hall. She will not move in with him. His routines depress her, his grievances, his inertia, his implacable bitterness.
After he gets into bed, he says, “You wish I would take Prozac and snap out of it. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking. Not at all,” she says, almost laughing at this absurd presumption.
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.”
“What if I want to move to New York?”
She stares at him. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“I don’t know. No reason.” He pauses. “I’m not in love with Elise Connor. I just think that my dad should date someone closer to his age. He’s thirty years older than she is. Who the hell does he think he is?”
It is a ridiculous question, something she guesses he realizes as soon as these words are agitating the air between them.
“Will,” she says. “Let’s not talk about this right now.”
“I’m not in love with her,” he insists. “I can see why you’d think so, but I’m not. She’s going to dump him as soon as she meets someone else. Someone closer to her age.”
Like you, she thinks.
“Let your father worry about that,” she says. “You know he’s going to do whatever he wants.” She pauses. “If you dislike him so much, why are you so worried about what he does?”
He hesitates. “I don’t know. I just am.”
“You need to sleep now. So do I.”
“Kiss me,” he says, and she does, reluctantly, but he doesn’t pressure her to do more. She has almost never refused him. Before now, she hasn’t wanted to. His hand reaches for hers under the sheet and she lets him hold it for a long time, even though she has told him that she can’t sleep if any part of her body is touching his. She has been like this since her marriage, when from the first night they were together, her husband slept on his side of the bed and insisted that she sleep on hers.
In the morning she can see herself making eggs and reminding Will of his dental appointment in the late afternoon. She can see him looking at her with mild amusement, or else he will be distracted, the previous night’s problems and controversies returning with the force of a blow. Like her ex-husband, he is unlikely ever to be happy. At least not as he is currently living, measuring his life against his father’s, a man to whom only a tiny percentage of the population can reasonably compare themselves. The kind of fame Renn has achieved, Danielle realizes, is more or less a novelty. Before the camera’s invention, before movies and TV, certainly before the Internet, fame was more local, less colossal. But Will’s misery, she knows, would still be powerful, no matter which century he might have been born into. His father’s life is an aberration; his gifts, his privileges, all of the possibilities to which he has access, also aberrant. In that moment, an hour after midnight, when she can hear some restless soul down on the street gunning a motorcycle, she does not know how either man can stand it.
Chapter 3
Meaningful Experience
Sometimes I don’t know what to say when I’m wrong. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I find myself no better equipped to handle it than the last time someone pointed out an error to me. The child was allergic to wheat, not milk. The prescription should have been a hundred milligrams, not eighty-five. I married the wrong man. I married the right man at the wrong time. I shouldn’t have gotten married at all. One thing I do know, something I realized a year or so after the divorce, is that I should have gone back to my maiden name. I didn’t do it at the time because I wanted the same name as my children. Perhaps I also wanted to inspire curiosity or jealousy, anything that might have required me to air my many virulent grievances, to offer my story as a cautionary tale.
For three years Renn, my ex-husband, kept trying to talk to me as if we were friends, to relieve his guilty conscience and prove to himself that I was doing fine, that Anna and Billy were fine too and one day we would all forgive him, but of course we wouldn’t forget him. Renn and I are almost exactly the same age. His birthday is two weeks before mine; he was born in Evanston, Illinois, and I