“And the battling of tourists,” he said. “Every year it gets worse. The jostling, the jockeying for position. They’re descending on the imperial city for their bread and circuses. I wish we didn’t have to do this.”
She started walking to the train. A couple passing in the other direction gave her curious looks, as though they could see the intensity of her disgust in her expression. She found herself unaccountably smiling at one man, giving him a manic sort of grin full of the slightly breathless ecstasy of being unmoored, and he returned it with a delighted blush. By the time she felt a tug on her elbow, she was at the next corner.
“Don’t be hysterical,” Ed said. “I was just making a few observations.”
“The world isn’t a lab.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back and look.”
In his worn jacket with the frayed sleeve ends, he looked like a war veteran about to ask for change for the subway.
“You’ve ruined it.”
“Don’t say that. Listen, I can’t help myself sometimes. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I do,” she said. “You didn’t have enough fun as a kid.”
He pulled her arm, but she wouldn’t budge. She watched steam rise from a manhole cover and felt in her chest the rumbling of a passing bus. She was keenly aware of the limits of the physical world. She wanted to be in one of those scenes in the windows, frozen in time, in the faultless harmony of parts working in concert, fulfilling the plan of a guiding, designing hand. It would be lovely not to have to make every decision in life, to be part of a spectacle brought out once a year, for the safest of seasons, and put to work amusing people who stared back in mute appreciation. The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.
“One of these years,” she said, “we will come here and you will enjoy it and not make me feel miserable about it. I dream of that.”
“Let’s let that be this year,” he said. “Let’s go back and look at those windows. Please, honey. Let me make it up to you.”
“It’s too late,” she said.
“It’s never too late,” he said. “Don’t say that.”
She hadn’t been looking at him; now she stopped to. Streams of people flowed past in either direction, rushing toward obscure destinations. This was her life right here, petty as it seemed at the moment, and this was the man she’d chosen to spend it with. He was holding his hat in his hand as if he’d taken it off for the purpose of beseeching her, and she saw that he would always have flaws, that he would always be a little too intense in his objections, a little too unbending when it came to the decadence of the world. She thought, We can’t all wear a hair shirt all the time. But there he was, trying to pull her back to the scene he despised, and she saw that he couldn’t live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered. Everyone else around seemed as insubstantial as the air they moved through, the shopping bags they carried the only things anchoring them to the ground.
“Did I tell you I love what you did with your hair?” he said, and she let herself be mollified, because she’d thought he hadn’t noticed. She took his hand. They retraced their steps, the street around them thrumming with life. She saw that there was something perfect about the imperfection of her husband—her mortal, living husband with his excessive vigilance about the effects of capitalism and his unmistakable pair of bowed legs that she watched carry him forward. She kept her eyes on his shoes hitting the pavement and let him guide her wherever he was going.
Shortly after getting his PhD, Ed came home with the news that he’d been sought out by an executive at Merck, who’d read an article of his in a journal. Eileen was in the kitchen cutting vegetables for stew.
“He said I could have my own lab, with state-of-the-art equipment, everything top of the line. I’d have a team of assistants.”
“Did he say how much you’d be paid?” She pushed the peppers into the stewpot and rinsed the knife in the sink. She could smell something fried and sickly sweet coming up from the Orlandos’ apartment below.
“He didn’t have to. More than I’m making now. Let’s just say that.”
“How much more?” She began to cut the beef into cubes. It was a thick cut with veins of fat. Ed would not have approved of how much she had spent on it.
“We’d be very comfortable.”
He didn’t appear terribly enthused to be able to make such a statement.
“Honey!” she said, hearing herself squeal as she put the knife down. “This is amazing!” She threw her arms around him.
“We’d have to move to New Jersey.”
“We could live anywhere we wanted,” she said, letting him go to take a few steps and get the motor started on her thoughts. She was already envisioning a house in Bronxville. “If not New Jersey, then Westchester County, for instance.”
“That’s too far to commute.”
“Then we’ll move to New Jersey.”
“Not me,” he said.
“How do you want to do this, then? What would make you comfortable?”
“Staying where I am,” he said.
She looked at him. He was seriously considering not taking the job. If she had to say, he had already made up his mind. She picked up the knife and cut the last slab.
“You love research. Think of the lab you’d have. I’d have to drag you home.”
“It’s not research. It’s making drugs.” Ed paced toward the living room and back.
“Drugs that help people,” she said, pushing the meat into the pot.
“Drugs that make a lot of money,” he said.
This opportunity looked like their destiny. There had to be a way to get him to listen to reason. She added salt and pepper and two cups of water and turned the burner on. “You research drugs already. What’s the difference?”
Ed stood in the arched doorway between the kitchen and living room. He stretched his hands up and flexed his muscles against the doorway. “Researching drugs and making them are not the same,” he said. “On my own I can be a watchdog. For them I’d be a lapdog. Or an attack dog.”
“What about when we have kids?” She put the caps back on the oil and the spices. “Don’t you want to be able to provide for them?”
“Of course I do. I guess it depends what you mean by providing.” He gave her a meaningful look, let down his hands, and peered through the glass lid of the stewpot. He switched the radio on and played with the antenna to relieve the static. The kitchen filled with the violins and flutes of a classical orchestra.
“I could make you do it,” she said. “But I won’t.”
“You could not.”
“I could. Women do it all the time. I could find a way. But I won’t.”
He straightened up. “You’re not like that.”
“Lucky for you, that’s true,” she said, though what she was thinking was that she was more like that than Ed understood. If her husband wasn’t going to fight to secure their