He read it out loud. “‘Mr. Jacob A. Blaumann. Of question mark street. Apartment number question mark. NYC, NY. Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, dash, four more question marks.’ ”
“I take my postal codes very seriously,” Sara said. “Open it already!”
He did. “‘Please save the date of March 20, 2011, for the wedding of’”— he paused and then shouted her name across the room—“‘MS. SARA SHERMAN AMPERSAND MR. GEORGE MURPHY’—that’s a commendably bold font choice there—‘New York, New York. Invitation to follow.’ Don’t you need to tell people where it is?” Jacob asked, flipping the card over. “Where’s the place I check off chicken or fish?”
“That comes on the invitation.”
“This isn’t an invitation?”
“No, this is a save-the-date card. The invitation comes — well, soon now actually, but I’ve been trying to get this to you since June.”
“I’ve been swamped.”
“I know. It’s hard to — I know it isn’t the same. Look. George and I wanted to ask you — we were wondering if you’d read something at the wedding. You pick. Something from The Bridge if you want. Of course, an original Blaumann would be fantastic, but—”
Before Jacob could refuse, the little jingle bells on the front door sounded. He glanced around just in time to see Sissy Coltrane walking in, her bony arm hooked around Oliver’s. They were laughing and paused to punctuate their happiness with a soft kiss. Even the servers seemed to realize this was awkward, as in midconversation Oliver began strolling directly to his usual table, which was apparently also their usual table, and where Jacob and Sara were already sitting.
“Oh! Jacob!” he shouted, loud enough to scare the fish in the tank in the back. “Funny to find you here! Sissy and I were just having a meeting. Sorry. You must be Sara. We spoke on the phone? I thought — I thought you two were heading for a big night out in the city.”
Jacob watched as deep red shame soaked through the baggy skin of Sissy’s cheeks, and she looked as if she wanted to bolt out of Szechuan Garden and the entire state of Connecticut. Oliver did a very nice job of looking vaguely off at the window, as if the situation might disappear if he didn’t acknowledge it. Fortunately Sara wasn’t as ambivalent.
She pulled Jacob to his feet, and they were out the door before anyone realized they were dining and dashing. It was like a scene in a movie — too exciting to be real. Or to be part of his life, at any rate. But the longer he sat there, mute, in the passenger’s seat of the Prius, the more sense it made. His secret, older boyfriend had a secret, older girlfriend. Sara, on the other hand, was fuming. She sped down the parkway ranting, like the Jacob of old. How dare he this and how dare he that. Jacob didn’t argue. She had a valid point. But what shocked Jacob the most wasn’t Sissy’s age or gender, or even the fact that Oliver was sleeping with another of his subordinates, but that he’d dared, period. How could someone who only ever ate at one restaurant juggle two love lives at once? Jacob was almost impressed.
As the skyscrapers emerged on the horizon, and the city noises grew in his ears, and the world outside the car filled up with people, rushing around with such purpose, Jacob felt like no part of it at all. He couldn’t shake the feeling all through the night as Sara dragged him through the streets, outraged and leery the whole time, to the caterer and the cupcakes (they skipped the dancing) and to the speakeasy, where they really did pass through a secret passage to sit at a narrow bar and sip twenty-dollar cocktails made with Carpano Antica and house-made ginger syrup and yellow chartreuse. He let the night happen to him, moving through it all like a ghost. At the end of the night, he stood at the foot of the hotel escalators and kissed Sara goodbye on both cheeks and said he had to get back home. He promised to meet her and George for brunch in the morning, though he already knew he would not go. She promised him it was going to get better, that he didn’t need Oliver — and Jacob knew that that was true. He wasn’t feeling like this because of Oliver. This was how he’d felt all along, but Oliver, Anchorage House, and even Ella had been distracting him from it. He was absolutely lost.
Jacob walked all the way to Columbus Circle. He’d been gone so long, the old MetroCard in his wallet had expired. He bought a new one and went down to the 1 train, waiting at the very end of the platform, trying to get as far as he could from the fiddler and the guy with a washboard who were playing something intolerably cheerful. He closed his eyes and waited to feel the faint breeze — the front end of the gust of wind before the train — the first signal to every real New Yorker that a train was coming, before you could lean out and see the headlights on the tracks or hear any noise at all. He still knew just where to stand to have the doors open right in front of him. When they did, he stepped into the back of the train and for the first time in his life found himself in a car that was completely empty. His heart pounded as he studied the vacant yellow and orange seats. He stood, in the very center, as the doors closed, and he began to fly along beneath the ground. He shut his eyes and tried to feel as if he were weightless, on a new planet, lost in the sound of the tunnels. Instead he felt himself underwater, unable to breathe, as if the car were packed with a thousand people.
And then, with no one there to see, Jacob wept for the first time since Irene had died. And he kept weeping, even after he transferred to a 2 train at 72nd Street. Nobody minded much. It wasn’t so odd, in the city, to see a grown man crying in the middle of a whole lot of people. He got off at 110th, with the dark void of Central Park at his back, and walked the rest of the way to his old apartment — some thirty blocks through Harlem, lurid and alive, all brassy horns and endless green lights arching above the avenues. Everyone seemed younger than they had been a year ago; everything felt bigger. It was always the same city, only more so, and this was why he’d had to subtract himself from it. He couldn’t stand to see it not being less so: the bums and the bridges and the bodegas and the bottles that overflowed the trash cans on the corner. She wasn’t there, and it seemed impossible that all this could still be going on.
NOVEMBER
Either Oliver felt guilty enough or Jacob’s cold shoulder wore him down, because at the beginning of November the paperwork was completed to have Jacob join the staff part time as an assistant art therapist. This meant he’d work an extra shift per week, which barely helped cover his train ride each day up and back from Harlem, but he didn’t mind. Under the auspices of this “special pilot program,” he was even able to get permission to walk with patients around the property. He had a budget to buy books (one copy of The Odyssey, which had to be shared) and an hour a week to meet with patients to discuss readings on an individual basis. Maura signed up, and then so did Roy (they were “dating” now, whatever that meant when you were both stuck in a mental institution), and then Jane and Annabeth joined.
It was slow going. A lot of them protested the choice of material. Many seemed to be hoping they’d talk about The Hunger Games, but Jacob encouraged them to read slowly and out loud if a passage didn’t make sense at first. They discussed history and geography as they hiked around in the crisp, late autumn fog. Around the overgrown foundations of the original manor house, they dissected the Lotus Eaters, and down in the graveyard they went over the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. Under the drip of mossy overgrown trees, Jacob began to recall some of the Gothic creepiness that had appealed to him about this place not so long ago. They walked to the farthest north side of the property, past the stables with the collapsed roof, where they could stand amid the rubble and read from “Nausicaa” while the clean-suited men and women of Discover Card waited for the bus across the highway. Down by the duck pond they watched the Chinese Academy boys soccer team practicing their goal kicks. Jacob and Maura spoke about the Cyclops.