The Ten-Year Nap (44 page)

Both of them were unable to turn their brains off like light switches; they had this in common. They also had in common a belief in the likelihood that their shared primary interest, superstring theory, would turn out to be a valid theory of everything and that one day this would be universally accepted. Until then, it was just a question of plodding along, gathering data, making your case at conferences, standing at a lectern and delivering a paper in a small but forceful voice, and also standing at a blackboard at night, writing an equation until the chalk dissolved. Isabelle Gordon didn’t mind being just a flouring of yellow chalk dust herself, or a vibrating object that thought about everything constantly and liked designer shoes and loved her children and her husband madly, crazily—as much, she had told her son Ty once before bed, as she loved D-branes and gauge bosons and Calabi-Yau manifolds. Yes, as much as that, which, they all knew, was really saying a lot.

B
UT LOVE
did not have to be the thing that everyone at work aimed toward, arrows poised. Amy Lamb knew this early on into her new job. For five months now, she had been working as a lawyer in general practice. It had taken a long time to find an acceptable position. She’d answered an online ad for a women’s law firm that had seemed wonderful initially, but when she went for the interview it soon became clear to her that the young woman behind the desk thought Amy was far too old to work there. It was a great insult. Though she got herself a couple of interviews cold, it was actually through Lisa Silvestri’s connections that Amy found the job as one of four attorneys at a modest storefront law office downtown called Stellan Frankel Bern. The other lawyers, two women and one man, all in their thirties, were convivial enough, and seemed to have lives outside their job. Most of her cases were standard T&E, work that Amy would never burn to do or regard with great desire. Yes, what a shame it was, she thought now, silently addressing her mother, that she hadn’t found something she really loved and was brilliant at in time to chase it down. But still it was a relief to earn money, and it was sometimes a surprisingly significant pleasure to find that most of the particulars of legal language and instinct had held fast over the years after all. And she also felt it was a pleasure, an honor, weirdly, just to be working. On Monday mornings, the lawyers lingered briefly in one another’s cubicles, asking about the weekend, dawdling a little before giving themselves over to another week.

Amy and Leo now took turns taking Mason to school in the morning. Leo disliked having to skip the gym every other day, and he worried that he was arriving at his desk far too late, but he found that it wasn’t a tragedy and that his clients would manage if he arrived at a more reasonable hour. Amy still looked forward to the days when she took Mason to school; she had been doing it for so long that it had become part of what she expected. Sometimes the mornings were hectic and unpleasant. She had a meeting with a client first thing and could not afford to be late, yet she couldn’t get Mason but of bed.

“DO YOU KNOW HOW IMPORTANT IT IS THAT YOU GET UP RIGHT NOW?” she would cry to him, but maddeningly there would be no answer.

Sometimes, he simply could not find whatever book he was reading; it was certainly not one of the
Blindman
series anymore. The long novels of Rachel Millar had finally been abandoned in favor of another series, by an Englishman named Sebastian Sunderland, whose
Starfish Island
trilogy involved an underwater cave populated by creatures who had the ability to regrow severed limbs at will and breathe perfectly in the silent depths of the ocean.
Blindman and the Moorchaser: Book the Third
had been placed on a high shelf in Mason’s room; he would likely never look at it again until the day when he became a father reading to his own child.

One morning when they were about to leave the apartment for school and then for work, Amy could not find her briefcase. “Oh God, where is it?” she repeated. “Where did I leave it? Oh, this is bad.”

“What’s going to happen, you’ll be marked unprepared?” Mason said.

“I’m serious; it’s important.”

Mason produced his electronic object finder, which, she had recently learned, he had programmed to include his mother’s most essential belongings too, ever since she had gone back to work. He pressed a code into the plastic device, and they both waited. Momentarily there came a corresponding, faraway, android voice.
Your-brief-case-is-o-ver-here,
it said, and she and Mason ran through the apartment in search of the sound.

There, in the bedroom, under a pile of silky clothes that she had worn yesterday and had neglected to put away, so tired was she last night, was her briefcase, with the brown leather surface and the golden metal clasp that made a gratifying noise when the nub was pressed into its groove.

Your-brief-case-is-o-ver-here,
the object finder repeated, and she picked up the briefcase and opened it, checking the contents, seeing that all the papers were there, all the directions for the day.
Your-life-is-fi-nite,
the object finder told her.
No-one-knows-a-ny-thing. But-do-not-stop. Do-not-fal-ter. Do-not-wait. It-is-late-in-the-day-but-I-think-there-may-still-be-time.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
that Amy deposited her first, fairly modest paycheck, she went into a small bookstore near her office and bought Leo a copy of
The Magic Mountain.
Slowly, over the weeks, she began to notice that the red satin bookmark moved from page to page like a hand on a clock, collecting heft behind it. Leo was tired at night, but she watched him make his way through the book she had bought him. He had lost a little weight, but particularly with his reading glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose, he did look like his father. But she looked like her mother, and there were worse fates than that.

Penny Ramsey remained mostly an absence. On the rare occasions when Amy saw her on the street, Penny was with Holden or her teenaged daughters, and once she was with Greg. Or else Amy was with Mason, and the two women simply smiled and said hi, how are you; how are the kids; how’s school going for them; how’s the museum; I hear you’ve started at a law firm—is it going well? And then each of them barely waited for the answer. But always Amy imagined that one day she would see Penny alone, and she would say something to her of significance. It had been over a year now, yet that still hadn’t happened.

Could you tell me something, please, Amy would ask: Was our friendship real back then? Did you actually even like me at all? Did you love Ian? Did you love your husband? Do you love him now? Wasn’t that whole thing crazy? Do you even know what became of Ian, finally?

Amy had lost track of Ian Janeway; he’d never replied to her letter, not that she’d expected him to. Sometimes she imagined him in London, still recovering and obsessive and hopelessly lost, unsteadily making his way up the stone stairs of the National Gallery assisted by two metal canes, each step sending jags of pain humming through the thirty-three vertebrae of his spine.

As it would turn out, Amy Lamb saw Penny Ramsey alone one day at the end of that spring. It was during the evening rush hour in the subway below Penn Station. Amy was walking quickly in a crowd toward the trains after work, when she glanced into one of those brightly lit, nonfat frozen-dessert stands to which women are often drawn, needing a vague trace of sweetness at the end of the day. Penny Ramsey was perched on a stool in the tiny space, taking a few hurried spoonfuls of milk, sugar, chemicals, and air from a cup. A briefcase and a good, candied-looking pocketbook were at her feet, and in her left hand was a sheaf of slides that she was holding up to the light.

Amy would have said something to her; it was all so long ago already, and neither of them thought about it much, and she wasn’t angry with Penny anymore, and it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But Penny, she could see, was working. She was working even now, after hours, sitting at a frozen-dessert stand, because work often expanded and lapped over the edges of anyone’s day. Penny was thinking about something that had nothing to do with Amy or Ian or being a friend or being in love or walking away from her injured, overexcited lover. Actually, she was thinking about mid-nineteenth-century bromine daguerreotypes, and whether she ought to build an entire exhibition around them at the museum, and Amy felt it was only right to leave her alone. She watched as Penny Ramsey looked and looked at those slides in a long moment of concentration. Then Penny dropped her cup into the trash, picked up her briefcase and pocketbook, and slipped off among the crowd of people heading for all the different trains that flowed like separate rivers from this single station.

I
N THE GOLDEN HORN
on a Monday morning at the very end of the school year, the owner, Adnan Veysel, said to a waiter, “So where have the ladies in the back been? I don’t see them very often.” The waiter, young, uninterested, shrugged and proceeded to spray a table with blue liquid from a bottle, then wipe it away and place buntings of napkins and silverware on its surface.

“Maybe they went to another place,” the owner said in answer to his own question. He had noticed that the back booth was less frequently full in the mornings at the start of the school day, or at least that the women who came and sat here lately were not the same ones he had been seeing for years. He saw some younger ones these days, with baby carriages and strollers. Their voices often sounded excited, and they had so much equipment that they practically decorated the booth with it. Over time he would probably start to forget about the regulars; this new crowd would become the new regulars.

But now, though, he still thought about the women who until recently had come here most mornings. He had never known any of their names, and he saw them only briefly when they first walked in, and then perhaps from above, if the place was particularly busy and he ended up bringing them their water glasses or even their orders. He recalled looking down at the tops of their heads and the parts in their hair as they sat and he stood. He thought of them as the ordinary-looking brown-haired one who always smiled at him right away; the very tall and pretty blonde one—she’d already stopped coming here so much earlier, but he still remembered her; the slightly thick-built one with the nose; and the Asian one, who always figured out the bill. Different women had joined them from time to time, but it was the four originals who no longer came very often.

He might see one of them sometimes, or maybe another, but they didn’t appear consistently anymore, or in a group. In the past they had always lingered after the breakfast rush. They overtipped the waiters, he’d noticed, leaving amounts of money that seemed to have nothing to do with how much food they had actually ordered.

But as he thought about it now, he decided that he could not believe they had gone somewhere new; it just didn’t seem like something they would do. He imagined that they felt a kind of loyalty toward the Golden Horn, as if it were their school or their house of worship, and that this feeling had held them in place over such a long stretch of time. For his own reasons he was glad that it had. But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.