I had gone alone, and I had stood at the back of a gymnasium for three hours, and afterward I had bought him a hamburger and he had talked to me for forty five minutes about ion exchange, which was the longest conversation he and I ever had, and I had gone home and cried in the bathroom with the water running because it had felt like a door opening.
On the back, in my handwriting, I had written the date, and one line.
I was at all of them. Ask her why she told you I wasn’t.
Then I left.
Priya handled everything after that, which was, in the end, very little, because there was almost nothing to handle. A lease is a lease. The management company did not care about anyone’s marriage. Eleanor called the building twice to explain that a mistake had been made, and the second time they told her, politely, to stop calling.
They were out in fifty eight days.
Arthur and Valerie and the baby went to a two bedroom in Yonkers. Eleanor went with them, into the second bedroom, which became the nursery six weeks later, which meant Eleanor went to a studio in Riverdale that she could afford on her widow’s pension and her late husband’s annuity, which turned out to be considerably less than the life she had been performing for a decade.
I learned all of this much later and mostly from Leo.
Arthur called eleven times in the first month. I answered on the ninth.
He wanted to explain about Valerie. I told him I did not need the explanation, that Valerie was thirty two weeks pregnant and none of it was her fault and I had no interest in the details. He said something about how it had been complicated. I asked him one question.
“When your mother told me to leave, did you know she was going to?”
There was a very long pause.
“She said she’d handle it,” he said.
That was the whole marriage, in six words. I filed a week later. It was not contested and it took nine months and I felt almost nothing when it finished, which frightened me more than grief would have.
The part I did not expect came in April.
Leo called me.
I did not recognize the number. He said, “It’s Leo,” and then neither of us said anything for about eight seconds.
Then he said, “I found the picture.”
Arthur had left the envelope on a shelf in the Yonkers apartment. Leo had gone looking for a phone charger.
“I remember that day,” he said. “I remember you were there. I remember the hamburger. I’ve remembered it for six years.” His voice was doing something. “So why do I also remember being told you didn’t come?”
We met at a diner on Northern Boulevard three days later.
He was twenty years old and taller than his father and he could not sit still. He had brought a list. He had actually written a list, on the back of a receipt, of things he needed to ask me, and he went through it in order, and the first one was, did you ever say you wanted me out of the apartment.
“No,” I said. “Not once. Not to anybody.”
He looked at the receipt for a long time.
“She told me you did. When I was thirteen. She said she overheard you and Dad.” He rubbed his face. “She told me a lot of things. And I believed her because she was the one who was always there.”
“She was always there,” I agreed.
“You were there too,” he said. “That’s what I can’t. You were there the whole time and I was told you weren’t and I just went along with it because it was easier and because she got upset if I was nice to you.” He looked up. “I was a kid. But I wasn’t a kid for the last four years and I still went along with it.”
I told him he had been a child inside an adult’s construction and that he did not owe me an accounting. He said, “I think I do, actually,” and I let him have that, because a person who wants to take responsibility should be allowed to, even when you do not require it of them.
