Sleepless Nights Page 3

  My husband and I caught each other’s gaze.

  “Listen Tom,” I went on, walking over and putting my arms around him, his big comfortable chest, his wide warm shoulders, “the truth is, I was thinking. What if you came too? What if you said to yourself, forget it, they’re not going to partner me-Crimpson made that perfectly clear before Samuel was born—so I’m going to use up all my long-overdue holiday entitlement and go away for a few weeks with my wife?”

  My chest thumping now, I stared at the bit of my husband’s shoulder in front of my face. It was a very nice bit of shoulder, as it happened, muscly, firm, and covered in starched white cotton. I pleated a bit of it in between my fingers, and waited, hoping.

  Tom craned down to look into my face, his warm breath fanning my eyelashes. “You want me to commit suicide at Crimpson?” He sounded incredulous. “In this economy? Q, do you know what’s happening out there?”

  “I know how it sounds,” I admitted. “I know what the partners will say. I know what they’ll think. But Tom, your position is tenuous no matter what we do. If Luis didn’t think you’re the world’s best lawyer at handling bankruptcies, you’d already be out on your ass. I think you should take control now—ask for a few weeks off, which you’re entitled to, after all. Luis is bound to support you; he’s desperate to keep you around. And then we can use the vacation to really think through the next step.”

  “I don’t want to push Luis too hard, he’s still talking about trying to get them to revisit the partner decision,” Tom fretted; and then, in response to a lift of my eyebrows, “Yeah, I know. Not realistic. But look, there’s my professional reputation at stake, Q. Skipping off for two weeks just isn’t done.”

  “People know you in town, Tom, it’s not as if you don’t have friends and associates in other firms,” I said reasonably. “Paul himself, for example. He might be willing to put in a word for you at Prince, or another Wall Street firm for that matter. Not everyone’s tanking—people say Mahon and Mackey are actually recruiting; and with your skills—well. You don’t need to impress Crimpson anymore. In fact, I think you should view their decision not to promote you as sort of liberating. Otherwise you’d never have risked jumping ship. The stress of being at Crimpson, especially in these circumstances, is really wearing you down, Tom. I can see it in your face. I want to get you out of there. At least for a few weeks.”

  My husband pulled away, sat on the window seat, and looked out into the evening. The sun was spreading its last colors across the millions of windows outside our own, a sea of orange fire engulfing the office buildings of Manhattan. Samuel sneezed in his sleep.

  “We can start again, Tom,” I pressed, coming to stand in front of him.

  “You were playing me last night,” Tom remarked, shaking his head at me, but the corners of his wide mouth were soft, his eyes gentle. “I see it all now. Trying to get on my good side. I thought it was too good to be true. ‘You’re so expert at mothering, Lucille, can you show me that burping position again?’ ‘Peter, tell me more about minimally invasive coronary bypass procedures.’ Very subtle.”

  I sat beside him. “I want a vacation with you.” I took his hand in mine. “And Jeanie—”

  “You know she’s going to want wall-to-wall cocktails and parties and stretch limousines when she gets here, that’s why she’s coming out to New York.”

  “Leave Jeanie to me, I can persuade her. And she’s not really like that, you know,” I murmured reproachfully. Samuel stirred again, and opened his mouth in a cat’s yawn; this time, after a second or two, he whimpered and opened his sleep-darkened eyes. I glanced at the clock; it was time for a feed. I picked him up and curved him into the crook of my arm, lifted my T-shirt, and spilled myself into his tiny, insistent mouth. We listened to his gentle suck-swallow, suck-swallow as the window square blackened and the stars appeared to prick out the sky.

  “Okay,” Tom said slowly, at last. “You win. I’ll phone Paul tomorrow.”

  4

  Jeanie

  I Love New York” (Madonna). “I Feel Safe in New York” (AC/DC). “Summer in the City” (The Lovin’ Spoonful). “Skylines and Turnstiles” (My Chemical Romance).

  My iPod was brimming with New York-themed music. Before leaving London I spent two days downloading songs and even the occasional album to get myself in the mood, although I hadn’t quite gotten around to organizing it all. I’d start nodding off to Paul Simon then get woken up by Busta Rhymes. It was a little bit disorienting.

  I’ve always loved flying. I love the adrenaline rush as the jet speeds down the runway. I love the little dinky dinners in square white boxes. I love sipping gin-and-tonics at eleven in the morning while watching movies of scenically catastrophic destruction. Not that flying is without its downsides, of course: I don’t like tucking my knees into my belly button (a necessary feat if someone belonging to the human race is to fit into an economy class seat), and I don’t enjoy being told off by gaunt ladies with ugly hats. But there’s always the pleasure of needling the ugly ladies through mild acts of rebellion, e.g., reading a magazine four and a half seconds after being asked to put it away. And the relief of leaving my problems far, far behind me.

  “All the Critics Love U in New York” (Prince). “City of Blinding Lights” (U2). “Streets of New York” (Alicia Keys). “Big Apple Dreamin’” (Alice Cooper).

  Somewhere back in Heathrow the morning I flew out, Dave was left yelling at the oil-soaked gaskets and widgets (or whatever they’re called) in the engine of “Betty,” his Morris Minor, as I soared overhead. I could see him in my mind’s eye, fussing under the dented bonnet, rubbing his dirty hands distractedly on his graying T-shirt, swearing furiously at Betty for her remarkable unwillingness to start whenever she’s away from home. (Betty was consistent in nothing but this.) Eventually, after an hour or so, after much hammering and yanking and bashing, Betty would (if the past was anything to go by) splutter apologetically back to life, and Dave would hop into the driver’s seat and roar back down the North Circular Road into London. Settling back into my seat, I hoped he was all right. I hoped he would manage without me. Perhaps Alison would drop by his flat sometimes, check how he’s getting on, I thought to myself, ripping apart my third bag of pretzels. She’d been quite good with him recently.

  “Manhattan Skyline” (a-ha). “New York” (Ja Rule). “New York Fever” (The Toasters). “JFK to LAX” (Gang Starr). “I Run New York” (50 Cent).

  I saw the skyline unfolding out of the dirty coach window with delight, the mad futuristic buildings thrusting through the yellow-gray haze. The city never looked quite real, more like a Hollywood production. (If you looked carefully I was sure you could see the ticky-tacky tape, holding it all together.) All the way into Manhattan I dreamed about the weeks and months I would spend getting to know the place properly. I would become the sort of person who could go back to England and begin sentences for the rest of her life with the phrase, “When I lived in New York.” The sort of person who could throw phrases like “uptown” and “downtown” casually into conversation, and “Broadway” and “Central Park West.”

  Dave would be fine without me. Really.

  “Times Square” (Marianne Faithfull). “To the Five Boroughs” (The Beastie Boys). “Lighters Up (Welcome to Brooklyn)” (Lil’ Kim). “Central Park” (Pete Miser). “Manhattan Avenue” (Nellie McKay). “Cabbies on Crack” (Ramones).

  I could buy very cool clothes that nobody at home would have. I could take home magazines that nobody I knew had read. I could buy not-very-expensive Christmas presents, write on the label “a little something from New York,” and get away with it. I could procure a stunning haircut, then grouse about the fact that “no one styles like that at home.” (As long as I could afford the stylist, of course. What, I wondered, could you get for $40 in New York?)

  I hoped Dave could hold out until I got back. His mother’s Alzheimer’s had been advancing fast and his dad’s moods had been getting blacker and blacker. Sometimes
I wondered how one family could take it all, the illness and the hurt and the loss. If the worst came to the worst, I supposed I could always jump on an airplane and fly home again. I was sure Q would understand. And Dave would be so pleased…Perhaps he’d come to meet me at the airport with flowers! I briefly fantasized a reunion involving tears and people clapping, then sighed and shook myself. This was Dave, after all. Dave’s idea of a romantic occasion was watching Spurs on the big-screen TV at our local pub-with a glass of wine.

  “Englishman in New York” (Sting). “Lonely in New York” (Sophie Milman). “I Can’t See New York” (Tori Amos). “Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)” (The Clash).

  We need a change of scenery.” “We need a break.”

  Too bad, really; that was what I thought I was getting by going to the States.

  Now, I discovered, we were going to Connecticut. I didn’t even know where that was. I looked on a map. Turned out it was one of those states so small its name was written out in the Ocean.

  “The important thing is that I’m here to see you,” I said at last, coming to sit beside her, getting my priorities straight, dumping my Top Shop shoulder bag on the floor. My sister and I hugged each other. “It’s so long since we’ve lived in the same house,” I added thoughtfully, “and you know, my visa says “six months.” Now listen, Q, where’s this baby of yours? I’m so excited to meet him, I wish you hadn’t put him in bed already. Does he look anything like me?”

  “A little,” Q offered, laughing, and then she described her new son’s manifold attractions while I sipped at my hot black tea. Samuel was, I was given to understand, a paragon of a baby, the most beautiful, most advanced, most well-behaved child ever to be born—apart from the fact that he happened not to sleep at night and screamed himself into a fit if she so much as stepped outside the front door. Small flaws, clearly. I cooed in the right places, fingered his tiny clothes, and marveled at the fact that my sister had a child of her very own.

  “I’ve brought a list of clubs and boutiques,” I explained, when she finally fell quiet, excitedly producing a well-thumbed page torn from a Time Out special on “What’s Still Hot in New York.” I’d saved it especially; every night, the month before leaving, I’d been reading and rereading it, salivating at the thought that soon I-I!-would actually be beating the streets of New York City. “And—” turning over the page, showing her all the sections—“there’s also a section on flea markets. Places where hip young designers flog their stuff. You know, the ones hoping for a lucky break. There’ll be plenty of time, when we get back to the city, for us to work our way through them together, won’t there Q? It’s so nice you’re on maternity leave,” I went on enthusiastically, in answer to her faint nod, “we can really do things together this time. Oh Q, it’s going to be lovely!”

  She was looking tired, I noticed suddenly—tired, and a bit lumpy. “You need to get more rest,” I said solicitously, touching her thickly tangled auburn hair then hastily letting it go (what was in there?). “It’s good I’m here, Q. I can really take care of you.” Her skin was almost gray; she’s one of those people who’s sort of pretty when she’s plump and sparkly-eyed, but quite plain otherwise. She rested her head on my shoulder. “That would be nice, Jeanie,” she said, heaving a big, exhausted sigh, and then she rubbed her face slowly against my shirt, like a fond but knackered pony. “It turns out it takes a while to get used to—all this. Motherhood. You know.”

  “I know, Alison said you’d be exhausted—” I began, but I swallowed the rest of the sentence when I saw her eyelashes flicker. “Really?” my sister retorted, sitting up straight again, one hand resting defensively on her rounded tummy. (She looked suspiciously as if she were still in maternity clothes.) “Says I can’t manage, does she? Typical!”

  “I wouldn’t say that—”

  “Well, I would,” Q returned crossly. “You should have heard her on the phone the other day. “Motherhood doesn’t come easily to everyone, Q. For some of us it’s second nature, of course. But you mustn’t feel it’s a comment on your femininity if you find it hard…’” She mimicked Alison’s voice in a scornful high falsetto. “She’s just longing for me to fail,” she went on. “She wants everyone to think she’s the world’s best mother and I’m just some careerist freak who can’t even change a diaper. Well, I’ll bloody well show her—and you, Jeanie,” she turned to me owlishly, head swaying, “you can help me by staying on message, okay? Whenever you talk to her, I mean. I deal with Alison on a strictly need-to-know basis, which is a simple enough rule because she doesn’t need to know anything. But look,” she went on, after a moment, snaking her arm around my waist, “let’s forget Alison. I try to as often as possible. Let’s talk about you, dear. Did you manage to finish your course? Your social work degree?”

  “Of course I did,” I said, nettled (just how disorganized did she think I was?). “So was it useful? Worth the money? What did you learn?” she went on, sounding more like my mother than my mother. “How to speak in words of nineteen syllables,” I returned, irritably, draining my cup and setting it down with a bang. That was the one skill I was confident I’d picked up from my master’s course, actually. I used to have my friends in stitches at lunchtime, converting every event of the day into social-work-speak: we didn’t catch the bus, we “engaged with a broad-spectrum transportation network which facilitated the practice of time-keeping skills and coordinated cross-class collaboration.” Instead of cooking dinner we “learned crucial choice-making in a domesticated setting, developing hand-eye coordination and temperature-regulation skills, essential first-order disciplines for all health-care professionals.”

  Q was clearly half-asleep. “It was—you know, fine,” I finished blandly, not feeling inspired to expand in the circumstances. “Really fine.” Visibly shaking herself, she opened her mouth to continue the interrogation but fortunately (for my purposes) Samuel began shouting in the other room. I didn’t see the child but could attest to the size of his lungs, although why his scream had to be so freakishly high-pitched I couldn’t say. That child made some noise! Thankfully, I took the opportunity of Q’s absence (she flew off the sofa like a mother duck sighting a fox, wild-eyed and clucking) to slip off for a long, hot shower and some me-time. It had been such a long day.

  5

  Q

  Don’t suppose there will be any baby gear at Paul’s house, will there,” Tom said doubtfully, as we gazed around at the contents of the bedroom and the sitting room. My heart almost failed me at the thought of all the accoutrements that somehow accompanied Samuel. Was this a good idea? If Tom hadn’t talked Paul into offering us his house, and if I hadn’t talked it up to Alison on the phone, I think we might have backed out at that point—holidays in your own place can be so relaxing,” I heard Tom muttering disconsolately, eyeing the baby bath, the baby swing, the baby mobile the size of a family car—but who wants to be the kind of parents who get stuck at home, unable to move a step, because of their baby? Tom wrestled three vast suitcases out of the closet.

  “I was planning on using the place myself this month,” Paul observed, when Tom phoned, deeply embarrassed, to ask “for a favor…” But after a pause, he agreed. “If you don’t mind sharing with me for a night or two, perhaps a weekend when I come up to work on the boat, I guess it could work.” Tom actually viewed this as a plus (“We can catch a game, go fishing—!”). “But what are you doing about work?” was Paul’s next, inevitable question, at which point my husband coughed uncomfortably. “I’m thinking of taking an—um—vacation,” he said, and you’d have thought he was suggesting crack cocaine. Paul, however, received the information tolerantly. “Great idea,” he agreed, “you should spend some time with your new son.” Tom relaxed visibly about the whole plan after that; it was as if Paul had given him permission. He marched into Crimpson the very next day and asked for two weeks off. There were some raised eyebrows, but Crimpson still didn’t want to think of itself as one of the firms in distress—and Tom h
ad a reputation with the clients as one of the very best bankruptcy lawyers in the city. So the smiles were, for the most part, bland; “Enjoy your vacation,” the partners murmured, “and give our best to your wife.” Tom’s biggest supporter Luis pulled him into his office just as he was leaving (eyes flicking up and down the corridor) for an intense, excitable conversation about “future options at the firm.”

  We packed the rental car, leaving just enough room for Jeanie to actually sit in—quite an achievement. Glancing back at our trunk of neatly stacked monochrome luggage, I felt strangely clean and pure. No junk, just necessities! We should live like this all the time.

  After an energizing argument about the route, and after both of us had checked three times on the harness of Samuel’s baby seat (too tight inspires fears of chest constriction, too loose incites images of fearsome automobile accidents), we threw ourselves out into the Manhattan traffic heading out of town for the weekend, lurched over steaming potholes toward the press of the FDR Drive, and dove among the cars heading toward the Triborough Bridge. At the toll, the air shimmered with the heat of a thousand idling engines. Samuel whimpered uncomfortably in his seat; Tom slammed an impatient hand against the wheel, cursed softly, then flicked compulsively through XM radio channels, while Jeanie and I meandered through a desultory conversation about our mother’s yoga business back home in England.

  But once the barrier finally rose to let us through, a new world opened up. “I-95 New Haven” announced a large green sign above the sweating, smoking asphalt. Picking up speed at last, we skirted the edges of a dozen small commuter cities, curved around the unprepossessing hotel fronts of Stamford, flew across Bridgeport’s overpass, and then, as the scattered high-rises and implausible sheer face of New Haven’s East Rock glimmered a tantalizing gold and bronze upon our left, sped beyond, around the underarm of the coast, into the deepest part of the state.