One time, she forwarded Ana a family photo from a weekend vacation to an amusement park. The kids tumbling off Elspeth’s lap in front of a fiendish cartoon mascot, and Tom, Elspeth’s husband, at the edge of the picture with half his body sliced away. This was the image Ana saw in her mind’s eye whenever Elspeth spoke of her family, whom Ana had never actually met.
No one else at work spoke of Elspeth’s outside life. She was sober and efficient, stayed until nine or ten at least two nights a week, took the bare minimum holidays, and moved up fast. And Ana would be next, everyone said, the next woman to make partner. Soon.
Ana heard the low laughing of the men growing more boisterous; drink three had been drunk, the volume was increasing. She grabbed a second glass of wine from the tray, dropping down her empty glass and taking a long, deep sip. Ana looked across at James, nodding as Rick gesticulated. These parties were one of the few places in the world where Ana saw James being deferential. She took this for love.
Ana recalled that Rick’s desk contained a photograph of two children, sunburned on a boat, but he hadn’t spoken of them in years, or not to Ana. Perhaps only Elspeth dared confide in the hollow crone. She thought of the word “childless,” spreading like a fungus across her, infecting everyone: She is less a child, so don’t dangle yours in front of her or she might snatch it away.
Ana was overcome with the sensation that she needed to speak. “Where are your kids tonight?” she asked Elspeth. The young women glanced about, surprised.
“Tom—my husband,” said Elspeth, for the benefit of the juniors. “He has them, of course. He would never come to one of these things.”
“One of your nannies is at my house,” said Ana, finishing her second glass of wine, feeling it rise to the top of her head.
Elspeth smiled. “That’s right. How strange.”
The blond one inquired politely of Ana: “How many children do you have?”
“Oh, none. I just borrowed one from a sick friend.” The three women shifted. Elspeth tried to intervene.
“Ana’s a godmother to a little boy whose mother is in the hospital. He’s staying with her.”
“Godmother? Oh, Elspeth. That makes it sound so profound. Fabulous. Can I start using that phrase?”
Ana knew that this bitchy streak was awakened only with alcohol, yet she replaced her empty wineglass with a full one as the young waitress walked by. She took another sip.
The blond one took a swallow of her drink, as if steeling herself for what she was dying to ask.
“So it’s possible, then, to have children and work here? I never hear anyone talk about that. The statistics about women lawyers …” Ana noticed a huge ring on her finger, an eyeball-sized diamond. She won’t be working in a year, thought Ana.
“Of course it’s possible. You don’t have to sacrifice every feminine experience to be successful,” said Elspeth in a hectoring voice. Ana dwelled on the word “feminine,” picturing her childless self mustachioed, wearing a hard hat. “I’m surprised someone from your generation would subscribe to such a retrograde notion.”
The blond woman colored pink.
“Well, Elspeth, I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true,” said Ana. “Suppression is a significant aspect of the working world. What do people say? ‘It’s business, it’s not personal.’ ”
The blond woman, buoyed by what she perceived as Ana’s defense of her, piped in: “I read in some magazine that if someone at work ever says that to you, like because you were crying or something? That what you should say is: ‘It might be business, but I’m a person, so it’s personal.’ ”
Ana took this in then laughed bitterly for a moment until halted by the girl’s crestfallen face. She had meant this anecdote seriously.
“I only have one piece of advice for your generation,” said Ana. The two women leaned in. “Get off Facebook. It will expose you.”
Ana excused herself, gliding through the room on rails, making stops here and there to shake hands, dole out praise, make mention of her most recent settlements and victories.
She was looking for James, because James was her way of differentiating herself from this. Even now, he remained her rock ‘n’ roll connection, some vestige of her childhood in the demimonde. Whenever she drank this much, she longed to believe she had just been dropped into her work, temporarily, like someone in a witness protection program. This part of the job was tolerated for the sake of the hours it allowed her in the office. If she could suffer through these nights (and she did, adored by all), then she could retreat tomorrow to the sprawling problems waiting to be clipped and contained on her computer.
He was in the shadows, back to her, arms moving, beer sloshing out of his glass. When he pulled back, he revealed Ruth, looking less wan than usual in a black dress of indeterminate taste. Her feet, however, were in thick-heeled laced booties that made Ana think of war nurses. But her face was ecstatic, flushed, her eyes alight, and James, when he turned to Ana, was panting as if he’d sprinted through a door, his forehead shiny, his hair on end.
“Ana!” he said, too loudly. He leaned in for a nuzzle.
“James was telling me about when he went to Liberia,” said Ruth, revealing the piled teeth. “I’m really into Afro beat.” Ana nodded. She had almost forgotten about James’s trips, how many years he’d spent traveling with a film crew and how he would return with stacks of photos and anecdotes and some unwearable beaded garment as a gift. What struck her about those trips was how similar they were, how every country suffered exactly the same poverty and the same corruption. Back and forth between those two poles, with James vacuuming stories from the inside of the countries, all that heartbreak residue to collect.
“You used to spend so much time on the road,” said Ana, reaching a hand out as a server walked by, plucking another glass of white wine.
“Do you guys want to go dancing?” asked Ruth. And if he were a cowboy, James would have taken off his hat, flung it in the air, and hooted: “Hell, yeah!” Ana considered the alternatives and nodded her assent.
The club was on a street between a Portuguese grocer—salted cod suspended in the window; a strange chemical soap smell as they walked past—and an auto garage. Ana rubbed her hands together to get warm while Ruth stood to the side, texting invisible friends about guest lists and entry.
James said: “We should call Ethel.”
“Should we?”
He dialed, his fingers growing colder. Ana couldn’t hear what he said, standing between two people on their cell phones in the nothing streetlight, watching the babies, babies going in and coming out, their unlined faces under knitted caps and curtains of long hair. This season, Ana noted, beards were back. Almost every guy entering had a grizzly backwoods coating. Was that where James had gotten the idea for his?
But around their eyes, only youth, flat and nervous and boyish, like they couldn’t believe they were out on a school night.
“Everything’s good,” James said, putting his phone in his pocket. Ana looked at him blankly.
“With Finn. Everything’s good.”
“Oh,” said Ana. “Good, good.”
“He went right to sleep,” said James, covering a little pull of disappointment over the fact that Finn didn’t require him at bedtime.
Inside the club, the band, too, was bearded, all except the female singer, who had bangs that covered half her face. There were so many of them, Ana felt like she was looking at a Dr. Seuss picture of alike creatures populating a village: This one has an accordion, this one has a saw, this one has a tuba. But when they turned it up, it sounded good, cacophonous, pure.