Everybody Has Everything

“We should put the adoption thing on hold,” said Ana, tossing the salad. She thought James would fight her, but he didn’t say anything, his head down.

The two of them sat in front of their pasta at last, neither of them eating. Ana wondered if her husband was also feeling that they had lost their grasp. Something had been severed and set adrift; Ana was left feeling arid. But she suspected James’s sensation of loss, radiating off his curved back as he picked at his food, was something entirely different, bound to a manhood she could scarcely bring herself to imagine.

In Sarah’s living room, weeks later, Ana had told her friend: “James has a beard.”

“Is it sexy?” asked Sarah. Ana had never considered this possibility, as the beard was so clearly linked to his firing, to the strange new arrangement in their house. It was the opposite of sexy. It was impotent.

“No. He looks like a fisherman.”

“Fishermen can be sexy.”

Ana shook her head from side to side and raised her eyebrows, as if considering this possibility.

Fi

Sarah sipped her coffee. She was barefoot, like Fi

“Did Marcus ever have a beard?” asked Ana.

“Oh, God, yeah. He went through a whole proletarian thing in his mid-twenties. He was breaking from his parents for good. Bought a van and went west, worked in a national park.”

“You’re kidding.” Ana couldn’t see this, picturing Marcus in his plain black sweaters and wire-framed glasses that made her think of German architects. “Where were you during that time?”

Sarah stretched one arm over her head, groaned a little. “Probably backpacking, or screwing around or something. We weren’t so serious then,” she said. “Really, it was only a summer, when I think about it. I guess he hasn’t had too many beards, actually.”

The credits of the television show moved across the screen.

“Mommy, more TV. TV on,” said Fi

“Sure, tomorrow,” said Sarah. “Can you press the Off button now?”

Fi

“Good job, Fi

“I can’t seem to get the sizes right,” said Sarah as Ana glanced at the pants. She opened her arms for her son to run into. “Everything he owns is either way too big or way too small.” The boy took a kiss on the head, then disentangled himself and ran toward a pile of blocks in the center of the room, begi

“Did you notice how I didn’t say n-o to him when he asked about the TV?” said Sarah in a low voice. Ana nodded. “I’ve been reading up. You say: Yes, later, or yes, tomorrow, instead of n-o-t now. It’s a tactic. It confuses them, offsets the meltdown.”

Ana felt a little sorry for Fi

“I think James might be depressed,” said Ana. “He reminds me of my mother these days.”

“What, is he drinking?”

“No, it’s something else. He’s just not”—Ana struggled—“alive to the world like he used to be. Does that make sense? James has never had any bad luck.”

“Do you think it’s only bad luck?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but James has a kind of … certainty that might be hard to work with,” said Sarah carefully. “You know what I mean. I mean, we love James because we know him, but I wonder, in a workplace, if that could be …”

Ana felt a touch defensive on James’s behalf, but she knew that Sarah was right, and the certainty she referred to was, in fact, arrogance. James had left the university when he became a hot young pundit, in high demand after a seminar he designed on the decline of masculinity made him an expert on men. He had a national newspaper column and a radio show by thirty, and then ten years on TV, hosting this and that, called upon to air his views on any subject. James always had an opinion: the return of debauchery, the need for a new waterfront, why hockey matters. Somewhere in there was the book about cultural identity. Oh, James had been so proud at that book launch, but there had only been two trays of cheese. The lack of cheese was the first sign that, as an author, James had arrived late to the party. Store shelves were already heaving with books on cultural identity. No one bought James’s. He went back to television, a little stiffer, a little meaner.

“I worry about him,” said Ana, but the reason went unsaid because, suddenly, Fi

Out of habit, Ana imagined herself with a child that age. She stored away Sarah’s wisdom and words, trying to picture herself applying them later. But the picture was fainter now than it had ever been. Any child to come would not be hers, in all likelihood. This hypothetical child might even be out there right now, floating in a woman’s belly in a faraway country, being carried through a rice field, out of the hot sun. The image didn’t excite Ana, or sadden her. It seemed absurd; the stuff of science fiction, of a future she hadn’t arrived at yet.

She looked again at Fi

When Fi

“I feel like …” said Ana, groping for it. “I feel like I miss him. I miss something we were.” She was remembering the previous night, how she had returned home and James was gone, as usual. He had made some kind of silent commitment to not being home when she got home, as if to sustain the scaffolding of the life before he got fired. Ana did not ask him where he went.

In the immediate wake of the firing, there had been meetings, interviews, and then a long late-night conversation about James taking “a break.” Perhaps they could live off her salary while he tried his hand at fiction, maybe wrote a script on spec for a hard-hitting cop show about the politics of downtown living. Ana trod delicately while they spoke, knowing James did not want to hear anything but yes, yes, yes, that he saw everyone but her huddled together against him in a giant no. They could afford for James not to work, after all, because Ana had always made more money, and because, most of all, they didn’t have children. Neither of them said this, but it was there, breathing between the lines of the conversation.