“Thank you,” he said, surprised. “Would you like some change?”
“No, thank you.” She had been overtipping for as long as she’d had money. These small compensations for how fortunate she’d been. She pulled her carry-on suitcase into the Neptune Logistics lobby, cleared building security and took the elevator to the eighteenth floor.
She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here. A twenty-three-year-old Miranda with the wrong clothes and her hair sticking up, washing her hands and peering anxiously at herself in the ladies’ room mirror; a twenty-seven-year-old recently divorced Miranda slouching across the lobby with her sunglasses in place, wishing she could disappear, in tears because she’d seen herself on a gossip website that morning and the headline was agonizing: IS ARTHUR SECRETLY CALLING MIRANDA? (Answer: no.) Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. “I regret nothing,” she told her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, and believed it. That day, she attended a series of meetings, and in the late afternoon another car delivered her to a hotel. She still had an hour or two to kill until it was time to see Arthur again.
He’d called her in the New York office in August. “Will you take a call from Arthur Smith-Jones?” her assistant had asked, and Miranda had frozen momentarily. The name was from an inside joke that she and Arthur had batted around when they were first married. All these years later she had no recollection of why the name Smith-Jones had been funny, but she knew it was he.
“Thank you, Laetitia, I’ll take the call.” A click. “Hello, Arthur.”
“Miranda?” He sounded uncertain. She wondered if her voice had changed. She’d used her most self-assured addressing-large-meetings voice.
“Arthur. It’s been a while.” A moment of silence on the line. “Are you there?”
“My father died.”
She swiveled in her chair to look out at Central Park. In August the park had a subtropical quality that entranced her, a sense of weight and languor in the lushness of the trees.
“I’m sorry, Arthur. I liked your father.” She was thinking of an evening on Delano Island, the first year of their marriage and the only time they’d gone back to Canada for Christmas together, Arthur’s father talking with great animation about a poet he’d just been reading. The memory had dimmed since she’d last retrieved it, imprecision creeping in. She no longer remembered the name of the poet or anything else about the conversation.
“Thanks,” he said indistinctly.
“Do you remember the name of the poet he liked?” Miranda heard herself asking. “A long time ago. When we were there for Christmas.”
“Probably Lorca. He talked about Lorca a lot.”
There was a person in the park wearing a bright red T-shirt that contrasted magnificently with all the green. She watched the T-shirt vanish around a curve.
“He drove a snowplow and did carpentry all his life,” Arthur said. Miranda wasn’t sure what to say to this—she’d known what Arthur’s father’s occupations were—but Arthur didn’t seem to require a response. They were quiet for a moment, Miranda watching to see if the T-shirt would reappear. It didn’t.
“I know,” she said. “You showed me his workshop.”
“I just mean, my life must’ve seemed unfathomable to him.”
“Your life’s probably unfathomable to most people. Why did you call me, Arthur?” Her tone as gentle as possible.
“You were the one I wanted to call,” he said, “when I got the news.”
“But why me? We haven’t spoken since the last divorce hearing.”
“You know where I’m from,” he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we’ve built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it wasn’t for you. And aside from that, she realized, he was currently wifeless.
Arthur was starring in King Lear, presently in previews at the Elgin Theatre. They’d arranged to meet there, because Arthur was in divorce proceedings with his third wife, Lydia, and he feared any restaurant he entered would attract a flock of cameras.