Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

Melody blew her nose, rooted through her purse for more tissues. She had the hiccups. “When did Leo start hating us?” she said. Nobody responded. “How was it so easy for him to leave?” She wasn’t crying anymore, she was spent. “Was it really just about money? Was it about us ?”

“People leave,” Jack said. “Life gets hard and people bail.” Bea and Melody exchanged a worried look. Jack didn’t look good, and he wouldn’t talk about Walker or the fight at the birthday dinner. He’d fiddled incessantly with his wedding ring since they sat down. “Besides,” he said, a little brighter now, arms spread wide, “what could possibly be wrong with any of us?”

Bea grinned. Melody, too. Jack laughed a little. And as they sat, trying to muster the momentum to make their way out of the office, they all thought about that day at the Oyster Bar, seeing Leo’s agreeability then for what it really was. Jack wondered how he — of all of them, the one the least susceptible to Leo — could not have been more suspicious about how disarming and humble Leo had been. Bea remembered how it had seemed that Leo was maybe, kind of, taking responsibility and evincing a desire to make good. How he’d leaned forward and put his palms on the table and looked each of them in the eye — sincerely, affectionately — and told them he was going to find a way to pay them back, he just needed time. She remembered how he’d asked them to trust him and how she’d believed, too, because Leo had lowered his head and when he looked back up at them, damn if his eyes weren’t the tiniest bit damp, damn if he didn’t seduce them all into giving him the slack he probably imagined he’d have to work much harder to obtain. How grateful he must have been in that moment, Melody thought, to discover how little they were asking from him, to realize how eager they were to believe him.

Exactly ten days after the birthday dinner, Walker moved to a new place. He would have left the next morning, but it took him that long to find a short-term rental that wasn’t too far from his office. Until the minute Walker wordlessly lugged two boxes and three suitcases loaded with clothes into a taxi, both he and Jack thought he was bluffing.

The story about the statue had unraveled with stunning celerity the night of the dinner party. After Stephanie’s unfortunately timed announcement about Leo’s disappearance, Walker had pulled Jack into the kitchen.

“If Leo hasn’t been around for weeks, how have you been meeting with Leo?”

Jack equivocated, but that only made Walker assume he was covering up an indiscretion, an affair. Jack had no choice but to explain, and as he watched the color drain from Walker’s face, he almost wished he’d made up some kind of flirtation to confess instead.

Walker had slowly removed his apron and folded it into a neat square. “What you are doing is not only against the law, it’s completely unethical,” Walker said, practically spitting out every syllable.

“I know how it sounds,” Jack said.

“Don’t,” Walker said. “Please. Please do not try to justify what you’re doing right now.”

“But if you could see this guy,” Jack said, “you might understand. He’s a complete wreck about having that thing in his house. He needs to get rid of it. I’m doing him a favor.”

“Do you even hear yourself?”

“Walker, he lost his wife when the towers fell.”

“What does that even mean ?” Walker was shouting now. “I’m sorry about his wife, but how on earth does that justify what you’re doing? Aiding and abetting a black-market art sale.” Walker was pacing now and he stopped and slammed his fist on the counter. Jack was scared. This was worse than he expected. “When the towers fell? Jesus Christ. What else, Jack, what else ? If you don’t help, the terrorists win? These colors don’t run? Never forget? Am I ignoring any other pat jingoistic sentiments that you’ve previously reviled but might now summon to defend your abhorrent greed?”

“It’s not greed. It’s, it’s—”

“It’s what?”

The last thing Jack wanted to do at that moment was confess the home equity scheme, but he didn’t see how he couldn’t. If he waited, it would just be worse. “There’s something else,” he said.

Walker listened to Jack without saying a word. When Jack was finished, Walker walked to their bedroom and closed the door behind him. All their communication since then had been through terse e-mails. Jack learned from Arthur that Walker had put the summer property on the market. He sent Walker a series of imploring e-mails begging to talk, however briefly. They all disappeared into the great abyss of Walker’s fury and silence.

WALKER HAD SURPRISED HIMSELF.It wasn’t like he didn’t know Jack; he did. He knew exactly what Jack was — and was not — capable of. It wasn’t as if Jack hadn’t done dumb things over the years and tried to hide them. (God, where to begin with the dumb shit Jack had done over the years — always failing, always, he was terrible about covering his tracks.) Walker realized that he’d tacitly agreed to subsidize Jack’s failing efforts years ago. He pretended optimism every time Jack had a new trick up his sleeve, quietly paying off lines of credit that never materialized into revenue because that was what you did when you loved someone, when you were building a life together. Your strengths compensated for their weaknesses. You became the grounding leverage to their impulses, ego to their id. You accommodated . And if Walker got impatient, if he sometimes wished things were a little more balanced, he would just imagine his life without Jack and recalibrate, because he couldn’t imagine life without Jack.

But something inside him had snapped the night of Melody’s birthday. He was genuinely horrified when the story came pouring out of Jack about the illegal sale of the Rodin. It was illegal ! Whatever stupid things Jack had done over the years, breaking the law was a first (he assumed, he hoped). If he’d gone ahead with the ridiculous scheme and gotten caught, Walker couldn’t even bear to imagine what they’d be facing and not just personally — for him the repercussions would be professional. It was beyond imagining.

As he’d stood in their kitchen that night, watching Jack try to explain himself and toggle between evasive and indignant, Walker’s years of resigned tolerance evaporated. In the coming weeks, he would spend a lot of time trying to unpack that moment, not understanding himself how years of commitment and love and tolerance could just vanish. But they did. As he stood and watched Jack, he realized that for more than twenty years he had parented his partner. And on the heels of that debilitating thought, a brief flash of insight that leveled him: The reason they’d never had a child, something Walker had dearly wanted but had never been able to persuade Jack to want, was because Jack was the child — and Walker had let him be the child, enabled him. His husband was his forty-four-year-old petulant, needy, responsibility-avoiding son, and now it was too late for other children, and with that realization Walker was undone.

He thought he’d come to peace with the child decision years ago; it didn’t bother him that much anymore, just the occasional twinge. But seeing Melody’s daughters — so lovely, so sweet — had set something off and then when Stephanie said she was pregnant, he was overwhelmed by such a sudden and unexpected melancholy that he had to leave the room to breathe. Then the confessions, forcing Walker to stop ignoring Jack’s careless, greedy heart. It was as if on the night of Melody’s birthday a yawning crevasse had opened beneath him and he couldn’t clamber up the side to safety. Every day, all day, he felt a kind of vertigo, as if there were nothing holding him up, just a dangerous looming beneath, a valley of regret and waste.