Ana Turns

1

ANA

HENRY IS LONG GONE BY THE TIME I WAKE. HOW HE DOES IT—rising every weekday at five with his mind clear, determined to make it through his shift at the gastroenterology procedures clinic with only the help of a brace and alternations of Motrin and Aleve—amazes but does not surprise me. This is Henry. Even-tempered, practical, hardworking Henry. The last person anyone would imagine spending his nights in a marijuana haze.

Next to the coffee pot is a note:

Happy Birthday Dear Ana,

I love you more and more every year. To me, your wisdom and refinement at 60 make you even more beautiful than you were at 27 when we met.

Your eternal admirer and husband,

Henry

PS There is a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice in the refrigerator.

I drink the juice, squeezed for me by a husband I’ve not had sex with since he cracked two vertebrae nine years ago. As good a man as I’ve ever known.

When I open my phone, there’s an emoji-dripping text:

Catherine: Happy Birthday!!!

Don’t worry, we’ll bring your mom tonight XOXO

I’ve known my brother’s wife for more than half my life, and we are in closer contact than I am with George. I credit Catherine, who set the tone shortly after her engagement by calling to invite me to lunch. Touched by the gesture, I was startled that Catherine seemed unaware that I was in my third semester of graduate school, making traveling from Philadelphia to New York on a weekday, as she initially proposed, impossible.

We settled on a Saturday. On reaching the restaurant, late on account of the train, I learned that Catherine had already ordered lobster salads for us both. The Tiffany solitaire George had given her glistened as she touched my arm. ‘It’s the signature dish,’ she said with a sugary smile, as though soliciting my retroactive assent.

When the salads arrived, Catherine speared a chunk of lobster, and then rested her fork on her plate. She had a question. It had to do with my parents. She’d asked George how they met, and he claimed he didn’t know. Did I know?

I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. Of course my brother knew. It crossed my mind that maybe he didn’t want his bride-to-be to know. But he’d given her my phone number. If there was anything George objected to my telling Catherine, he would have called to deliver his instructions. Commands would have felt more like it.

‘My parents agree that they met at a party. It was my mother’s second year in New York. She was twenty, working as a catalog model, and he was twenty-two, in architecture school. After that, their stories differ.’

Catherine seemed to be holding her breath.

‘In my mother’s version, my father was a wickedly smart student who cornered her and insisted she take the subway with him up to Columbia so he could show her the balsam model he’d constructed for a class project. He says she was an astoundingly beautiful girl who looked more like a Swiss farmhand than a New York model, and that she drank too much and he gallantly escorted her back to her room at the Barbizon Hotel.’

Catherine clasped her French-manicured hands and wiggled her shoulders in a cultivated alternative to a shimmy. ‘I love it! Wickedly smart! Astoundingly beautiful! It sounds like they swept each other off their feet!’

I no longer find the moniker ‘Cutie Doll’ Henry once had for Catherine amusing—the good mother Catherine has been having made me see her more generously. That day, though, at our lunch, Cutie Doll perfectly captured five-foot-two Catherine with her café au lait hair (requiring biweekly visits to her A-list colorist) and her purchased boobs (an embarrassment, I would have thought, for a Dartmouth grad, but apparently not in Catherine and George’s set) and her four-inch Manolo Blahnik sling-backs (bringing the top of her head in line with my brows).

Catherine’s expression darkened. Having met both of my parents, she’d surely heard Jean, who never missed an occasion to do so, call Rolf a liar and worm. ‘But why did your mother marry your father? She must have known …’ Catherine’s voice trailed off. With parents who golfed together at their Greenwich country club, where they’d held her engagement party, she couldn’t even utter the words that would complete her thought.

‘My mother got pregnant. She wasn’t religious, but abortion was out of the question. Somehow, she convinced my father that he had to do right by her and marry immediately at city hall.’

Despite having heard my mother tell what happened next for as long as I could remember, it still made me nauseous. ‘She claims when she miscarried a week later, my father accused her of having faked the pregnancy and then pretending her period was a miscarriage.’

Catherine held her fork mid-air. ‘My goodness,’ she whispered. ‘Truly, my goodness.’ The gummy pink lobster dangling from the fork tines looked vaguely fetal. There was a long pause. ‘So how did your parents’ marriage end?’

‘My mother says the beginning of the end was when my father won a prize for a boutique hotel renovation. There was a feature article about him in the Wall Street Journal. She says it went to his head and he was never the same.’

It was my mother who showed me the article, pasted into a scrapbook about my father she’d kept while they were married. The reporter described Rolf as having grown up in Sils Maria, not far from St. Moritz, in the staff quarters of an historic hotel, and how this led to his understanding of the romance of travel and his conviction that a great hotel should evoke a sweep of time that transports guests—and here, the reporter had quoted my father—‘out of the specificities of their own circumstances into a more ethereal and perfect world while, at the same time, creating an environment with sufficient familiarity that guests feel entirely at home.’

‘After the article, the commissions poured in. My mother suspected he slept with other women while on work trips, but by the time she was pregnant with me, he was sleeping with a draftsperson in his office. She caught him outright a few days after I was born.’

Catherine’s lips parted.

‘Not literally. A note or a receipt or something he couldn’t deny.’

‘She didn’t leave him then?’

‘She had a three-year-old and a newborn. She told him if it happened again, she would. Of course, it did. The timing was awful. Her sister had just died of a brain aneurysm. When she got back from the funeral, there was a letter from an associate in my father’s firm with sordid details about the affair she’d been having with my father.’

I used to be mortified when my mother related this chapter of her history, which she wore like a red badge of courage. In my mother’s account, she’d been so grief-stricken about her sister, she’d been numbed by that pain to the pain of leaving her husband.

‘She packed us up—I was five and George was eight—and we moved in with her parents in Baltimore.’

Catherine waited for the server to clear our obscenely expensive salads, neither of us having eaten even half, before responding. ‘George said he grew up with your grandparents—but I thought they’d moved in with you.’

Now my lips parted. Had my brother never told his fiancée about our grandparents’ row house, with the cracked concrete in the backyard and the mousetrap under the dripping kitchen sink, the two of us sharing the room that had belonged to our aunt Uma, our mother sleeping in the one that was hers as a girl? That with the Baltimore public schools in turmoil, she’d enrolled us in Catholic ones, the least expensive private option, and it had been his job to deliver me to my classroom, a job he made clear he hated by walking so fast, I had to run to keep up with him? It seemed not. He must have assumed it would be impossible for Catherine, who’d grown up in a house with five sparkling bathrooms and a live-in housekeeper, to imagine our mornings—our grandfather banging on the bathroom door while we hurried to wash our faces and brush our teeth. Never cursing at us or our mother, but nearly every evening, after he’d had a few, shouting at our grandmother: Shut up, you stupid bitch, you ugly hag. Our grandmother’s cheeks wet with tears as she shooed us away: ‘Don’t mind him. It’s the whiskey talking.’

‘My mother could never have afforded to stay in New York with us.’

Catherine patted her mouth with her napkin, and then softly asked, money a topic in her own family as taboo as sex, ‘But didn’t your father support you?’

If my brother hadn’t told Catherine about our grandparents’ house, perhaps he’d not talked either about our summers: how jarring it felt each time plane tickets arrived so we could join our father, at work on the renovation of a once-glorious hotel with crystal chandeliers in the dining room and a swimming pool where tall iced drinks were served by white-coated staff to guests on terrycloth-covered loungers. ‘He paid for our trips to visit him and in theory he paid child support, but there was never any question that my mother had to work.’

‘She was an actuary?’ Catherine said brightly, pleased, it seemed, to know this.

I nodded. My mother had worked in my grandparents’ bakery, I explained, until the clientele began decamping to the suburbs and there wasn’t enough business to keep paying her a salary. ‘Somehow, she came up with the idea of doing a night school program in actuarial science. It suited her perfectly—the doomsday computations of the likelihood of illnesses and deaths and other unfortunate events.’

Catherine twisted the diamond solitaire until it made a complete circle on her finger. It was hard to know which was more alarming for her: learning about her husband-to-be or realizing how little he’d told her.

I CARRY THE JUICE HENRY MADE INTO MY OFFICE. IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY, I tell myself. You don’t have to check the voice mail on your work line.

If I don’t, though, I’ll regret it. At yoga with my nieces, at lunch with Simon, the thought that there might be a message from a vulnerable client that kindness dictates should receive a prompt response will niggle like a bit of food caught in my teeth until I can’t focus on anything else. Had I realized I’d feel this level of obligation, would I have embarked on the work I do, drawing as much from what I learned in social work school as from my graduate studies in English? Maybe, but maybe not.

You’re a manuscript therapist, Fiona says, plain and simple. I recoil from the word therapist. The way I put it to prospective clients is that in addition to helping clarify the content, narrative choices, and organization of a piece of work, I help writers understand how their texts are constricted by conflicts about what to reveal and how to be seen. To recognize the fingerprints of their inner lives on what’s said and not, in the tone employed, on the arc of a story. I’ve learned that it’s too much—too abstract, too overwhelming—to discuss during initial consultations the most debilitating roadblock: re-creations in the writing itself of an author’s character traits.

With the time stamp on this morning’s voice mail, five a.m., and the pause before there are words, it can only be Bettina.

‘I’m sorry for not giving you any notice, and I’ll understand if you’re too busy … but is there any chance we could meet today?’ It’s hard to hear the rest of the message because Bettina is mumbling and perhaps crying, but I make out Teresa, which is how Bettina refers to her mother, and something about seeing Jack, her stepfather, and Carol, her half-sister.

I exhale loudly. Damn it. I scheduled no client appointments for my birthday, planned not to work at all. But there’s an implied covenant with my writers: I instruct them to dig deep, no matter how painful. When they hit the shoals, I’ll be at the shore to help them find their way—which, from Bettina’s message, means today.

In graduate school, we read a Marxist theorist on time as the truest luxury and nirvana as the condition when work and play are one—though having the good fortune of the two aligned, the author added, does not mean that at every moment our desires will match our obligations.

Buck up, I hear my mother saying.

I text Bettina: Let’s meet at 4:30.

NEVER HAVE I WAVERED IN THE BELIEF THAT I LEARNED EVERYTHING important that I know about editing from Fiona. Instructors in college had scrawled illegible comments in the margins of my papers, comments that posed as penetrating but were slap-dash errant thoughts. Fiona, by contrast, was a surgeon zeroing in on the places where my writing was diseased.

My first experience of Fiona’s scalpel was with a paper for our introductory graduate seminar that I sheepishly asked her to read.

‘Do you want me to be frank or pat you on the back?’

My face burned.

‘Hey—there’s nothing wrong with wanting a pat on the back.’

We’d only recently become friends and already Fiona had discerned how insecure I felt. How worried I was that being a dogged workhorse wouldn’t hide my scrappy academic background (community college classes followed by an undergraduate degree from a commuter branch of the state university, where my classmates read nothing aside from the assigned course materials, if even those) or, more devastatingly, my limited ability. How hungry I felt for praise. ‘Completely frank, of course,’ I said.

The paper, about Virginia Woolf’s conception of time, came back with dead wood, dead wood, dead wood in red ink on page after page where I’d cited philosophers and physicists about the complexities and contradictions embedded in the notion of time and attempted, ineptly, to employ a deconstructionist analysis. Two years later, when I told Fiona, by then a year gone herself from Penn, that I was dropping out of the PhD program to move to New York with Henry, Fiona asked, ‘Is it because of me? Have I been discouraging?’

‘You are a hundred percent responsible. My decision has nothing to do with Henry having been offered his dream job. With our getting married.’

We were on the phone, so I couldn’t see Fiona’s face, read her silence. Had she taken my comment seriously?

‘I’m joking. Truly, can you see me as a professor? I love novels and thinking about writing, but in my own loose way. You know I can’t keep historical eras straight, and my mind turns to mush reading literary theory. I’d rather go before a firing squad than try to explain structuralism or Lacan’s influence on post-modernism.’

‘No one understands that shit. It’s not meant to be understood. And yes, I can see you as a professor—with fantastic boots and an edgy haircut at a nice liberal arts college in New England. Half the students in your British lit seminar, the girls as much as the boys, in love with you.’

‘I couldn’t even confront the deli guy who put sugar in my tea after I said three times, no sugar. I’d never be able to toe the line with late papers and grades. I’m leaving with an MA in English. That should be good enough to get a decent job.’ And it had led to a job, as a screen agent’s assistant. A job that would have been decent had the screen agent, who expected me to do all his reading and once threw an ice bucket because his hotel room wasn’t stocked with low-sodium V8, not fallen short of being decent himself.

Fiona says I’m the poster child for theories that posit the heavy hand of chance in every domain: evolution, history, love. Having quit the job with the screen agent, I stumbled into a blissful year as the nanny for my nieces, with their preschool chivalries of line up for the water fountain and share your baggie of Cheerios, after which I returned to graduate school, but in social work, not English.

I fell into editing in the same fluke way. Seven months pregnant when I graduated, I held off on searching for a social work job. Sitting home, though, with nothing to put my mind to aside from layette shopping and worrying if my baby would have a full complement of fingers and toes, I was miserable. When Fiona asked if I’d consider editing a novel by her former Hopkins classmate Nan, I told her I’d happily do it for free. But I wasn’t an editor. Wouldn’t Nan be better off working with an editor?

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You have a master’s in literature and a social work degree. You spent three years deciding whether novels should become movies. You understand people. You’ll be perfect.’

By fifty pages into Nan’s manuscript, it was clear that the novel faltered from how Nan was trying both to develop and flee the central theme: the conflict the protagonist, the daughter of wealthy assimilated Jewish parents in nineteenth-century Vienna, felt between her longing for and disdain of religious practice. Terrified that a depiction of the full force of her character’s ambivalence would offend her own parents, Nan was using vague contradictory metaphors, leaving the reader as confused as she felt herself.

‘What you did with Nan,’ Fiona proclaimed, ‘was brilliant.’ It was a bright Sunday afternoon, the following summer, and I’d taken the train with Simon, by then five months old, to visit Fiona. We were seated under an umbrella on the deck of Charlie’s and her new house, sipping Charlie’s concoction of iced red zinger tea mixed with lemonade and ginger while Nick played with a toy submarine in the wading pool and Simon napped in his stroller. ‘You showed Nan the parts of the story she was afraid to tell.’

‘It wasn’t brilliant. In fact, it was pretty obvious.’

‘You’re underselling yourself. Most people can’t think in two registers. You thought about the manuscript on its own terms, and you thought about Nan as both reflected in and existing beyond those pages. And then you put the pieces together. Which was exactly what you did for me that first time you read my poems.’

Nick let out a yelp. He’d thrown his submarine onto the grass, after which it dawned on him that if he climbed out of the pool to fetch it, the grass would, to his horror, stick to the bottoms of his feet. Fiona retrieved the submarine and held it over Nick’s head as she firmly told him that she knew he did not like to walk barefoot on the grass, but he was four now and able to use self-control and she was not going to fetch the submarine for him a second time.

‘You’ve got plenty of classmates who can work with the families of psychiatric patients,’ Fiona said when she rejoined me. ‘What you did for Nan is what you should be doing.’

The great paradox of our friendship is that while what I learned from Fiona about editing is key to the help I’ve given scores of people with their writing, I’ve not been able to help Fiona return to hers. To this day, I wonder how Fiona’s life would have unfolded had she stayed in the Penn English graduate program. Perhaps she would have become a professor and continued writing her poems. Instead, she responded to her father’s bankruptcy falling atop her mother’s cancer diagnosis by walking away from a writing fellowship and applying for the training program at a consulting firm like the one where my brother was working by then. Money, honey, before art, Fiona explained: Her sister’s college fund was gone and her parents might lose their house. Having never taken a business class, not even Econ 101, Fiona figured she was offered the position because someone had looked at her summa cum laude from Harvard and the MFA from Hopkins and thought, well, the girl can write. She’d be value added to the math geeks with their modeling theories.

Now, no longer held back from writing her poems because she needs to pay for her sister’s college or find a school for her calendrical-savant head banging son, the same woman who told me to forgo working with the families of psychiatric patients says she finds her grant-writing satisfying. Even if she could make ends meet as a poet, Fiona says it would seem wrong to direct whatever talents she has to finding the word with the particular meaning and rhythm and alliteration a poem requires rather than to securing funds for after-school programs for special needs children.

Still, I feel certain that Fiona suffers from the loss of her unwritten poems—that she wakes in the middle of the night with stanzas never put to paper on her mind. What took me longer to understand is that her father’s chicanery and her mother’s cancer and her son’s neuroatypical brain had also been her protection from writing. Yes, there were practical forces at play, but in truth Fiona stopped writing because of what it did to her: how she felt that her writing ate her alive like a self-cannibalizing disease.

Remarkably, it was my mother, who I’d never thought of as observant of anyone, who recognized while Fiona was her boarder the agony Fiona experienced working on her poems—as though she were digging them out of herself. Not that my mother used those words. What she said was that Fiona had stretches during which she’d work until dawn, drinking at midnight a pot of black coffee and eating only vanilla wafers and boxes of raisins, sleeping no more than a few hours a day, followed by weeks on end when she was too exhausted to change out of pajamas or leave the house.

Most surprising was my mother’s tone: Tolerant. Begrudgingly admiring.

LANCE: WHERE’S THAT CALL YOU PROMISED? GOTTA SEE U

Me: tomorrow is better

Lance: nope wanna give you birthday present

Lance: TODAY

I stare at my calendar, with Bettina’s appointment now added to yoga with my nieces, lunch with Simon, and my birthday dinner. If I forgo walking home after lunch and take a cab to Lance’s apartment …

Me: 2:30—but can’t stay long.

Lance: we’ll see

I erase the texts from my lover. Lover. What a melodramatic word. Mistress at least has some heft and the allure of that ess falling somewhere between a sigh and a yes, but Master would be impossible. And, after seven years, is Lance less a lover than a second husband? If so, would that mean that I’m a bigamist, not a cheat?

Nope, Lance would say. We’re cheats. Both of us.

When I first told Fiona—the only person I’ve told—about Lance, I burst into tears. We were on one of our reservoir walks, and Fiona wrapped her arms around me. ‘Oh love,’ she murmured as she rubbed my back.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Henry’s a fantastic person, especially for a man. But he’s breached the marital contract by abdicating on sexual relations. I know that sounds legalistic, but your actions are a just amendment: You’re committed to the marriage in every area save the one Henry by his actions, or lack thereof, excised from the contract.’

Fiona fished a tissue from her bag. She handed it to me. ‘What matters in a marriage is the degree of authentic connection. Whether or not either party touches anyone else’s genitals is irrelevant.’

Once, when I asked Fiona how she squared lying with an authentic connection, she countered that the very question was based on shaky assumptions. Much of what is true in fact, she’s fond of saying, is a lie in truth. Honesty is a worthy aim, but as a virtue is inferior to kindness or respect.

It’s been a revelation how easily truth can be sidestepped: with liberal elisions, my affair with Lance requires few lies. More troubling has been the awareness that I’ve abandoned Henry. Left him alone in our little TV room to vape himself each night into oblivion.

I CHECK THE CLOCK FROM MY FATHER: A QUARTER HOUR BEFORE I’ll leave to meet my nieces. On the day my father gave me the clock, he called unexpectedly. It was after he’d moved upstate with Miko, his third wife, but before he got sick. He was in the city, he said. He’d just left the Museum of Modern Art and was hoping he could drop by. Tamping down the hurt that visiting me was clearly an afterthought and focusing instead on how nice it would be for Simon, I invited him for dinner. He placed the clock on my desk in what I’m sure he thought was the perfect position.

I’d always assumed that if my father became ill, I’d care for him in proportion to his limited parenting. When the day arrived, however, the equation dissolved: I was overtaken by what felt like a primal response, as though filial duty was encoded in my DNA. I made the weekly trips to see my father, which, as his end approached, became several-day visits, not out of obligation