“It’s too hard,” Betty said quietly. “There’s too much stress in your work—”
“My work isn’t stressful.”
“—Along with having a baby? Diane, it’s too hard.”
Betty, of course, had downgraded to part-time employment after her first child. With the birth of her second, she had quit altogether. People always believed, no matter what they said, that everyone should copy their life choices. Even if they were miserable. And whether Betty admitted it or not, Tony’s play was a public humiliation for Betty, an advertisement that he was consistently unfaithful to her, that he stayed in the marriage only because he loved his children. This point of view was a lie. Diane knew it was a lie. Tony would collapse without Betty; the stuffing would come out of his bright suit of clothing like a scarecrow rotting in an abandoned field. But Tony had manufactured this falsehood into a play, and everybody took it to be true and felt sorry for Betty. Diane wanted so badly to say this to Betty, to make her know the fucking truth. “I’ve been thinking of quitting,” Diane said instead.
“You have.” Betty nodded with an obnoxious, knowing air. “You can afford to, right?”
“Peter’s rich.” That was another thing wrong with Peter, another free pass he’d been given that had made him spoiled and selfish. “Maybe I should do what he’s probably doing. Go out and get myself a lover.”
Betty, to Diane’s surprise, laughed. She looked off musingly. “I’d do it too. But aren’t you scared of AIDS? God, when I read those articles, when Tony tells me about — you know Raul Sabas has it?”
“Really?” That was sad. Even in her rage at theater people, Diane got an image of Sabas dancing across the stage and singing of love, his face happy, looking to the sky. “Poor man,” she said.
“Yeah, they’re saying it’s lymphoma, but it’s AIDS.”
“Well, I might get it anyway,” Diane said, determined to be hard, to be truthful. “How the hell do I know who Peter’s screwing?”
“Diane, stop it. That’s horrible.” Betty fussed with her napkin and then tossed it on the table. She picked up her purse and opened it nervously, then stopped. She looked puzzled. “I don’t smoke anymore. Can you believe that? I was going for a cigarette.”
“Maybe he’s gay,” Diane said, bored by Betty, especially by her quitting smoking.
“Tony gay!” Betty arched in a funny, cartoon leap, cat on a stove, paws in the air, voice screeching.
“I don’t know, but I was talking about Peter. Be just like him— being in the closet. He’s in the closet about everything else, every other feeling. Christ, he’s got the biggest closet in New York. He lives his whole life in the dark.”
“Calm down,” Betty ordered, obviously made uncalm herself by Diane. “Have you thought about seeing a therapist—”
“Not you too!”
“It’s helped Tony,” Betty stammered.
“Maybe instead of my quitting,” Diane answered, “you should get your old job back. Everything is in terms of Tony.” Betty stopped fidgeting, a deer frozen by headlights. Betty’s look of shock and hurt slowed Diane down, but Diane couldn’t prevent a furious mumbled afterthought: “Tony, Tony, Tony.”
Betty stared at Diane, her mouth tight. “Why are you so angry at me?” she asked in the tone of a judge challenging a defendant to express remorse about his crime.
Last chance for mercy, Diane thought. What the hell, I’ll make it. “I guess because you’re happy, because Tony is happy, you got two kids, you don’t feel any conflict about work.”
“Sure I do!” Betty said, at ease again. “I go out of my mind when Tony goes to L.A. for script conferences and I’m stuck with the kids for weeks. I don’t have anything to say when I’m at parties except that Gina is now talking, and Nicholas is starring in the Lower School Music Assembly. Maybe I should start working part-time again and you should cut back.”
“Betty.” Diane couldn’t help chuckling at her naïveté. “There’s no way to make partner and work part-time.”
“Is it really that important?” Betty asked gently.
“Making partner?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re just a clerk if you don’t make partner. You take orders.”
“I didn’t realize it was that important to you,” Betty said quietly. “Obviously, I knew you wanted to practice law, but—”
Betty was right, Diane decided later, making partner wasn’t that important. Diane went back to the office and ran into Didi, who was bursting with office gossip. One of the middle-aged partners had left his wife and shacked up with a first-year associate. Everybody was shocked at the partner’s many blunders: he hadn’t closed out the joint financial accounts; he hadn’t bothered to conceal that he’d moved in with the young associate; he hadn’t discussed it with Stoppard or the other powerful partners who might disapprove. And as for the first-year associate, well, her career was finished. “They’re both crazy,” Didi said.
But they were in love. Maybe they had flipped, but if not, if it was passion, then why should the senior partner care if he got screwed in the divorce settlement, if he got hassled by Stoppard, why should the first-year associate worry about a possible partnership seven or eight years hence? Why should a career block happiness?
Yes, Diane no longer believed that justice would prevail in the world, that blacks would ever be given equal opportunity, that there would be peace, that the rich would get poorer, and the poor richer, or that any of the dreams of her college days would come true — but to go to the other extreme, and decide that making partner in a law firm was more important than her own peace of mind, that was madness.
Diane said none of this to Didi. She merely nodded at the titillated Didi and thought: I don’t even need the money. Once alone in her office, Diane called Peter.
“Do you care,” she asked her husband without a preliminary, “if I look for other work?”
“Like what?” Peter said.
“I don’t know, teaching, maybe even public-interest law. No, that could be a heavy caseload. Anything that leaves me more time to be with Byron.”
Silence. What was he calculating? The cost to him?
“Are you worried about the money?” Diane asked.
“Of course not,” Peter snapped, with the true contemptuous dismissal of inherited money. She believed him. “Is this your way of preparing for a second child?” he asked.
“You don’t want another child,” Diane answered.
“You don’t always pay attention to what I want,” Peter said.
He’s prepared a final argument against me. For a moment, she couldn’t swallow or talk. He’s ready to divorce me, Diane thought so coldly that she chilled herself.
“I think it’s a good idea,” Peter said before she could answer. “I still don’t want to have another child. But I think it would be good for Byron if you were around more.”
“Fine,” Diane said, and hung up without a good-bye. She waited for Peter to call back. He would have in the past. Even if he didn’t mean it, Peter would call back and say, “Are you angry?” listen to her bill of indictments, and then say, “I’m sorry, I’ve been bad. My mother’s driving me crazy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I love you. I’d fall apart without you.” Even if the words slid out of him too fast, soda cans dispensed indiscriminately, sugar bombs for a little girl, that effort of insincerity showed he still cared.