Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

He smiled, too, but what he thought, reflexively, was, Here we go .

“Hey,” she said. “Were you supposed to read something for Bea? She called me yesterday.”

Crap. Bea. Her pages. “Crap,” Leo said. “I forgot. I’ll take a look.”

“If recent experience is any indicator, it won’t be a long read. Call me at the office if they’re decent.”

“I guess I’ll talk to you tonight,” he said, brightly.

“Funny.” She leaned over and kissed him. She tasted like banana and coffee, and he pulled her close. He slipped his hands inside her jacket, holding her tight, trying to right whatever was listing inside. He smoothed back her hair and kissed her, deeply, opening himself to her, and the darkness moving through him lightened. She seemed distracted, stiff, so he ran his hand over her silk blouse until he felt her nipple harden and then moved his tongue the way she liked, lightly across her lip first and then harder, more probing, until he felt her relax against him.

“No fair,” she said, softly, pulling away. “I have to go to work.” Stephanie knew she had to stop procrastinating and tell Leo what was going on. Tonight, she figured, was as good as any night. “Maybe I’ll leave early today.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Bea,” she said, grabbing her bag. “Don’t forget.”

AFTER STEPHANIE LEFT,he made another pot of coffee. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t have any desire to open his computer. Go to his “office.” Do work. The thought of sitting and looking out the small back window to the dreary quilt of adjacent brown yards was depressing. His phone vibrated on the counter. He picked it up to see the incoming call. There it was, again. Matilda Rodriguez. He dimly remembered insisting on getting her number the night of the accident and texting her repeatedly when she was still back in the kitchen getting her things before they headed for the car. She wasn’t supposed to call. He was going to have to talk to George. It wasn’t only Matilda he was avoiding; Jack was sending daily e-mails about a dinner party for Melody’s birthday, and Melody had left a handful of messages asking to have lunch. “Just the two of us. It’s urgent.”

Something here is not right.

He went upstairs and found Bea’s leather bag on the bookshelf where he’d left it, back when he believed he had more important things in play. Maybe the story would be good. Maybe he’d have something useful to say about it. He tried to settle his troubled brain and concentrate on the first few paragraphs. It was about some guy named Marcus. (Leo was surprised to feel a flicker of disappointment that it wasn’t an Archie story.) Some guy named Marcus. A wedding. A caterer. A car. Leo’s pulse started to race. He flipped through more quickly as words floated off the pages, headlights, severed limb, emergency room, suture. “Tomelo, Mami,” he read. “Take it.” Christ. He turned back to the first page again. The story was about his accident. The story was about him.

The night Stephanie was planning to tell Leo she was pregnant — but didn’t — she came home to find him wearing the same clothes as when she’d left that morning, including the T-shirt he’d slept in. He was apoplectic about Bea’s story. He must have started reading right after she left and then spent the rest of the day working himself into his Leo lather. It took her a good five minutes to calm him down enough to understand what was happening, that the story was about his accident and about someone who had been hurt during the accident in ways that Leo was not calm enough — or willing — to explain.

“Did you kill someone?” she finally asked. In the seconds before he answered she was sure that he had, sure that the wild terror she saw in his eyes was because he had to tell her that he’d gotten behind the wheel, inebriated and high, and committed involuntary manslaughter but had somehow gotten off the hook. But he hadn’t. A severe injury was all he would say, something that was bad but had also been taken care of and if Bea published this story, he insisted, the truth would be out and everyone who had it in for him would not hold back — all this came out in one invective, evasive stream; it was a lot for Stephanie to take in.

Leo stood in front of her, shaking the pages. “This is bullshit!” he said. “It’s an Archie story!”

“It is?” Stephanie was surprised. An Archie story. Interesting. “Is it any good?”

“Are you kidding me? That’s not the point!” He threw the pages on the table and a couple of the sheets slowly drifted to the floor. He stepped on one, tearing the paper under his heel. “She’s pretending it’s not an Archie story — she gave the character a different name — but it is. It’s about last summer and there is no way on earth she is going to fucking publish that story.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“No, not yet. I’m not sure I ever want to talk to Bea again.”

“Let’s take a deep breath and slow down,” Stephanie said. She pulled out a chair and motioned to him. He sat and furiously rubbed his head with his hands and gave a sharp groan. His unwashed hair stuck out at odd angles, the day’s beard darkened the lower half of his face, and his eyes were bloodshot and a little crazed.

“Maybe she just needs to know how upsetting this is to you. Maybe there’s a way to fix the story. She’s writing fiction, for God’s sake. It’s one story—”

“It’s not even finished.”

“Okay, so it’s just a draft. Even better. Let’s take one thing at a time.” She managed to calm Leo a bit and eventually coax him upstairs to shower and change while she ordered takeout. She reassured him that when he came back downstairs, they’d figure out how to talk to Bea who might be many things but was not cruel or unkind.

Stephanie remembered her earlier phone conversation with Bea and wished she’d known then what she knew now. She could have set the stage for discouraging her, warned her that Leo was not happy. Shit. Her announcement would have to wait for another day. This was not the night to talk to Leo about fatherhood, not when he was already feeling paranoid and trapped, blindsided.

Stephanie started leafing through her take-out menus, annoyed. This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives. She did love Leo. She’d loved him in a host of different ways at different times in their lives, and she did want whatever their current thing was to continue. Probably. But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.

On the one hand, she knew that Leo was never going to really change. On the other hand, she knew that Leo had spoiled something for her. She wasn’t going to enter into the type of willful ignorance that life with Leo might require, but she wasn’t going to settle for less than the charge, the excitement she felt when Leo was around. She was open to love, but she was best at managing her own happiness; it was other people’s happiness that sunk her.

She realized (abstractly, she knew) that parenthood was nothing more than being responsible for someone else’s happiness all the time, day after day, probably for the rest of her life, but it had to be a little different. It couldn’t be the same as feeling responsible for another adult who came to the party full of existing hopes and behaviors and intentions. She and her lovers had always managed to break what they built between them. She never figured out how to nurture the affection so it grew; it always ended up diminished. She knew parents and children could break each other’s hearts, but it had to be harder, didn’t it?