them ever called.
That previous spring, she had lost twelve pounds from grief. Nomi tried to force her to eat, but Elisabeth kept saying she couldn’t taste anything since Jacob left.
Jacob. Memories of him were hidden around this city like Easter eggs. The night they met, at someone’s birthday party, out in the backyard at Sweet and Vicious; their first kiss, standing in line for a movie at the Angelika. All the basement clubs and bars where she went to see his band play; the Strand bookstore, where he worked by day. He told her he loved her for the first time in his apartment on Saint Mark’s. Not long after, he moved into her place. Two years later, he told her his father was leaving his mother, that Elisabeth’s father was to blame, that he never wanted to see her again. There was nothing she could do to persuade him otherwise.
The memory of this brought on thoughts of Charlotte. Elisabeth couldn’t say she missed her, exactly. She missed what she thought they had. That solidarity, that shared sense of purpose that began when her relationship with Jacob ended. Though now she wondered if Charlotte had ever stopped taking their father’s money. Had he held the cards all along?
Her father’s way of getting Jacob out of her life had sickened Elisabeth for so long. The way it happened sickened her still. But what would have become of the two of them otherwise?
Jacob, she realized, had been her Clive.
Over the years, Elisabeth had looked him up on Facebook from time to time. He still looked good. The band never took off. He worked in a bookstore in Seattle now. He had a rocker-chick girlfriend who seemed to own nothing but black bandage dresses. He held a beer in every photograph. As far as she could tell, Jacob had never grown up.
* * *
—
Nomi was waiting for her outside the spa.
They ran to each other, squealing, hugging tight.
In the lounge, they sat on a velvet sofa in fluffy white robes, gossiping and sipping cucumber water. They had arrived forty-five minutes early to do this. Nomi had instructed her assistant to tell anyone who asked that she was in her office, behind closed doors, on an important call that should not be interrupted for any reason.
Elisabeth’s masseuse was a woman in her sixties with tight gray curls. She felt a bit jealous at first that Nomi had gotten the one in her twenties, with a pixie cut and yoga-toned arms. But the older woman proved to be stronger than she looked. Elisabeth felt herself relax under her touch.
When she was pregnant, and for a long time after, she felt like her body was no longer hers. She was in service to another life, a tiny stranger. Women complained that no one ever told you the specifics of birth. But by the time Elisabeth had Gil, she had heard it all. Friends told her how you bled for weeks after. How Pitocin might make you shake uncontrollably on the table, and that if they gave it to you, chances were you were headed for a C-section. One friend had the epidural needle stuck straight into a nerve and could never feel the urge to pee again. Another had a piece of her placenta left inside her and, months later, was forced to deliver it.
When it came time for Elisabeth’s turn, the whole thing had been demystified to the point where she envied some young thing coming in with no idea of what was about to happen to her.
Gil’s birth was easy, unremarkable, as births went.
Two days after getting home from the hospital, Elisabeth held a hand mirror between her legs, even though the nurses had warned her not to. She looked, and the words that came to mind were Portal to Hell. She didn’t look again for six months.
Back then, the thought of another human being’s hands on her body could not have appealed less. But here she was, whole again already.
The massage room was lit by tea candles. Soft music played.
Elisabeth lay facedown on the table, her forehead resting on a U-shaped pillow that smelled of eucalyptus.
She was just beginning to relax when Nomi said, “How’s Andrew doing with the Denver news? What’s going to happen with his invention?”
Elisabeth groaned. It was the last thing she wanted to think about.
“Who knows. I don’t see it catching fire, if I’m honest.”
“Was that a grill pun?” Nomi said.
“Ha. We’ve been arguing about it. Without