Jill had easily given up those seminar rooms, first—briefly—for Tilt-a-Whirl Productions, and then for the long and unscrolling state of everything that came afterward. It was hard for anyone to stay fixed and certain in life. Many years down the line, so many people were not where you had thought they would be. Selby Rothberg, the former head of Tilt-a-Whirl, had gone on to run a major movie studio, where she was responsible for several summer hits until she was forced out in a kind of overnight coup. But it wasn’t simply about sexism, someone suggested; it was now also about ageism. Selby Rothberg had aged out of the system and had been replaced with a smiling, cool baby shark named Caitlin Verstappen, who would do the bidding of the Japanese shareholders of the studio’s mother company. No one seemed to know what had become of Selby Rothberg. It was said that she was writing her acidulous Hollywood memoirs, though it seemed too late for such a book to interest many people; other, similar books had been written long ago, in a time when people had the leisure to care about that subject. Someone else had heard that Selby lived on her payout in a crumbling house in Malibu and that she was involved in animal rights. Many women had claimed her as their mentor over time, perhaps without her knowledge.
Jill’s advisor, Michael Dearborn, had died of AIDS-related complications in the mid-1990s, before protease inhibitors were widely used. She’d learned this from the alumni bulletin she received each month even though she’d never gotten a degree. Oh, her handsome bearded mentor, gone from the world in that pile-up of young men. The long view over time of anyone’s story was surprising but inevitable, and inevitably sad.
“You know,” Jill said to Amy recently, “I think I was probably depressed back in the days when I was having trouble writing my thesis, and I just didn’t know it.”
“It can run in families, right? A genetic predisposition?”
“Yes. You know how they always say that when a parent kills herself it’s like she’s leaving the door open for the child? And then that door is always open?”
“For you it’s shut,” Amy said. “Click. I have just shut it.”
“No,” said Jill. “Nadia shut it.” They were quiet. “Do you realize that if I’d gotten my Ph.D. back then, by now I would probably have been teaching college for fifteen years? That would be my life. ‘Professor, can we go over my paper now?’ ‘Why yes, Sally, come in.’”
Here on the lawn at the Pouncey School, when the women were done exchanging stories, someone said, “So what do you think she would have become?”
“Who?” someone else asked.
“Vivian Swope.”
They all took a few minutes to imagine what might have become of that original promising girl with the silk hair ribbon if she hadn’t been killed on a school outing in 1931. She could have been a pilot, one woman conjectured; it was said that she was very adventurous. A biologist, said another. Poet. Costume designer. Housewife. Nun. They kept talking as they headed toward the Westaway Refectory, where they used to consume fried flounder and a variety of puddings, and where soon they would sit and eat and keep talking until the kitchen staff told them it was time to close up for the night.
NO ONE had been all that surprised when Roberta Sokolov had announced that she and her family were moving to Harlem. People heard “Harlem,” and they stiffened slightly, thinking you were moving where you really weren’t wanted, or that you and your children would be unsafe. Neither seemed wholly true, though Roberta wasn’t sure. She knew she wanted a big change. You just had to know the good streets, she told her friends. You had to get to know the neighborhood. Her friends had given her a farewell breakfast at the Golden Horn, with gifts for the new house, and she had cried a little and said, “I will really miss this whole thing, being mothers together all these years,” but it seemed to her afterward, as her feelings of sentimentality diminished, that she could leave the other women behind without a tremendous amount of regret. She would be pulling her kids out of their private schools and putting them in a new charter school not far from their new home that, while only a year old, had a very good reputation. It was ironic, she knew, that back when she and Nathaniel had no money, their kids had gone to private school, and now that they had money, their kids were going to public school.
In the weeks before the move, Roberta went through her belongings and separated out the things that she no longer wanted. These she took into the hallway and placed on the windowsill of the stairwell, the way tenants sometimes did in that building. There, then, were the books she had owned but had never read or had already read and would never read again; a bottle of very expensive moisturizer that Karen Yip had once bought for her as a birthday present, its seal still unbroken; one of Roberta’s parents’ old centerpieces from St. Patrick’s Day, with its now rock-hard sugar shamrocks and tiny leprechauns hiding among the shredded green tissue paper, which Roberta had felt too guilty and emotional about ever to throw away. Suddenly she had courage. Everything not essential was shed before the move.
Then, finally, the family was installed in the new house on Strivers’ Row, the historic street in Harlem. The place was beautiful, and though there was still a good deal of renovation to do, she loved it there. Her children had their own bedrooms, and Roberta had an art studio, as Nathaniel had said she would. But while it was not really a surprise to her—instead, it was more of an expected sadness—still her artwork hadn’t taken form in the muscular way she had hoped. At first, after Harry and Grace were off in their charter school, Roberta tried to paint. Then, after a few weeks of hesitation and paltry efforts, she thought, Fuck it, and gave it a rest.
Wandering around the new neighborhood, trying to find a drugstore and a place to get coffee in the morning, Roberta had come upon a flyer on a lamppost asking for volunteers at a women’s health services agency on 128th Street called Essential Care. She called, and they gave her a job answering telephones; the place was understaffed and, according to the director, had “one foot on a banana peel.” The paid workers—all women—in the office of EC often complained at length about the low salary and the unrewarding nature of the work, which often involved trying to get adolescent girls with STDs or extremely old women to go see a gynecologist for the first time ever.
It wasn’t that the dismal offices of EC appealed to Roberta at all, or that she felt real affection for the other people who worked there. Officiousness was a common trait among the staff; maybe it was a defense against the onslaught that always took place in this medical office: the clients crowding the dingy waiting area, demanding service as they poked their heads in through the small slot behind which a receptionist warily sat.
Roberta worked there in a volunteer capacity at first and then eventually for pay. Part-time at first and then, finally, though she had not planned this, full-time. Soon she was doing everything at EC: answering phones and giving advice and making referrals, behaving in a manner that was sometimes officious but more often just kind and tired. She occasionally heard herself saying to a frightened woman who’d come in, “Just get the mammogram. It’s better to know than not to know, don’t you think?”
Work rose up in the same inexplicable way that her art had receded, except once in a while, on the weekend, Roberta went into her studio and fooled around a little with a charcoal pencil or a thin brush and a glass of milky watercolor water. Neither of her kids ever asked if they could use the studio for storing their bikes or having a sleepover, or wondered aloud whether that space really needed to be called “the studio,” when it was clear that Roberta rarely used it as one. Maybe Nathaniel had warned Harry and Grace away from ever saying anything to their mother that would make her feel bad about the fact that her painting hadn’t gone well since they’d been living here, just as it hadn’t gone well when they’d lived in their tiny walk-up apartment.
She was touched by their sensitivity to her, though it was possible that she’d imagined the whole scenario. Children were narcissists, after all, and perhaps her children never thought about her art studio and how str
ange it was that their mother was rarely in it. Or maybe it never occurred to them that art was something that some lucky people did full-time; after all, being a working artist was so hard. You had to be disciplined all the time, and almost no one in the world was able to earn a living from art.
Lately, she was rarely in the house at all; with Nathaniel’s television success, and Harry and Grace doing after-school programs at their disorganized but diverse and so far not-bad charter school, and Roberta working full-time at EC and overtime on some days when they were understaffed, the house sat, fully alarmed and defended, in its own sunlight during the afternoon, without anyone there to admire the preserved and recently painted moldings or the little rectangles of green and violet stained glass or the high ceilings or the gently curving banisters. It was like a craft project that, over time, would start to falter and nobly collapse, but this wouldn’t be discernible for many, many years. At night, the family converged and stomped around, tired, overworked, full of complaint and anecdote, and then they sat at the table in the grand dining room and ate the take-out that someone had brought home, and told one another about their day.
ACROSS THE COUNTRY in Lorton, South Dakota, Brandy Gillop came home from the casino and paced the small living room of the apartment, giving a cool, critic’s assessment of her most recent painting that sat on an easel. It was good, she decided, but not great, though she wasn’t particularly skilled at knowing when a painting worked or didn’t. That woman in New York City had just shitted all over her, and that was typical of the human race. People always disappointed you; this was something you could count on, and you shouldn’t ever forget it. Roberta Sokolov had been a big tease, and the dream of New York City now seemed like a big tease too.
Roberta had once told Brandy that she’d always hoped to do a series of portraits of some kind; it had something to do with children growing up, she remembered. Brandy thought about doing her own series of portraits now. She could call it The Disappointment Series, she thought, but then right away she had a better idea; she’d call it People Who Fucked Me Over, and she’d use dirt colors and thick, angry strokes. She would paint disgusting, ugly portraits of Tyler Parvell and her uncle Roy and her father, of course, and Roberta. She would need a thicker brush than the one she had. She made a note to herself to go out later and buy one.
KAREN YIP’S PARENTS, Chu Hua and Jun Tang, flew in from San Francisco and stayed for a full week late that spring, exclaiming once again at the opulent life that their daughter and son-in-law lived, and bringing bags of Chinese lychee gummies for the twins. No one could say for sure what a full enough life was; everyone’s standard was different. Karen still went for job interviews, treating each one as spectacle, enjoying getting dressed up in a fine suit for the occasion and hearing about the work that was currently being done at the firm, and in what way she would possibly “fit” into all of it. She had been uncommonly brilliant at statistical analysis, and though she hadn’t worked since the twins were babies, every interviewer inevitably offered her a job.
“We can really imagine you here,” the interviewers said. “We think it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
They wrote down a figure on a piece of paper and slid it across the table to her. She loved that sexy, dramatic moment, the shoosh of the paper being moved. The figure was always impressive; her worth had remained high even over these years of absence. But inevitably she said no, the job wasn’t right for her, she did not think it was a perfect fit after all. Wilson didn’t care at all if she worked or not; he liked hearing about the interviews and the offers and the specs of the companies, but it was up to her whether or not she went back. One day, she supposed, she might find a job that impelled her away from the soft freedoms of her daily life; it was possible, even statistically likely, that she would. But there was no need for it. She wasn’t impatient with the way her life was going, and they had enough money, and she didn’t care what anyone else thought.
For now, at night, with her parents asleep downstairs in the guest room, her twin sons asleep across the hall, and her husband Wilson asleep beside her, Karen simply let herself be pelted with numbers, which surrounded her and accumulated in drifts and columns, adding up.
DRESSED IN MATCHING orange vests, two kindergarten fathers walked round and round the streets of the neighborhood. “What are we looking for, exactly?” one asked.
“No idea,” said the other. “Mayhem, I guess.”
They laughed a little and made a few remarks about safety walk: how it seemed useful in theory, but how it probably never made a difference. The men were both thirty-two years old. One of them also had a baby at home, though he had left her with a sitter so he could come out and do safety walk at his older son’s school. His wife was a psychopharmacologist with a successful fledgling practice. Did the people of the city get more and more troubled with each passing year, given the anxious circumstances of their lives, or was his wife simply a wonderful doctor? He really had no way of knowing.
He’d been the features editor of a newsmagazine until their second child was born, and then he and his wife had had a discussion, and they agreed that he would take off two years to stay home with the baby. Two years, and then they would do day care; they had enough saved up to make this plan possible. At times he thought about the office: the particular smell that it had had, something clean and metallic, which didn’t exist anywhere in his home. It was the smell of paper clips, he had decided once, with longing, after the baby had spit up a gruel of milk and strained lamb on his shirtsleeve.
But mostly, though, he knew that if you longed for what you did not have, then you would be one of those unhappy people you could find anywhere in any setting, the ones who couldn’t appreciate what they had as long as they saw something they did not have. He thought of his wife sitting in her office, leaning forward in her chair with her prescription pad at the ready, while someone in the chair across from her sobbed. His wife took the burden of that patient’s pain, and though he admired her for doing this, he was relieved that it was not his burden. He had no deadlines at the magazine anymore, no crazy art director to deal with. He thought now of the baby, hoping she had gotten a good nap today. When she didn’t nap, her schedule was screwed up for the rest of the day and night. He also thought about his son, who right at this moment was staying after school for karate class, his legs kicking and his arms whirling, shouting “Hi-yaaaaaaa!” to another little boy, who would shout it right back.
The two fathers said hello to the mothers who streamed by on this pretty, calm street in the middle of the afternoon on what would have been a workday once and was, at least for now, something else.
AT NIGHT, in midtown, at a scientific research institute funded by a European conglomerate, the lights of an office were still on, though almost all of the scientists had gone home. Isabelle Gordon, string theorist, stood at a green blackboard talking to her colleague Martha Scarpino. Their words went back and forth as Isabelle wrote out an equation that was so long that the nub of yellow chalk just disintegrated between her fingers as she wrote. But she was on a roll and didn’t want to stop; so she kept on going, uninterrupted, writing with her fingertips in the air above the blackboard, continuing the equation for Martha, who followed along, nodding rapidly.
Both of them were unable to turn their brains off like light switches; they had this in common. They also had in common a belief in the likelihood that their shared primary interest, superstring theory, would turn out to be a valid theory of everything and that one day this would be universally accepted. Until then, it was just a question of plodding along, gathering data, making your case at conferences, standing at a lectern and delivering a paper in a small but forceful voice, and also standing at a blackboard at night, writing an equation until the chalk dissolved. Isabelle Gordon didn’t mind being just a flouring of yellow chalk dust herself, or a vibrating object that thought about everything constantly and liked designer shoes and loved her children and her husband madly,
crazily—as much, she had told her son Ty once before bed, as she loved D-branes and gauge bosons and Calabi-Yau manifolds. Yes, as much as that, which, they all knew, was really saying a lot.
BUT LOVE did not have to be the thing that everyone at work aimed toward, arrows poised. Amy Lamb knew this early on into her new job. For five months now, she had been working as a lawyer in general practice. It had taken a long time to find an acceptable position. She’d answered an online ad for a women’s law firm that had seemed wonderful initially, but when she went for the interview it soon became clear to her that the young woman behind the desk thought Amy was far too old to work there. It was a great insult. Though she got herself a couple of interviews cold, it was actually through Lisa Silvestri’s connections that Amy found the job as one of four attorneys at a modest storefront law office downtown called Stellan Frankel Bern. The other lawyers, two women and one man, all in their thirties, were convivial enough, and seemed to have lives outside their job. Most of her cases were standard T&E, work that Amy would never burn to do or regard with great desire. Yes, what a shame it was, she thought now, silently addressing her mother, that she hadn’t found something she really loved and was brilliant at in time to chase it down. But still it was a relief to earn money, and it was sometimes a surprisingly significant pleasure to find that most of the particulars of legal language and instinct had held fast over the years after all. And she also felt it was a pleasure, an honor, weirdly, just to be working. On Monday mornings, the lawyers lingered briefly in one another’s cubicles, asking about the weekend, dawdling a little before giving themselves over to another week.