“With Sally and myself. Let me assure you, though, that I have not fallen back into a routine.”
“Uh,” Will repeated.
“This dinner is at my home, and I am cooking, which is not something I often did during my marriage. Sally would enjoy having you with us.”
Will cleared his throat, fully aware of how absolutely ridiculous he must look, standing here in his bike helmet, staring down in shock at his boss.
“I don’t want to intrude,” he said, which he recognized was exactly what people said when they wanted to be told they weren’t intruding. And he realized that this was, actually, exactly what he wanted to be told. He wanted to have dinner with Gerald and Sally because he was confused and frustrated and lonely enough that a meal with a possibly reconciling couple sounded absolutely fine, or at least absolutely better than going back to his own place and staring into the void, thinking about how Nora would be back tomorrow night and he still had no idea what to do.
“You are not intruding because I already told Sally you were coming,” Abraham said. “I phoned her two hours ago.”
“What if I’d had other plans?”
There was a brief pause, Abraham looking up at Will like he’d just tried to splint a finger in the middle of a massive trauma.
“I’m sure you think you’re rather mysterious, Dr. Sterling,” he finally said, in that clipped, professional-rectitude voice. “But in fact it is very clear that your problem lately is that you have no plans at all.”
For the first hour or so, it didn’t really help.
One problem was that Gerald’s place—though larger and in a posher part of town—was disturbingly similar to Will’s own, at least in terms of the details. Like Will, Gerald seemed to have missed the memo on hanging artwork or putting furniture in places other than “up against a wall.” Also like Will, he seemed to have an aversion to household items that didn’t serve any particular function; beyond the couch, chair, and coffee table, the living room had nothing in it except a floor lamp and five shelves of books, most of them related to medicine. Will had two such shelves, and all of a sudden he saw the next three decades of his life built out in front of him: one shelf at a time, more and more books about the only thing he filled his time with.
There was also the problem of Sally’s arrival—not in and of itself an issue, since he liked Sally and also welcomed a break from the ongoing talk about the orthopedics department’s failures. But when she bustled through the front door—using a key, Will noticed, signaling him to the state of this reconciliation—she was holding a big, blue plastic cat carrier. When she set it down in the entryway and opened the door, Quincy and Francis ran to Will like they remembered him, and he coped with an outrageous longing for the nights he spent alone with them in Donny’s apartment, Nora only two floors above instead of all the way across the country. When they left him to rub themselves across Gerald’s shins, meowing until he gave them treats from a package he had on his counter, Will thought seriously about hiding in the bathroom to google (on histelephone) whether there were any hypoallergenic cats in existence. The hairless kind, maybe? Would Nora like one of those? Would that fix what he’d done, what he still couldn’t do?
And then there was the problem of watching Gerald and Sally this way, two people he’d known separately who had never really made sense in his mind as being together. Their reconciliation clearly wasn’t settled yet, and it was somehow both amusing and stressful to watch them try for it, like they were doing a dance they hadn’t quite learned all the steps to. In the small kitchen, a sweating glass of iced tea in his hand, Will could see Sally struggle not to interfere with what Gerald was doing with his roast chicken; at the table, Will could hear the way Gerald worked to acknowledge all the things Sally said, even the digressions—something about a sequined headband in the middle of a story about her book club, something about ankle weights while she talked about the city council campaign she was volunteering for. It was awkward and gentle and fascinating, and that was because, Will realized, he had never seen anything like it. His own parents’ togetherness had always seemed effortless, assumed. A default state of being that had been disconcerting in its own way.
Eventually, though, things eased: Will was hungrier than he’d thought, and Quincy and Francis sat on a chair next to him and watched food go from his plate to the mouth like they were at a tennis match. Once he was used to it, Gerald and Sally’s conversation became much like Gerald’s workday lectures and complaints—background noise that was welcome, at least, for the way it drowned out Will’s own thoughts.
But as soon as he set his fork and knife across his plate, Sally looked straight across the table at him and said, “Well, I guess Gerry isn’t going to bring it up.”
Who’s Gerry?Will thought.
“I brought it up,” the man Will would never callGerrysaid. “At the hospital. I mentioned his work hours and his attitude.”
Sally rolled her eyes. Will didn’t want to be responsible for any friction, so he said, “I have been working a lot. With . . . an attitude.”
Sally put down her own knife and fork and set her elbows on the table, a move Gerald tracked with his eyes and then seemed to—with effort—look away from.
“Is this about the woman from your building?”
Will thought he could feel Quincy and Francis staring at him. “How do you know that?”
“You probably forgot that you went after her like she was a house on fire that day you almost got caught in a public relations disaster!” She looked dreamily toward the chair beside Will. “That was the day I took home my babies.”
Will swallowed. “Right. No, I didn’t forget.”
“I knew you had a thing for her.”
At this, Gerald stood and collected plates, and Will had a feeling like he’d had the day Marian and Mrs. Salas had arrived with all their Tupperware.Sabotage, he thought, but this time, he supposed he didn’t really mind.
“I’ve got more than a thing for her,” he said, because the correction seemed important. “That’s the problem.”
Sally looked at him with eyes full of sympathy. “So it’s unrequited, then. No wonder you look this bad.”
He would’ve been insulted, but he’d seen himself. Hedidlook bad. He needed a shave and a good night of sleep, and also probably a few more meals like the one he’d just eaten.
“I’m not sure it’s unrequited,” he said, which was an embarrassing thing to admit. But also he was sitting at a dining table next to two cats and getting a talking-to from his boss’s ex-wife, so.
“Well, what’s the problem, then?” She lowered her voice and smiled. “Does she criticize you for putting your elbows on the table?”
