Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

Miguel. If there was a reason for that gratuitous conversation piece of a name, I didn’t want to hear it. Miguel fixed a serious look on me, the whites of his eyes hypnotically watchful.

I looked at the child. “Good luck, Miguel. You’re going to need it.”

A cursory scan of the room revealed no trace of Sara.

“He’s really cute, Josie,” I said. The remark felt hollow without a more human display, so I pinched the kid’s cheek.

“He is cute, isn’t he?” Josie gushed with a grin that wrapped all the way around her trendy maroon spectacles. “I guess Sara’s coming later?”

“I guess,” I said, pulling out my phone and thumbing a quick text.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Teddy,” Josie said, petting my chest to show me just how glad.

The trip, she told me, had been a blissfully exhausting ordeal. Initially, Miguel was less than overjoyed to be handed to this pair of ghosts, and he spent the first couple of days bawling his way from one nap to the next. But holed up in a hotel room for a week with these new mommies of his, he soon got to thinking they weren’t half bad, wooing him as they were with Elmo puppets, Cheerios, toy phones, and unreasonable quantities of love. The jet lag, sleep deprivation, and capsized routines could have taken a harsher toll on Josie and Wynne, who were in their late forties and thus somewhat less elastic than most new parents, but what they lacked in youth they made up for in zest. They were the happiest fucking mess you ever did see.

“Sara told me the big news,” Josie said. She was smiling at the baby, so much so that I thought maybe Miguel was the one with the news. “The band? The album?”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see how it goes.”

“That’s huge. Huge,” Josie affirmed. “I’m so proud of you.”

“You are?”

“It takes serious guts to commit to something you love.” She slapped my cheek lightly with her one free hand. “You’ll never regret it.”

And yet regret was the emotion that was most prominent in the mix these days.

Wynne sauntered up to me. “Where’s Sara?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I thought she’d be here.” I consulted the phone in my palm but saw no response to my text.

Ravi, from Sara’s office, was there, his connection to the proceedings unclear. Next to him, and already as tall, was his twelve-year-old son, Pritham. Despite shuffling with embarrassment at the fact of his father’s existence, to say nothing of the unique shade of his old man’s sport coat—it was the color of poorly applied spray tan—the kid never ventured away from his dad’s side.

“Have you seen Sara?” I asked Ravi.

He shook his head. “By the time I left the office, she was already gone.” He touched his son’s forearm. “You know, Pritham, this man used to be in a very famous band. In the mideighties, right, Teddy?”

I winced. “Thanks, Ravi.”

Pritham bobbed mechanically. “Cool beans.” Then, at his dad’s prodding, he proceeded to regale me with captivating tales of soccer camp.

A little while later, both concerned and suspicious about Sara’s whereabouts, I decided to call her. I stood in a quiet corner of the living room beside a sketch of a bull standing on its hind legs, a lonely lightbulb dangling over the bull’s head. The animal stared back at me with wry self-awareness, as if he understood just how out of place he was in this drawing. It struck me that every single human being who took in that arresting little sketch must have felt an instant connection to it, thinking, Okay, tell me again how I ended up here.

Before my phone had reached across the airwaves and rung Sara’s, I heard Wynne’s voice lilting behind me. “Teddy, look what the cat dragged in.”

I spun around and saw Sara. She was elegantly dressed in a long brown leather skirt and a white blouse unbuttoned at the top. Either she’d already been equipped with a glass of white or she’d driven over with it in her hand.

“Teddy.” Sara gaped at me like I was an obsessed extramarital one-night stand who’d started showing up at her kid’s Little League games. “I had no idea you were coming.”

“Apparently,” I said.

“Well, ain’t this a kick in the ass,” Wynne hooted. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you two in the same room. I was beginning to think you were the same person, like maybe Sara was Teddy in drag or something.”

I pulled back the edges of my mouth. “I’d rather you leave me out of your weird little fantasies, if it’s all the same to you.”

Sara looked at me and collapsed her forehead into the bridge of her nose. This was code for What gives?

“We finished up early at the studio, so I figured I’d surprise you,” I explained. “Where were you?”

“At a client’s,” she said. “You should’ve told me you were coming.”

I eyed her carefully, sussing out clues of deception. Josie and Wynne’s studio was obviously unavailable to her as an alibi tonight. The only other place she could’ve been was with Billy, of whom she spoke only in the most elliptical of terms. My periodic inquiries into the status of the divorce had been met with shallow nonanswers, unremitting evasiveness. Something else that was none of my fucking business.

We were joined by Josie, who was leading her mother over by the wrist. “You met Teddy, Mom, but this,” our hostess said grandly, “is Sara. Sara Rome.”

Josie’s mother, a peppy little dumpling, practically exploded. “Of course! The interior designer. Aren’t you adorable!”

“Congratulations,” Sara said. “Miguel’s beautiful.”

The little round woman clutched her heart with great theater. “Is he not the most precious thing you’ve ever seen?”

Then she proceeded to catalog all her favorite decorative strokes around the house that Sara had authored. Sara modestly accepted the compliments, though she did point to the painting above the fireplace, a blighted wintry street scene, and remarked, “I still think the Vincenzo goes there.”

“I know I’ve said this a zillion times to Josephine, but I’m getting your number tonight. Mel and I haven’t updated in thirty years.”

When Josie’s mother scooted away to attend to her suddenly irritable grandson, I noticed Sara staring at something over my shoulder, something drawing her attention between her increasingly aggressive sips of wine. Finally, when her furtive glances had elevated to the point of obviousness, I turned and followed her eyes, discovering that the object of her absorption was Pritham, Ravi’s twelve-year-old. It didn’t take long for me to realize why.

“I didn’t know Ravi had a son,” I said to her carefully.

“Yes, you did. And he has three.”

“Anyway. You look really pretty tonight.”

She smiled at me as if finally buying into the suitability of my presence there.

Then, a strange look overtook her face, and she snatched my hand and tugged me out of the room. Toward the back of the house we moved hurriedly, past the island in the kitchen where a stack of dirty plates leaned precariously by the sink.

Sara opened a door and flicked on a light. We stood atop a rickety staircase.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

A finger to her lips, she pulled the door closed behind us and led me down the steps. The cellar was furnished with a sprawling old mushroom of a sofa, presumably deposited there to live out the end of its life in peace, and was floored with a red Persian rug that fueled the illusion that the entire basement could levitate as if on a magic carpet.

My attention was instantly hooked by a pearly iridescence under track lighting at the back of the room. I looked over and beheld an array of mosaics suspended across the walls. They were gorgeous, mesmerizing creations, some ovoid, some rectangular, one shaped like a starfish, another the female form. Each consisted of hundreds of glass tiles bursting with color, exploding with light.