his nights without those numb hours of wakefulness. It was as if they had served their purpose. They gave form and shape to a restlessness he hadn’t known was in him.

He’d already tried finding Janine in the phone book, and as expected, there was no listing for her. He was certain, intuitively, that she lived here, she hadn’t been just visiting or passing through. She’d been cautious with him because she knew she could be found.

Once he returned to work, he had the opportunity to better proceed. There was no question that he was going to try to find her, if only because she didn’t want to be found. Beyond that, he didn’t permit
himself to go, because he knew very well that he was being willful and perverse, poking a stick at something that might rise up and do him harm.

There was a Pasqua in Lake Forest—her father, Ryan was pretty sure. But he didn’t think he would get anywhere by calling and nosing around, claiming some vague old acquaintanceship. Her father wouldn’t have given someone like him the time of day. He wasn’t glib enough, or inventive enough, to come up with some better cover story. He believed she must live in the city, and perhaps not all that far from him, given her presence on that particular street at a late hour. He kept his eyes open as he went about his rounds of commuting and errands. No sign of her.

Her car had looked new. She’d always driven new cars; it seemed that prosperity had not left her. He searched out Mercedes dealers in the northern suburbs, found three of them. It was another two weeks before he was able to make his way there (his wife and daughter dropped off with a friend, another mommy, for a play date and shared lamentations). He sauntered around the lot, admiring the high polish of the new, immaculate metal, until a salesman joined him. They shook hands, and Ryan asked about this model and that one, heard about their features, their value, their many virtues.

And didn’t Dr. Pasqua’s daughter have one of these?

At the first dealership he drew a blank, but at the second he was told that yes, Mrs. Burnham had this year’s model, she was pleased with it. Burnham. Now he had a name.

Then he went no further. He carried his new knowledge as he might a gun in his pocket. He and his wife had a discussion, verging on argument, about money, and another one about sex. If they could get around to in-laws, they’d achieve the full trifecta of married conflicts. It might have reassured him or consoled him that their problems were the same as other people’s, and other people got by or muddled through them. But it made him impatient and melancholy.

As part of an effort to create more time for each other, which they both agreed they needed, one night they got a babysitter and went out
for dinner at an elegant Gold Coast Italian restaurant, the kind that served nothing in tomato sauce. It was still winter. They had to park a couple of blocks away and quick-walk through the trampled slush at the curbs. Their eyes watered from the wind. At the restaurant his wife unwrapped herself, took off her heavy coat and wool hat and muffler and gloves, revealing her pretty dress. They were shown to their table. They settled themselves and shook their heads and took a steadying breath. These days it seemed to take so much effort to do anything.

They ordered drinks; the waiter brought bread and olive oil. His wife looked around the room. The restaurant was new to them. “What do you think?”

“Nice.” He thought it looked like any other restaurant, with its recessed lights and expensive surfaces and gliding waiters. Nor did it smell of food. “You look great tonight.”

“Thank you.” Her fingers touched her hair, her throat. Since their daughter’s birth, she’d worried about her weight. She went on grim campaigns of dieting and exercise, doing battle with her extra ten pounds, although Ryan told her truthfully, no one noticed or cared about them but her, she was a beautiful, sexy adult woman whom he still had the hots for. The fight about sex had made it necessary for him to say this from time to time.

“You look good in red.” The dress had a low neckline. His eyes rested on the place between her breasts where there would be just enough space for his exploring fingers.

She shrugged. “Trying to make up for the days when I never change out of sweatpants.”

The waiter brought their drinks. They opened the menus and studied them. The different courses were presented in florid calligraphy, and there were words with which they were not familiar.
“Carpaccio?”
Ryan ventured.

“We can ask the waiter.”

“It’s not important.” He hated asking about things he thought he should already know.

“You are so funny sometimes. That’s what the waiter’s here for, to
answer questions. And why are you whispering? You always whisper in restaurants. Yes you do.”

He guessed he did. A stupid, hick habit he hadn’t broken. A good restaurant still felt a little like church, or a library, a place requiring solemn good behavior.

He didn’t much like having it pointed out to him. As if she was some born sophisticate! She’d grown up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Christ’s sake!

Because he didn’t want to spoil the evening with ill humor, he said, “I will ask the waiter about the carpaccio. I will bellow at him.”

They ordered and their food came, and it was all very good. Things such as veal, and gnocchi, and thin-shelled pastas filled with wild mushrooms. They agreed that this must be cuisine from some fortunate part of Italy where life was so good, no one ever emigrated. Unlike the poor Sicilians with their meatballs and pizza. “I’d like to go there sometime,” his wife said. “Italy.”

“Really?” This was a mild surprise. “Why Italy?”

“Because it’s so different from everywhere else. Everything I grew up with.”

Ryan knew what she’d grown up with: the Dutch Reformed Church, as pious and grim as anything the Lutherans could offer, the expectation that she would settle down within twenty-five miles of her birthplace and raise up a family of equally pious, grim, judgmental, fault-finding progeny. Really, it was extraordinary that their two Old World ancestries had dispersed to the New and united themselves in marriage. They had laughed about it and resolved to leave behind them all the conventions and strictures of their upbringings.

His wife said, “Not that I knew any Italians. Just what you’d see on television. Or like,
The Godfather.
They had big messy families, they sang opera, they had passionate fights, they drank a lot of wine . . .”

“They stomped grapes with their feet. They danced the tarantella.”

“Something like that.” His wife gazed around the well-mannered dining room, where no one was doing anything boisterous, shouting
Salute,
or planning hits.

Ryan said, “Clearly, we have to get you to Italy. Let you bust loose.”

She shook her head. “When is that supposed to happen?”

“When Anna’s a little older. When it’s a little easier to travel with her, when she can appreciate it.”

“What about Spud?” Spud was the name they had given to their planned, yet-to-be-conceived second offspring.

“Spud can come too.”

“That means, maybe we’ll get there in about fifteen years.”

“Not if we make it a priority.”

“A priority,” his wife said in the patient, instructive tone he had come to dislike, “is saving for college educations, or for a house, or an orthodontist, or something we really need.”

“Maybe what we really need is a little bit of pleasure once in a while.”

“
Pleasure
meaning ‘self-indulgence.’”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Ryan said, trying to deflect her mood. Once she began in this dreary, my-life-is-a-series-of-burdens vein, they often ended up in an argument. He thought she didn’t really regret her life up until now; she just wanted to complain about it.

“If you have a child, the child comes first. The child gets her orange juice when she needs it, and her vaccinations when she needs them, and her vitamins—”

“It’s not like we leave her out in the car while we go have a few beers. Jesus, Ellen.”

“If you have a child,” she went on doggedly, “then you’ve made certain choices. You’ve said, ‘This is important enough for me to be unselfish. Because someone depends on me entirely for her very existence.’” His wife slumped back against her chair, looking both tragic and irritated.

“I get that,” Ryan said. “Why would you think I didn’t?”

The waiter appeared then, asking if they would like to look at the dessert menu. “By all means,” Ryan told him. “Is there anything particularly self-indulgent tonight?”

She flicked her eyes over the menu and closed it. Ryan said, “A little gelato wouldn’t kill you.”

“I’m already going to have to swim extra laps to work off this meal.” Swimming was his wife’s exercise two days a week. The Y had a kids’ program and his daughter was a Water Baby, working her way up to Tadpole.

“Tiramisu,” Ryan told the waiter. “And an espresso, please.”

“Good luck sleeping,” his wife said, and she was right about that, but by now he didn’t care.

When his dessert came, he offered her a bite of it, and she said no thank you. She watched him eat. She said, “Men can do that. Pretend that life doesn’t change entirely once you have a child. They’re not on the front lines. In the trenches.”

“Right.” He saw no point in arguing with her when she got like this. It wasn’t even an argument.

“I don’t forget about her for a minute. I can’t. It’s almost like I’m still pregnant, when everything I did or ate or even thought affected her. Fed straight into her.”

Ryan reached across the table and took one of her hands in his. “I’m a little worried about you.”

She shrugged. “Well, maybe you should be.” Her hand stayed inert, neither drawing back nor squeezing his.

He paid the check and they retrieved their coats and he said he would go get the car and come back to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to go so far in the cold. In truth, he wanted to get away from her for even the ten minutes it might take him to walk to the car. Alone time.

For the first time, he found himself wondering if his wife had some kind of mommy depression, the kind you read about. More and more often there had been scenes like this one, when she seemed determined to take no delight in their child, no delight in their present or in their future.

And that wasn’t like her. She was as levelheaded and focused as any woman he knew. She’d wanted to be married (to someone, presumably to him), she’d wanted a child, children, she would stay at home for
three years and then reattack the job market. Now it seemed that none of that was worthwhile.

He would talk to her about seeing her doctor, getting a prescription. Lots of people took things nowadays. Half his office was probably on Prozac.

It wasn’t true, as she’d accused him, that he was lighthearted about having a child, or that he separated easily from his responsibilities. The terrible weight of loving his daughter was with him always.

The car was up another block and down a side street. This block of north Clark was home to any number of restaurants, their windows allowing views of warm light and of people taking pleasure in each other, in the food and sparkling glassware before them, so that on this block, at least, you could believe the whole world was a place of elegance, abundance, and good cheer. He was passing by one of these, its windows outlined in small white electric lights, its tables blooming with arrangements of white flowers, when he saw Janine Pasqua Burnham sitting at a table next to the glass.

He kept walking, then once he was out of her view he looked back to see who sat across the table from her. A man, Ryan couldn’t make out his face, only a general impression of his dark shirt, casual, undressy. He took two steps past the restaurant’s door, then turned around and went inside.

A host stood at the entry, checking off names; the restaurant was busy and even this late at night people were waiting in the bar to be seated. Ryan walked past them, not wanting to explain himself, turned a corner and went up to Janine’s table. Her back was to him; the man saw him coming and narrowed his eyes, a question, an alarm. “Hi,” Ryan said to him, then turned to her. “Hello, Janine.”