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  “I do,” he said, as though defending a great principle.

  “Is she your girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “What is she?”

  “She’s a friend. Am I getting the fifth degree here? Do I need a lawyer present?”

  “You can do what you want.”

  “I’ve had a good week.”

  She didn’t know what he meant by the comment.

  “Go ahead and screw her if you want,” she said, unfortunately, pointlessly.

  Her boy did a strange thing then. He started crying.

  He didn’t go out that night or the next. He watched TV on his own, or read in her study. He wasn’t friendly or particularly unfriendly.

  After three nights of this, the mother asked, “What happened to the hostess?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  “I blew her off.”

  And that was that. He went out with friends that weekend and for a few nights did nothing. She’d walk by the hostess and draw looks and then she stopped walking by.

  One day on her way home she felt the hostess following her.

  “What did you tell him?” the hostess said.

  The mother turned and faced her. The hostess had on a thick navy turtleneck sweater over tight black jeans. She had a small stack of Buongiorno’s menus in one hand, as though to remind the mother of where she’d just sprung from.

  “I told him I didn’t want him seeing you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want him to. He’s nineteen, what are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “He’s just a kid.”

  “No he’s not.” She raised her eyebrows. “Believe me, he’s not.”

  The mother’s hand jumped out and slapped the woman. The woman slapped the mother back, and then they were yelling at each other and swinging their arms. A waiter and the stout old manager ran out to break it up.

  “Pathetic bitch,” the hostess said beneath her breath.

  She had always imagined a life for her son that would exceed her own: more travel, better clothes and food, a little land maybe, near a body of water; an unimpeachably bright, elegant, and decent partner, whom the mother could imagine as a daughter, the one she’d never had, for whom she could now buy sweaters and stylish scarves and sign the gift cards Love, Elaine. But what if what she wanted wasn’t what he wanted? What if this hostess was what he wanted? Her awful little apartment, her abject little life. And what if they had children and they looked not like him at all but like her? She pictured two children, four and six with the hostess’s face, those small dull eyes and those sunken nostrils.

  It occurred to her the hostess would tell her son about the incident. She’d describe the mother as crazy, and the boy might agree.

  She called the boy’s father and there was no answer. It was eleven thirty New York time. She tried again at one and reached him. After a little banter about her writing, he asked, “What’s up?”

  “I hit her,” she said, surprised at her own disclosure. “And she hit me back.”

  “Who?”

  “The hostess.”

  The line went silent, and the mother considered telling him she was joking.

  “You hit her?”

  “Yes. It was a mistake, okay? But she hit me as well. The people from the restaurant broke it up.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Let it go. It’s his life. Jesus, Elaine, you hit her?”

  “I didn’t call to be upbraided.”

  She dreamed that night the hostess was pregnant and that she’d given her son a disease.

  She didn’t see the hostess in the restaurant window after that. One day she saw in the doorway the manager who’d broken up the fight. She asked him what had happened to the hostess.

  “We let her go,” he said.

  “Over the incident?” the mother asked.

  “Yes, of course. We don’t condone that kind of thing. I hope you and your husband will come back and eat with us again,” the man said.

  Two days later she met with her editor. They went to lunch to talk about the new pages, which were about the failed-birthday-party scene in East of Eden (the moment that launched the late 1950s and ’60s youth culture, she postulated) and the influence of the Beats and the French new wave, and when the mother returned to the office, she found herself speaking at great length on all these subjects with the receptionist, a sophomore at Bowdoin College in Maine, an English major, with green eyes and lovely teeth, who wanted someday to be an editor. She had read the mother’s last two books.

  “What I loved about them both was how personal they were. Whatever you’re writing about it’s as if you’re speaking to one person, to a good friend. That’s what you make the reader feel like. You made me feel like it. I felt smart reading your books; smarter than I usually feel, anyhow.” She laughed.

  There were still ten days left in her son’s vacation.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” the mother asked.

  They would go to the movies and then get Indian food. He was doing her a favor, the mother said, because the girl might end up editing one of her books someday. The night started slowly, but before long the boy was telling his stories, and the girl listening, then telling a few of her own. The mother prodded them both with questions. They had much in common, she thought. But there were enough differences for them to learn from one another. When the girl excused herself to go to the restroom, the mother said, “Is this awkward? I mean my coming along like this.”

  The boy smiled, “No. It’s kind of fun really. It’s like being on the Charlie Rose show.”

  “I’ll head home after this and you can do whatever you want.”

  On their walk back to the apartment the girl asked more questions of the mother, how and where she worked, which authors she liked to read. Many of them the girl too had read. What was gratifying was how well the boy held his own in the conversation. He was never entirely an intellectual, but he was smart, and inquisitive, and there was reason to believe he’d grow into an interesting, expansive adult, given the right company. Already they were laughing easily at each other’s jokes. And besides, there was nothing wrong with the fact that the girl was a knockout, at least by the mother’s standards.

  Christmas Eve the mother filled the boy’s old red-and-white stocking with candy he wouldn’t eat, a book, and two CDs she knew he wanted. The next morning they listened to Christmas carols and opened their gifts. She encouraged the boy to open his father’s gifts in front of her. There was a beautiful blue ski parka, to accompany the skis she had bought him (they’d worked this out weeks ago on the phone) and, as a surprise to the mother and the boy, a laptop computer.

  She had been outspent again, but she didn’t mind.

  She had given him something better.

  They saw each other the next three evenings, and they were planning on going to a New Year’s Eve party at a SoHo restaurant that the girl’s high school friends had rented out. The mother got them theater tickets for a show on December 29, and this time she resisted going with them. She would go to a late movie by herself so that they could get settled in the apartment after the show. Part of this, she knew, was an attempt to make up for getting in his way with the hostess, but he’d someday understand, or maybe he already did.

  It had turned out so well, she thought. He seemed happier. The girl could visit him at school. And the mother thought there were advantages to having a girlfriend at another college. First of all, long-distance relationships were often the most romantic. Second of all, they left you more time for your friends and your schoolwork. Relationships in college were difficult to maintain. There were so many distractions, and those distractions were healthy. The boy was on an intramural basketball team and played bass guitar in a band. It didn’t matter that by his own admission the team wasn’t very good and neither was the band. She didn’t want him to have to give up anything.

  The night they went to
the theater, the mother went to a late showing of a trite Tom Hanks movie that was set in her neighborhood and made it look like a decent place to fall in love. When she returned, she was pleased to hear the sound of the stereo, of the two of them staying up late. She peered in before she went to sleep at midnight, and they were together on the couch looking at an atlas. The boy was showing her where he planned to travel over the summer. The mother pictured them in a curtained train compartment, rolling through the Romanian countryside, poring over a guidebook.

  “Good night, you two,” she said.

  And her son blew her a kiss.

  When she woke again, it was two thirty or maybe three and the music was playing still, or again. She went to get herself a glass of water. They were talking, and though she still felt hazy and half asleep, she realized it wasn’t the girl’s voice she was hearing. The girl was gone, and somehow he’d managed to get the hostess to come over for a nightcap. Tag team. Here come the reinforcements. It gave her a terrible sinking feeling. She retreated into her room and tried to remind herself that it was his life and that he was over eighteen and could do what he wanted. But the more time passed and the more she thought of the two of them in there, the angrier she got. Not merely on her own behalf, but on behalf of the girl. It was so ugly and pointless what the boy was doing, so soulless. She tried to go to sleep again and forget it all but she couldn’t help placing herself in the girl’s shoes. She might be thinking of the boy right now, and of the countries they’d visit together. And tomorrow when they went out again, the boy would tell her nothing of what he’d done with the hostess, nor would he seem different.

  She wouldn’t abide this. Not in her house, and not with a woman she’d come to blows with, no matter whose fault it had been. She walked to the study and threw the doors open.

  “I want you to get the fuck out of here,” she said.

  But there was no one in the room except the boy. He was alone watching TV. There was a bowl of ice cream before him and a can of 7UP.

  He seemed not angry then but frightened, the way one might feel while watching a spouse put her hand through a glass door panel, which her husband had watched her do. It happened in the period when she’d thought he’d been screwing around. He hadn’t, though he admitted he’d come close once. The boy never knew anything of this.

  Now he was walking toward the mother. She was crying soundlessly, and she felt as though she might never stop.

  “My God, Mom, what’s going on? What’s this about?”

  On the TV the woman, Barbara Stanwyck, was running her fingers through Henry Fonda’s hair. The mother had seen the movie a half-dozen times, but she’d managed not to recognize the dialogue.

  “I thought . . .”

  “I know . . . I know,” he said. He said it as one might say it to a child who’d thought she heard a ghost.

  She didn’t have to explain anything, she realized; he knew her better than she did right then and maybe he had for a while. Her son. It was as though her irrational behavior had promoted him to the role of the wise and clement adult. And while she felt significant pride in this, she feared now that he’d plan to spend his coming vacations in Seattle, or Europe, or Colorado. He was unlikely to spend another Christmas in New York with her.

  “Come on,” he said, as though reading her thoughts. “Let’s watch the rest of this.”

  “All right,” she said, and she let him fill her in on what she’d missed.

  Before the end of the movie, he fell asleep. She turned the TV off and threw a blanket over him.

  It was four now, one o’clock in Seattle. There was an off chance he could still be up, but of course there was no guarantee he would be alone. She imagined calling him, and him consoling her with his new girlfriend in bed next to him, and afterward, he’d say, “She’s still having a rough time of it.” And it would even score points with the woman who would see how gracious and tolerant he was. She thought then about the hostess, because it was she who had started all this. What was it the mother had hated so much? She was no criminal, and she hadn’t treated the boy badly as far as the mother knew.

  She had simply seemed too desperate, too lonely, too hungry. Her needs were too naked. The mother could imagine someone like that consuming her boy, swallowing him up, before he had the chance to see the world and become the person she knew he could be. He snored softly now, with the beginnings of a cold, she knew, because when he was a child it would begin that way: a mild sawing sound, a sniffle the next morning, and a temperature the following night. She would douse it with soups and juices, and she would secretly enjoy the days he was too sick to go to school and had to stay home with her. It was in the time they’d first moved to the Village, in that odd little apartment on Tenth Street with the stained-glass window and the false fireplace they bottom-lit to resemble embers, and the acres of built-in bookshelves, and the café down the street where they’d listen to bad poetry, and the tiny crowded market where she’d buy bread and fish. Her husband would be reading in bed, waiting for her. She would watch her sleeping son for ten minutes or twenty, and marvel at all his possibilities, a life that young, so full of wonder and unstained hope.

  Balloon Night

  Timkin’s wife left him during a blisteringly cold Thanksgiving week, two nights before their annual Balloon Night party. There was no time for Timkin to call their guests and cancel; nor would he know where to call in many cases. It was the sort of event attended by people from all corners of their lives whether or not they could produce a fresh invite. Once invited always invited, he and Amy had said.

  The Timkins had a three-bedroom eighth-floor apartment, on West Seventy-Seventh Street between Central Park West and Columbus, the balloon block. It was where those cloud-size cartoon characters for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were inflated, the night before Thanksgiving, and nearly all the residents would open their apartment doors to anyone and everyone they knew. Timkin grew up in the apartment (which his parents had ceded to him six years earlier when they moved to Naples, Florida) and had attended his first balloon party at age six. Now he was thirty-four.

  Timkin had been too depressed to tell anyone the dismal news, and in truth he had convinced himself that Amy would return, apologetic, or demanding an apology, which he would provide, and they would make up at dinner and in bed that night, and it would all blow over. He couldn’t even remember what they’d fought about, only that it was insignificant and he had been right.

  The first two days after Amy had walked out Timkin rode his bike around the island of Manhattan in a fog, dodging trucks and taxis, heading down to Battery Park, through Chinatown and the Village, and then up Sixth Avenue. He was at least in part on the lookout for Amy, but he did not go by the building where she worked. On day three he went in to his office and tried to keep busy, but mostly just stared at the phone, and composed on his computer the germs of letters to Amy, alternating fragments of forgiveness and bitterness.

  The guests would begin arriving at nine, and so at six Timkin went by himself to the Pioneer grocery on Columbus to get Coke and Sprite and scotch and beer and wine, then over to Citarella for assorted cheeses and pâtés, a few flat bread pizzas, caviar, salmon, the oilier dill-covered kind they called Grav Lox, dips, crackers, bread and carpaccio, and pumpkin and pecan pie. Spent a fortune. But he could pull this off. He would make the best of a terrible situation, and he could tell them something, that he’d get through this, though he wasn’t convinced he would. The balloons and the alcohol might be a distraction, no? Could you stay depressed with a decent scotch in your paper cup, and Underdog smiling overhead?

  You could of course. And then he wondered: Did he have to tell them?

  Eventually he’d need to, if the break were real. But telling everyone now was a bit like telling people you were pregnant one week after reading the home pregnancy test. So many things could change. And anyhow, would it harm anything, for the purposes of the party, to say his wife was away for a few days on business? Amy
worked in advertising, on the account side, and was quite often away.

  But away for Thanksgiving?

  She’d be back on Thursday evening at around 6:30, Timkin decided, and they’d have dinner with Amy’s parents on the East Side. She was heartbroken that she couldn’t be there, he’d tell his guests, and they would all drink a toast to her.

  It could work, Timkin thought. He pictured Amy arriving at Kennedy in her red wool jacket and then cabbing back to East Eighty-Fourth Street, and then he suddenly felt a warm surge of relief settle over him, which was very much like having her back. He could postpone his suffering for a night, why the heck not? He suddenly felt good, better than he had in weeks. And he went back to his bathroom to shave and dress, and put on his best game face.

  First arriving were the Willises, a sportswriter for the New York Times and his wife, Sabrina, who owned a small absurdly expensive beauty salon in the East Twenties. They’d been better friends with Amy, so there was the risk they’d know. But the leaving had only just happened on Monday, and besides, Timkin and Amy had been notoriously out of touch with their friends lately, perhaps as a result of their feuding, or because their jobs had been so exhausting.

  Jonah Willis covered college football, which meant he traveled a lot on weekends.

  “The bad news is that Amy can’t be here tonight. She’s heartbroken,” Timkin said. “She’s staying in a little Marriott in Cincinnati of all places.”

  “Oh God,” Sabrina said. “They’re really cutting back. I bet I know what she’s doing there. She’s making a P&G stop, isn’t she?”

  “You might know her better than I do,” Timkin said, smiling and fearing it might be true.

  The apartment was immaculate. Timkin, after all, was the clean one of the two. Amy’s untidiness had been an issue, but not a particularly significant one. Timkin liked finding the occasional book left out, or magazine article; he liked seeing where Amy had left off, and when they were first dating, he often tried to guess the last sentence she’d read before she put the book down. He’d tell her sometimes which one he thought and more often than not he’d get it right.