Lady in Waiting: A Novel Read online

“I interviewed last Thursday. They flew me up for the day.”

  My face instantly warmed with a weird jumble of embarrassment and surprise. Brad had been to New Hampshire and back, on a day I assumed he’d been in Manhattan working a twelve-hour shift.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I murmured.

  He pushed his mug away. “I really wanted to check this out on my own.”

  The air in the room seemed to still. “Why?”

  Brad rubbed his hand across his morning stubble. “Because … because I knew I would not be asking you to make any changes for me.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What do you mean?”

  But I knew. He meant he wanted to go to New Hampshire alone.

  He sighed the tired exhale of someone who has to explain something that shouldn’t have to be explained. “I think it’s time we were both honest with each other.” He said it like he’d already imagined saying it a hundred times. “I think we need a little break.”

  My first thought was that he was joking. But no one jokes about something like this. The worst of it was he thought I was in the know. He thought I also felt the need for distance, that our marriage had hit a dead zone, and that we needed some time away from each other, and that I’d been pretending I didn’t see it. He must’ve been feeling this way for quite a while. And I had no idea.

  The tears formed immediately. Two slipped out and slid down my face. Brad looked away.

  “A break from what?” I whispered. “You want a break? From me?”

  “Jane—,” he began, and it suddenly occurred to me, with nauseating force, that he was having an affair.

  “Is there someone else?” I blurted. “Are you seeing someone? Are you having an affair?”

  “No.”

  He said it quickly. But in that same tired voice.

  “You’re not having an affair?” I wanted to believe him but was afraid to.

  “I’m not having an affair.”

  For a split second, I wished he was. I wished he was having an affair, that someone had stolen his attention away from me. Then there would be someone else to be angry at. Someone to blame for yanking him away.

  More tears slid down my face. Brad reached for a tissue on the breakfast bar behind us and held it out to me. I ignored it and wiped the tears away with the sleeve of my bathrobe.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” I said.

  He tossed the tissue onto the table. “Can you honestly tell me you think everything is fine with us? Don’t you know it’s not? I shouldn’t have to spell it out. I never wanted to hurt you.”

  “Well, how did you think I would feel when you told me this?” Resentment rose within me, fueled by hurt and bewilderment. “How did you think I’d feel when you told me you wanted to leave me?”

  “I didn’t say I was leaving you. I said we needed a break.”

  “But you’re leaving me!” I put my hands in my lap to try to still them.

  “I just think we both need some time apart to see if there’s anything that is keeping this marriage alive.”

  My face stung as though I’d been slapped. “What?”

  “I think maybe Connor has been the only thing keeping us together. When he went away to college, it’s like he pulled out the last nail. It hasn’t been the same for us. And I think you know it.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but there were no words ready. In that instant I knew I had done nothing to address the void in our lives when Connor packed his bags for Dartmouth. And neither had Brad. For the last eighteen months, we’d been holding our breath in between Connor’s semester breaks and visits home. Well, at least I had been. Brad had apparently been doing something else—imagining life without me. But what he was suggesting made no sense.

  “How will being apart help us see what’s keeping us together?” I asked.

  “Because being together isn’t doing it.”

  This, too, stung me. I reached for the tissue, and he handed it to me. “Shouldn’t we try counseling?”

  He hesitated a moment. “Maybe. In a little while. Right now I just need some space. I think we both do.”

  I grabbed the french press and rose from my chair. I stepped into the open kitchen and slammed the press onto the counter. Coffee sloshed onto our breakfast dishes.

  “Jane?”

  “For how long?” I kept my back to him.

  “I … I can’t answer that.”

  “What about Connor? What are we supposed to tell him?”

  “We tell him as much as he needs to know. That I’ve been offered a great job in New Hampshire and I am taking it while we see if it’s a move we both want to make.”

  I turned around and stared at him, my radiologist husband who spent his days looking inside people. “Is this really what you want to do?”

  He closed his eyes, as if I had asked the wrong question and he was trying to find an answer that would make the question work. “It’s what I need to do.”

  For a long stretch of seconds, neither one of us said anything. Then he methodically told me, as if he’d rehearsed it, that he’d rented a furnished condo near his new hospital, that he’d given notice at Memorial and asked for an early out so that he could start on Tuesday. Memorial had granted it. He asked me if he could take the car, even though it was his anyway. Then he told me we’d use the time away from each other to see where our hearts were headed.

  “What am I going to tell my parents?” My cheeks were wet with tears, spilled as he spelled out the arrangements he’d made.

  Brad stood. “This has nothing to do with your parents.”

  “What am I going to tell them?”

  “Tell them this is my fault.”

  He started to walk past me, probably to start packing. I reached out to touch his arm, and he stopped.

  “You made love to me last night,” I whispered.

  When he said nothing in return, I looked up at him. He was looking down on me, at my arm on his arm, waiting for me to let him go.

  He didn’t say it, but I suddenly knew his thoughts.

  What we had shared the night before was the most visceral vestige of our oneness. He had considered it, and it wasn’t enough.

  We’d been sharing the same house, the same car, the same friends, the same bed for twenty-two years. And it was Connor who’d kept the loose threads tied together.

  I let my hand fall.

  I had missed the signs that Brad was bored with our life. Surely they had been there. But I’d missed them. My best friend, Molly, upon whose shoulder I’d leaned daily after Brad’s departure, said I perhaps distracted myself with managing Thea’s shop, because I didn’t know what to make of the signs, didn’t know how to address them, so I’d pretended they weren’t there. But there had been no pretending. I just didn’t see them.

  After he left, I had no choice but to consider them. The signs that I didn’t see morphed into the reasons he left. My empty bed coaxed me into pondering them night after night while the rest of Manhattan slept. Morning would come and I’d drag myself down to the shop, woozy as a victim of malaria. The week Brad moved out, I hadn’t hired Stacy yet. It was still just me and blunt, Hawaiian-shirted Wilson, the retired high school history teacher and self-taught repairman who’d been Thea’s only other full-time employee.

  “You hung over?” he asked, the first morning Brad was gone, appalled at my morning stagger.

  “No, Wilson. I didn’t sleep well.”

  “Pity. I’ll make you coffee.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure, of course. You know, if you didn’t consume so much refined sugar, you wouldn’t be up at night, Jane.”

  I slowly took off my coat and hung it on the hall tree by the cash register. “I’m sure you’re probably right.”

  He had stared at me. “I am totally kidding. Want an éclair with your coffee? I picked up some on the way in.”

  Over dark roast and pastries, I’d quietly confided in gray-haired Wilson. I told him Brad had taken
a job in New Hampshire and wanted to move there alone for now.

  “So he left you.” Wilson wiped a bit of cream from the corners of his mouth.

  “Not exactly. But that’s sure what it feels like.”

  He stood and tossed the wax papers that had been around the éclairs into the trash. It was nearly nine. Time to open. “That’s because that’s what it is.”

  I flipped on a table lamp at the register. “Remind me not to come to you for sympathy.”

  He began walking toward the front door, keys jangling in his hands. “Oh! Is that what you wanted? You wanted sympathy? Do they sell that here in New York?” The key went into the lock and he turned it.

  “Tell me again why Thea hired you?” I called over to him, enjoying the slight grin he’d extracted from me. It had felt good to smile, even for just five seconds.

  Wilson began walking back toward me. When he got close, I could smell his favorite pipe tobacco in the fabric of his tropical shirt. The many wrinkles in his seventy-five-year-old face stretched into arcs as he grinned. “I was her paramour, of course.”

  The phone had rung just then, and he picked up the handset to answer it. A set of customers came in the next moment, and I didn’t have the courage to ask him later if he’d been totally kidding.

  My mother and I arrived at my shop from the East Village town house, and she double-parked while I dashed inside for the gerbera daisies. A late morning sun was warming the busy street, and cars zipped past her left and right. Someone honked at her as I opened the passenger door and positioned the vase on the floor of her car.

  “Don’t forget we’re celebrating Leslie’s birthday next weekend. And get some sleep, for heaven’s sake. You don’t look well, Jane,” she called to me and then added that my sister didn’t want any nasty black balloons or milk of magnesia or denture cream for her fortieth birthday. I assured her I’d find something in the shop that Leslie would like and that wouldn’t suggest she’s an old woman.

  “Too bad that clock back at the Village house doesn’t work!” my mother yelled as another car honked at her. “She’d love that.”

  I closed the door and waved her off.

  That clock was mine.

  Three

  Wilson was brewing a fresh pot of coffee at the far counter when I stepped back into the shop after my mother left with the daisies. Stacy was with a customer at the jewelry case, showing a well-dressed woman a glistening pocket watch with a French inscription. I could hear Stacy speaking the beautiful foreign words, and I again thanked heaven I found her. Stacy was the daughter of missionary parents and spoke four languages, including French and Italian. She was a graduate student at New York University and worked for me twenty hours a week. As I joined Wilson in the back, Stacy was telling the woman that the inscription read: “What has never been doubted has never been proven.” Wilson, sporting a tweed jacket with his banana yellow Hawaiian shirt, looked like I could ask him anything and he’d either know the answer or could easily assure me it didn’t matter.

  When I reached him, he nodded toward Stacy and whispered, “Diderot.”

  “What?”

  “The inscription on the watch. That’s Diderot. He was an eighteenth-century French philosopher. A radical. You are out of cream.” He handed me a cup of coffee. “A strange thing to engrave on a watch.”

  “Must have been inscribed by a fan of his.” I took the cup and brought it to my lips. Wilson’s coffee was dense, woody, and dark. Always the perfect antidote to a late-morning slump.

  “He probably gave it to himself,” he quipped, and we both laughed.

  He pointed to a collection of cardboard boxes near the alley entrance, all bearing UK postmarks. “Those came while you were gone.”

  Emma’s latest acquisitions. She’d told me on the phone that morning that they’d probably come today. She also said she hadn’t had time to organize the contents. The collection of clothes she had gotten from the same sale was a veritable gold mine, but in deplorable shape, and she hadn’t time to tidy my share of the inventory. So I wasn’t allowed to give her grief over the condition of the contents. She’d paid two hundred pounds for the lot, and she’d split the cost fifty-fifty.

  “Want me to open them for you?” he asked.

  I knelt down to look at the customs form slapped to the first box. Emma had marked the form “books, decorative tins, and trinket boxes” and given every item a value of ten pounds each. The boxes were giving off an odor. Mildew.

  The odor of regret.

  I was never around antiques growing up. My mother didn’t like them. Everything in the house I grew up in was contemporary. The moment the décor began to feel dated, Mom reinvented the house. New furniture, new paint, new curtains, new pictures on the walls, always color coordinated and trendsetting. As an interior designer, she was able to rationalize her decorative mood swings to my dad, at least most of the time. There was one time growing up, however, when Dad came home from a long day at the hospital and his favorite chair was gone, replaced by a clunky impostor. He exploded. There were words that night. Lots of them. Leslie and I hunkered down in her bedroom and played Yahtzee while our parents had it out over that chair.

  In the end, Mom got her way. I don’t know how she did it. Somehow she convinced Dad the new chair was better than the old one. It stayed. For a few years, anyway.

  My fascination with old things began the summer I was twelve. I spent ten days in Manhattan with Mom’s aunt Thea, at her invitation. She’d had the shop for a few years, opening it after her British husband had died and she’d returned to the States a moderately wealthy woman. She never had any children, and my mother was her only living relative. Thea let me poke around in the back of the store that summer, took me on buying trips, and thoroughly convinced me that every piece in Amsterdam Avenue Antiques had been a part of someone’s past—each piece could tell a story or two, if it could talk. That intrigued me—that the odds and ends of a person’s past could find their way to a new person’s present and everything would begin all over again. I think it pleased her that I had an interest in the things that she cared about. I spent another week with her the following summer.

  In high school I took a job working weekends for a couple who owned an antique jewelry store near my parents’ home on Long Island. David and Lila Longmont were an odd sort of couple. They didn’t seem to get along very well, yet they couldn’t stand to be apart from each other. Both of them seemed off balance if the other was away from the store, even if just for a few minutes. David was an expert on antique stones and settings, almost arrogantly so, and Lila, who couldn’t say a kind word to David’s face, was ferocious in her defense of his expertise to dubious customers. I loved how every piece in their store—every necklace, every brooch, every ring—had been worn by someone. I used to make up stories about the previous owners on slow Saturdays. I imagined that Thea might be doing the same thing.

  Much later, when Connor was a baby and I had stopped teaching to be at home with him, the attraction to old things returned. We were living in Connecticut then; Brad was in his residency, and Connor and I spent a lot of time on our own, strolling streets and looking in shop windows. It’s impossible to live in New England and not sense a connection to the past. Even my mother feels this connection, though she won’t decorate with it. I began buying a few antiques here and there and going to auctions and estate sales, and by the time Connor was in junior high and we were living in Manhattan, I knew more about antiquities than some of the dealers I bought from. But I never imagined I’d go into retail. I always figured I’d go back to teaching when Connor graduated.

  About the time Connor realized he could run faster and longer than just about anybody, I began spending my afternoons at cross-country and track meets, cheering for my son, hitting the Record button so that Brad could watch the meets later, and planning my return back to the classroom.

  It was my mother’s idea that I take over managing the store instead of her when Thea’s health beg
an to fail within a week of Connor’s leaving for Dartmouth. Not only did my mother quickly have my great-aunt’s blessing but also Thea’s insistence that if my mother wasn’t going to manage the store in her absence, it had to be me.

  My mother came to my apartment the day she and Thea decided this, with the shop keys in her hand, effusing joy that the perfect solution for my empty nest had just presented itself, and I alone was Aunt Thea’s answer to prayer.

  “But I was thinking I’d go back to teaching,” I’d said, staring at the keys she had placed in my palm.

  “But you love antiques. And for heaven’s sake, you haven’t been in a classroom in eighteen years. Besides, Aunt Thea needs you.”

  “I don’t know anything about running a business, Mom.”

  “Thea didn’t either when she started. She’ll tell you everything. And you’ll have Wilson there to help you.” She flipped her sunglasses down onto her nose and reached for the front doorknob.

  “You’re leaving?” She had been there less than ten minutes.

  “I’m staging a house in Westchester. I have to go or I’ll get stuck in traffic. Talk it over with Brad. It’s the perfect solution.”

  She opened the door and took a step out.

  “Perfect solution for what?” I called after her.

  My mother turned her head but kept walking. “For you, Jane. For everyone.”

  Brad had come home tired and overworked that night. I told him over lasagna that I’d been asked by Mom and Thea to take over the management of the antique store.

  “Do you want to do it?” he’d said.

  “Thea’s kind of insistent that it be me.”

  “But is it something you want to do? I thought you wanted to teach again.” He chewed slowly.

  “Do you think it’s a good idea?” I asked.

  He raised another forkful to his mouth. “I guess if it’s really what you want to do …”

  I realized later that I never asked him if he thought I’d be good at it.

  As we cleared the table, I told him I thought it might be good for me to take on a challenge like this one, since Connor was away at college and everything seemed so different at home. He had agreed with me.