Everybody Has Everything

“You smell good,” said James. Ana was wearing a fitted black dress, her breasts flattened in a way that was incongruously boyish and sexy at once. Her eyes were painted gray, her lips red.

“Where are you going?”

“Me? We. We’re going out, remember? This is the great sitter experiment.”

James had forgotten. He could see instantly in his mind’s eye the firm party, the new restaurant at the top of an office building overlooking the harbor, the grim black lighting and reflective surfaces that ensured you could never escape anyone’s face. The room would be filled with Ana’s colleagues, men growing fatter and louder in their pressed suits; the women thi

“Let me shower,” he said.

“Fi

“We need to get going,” said Ana.

“I can’t not let him try it.” James squatted and held the guitar across his knees. Fi

“Don’t be Paul McCartney,” said James. “Be Mick Jagger. People will tell you to be Paul McCartney, but don’t.”

In the shower, James looked at his hands and his buttery belly. He had put on weight; he was becoming immovable.

James’s dress shirts hung in a dry-cleaned bundle, twist-tied at the neck of the hangers, bagged in plastic. Ana must have taken them in for him. He had not worn one in months, not since his final meeting with HR.

As he slid his torso into a blue shirt, the crease along his elbow like a margin, he remembered a party a decade ago in a different bar in a different tower. Ana was a new associate, and James showed up wearing a concert T-shirt—Jesus Lizard—under a black blazer. He was lighter then. He walked fast and everywhere, never taking buses or taxis or driving, held to the ground only by army boots under his black jeans. It was only when he set foot in the bar, glanced around at the feet of the guests, all high heels and dad shoes, buffed and barely worn, that he realized how badly he had misjudged. It was one of the first times his youth had been revealed to him as crass, rather than a badge of honor. In the cool, crisp spaces between people, placed in elegant groups of two and three, James recognized new worlds that required other currencies, worlds in which his father moved back and forth with ease. He thought of his father, standing outside James’s bedroom door, his diagonally striped, navy blue tie in a full Windsor, his overcoat on, glancing bewildered at the posters on the wall, the guitar amp humming. And James in his white underwear on the carpet, having fallen asleep, deeply stoned and sixteen.

Fi

“Where you go?” he asked.

James scooped him up, pulled him close on the bed, breathing in his limbs, his small pumping chest, the worn comfort of the blanket.

“We’re going to a party. There’s a babysitter coming. She’s really nice. You guys will play and you’ll go to sleep, and when you’re asleep, we’ll come home and kiss you on the cheek,” said James. Fi

“Ana!” called James. She appeared quickly, as though she had been lingering in the hall.

“We better get going. Ethel’s here,” she said.

“Ethel?” said James, incredulous, and then, to Fi

“She’s from the Philippines.”

“Oh, God. This is someone’s na

“Elspeth, from work. I told you that,” said Ana. “She’s her night na

“Her night na

It was quite likely true that Ana did tell him about the evening, and he couldn’t remember or hadn’t found it worth noting. But now, suddenly, the thought of this Ethel alone with Fi

“What do we know about her? Did you check her references?” Again, his career backed up on him: He recalled interviews with police officers, macho men of the law who appeared before him red-eyed and destroyed, choking out stories about child slavery rings; pedophiles masquerading as caregivers. All the experts he had sat across from, dumbly and humbled, and now all James could remember from those conversations was: Don’t trust anyone.

“I just told you. She lives with Elspeth and her family. She’s been here for almost two years. She has a whole family back there. It’s quite sad.”

James took Fi

Sensing a nervousness in her—she seemed to be shaking giggles out of her mouth like a swimmer shaking off water—James began to be James, spilling over with curiosity. Within a moment, she had a glass of juice in her hand, and Fi

At the door, waving good-bye, both Ana and James were flung backward into their childhoods, each separately watching a marching band of babysitters who had walked through their parents’ doors over the years: the gum chewer, the sour old woman, the preadolescent with the babysitter course card. For James, the doorways were always the same, and his parents’ assurances the same, and his excitement the same. For Ana, the memories arrived in an aureole of confusion. Everyone was faceless, and the doors led to apartments and houses she’d lived in for only months at a time, some of which she wouldn’t recognize if she walked by them today.

“We’ll see you soon, buddy,” said James, preening a little for Ethel. He crouched down to give Fi

Ana made rustling noises, noting that James had never called Fi

“Good-bye,” said Ana, who bent down and delivered an awkward kiss atop Fi

They left him like that, lining up lipstick next to ChapStick next to hair clips. James wondered lightly if Fi

He stopped walking.

“What is it?” asked Ana. She looked grave, as if anticipating exactly what he was thinking, but terrified to hear it said out loud. He won’t be able to leave him. His wife, bundled and moving slightly to keep warm, her hands in her leather gloves anxiously swinging by her side.

“Nothing,” he said. And then he lunged at her, grabbed her from the waist, and pulled her to his mouth, lips smashing.

“James …” She pulled away, ran her fingers through her hair.

“Let’s go in an alley and fuck.”

“Jesus.” He reached for her again, tried to get his hand through the buttons of her jacket, but there wasn’t enough space. “You’re going to rip it—” said Ana before he closed his mouth over hers.

“Let’s get ugly,” whispered James. “Let’s get a hotel room.” He was panting now, shaking her lightly from the shoulders.

Ana shoved him back. “James. It’s not like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It’s not—We’re not—”