John Kenney - Talk to Me

Nancy was coming over that evening and they were going to make a Bolognese sauce and open a Barolo. After the bath, she’d dressed in yoga pants and, initially, an old shirt of Ted’s, until she realized that it was an old shirt of Ted’s, changing to a T-shirt and cashmere sweater. She’d laid the food out, all the ingredients she’d need for the sauce and the salad. She always did this. She liked the way it looked, a still life. She turned on music, picked Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” College days. Boston and Cambridge days. She opened the wine, poured herself a glass.

It was their ritual in the evenings. A long time ago. A shower, pajamas, music, wine. The giddy excitement of the hard part of the day done, the possibility of the evening, of talking and listening to music, drinking the wine and eating the food, watching half a movie. This was what marriage became for most people, time with a best friend. It may be dark and cold outside but here we are, in this warm, safe place. There is garlic to peel and a dressing to make and a salmon to poach. We are not alone. There is a person to talk with. A person who is endlessly interesting and interested in you, a shared history, someone to talk with about the price of pears at the new supermarket, about the small leak from the eave on the back of the house, about your day. Who’d you talk with, hon? Wait, what? Phil has skin cancer? Martha and Roger are splitting up? Gary’s dad passed away? These things that happen to other people. You talked about it and lived with it for a moment or two and then thanked the good Lord it wasn’t you, returned to your life, to the music, to the warm kitchen, to the sauce and a sip of the wine and the feeling as your husband came up behind you, wrapped his arms around your hips, his strong body against you, how it felt like home. He could sense the smile on your face as his face fell into your neck, how you could feel how much he needed you, as he inhaled your smell, his eyes closed now, a smell he knew. It was a moment and you were there, together, holding on, the music playing. Your music. Your moment. Your life together. Until it was gone.

Claire sipped her wine, alone in the kitchen. The song had ended. She tapped the iPad and played it from the beginning. She should call Ted and ask him to take his belongings from their two homes. Take it all. The clothes, the photos, bikes, and exercise machines used nine times and abandoned. She rubbed her forehead. The good feeling was ebbing. She’d call him tomorrow.

The knock at the back door startled her. She turned and saw Nancy smiling as she opened the door, talking, carrying a bottle of wine. Claire couldn’t make out what she was saying. She wasn’t really listening. She was listening to Van Morrison. She didn’t want the song to end.

Ted inched along the dense traffic on the Long Island Expressway on a Wednesday evening. He sat behind the wheel of an eight-year-old Volvo wagon. The helicopter was in his contract. He should have sensed something wrong when they said it wasn’t available to him. The network had two: a Bell 430 and a Sikorsky S-76. He preferred the Sikorsky, as its top speed was 180 miles per hour, whereas the Bell’s was only 160. Though even thinking this caused Ted to feel like a monumental blowhard.

Every one of the drivers around him—the overworked nurses coming home from a twelve-hour shift, the construction workers, the bankers and lawyers, the dentist getting a hand job from his assistant before dropping her off a block from her house in Ronkonkoma (Ted’s demographic, in other words)—knew who Ted was, had seen his face a million times, had probably read about his shame in newspapers and online, heard it on Entertainment Tonight , on the late night talk shows. He felt that they could see him, in the dark, as the car made its way east.

Claire had initially wanted to simply split everything, fifty-fifty. She didn’t care about the money. She wanted a clean start. Yes, she loved the Bedford house and hoped to keep that.

Claire’s lawyers, however, felt differently about what Claire was owed.

“Did you give up a lucrative career in advertising to raise your daughter?”

“Well, yes, but I’m not sure I’d call my career lucrative.”

“Were you rising? Do you think if you had stayed with it you could have achieved a high position?”

“I think so. I was good at it.”

“Over, say, a thirty-year career, how much could you have made?”

“Oh, I have no idea.”

“We do. We spoke with a top recruiter in New York advertising and she assured us that someone in your field could have made close to five hundred thousand dollars a year, not including bonuses. Now, if you were earning this salary for just half of those thirty years, that’s $7.5 million that you forfeited to raise Ted Grayson’s daughter, tend to his home, and emotionally support him.”

The numbers surprised Claire. She was not someone who thought in those terms.

“The next thirty years of your life, Claire, will be years where you won’t earn an income. How will you live?” She thought of Dodge but her brow furrowed because she didn’t want to be taken care of. She didn’t want to be kept.

Her attorney continued, “It is our experience and our opinion that you deserve far more than half. You earned this. I understand this language is uncomfortable for you and your sensibility. But it’s my job to think this way.”

And so, after giving it some thought and talking with Nancy (“Take it all,” was her advice), Claire instructed her attorneys to ask for the following, with the assumption that Ted’s attorney would come back with their own demands and that they would land somewhere in the middle:

The Bedford house (including all artwork, furniture, rugs, and draperies);

The adjoining ten acres of the Bedford house (which were Ted’s idea to buy and which had more than doubled in value);

The Sag Harbor house;

Ted’s vintage and pristine twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler that Ted repainted himself every spring, alone, at the Sag Harbor house, to get away from Claire and Franny;

The new Audi;

The two-year-old Volvo wagon that they kept in the driveway for God-only-knows what reason; occasionally the maid used it, sometimes Franny when she came home. Mostly it sat, clean and gassed up, in the garage, depreciating in value;

The 1968 Mercedes coupe, garaged at the Sag Harbor house, that Claire bought Ted as a fiftieth-birthday gift;

Annuities, life insurance policies, various stocks, 401(k);

And a lump-sum payment of $20 million in cash.

What Ted got to keep was the Upper West Side apartment, though he would forfeit all of its belongings (except for his own clothes), including artwork, furniture, rugs, lamps, window treatments.

Despite vigorous pleas from Polly, Ted didn’t want to negotiate. “Let her have it all,” he’d said.

What would he do with the Bedford house, anyway? Or Sag Harbor? The plan had always been to put it in Franny’s name, anyway.

That woman gave you her life, Ted’s mother would have said about Claire. Surely, she deserved the money.

Claire had called. She had called and asked him to move all of his belongings out of both houses. He wasn’t ready to do this in the Bedford house yet, to remove what he owned, to ship it to a storage unit in White Plains or some industrial part of town. It was too much. It seemed unreal. He really only had clothes and some boxes of old papers in Sag Harbor. He’d start there.

It was dark when he finally arrived, the house cold. It had a smell that always pleased Ted. Old wood, perhaps. He couldn’t quite place it. He turned on lights, the heat, though it was a drafty place and it always took a while. He was hungry. He thought about going out to dinner, sitting at the bar of the American Hotel in the village, having an overpriced meal and a few glasses of wine. But he would know people. People would recognize him. He hoped never to be recognized again.