All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Read online

  Janice sets the oven to preheat and quickly begins arranging the stargazer lilies into a centerpiece, with one eye on the clock: She is already behind on her cooking, and she needs to clean, too (her housekeeper, fired earlier in the month when Janice discovered that the liquor cabinet was suspiciously empty, has yet to be replaced). As she sets the table with the good silver, she snaps the television back on and, standing in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed against the chill of the air-conditioning, learns that the Applied Pharmaceuticals stock has closed out the day at 141¼. She absorbs this news neutrally, unable to conjure the breathless excitement she had only six hours earlier. Instead, she just feels weary: weary of taking all of this in on her own, weary of waiting for her husband to call her. Despite his schedule, he should have wanted to share the excitement, the second it happened. In this moment of weakness, what creeps in is the sneaking suspicion that her enthusiasm for reviving their marriage is not matched by her husband, that she is going to have to do all the work.

  But she perseveres with her table settings, folding three napkins into swan shapes, the way she always has for special occasions, just like Paul’s mother showed her so many years ago. The first time Paul took her back to his parents’ house in Connecticut for Christmas, her senior year of college, it felt like she had stepped into one of those homes her mother had once cleaned. There was the tree, decorated with matching gilt ornaments made of real glass; the homemade stuffing, not from a box; the napkins folded like origami; the sharp-scented pine boughs over the front portico. A portico! Cunning crystal salt and pepper shakers shaped like Christmas trees! The scene winked at her with such familiarity that she almost wept. When Paul’s mother asked her whether her own mother would miss her at the holiday, Janice thought of her, working an extra shift for the overtime pay and then eating a microwaved turkey dinner alone, and lied. “No,” she said. “She’s eating with friends. She’s baking a ham.”

  Despite the cordial napkin-folding lessons, Paul’s mother had been less than thrilled to hear, months later, about their shotgun wedding. Janice always suspected that Elaine had more ambitious aspirations for her only son’s wife, a suspicion that was finally confirmed a few years back, during their last visit to Connecticut, where an Alzheimer’s-addled Elaine was decaying in a senior citizens’ home. Elaine had grabbed Janice’s arm with her ropy hands. “I know you,” she had croaked, her breath sour in Janice’s face. “You’re the tramp that trapped my son.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple. If fifteen-year-old Janice had imagined college as a place where one went to meet a rich husband, twenty-year-old Janice had grown beyond that. This Janice—Jan to her friends—was a French major known, within her sorority, for her bohemian streak. During her first year at the university, an art history professor had written on one of her essays that she had a “sharp mind and an artistic spirit,” and she had taken him at his word. She read Balzac in the original French, took classes in ceramics (producing a series of very respectable teapots), sewed her own skirts, learned to cook pot-au-feu. She even took up smoking Gauloises at parties and liked the way they conferred upon her an appearance of continental nonchalance. By her junior year she was planning a postgraduation year in Paris, where her thesis adviser said he might be able to arrange a job at a student travel agency. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was thrilled by herself.

  Paul came as a surprise, a quiet and intense MBA student who materialized by her elbow at a sorority mixer at the beginning of her senior year and doggedly pursued her throughout the fall. When he looked at her, sometimes, she felt like a valedictory prize he had claimed as his own, and she would blush at how much this pleased her. By his side, she experienced a new stillness: He could calmly command a room like that, tilt it toward him until he seemed to be at its vortex. And yet he was vulnerable to her too. One night, they drank too much Chianti, and he told her about his banker father’s expectations for him and his mother’s patrician coldness and cried real tears, and she knew she was in love.

  Of course, she hadn’t intentionally forgotten to take the pill; not at all. The pill just passed through her mind, like water through a sieve. Graduation was looming, just a few months away, and the question of her future was growing less clear by the day. She had the job lined up in Paris and a room in the home of a young couple who were friends of friends of friends, but Paul no longer smiled benignly when she talked about leaving, as if her year abroad were some charming quirk; instead he glowered like she was betraying him. But if he was so angry with her, why didn’t he ask her to stay? Even though she wasn’t quite sure what her answer should be if he did beg her not to go, she grew increasingly concerned when he didn’t. Would he just allow this casual amputation? The thought made her ill. She spent most nights motionless and frozen under the old cotton sheets, unable to sleep. Lying there, in a black fugue, she would remember the smooth pink oval, wrapped in tinfoil and buried in her makeup bag in the bathroom, and think: I should get up and take the pill. I can’t forget the pill. And then the next thing she knew it would be morning and she’d be on her way to class and she would have forgotten entirely that she’d never taken it. And she wouldn’t remember again until three days later, when she guiltily gulped down four pills in a row with a glass of milk. She should have said no when Paul crawled in her bed, the way she usually would when this happened, should have told him of her mistake and insisted on a condom, but she didn’t have the willpower to turn him down, not now when he was so distant anyway. And so she lay in bed afterward as he slept beside her in a warm placid sleep and tried to forget that she had forgotten.

  She could have gotten an abortion—there were girls who did, even some who treated it like a badge of honor—but the truth was that she never even considered it as an option. When she got the test results back, she was surprised by the pang of pleasure she experienced: Here it was, her future as a wife and mother, the mistress of a beautiful home overlooking a lake somewhere, decided for her just like that; and it was strangely, comfortingly, familiar, like slipping on an old favorite dress she had forgotten she owned.

  She knew Paul wouldn’t flee when she told him she was pregnant, just as she knew that she was relinquishing herself into good hands. And maybe she would be giving something up, but wasn’t this comfortable life of the potential Mrs. Miller far more promising, long-term, than any impulses she might have followed on her own?

  The day after she told Paul she was pregnant, he took her out to the park overlooking the bay, where children were flying kites in what felt like hurricane-force gales. The setting sun caught in the fog over the city and rimmed the gray clouds with nuclear hues. Spring was late, and the temperature was just slightly above freezing. They walked to the retaining wall to look out at the water, and he dropped to one knee.

  The grass was muddy but he gamely let his khakis sink into the dirt. He pulled out a black velvet box and held it in his hands. She broke out in goose bumps at the sight.

  “I know it’s been hard lately,” he said, each hoarse word rising stiff and slow. “And I’m really sorry about that. But Janice, you have to know that from the very first moment I saw you, I knew you were a very unique woman, someone who is just so full of life. I can’t think of anyone I would rather have as the mother of my children. So maybe this is all very sudden—sooner than we’d wanted—and we have a lot to figure out, but I’m really optimistic. Optimistic about us. We’ll make a great team.” He paused. The wind lashed hair across Janice’s cheeks. “I love you.”

  Janice had started crying when his knee hit the grass, from relief and joy, and in part because of the sea salt that was being whipped into her eyes by the wind. He opened the box, revealing a simple gold band with a tiny chip of a diamond. Modest but tasteful. By the time he said the words “Will you marry me?” she was sobbing so hard she could barely hear him.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “Of course I will. I’m so glad you want me.”

  She let him slide the r
ing onto her finger and smiled, feeling strangely split, as if she’d triumphed and failed at the same time. Was this supposed to be the happiest moment of her life? She mostly felt dizzy, as if she’d just been sucked into a cyclone and was floating there in circles above the ground. Paul must have noticed the strange expression on her face as she looked at the ring on her finger, because he stood up and took her hand, covering it with his.

  “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you a bigger one soon,” he said. “If we’re going to do this, we’ll do it right.”

  Twenty-nine years later, she can track the progress of their marriage—and Paul’s rise through the corporate ranks—by the stack of velvet boxes in her armoire. He did get her a bigger ring, four years later, after her first miscarriage (the second and third miscarriages merited a peridot necklace and a pair of garnet earrings, respectively). And a 3-carat princess-cut diamond arrived nine years after that—long after she had taken her doctor’s advice and given up trying to have another child—when they were surprised by her pregnancy with Lizzie. And lastly, for their twenty-second anniversary, seven years ago, a 5.1-carat Asscher-cut diamond, with 1.5-carat baguettes, set in a platinum band—a stone that matched Paul’s latest position as CEO of an Internet start-up, their new four-bedroom house, and the Porsche SUV in the driveway. This was a diamond so big, in fact, that at first she found herself embarrassed by its ostentatiousness and nostalgic for the modest diamond she had once worn—until she saw Beverly’s fortieth-birthday present from Louis, a 7.8-carat Harry Winston shocker that drooped off her finger, and realized that size was always relative.

  Janice wonders, abstractly, what this new success will merit. Maybe, she thinks, he’ll arrive home tonight with another velvet box to install in the armoire, and she tries to muster the excitement for this, but mostly she just wants him to come home.

  The doorbell rings before the phone does. From the kitchen, where she is disassembling the duck for the confit, she runs to the door, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She finds a young man about Margaret’s age standing on her doorstep, with a faded rainbow fringe of hair that’s been smashed down by his motorcycle helmet. His motorcycle boots are covered in mud, and she wishes that he hadn’t stepped on her handwoven “Welcome to Our Happy Home” doormat, which she made out of dried lavender from the garden earlier in the spring. In his black leather jacket and jeans he reminds her vaguely of Bart, Margaret’s boyfriend, who also rides a motorcycle; at least Bart doesn’t dye his hair pink, though that’s about all she can say on his behalf.

  In one hand, the man holds a manila envelope; in the other, a clipboard. “Messenger delivery,” he says, and shoves the clipboard at her. “Sign here.”

  Janice wipes her hands dry in order to sign on the dotted line and tries to remember anything she might have ordered. Tearing the manila envelope open, she finds a white envelope inside with a familiar return address: Applied Pharmaceuticals, 220 Analgesic Loop, Millbrae, California. She stands there, just looking at it, and is suddenly terrified to open it. She resists this feeling as she breaks the seal of the envelope, but when she extracts a note written on Applied Pharmaceuticals letterhead (she immediately recognizes, without even looking at it, Paul’s signature on the bottom) she registers no surprise at all. Of course, she thinks, as a cloud of doomed inevitability descends over her.

  The letter, typed on cream-colored paper, reads:

  Janice,

  As you know, today is a day of big changes for me. And so it seems as good a day as any to start fresh. There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just going to be blunt: I think we both know that our marriage has become a sham. I haven’t been happy for years and, though I’m sure you would never admit it, I don’t think you’ve been happy either. We need to escape this claustrophobia, have the chance to find real passion before it gets too late. That’s why I’ve decided to file for divorce. My lawyer will be in touch. I’m confident that you’ll come to agree with me that it’s for the best.

  Paul.

  He has signed it in bright green ink, a green that she recognizes as coming from the fountain pen she bought him to match the green of the Coifex logo, the same green as those pills.

  Janice clutches her dish towel in one white-knuckled hand. She looks down at the word “Happy,” woven in lavender buds on the doormat. (“So happy together!”) She looks up again at the messenger, still loitering on the doorstep, and realizes that he is hoping for a tip.

  “One minute,” she says. She turns blindly back into the house, bumping into a chair en route to the kitchen, grabs her purse from the counter, and returns to the front door. As the messenger watches her, she pulls out a Prada wallet and finds only twenties.

  “Here,” she says, and shoves one at him.

  “Hey, thanks!” he says, palming the bill into the pocket of his motorcycle jacket. He smiles. “Thanks a lot.”

  As the messenger’s engine coughs to life, Janice scans the letter again, her hands vibrating so that the words smear before her. Janice is not sure where Paul has learned these turns of phrase, which sound like they were cribbed from a romance novel: How did Paul, who composes only business plans, who reads nothing but biographies of billionaire corporate executives, come up with florid ideas like “find real passion” and “escape this claustrophobia”? What on earth does that mean?

  For a few crucial seconds, her mind seizes up around these anomalies, refusing to consider the bigger matter: that her husband has just left her. She is dizzy, and black spots spin in the sun before her eyes. She looks down at the ground again, trying to focus herself, and can’t help noticing through her blurring vision that the messenger has left a shiny smear of mud across her mat.

  her hands are shaking so hard that she can barely dial. And even then, she has to call his cell phone five times before he picks up. Surely, she tries to convince herself, she is misinterpreting his note; it’s some kind of mistake. But when he eventually answers his phone, he does so with two simple words: “Hello, Janice.” A statement of fact, a tribute to the magic of caller ID, and with the blank utterance of those four syllables she knows that it is, in fact, true. Her husband is leaving her, because only that would explain the total lack of affection in his voice. “I assume you got the letter,” he says. “I’m sorry, but I thought that would be the easiest way…”

  “I don’t understand,” she says, reeling from the finality in his words. Her own voice cracks unattractively. “Where did this come from?”

  “It had to be this way,” Paul says. Janice is bewildered by how mild and rational he sounds, as if he were a dentist informing her that he is about to extract her molars. “But this isn’t the time to talk about it. I’m still at work.”

  “Find a private place to talk then,” says Janice. “This is important, Paul. This is our life. What do you mean, a sham?”

  “I think you know what I mean,” he says.

  Janice walks to the doorway of her dining room and stares at the table, at the centerpiece of stargazer lilies erupting like fireworks, at the crystal stemware ascending across each setting. Somewhere behind Paul, she can hear the pop of a champagne cork. She thinks of the champagne chilling in their own refrigerator and swallows. “No. I don’t know what you mean,” she says, and although this isn’t quite true, she also isn’t ready to admit this to him, especially now. “I mean…I need you.”

  “You don’t need me,” Paul says. “You’ve never needed anyone in your life. That’s half the problem. The only thing you seem to need from me is to pay the bills.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re not making any sense.”

  “Look,” says Paul. “Tell me the last time we had an actual conversation about anything of significance. We’ve been on autopilot for years, and, frankly, I don’t see why either of us should have to settle for that.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of an actual conversation, Paul,” says Janice, horrified by the pleading in her own voice. “Just because we haven’t had one lately doesn�
��t mean we can’t. Let’s talk now. Or later. We can get a counselor to help us talk.”

  “It’s beyond that,” says Paul. “We moved beyond that years ago.”

  Janice tries to say something, but all she can do is breathe shallowly into the phone. Her own damp inhalations echo in her ears. “Who are you?” she says, furious. “I don’t know this Paul.”

  “That’s exactly my point,” Paul says, and his logic silences her. Behind him, she hears a woman’s voice, muttering something. In this context she can’t quite place the voice, but the tone is familiar. Someone from Paul’s office, she thinks. How horrible, that a coworker might be overhearing this. Paul covers the mouthpiece with his hand, so that all she can hear is the muffled vacuum of a receiver pressed against flesh.

  Paul comes back on the line. “Janice,” he begins, but then from the background the woman’s voice cuts through his words, louder now, almost shrill. “You have to tell her,” the woman says. “She needs to know.”

  Recognition hits her abruptly, and when it does, it’s as if a bucket of ice water has been thrown in her face. All the premonitions of the day total together, finally, and she is stunned by what they add up to, by her inability to have seen it sooner. “Is that Beverly with you?” She can barely get the words out.

  There is a telling void on the other end. Paul clears his throat and says nothing.

  Janice drops the phone like a hot dish and stares at it, lying there on the floor, her heart pounding frantically. After a minute, the line disconnects itself and starts to beep insistently, in time with the throbbing vein at her temple.