Chapter Seven: Tricia and Tom

Do you know what you want from this life? 

Tricia always did. Before it really made sense to; certainly before she could appreciate the consequences of such a longing, what the pursuit of it would ask from her, or take from her, the sacrifices she would have to make, how it would one day—today—leave her pacing the sun room on the verge of tears, trying not to remember the oblivion she glimpsed in the thirty-eight hours she didn’t know if Desirée was alive or—

The unthinkable. She had to think it. Had to imagine, to endure the worst visions and go on breathing. 

“Darling—” Tom’s poked his head in at the door. “Can I get you anything? Is there anything you need?”

It isn’t fair, it helps no one, that she hates it that Tom was the one who realized Desirée was missing. Of course it doesn’t mean he loves her more or knows her better. No one would suggest it. He was only texting his daughter about the deposit he was making to her checking account. Like anyone would, he thought it strange she didn’t respond. Like anyone would, he logged in to check her phone’s location. Like anyone would, when he saw that unmoving dot beside the freeway outside Norfolk, he promptly phoned the police. 

And, he did try to call her first. She was in a meeting, on a video call with Noah, her Deputy Editor, trying to decide what to do about their profile of that group of environmental activists now that one of them was quitting. 

“It doesn’t send a good message!” She was inclined to scrap it, but Noah thought they could make it work.

“It’s interesting, you have to admit. More interesting, really. And, if we want to explore the complexities of this idea of salvation…”  

Two years ago, in another political climate, such a thing would have seemed possible, to explore the complexities of an issue. Once upon a time, that was The Magazine’s whole raison d’être. But now? When every day the world feels on the precarious edge of devastation? 

“I’ll leave it up to you,” she told Noah, “but I just wonder, a month before the midterms, is that the time to platform someone who’s convinced that we’re all doomed?”

How could Tom have known her meeting was one he should interrupt? She can’t blame him for declining, when her secretary asked him if he should. Wasn’t it a kindness, an effort to protect her? To know more before he tossed a live grenade into her day. He phoned the police, he made the necessary arrangements to leave his office, then he took the company car downtown to hers, to convey the news in person. By which time Virginia State Troupers had found Desirée’s cell on the side of I-64, noted the record of her speeding ticket, and issued an APB. 

Everything that needed to be had been done. And, anyway, the ordeal is over now. Desirée’s safe. Though that fact is far from sinking in. Tricia has no real quarrel with what Tom did, she just regrets she wasn’t the one doing it. Blames herself for having no intuition that anything was wrong. She can’t help thinking, if she were Desirée’s other mother—her real one, who birthed her, with whom she’s about to be speaking—then maybe she would have sensed it the moment Des took her turn away from the city. Maybe she could have called her before she ditched her phone, could have turned her back and saved the cops their man-hours, saved Tom his out-of-office, saved herself the horror of knowing how it feels to think the worst thing that ever could has come to pass. 

“Oh, there’s nothing I need,” she says with a sigh. “I’ve got my coffee. Thank you, Tom. I’m just nervous. I’m sure it’s silly.” 

“It’s not silly.” 

“I just—Will she like me?”

“Most people do.”

“And, will I like her?” 

“That’s harder to say. But, do you need to?” 

“Yes!” 

“Okay, well, but what if you don’t?”

“I’ve got to. I need to know Des is in good hands.” 

“Alright.” Tom’s come fully into the room and places a hand on her arm, making sure she looks him in the eye. “So, then, you will. Trish, it’s going to go fine. You’re going to get along famously. You’ll sort through the logistics. Mention we can send her some cash if it seems appropriate. We’ll do our part to make the visit easy. And it’s not for long. In two weeks Des will be back in school, and, who knows, maybe this misadventure will turn out to have been just the thing she needed to help work through her grief.”

Tricia nods. It can be maddening, how he always says the right thing. Maddening, but it’s also an enormous comfort. For a brief moment she leans her forehead on his arm.

“I think I’m going to walk while I wait,” she says. 

“Of course,” he says. “I’ll be here.” 

. 

For most of human history, a mother was just what women were. Not without exception, but certainly by default. Tricia, however, was born into the golden age of choice, grew up surrounded by girls more eager to talk about climbing the ladder than rocking the cradle, whose dreams were as diverse as astronaut and Supreme Court justice, but never not raging with ambition for professional acclaim. She came of age in the era of shoulder pads and au pairs. And, while most of her friends still assumed they would have a kid or two, to round out their portfolios, that bullet on their ten-point plans had the quality of a vestigial limb. Still present because it had once served a purpose, but no longer vital; awkward. A bit of a hindrance, really.

In this context, Tricia’s simple wish, her one true longing, was oft-mocked as old-fashioned. But this derision only lent the role of Mother a rare, an exotic air previously unknown to it. And so fortified her commitment to become what she had envisioned. 

Wanting one thing so much can make a person rigid, humorless, aggressive. But not so Tricia. Or, not for a very long time. As a girl, as a young woman, she held her desire lightly because she never dreamed it was in danger. Because she knew it as her destiny. And you can’t avoid your destiny. So, without an ounce of religion, she had perfect faith. And, accordingly, she did not worry and she did not rush. She trusted that, when the time was right, when the stars of circumstance aligned—career, husband and home—she would step effortlessly into the role. 

In the years since, prompted by therapists and the public discourse, she has had cause to reflect that the ease she always enjoyed probably contributed to her assumption that what she wanted would simply materialize at the moment of her choosing. Her privilege, her many privileges. Most obviously, the money. The dumb amount of it she just took for granted, her mother’s inheritance and her father’s earnings. They never denied her anything, and, thus, whatever she coveted—the Triumph TR3, the Arabian stallion, the sloop, the summers in Crete and Sicily and Provence—all potential pleasures appeared so readily before her, Tricia’s wants never had the chance to ripen into longing. And she was allowed the illusion that she could take or leave them, without ever being forced to do the latter. 

Her beauty, too, and her intelligence conspired to give her the sensation of skating through this life. It took her little effort to make valedictorian at Miss Porter’s. She thrived at Harvard with no more diligence than she deemed fun. And, there, she won Tom’s heart, too, without trying, taking for granted his instant and total devotion as just another fact of life. 

She had no ambition for a grand romance, though, and, believing the optimal time to link up with her child’s father would be in her later twenties, she dumped him unceremoniously the morning of their graduation, sending him off to law school with a broken heart while she packed her bags for New York City, where a TriBeCa penthouse and one of The Magazine’s coveted, unpaid internships awaited her. 

Not wholly immune to the zeitgeist, in Tricia’s dream of motherhood she did have a job. The difference was, the point of hers would be to make her a better mother, one who modeled for her offspring the having-of-it-all that the media kept hyping. So, she chose a profession with flexibility and prestige, and, with her characteristic ease, having entered at the ground floor of The Magazine, she rose through its editorial ranks at lightening speed—ironically just the type of professional triumph her girlhood friends would have coveted. 

By the time she bumped into Tom eight years later at Cipriani, both of them dressed in their best black and white for a good cause, she was a Deputy Editor and he a Junior Partner. Besides the title, in their time apart, he’d picked up a winning confidence, for which he sacrificed no sincerity, and when, by the end of the night, he confessed he was still in love with her, had in fact never loved anyone else and didn’t want to, she was ready to see the charm in it, to envision the father his devotion could make him, and to interpret his reappearance as a sign that the time approached for her to realize her dream. So, she didn’t hesitate to say yes—to dinner at Per Se, the weekend in Antibes, his box seats at the opera, a meeting of the parents, this little mansion on the Sound and then the diamond ring. 

Having always gotten everything she wanted, Tricia never considered her good fortune might have a limit. What a rude awakening it was then, a year after their picture-perfect wedding on the Cape, when she said, “I’m ready,” and the universe just laughed in her face. 

The one thing she truly wanted? For which she would gladly sacrifice all else? That would not come so easily to her. For seven years fate mocked her, or so she felt. And though she had begun the journey with grace and humor, these virtues did not last. No experience had prepared her for such relentless disappointment, for the blood that flowed month after month after month with cruel regularity. 

She hated that blood. Hated her womb. Hated her eggs. Hated Tom and his cock and his stupid sperm. Hated the calendar she kept and the thermometer on her night-stand and the test strips in the bathroom, all meant to pinpoint ovulation. She hated the rote sex and Tom’s uncomplaining adherence to her schedule. Hated to have to admit they could not do this on their own. Then, she hated Doctor Beer with her tests and her terminology—polyps and motility and fibroids and morphology. She hated the hormone shots that fucked with her body, that fucked with her mind. Hated the waiting rooms and the exam rooms and the endless sterile hallways between them. Hated the nitrile gloves and the paper masks and the paper gowns, the stirrups and the speculum and the swabs. Hated the PAs who were curt and the PAs who were warm. Above all, she hated how the romance left her life the moment she dared approach her heart’s desire. 

Your heart’s desire, when you trust it will come to you, is a bright star by which to navigate. But when your faith fails you, when that bright star sinks and is extinguished in an ocean of doubt, then, verily, you wander in the dark and you are lost. And the memory of light torments you. 

Tricia railed against the world, and it nearly broke her—she had her note written, she had the bridge picked out—but before she could throw in her cosmic towel, Tom came to her, broken himself and crying, begging her to think about adoption. “For your sake, Tricia,” he said, and she had to recognize the love in it. And when she did her hatred crumbled, laying bare her sadness, nestled, yin to yang, beside her age-old longing—both so tender—and she assented.  

This was the trial by which she learned to recognize the thing for what it was: a miracle to behold, a miracle to experience. Two years later, on a misty April morning, she took her daughter into her arms for that first time, the baby girl who didn’t yet have a name, and the sadness and the longing that had dwelt in her heart were gone, leaving in their place only a memory of struggle to remind her that no good thing is guaranteed. To make certain she will never forget what a gift she has been given. 

From the south balcony, Tom watches Tricia strolling down, past the weeping willow, past the tennis courts, the pergola, the infinity pool, down toward the boat house, toward the beach, toward the ocean. 

For all that they have built here, all the marbles and metals and Moroccan tiles they imported, for all the grand construction and the lush landscaping, there’s no denying that the ocean is their home’s real selling point. Six hundred feet of shorefront on the Sound, the amiable outcrop of Goose Island in the near ground and Long Island stretched like a dream out on the far horizon. 

Tricia grew up sailing these waters, a skill she tried to teach Tom, but his land-locked midwestern soul never felt quite at ease on the water. He prefers it at a distance like this. It was Desirée who was the better student, emulating, as if she really had inherited it, her mother’s fearless love of the sport, making him yet again grateful for this child who brought the love of his life such gladness. 

Had Tom cared about anything before he met Tricia? He’d imagined that he did. Dumb things like the Bears and the Cubs and the Bulls; smart things like political science and macroeconomics and constitutional law. But then she raised her hand in their freshman survey of the Western cannon and she said, “How could Milton make God compelling when perfection is so boring? Like, the closer you get to perfect, the closer you get to nothing. And nothing might feel blissful, I guess, nobody knows, but it doesn’t make good art.” Tom heard those words and knew instantly that none of what he’d mistaken for significant really mattered, except insofar as it had sustained him until this revelation was at hand. 

This revelation! Tom was not given to flights of fancy or leaps of faith. But here he was, one lecture on Paradise Lost later, talking like a poet, thinking like a born-again. Though it was neither John Milton nor Professor Brayton who was responsible for his conversion. Nay, for his awakening. The old Tom, the Tom of fifty minutes prior, would have scoffed at such a prayerful word. But the new Tom grinned and stumbled down the hall in blessed stupefaction. A believer where a skeptic had once walked. 

He suffered quite the crisis of faith, then, when, four years later, Tricia announced she was done with him. Or, he might have. He began to. Wrestled for some months with the why and wherefore of it all. But what saved him then was the precise and particular formulation his revelation had taken. He had not thought, We were meant for one another. Or even, There’s my wife. But instead, I am here on Earth to love this woman. So, when she left, he just kept on loving her. A day didn’t pass when he didn’t think of her, didn’t wish her happiness, didn’t, yes, also whisper a little prayer that her happiness might one day include him. 

Tom turns from the railing and ducks back inside, trots downstairs, to the main kitchen. He will make them a light lunch, he decides, to enjoy on the patio while they debrief after her call with Desirée’s birth mom. Tom learned many skills in the years he lived alone, in the hope that they would recommend him if he ever had the chance to woo Tricia again. And, they did. He’s a better chef than she is, though he rarely has the time for it these days. 

But he’s cleared his schedule for the week to be her ear and to be her shoulder, to be able to say, “Bid me do anything.” Her distress is a double-edged sword. Of course it kills him to see her in pain. But it also gives him purpose. 

And so what if he will never know what it is like to be the one who inspires the devotion. To be the source of the revelation. So what if he will always be turning toward her while she is turning toward Desirée. At least he has a sun in his sky, which is more than many can say. Yes, maybe he will wonder til the day he dies what it would feel like to be regarded with eyes like his own, that see in his beloved a totality—first, last, midst and without end, he whispers Milton’s words, memorized so long ago. Words written to describe a god. But he would never choose it, if it meant missing out on knowing her. 

Pulling olives, eggs, green beans, cukes and dijon from the fridge; anchovies and sardines from the cupboard; tomatoes and one lemon from their baskets on the island, Tom sets about his preparations. Peeling, slicing, blanching, juicing, whisking, this is love.