Anna, September 24-25, 2008
I love Nat. I Am Really in Love. Finally. Fully. So often before I thought I was on the brink, but now every morning I get up amazed by the unearthly wonder of it. We have been Velcroed to each other since the day he appeared in the supreme court, and we have spent every night together, except for a single trip I had to make to Houston. The New Depression, which has pushed the law biz off a cliff and in sober moments makes me worry about my job, has been a blessing for now, because I can depart work most nights at five. We cook. We love. And we talk for hours and hours. Everything Nat says pleases me. Or touches me. Or makes me laugh. We do not fall asleep until two or three a.m., and in the morning we can barely drag ourselves out of bed to get to work. Before he leaves, I look at him sternly and say, 'We can't keep doing this, we have to sleep tonight.' 'Right,' he says. I ache all day until I can return to him, when the whole blissful sleepless cycle starts again.
Nat moved in the first week, and there really was no discussion about where he will live at the end of the month. He will be with me. It's like everybody always told me: When it happens, you will know.
Dennis has asked, because that is his job, if the pure impossibility of the situation is part of it, if I've been able to give myself over only because I know I shouldn't and that disaster somehow lurks. I can't answer that. It doesn't matter. I am happy. And so is Nat.
My plan, as far as Rusty is concerned, has been no plan at all, except to allow him a warning. As he sat on that banquette in the Dulcimer, he grew lethally angry. I was unsurprised, not because I was hoping for that result, as he claimed, but because I always sensed there is a molten core behind that taciturn exterior. But in time, we will both get accustomed to the bizarre way this has turned out. We have one essential thing in common. We love Nat.
In the meanwhile, I have resolved to stay away from Rusty, which is not as easy as I might have hoped. Barbara calls Nat every day. He generally picks up and then tells her as little as possible. The conversations are brief and often practical-specials he might be interested in at a local grocery chain, news of family and the campaign, questions about his job search or his expected living arrangements at the end of the month. The last of those inquiries has meant that sooner or later he had to tell her about me. He warned me there was no choice because his mother seemed to be nurturing a hope he might move back home. Even so, I begged him to hold off.
'Why?'
'God, Nat. Doesn't that seem like a lot to tell her in one breath, we're dating and then that we're living together? It will sound crazy. Can't you just tell her you're going to share space with a friend?'
'You don't know my mother. "Who's the friend? What's he do? Where was he raised? Where did he go to school? What kind of music does he listen to? Does he have a girlfriend?" I mean, I wouldn't get away with that for a minute.'
So we agreed that he would tell her. I insisted on standing by so I could hear his end of the conversation, but I buried my head in one of my sofa pillows when he described himself as 'a love zombie.'
'She's thrilled,' he said when he hung up. 'Completely thrilled. She wants us to come for dinner.'
'God, Nat. Please no.'
I could tell from the way his brows narrowed that he was beginning to find my vehemence about his parents odd.
'It's not like you don't know them.'
'It would be weird, Nat. Now. With us so new. Don't you think we should socialize with some normal people first? I'm not ready for that.'
'I think we should get it over with. She'll ask me every day. You watch.'
She did. He begged off, using standard excuses, his work or mine. But day by day I am beginning to understand more about the weird symbiosis between Nat and his mom. Barbara hovers over his life like some demanding ghost without an earthly presence of her own. And he feels a need to satisfy her. She wants to see us together, but finds it trying to leave her home. So we must come to her.
'You could just say no to her,' I told him last week.
He smiled. 'You try it,' he answered, and indeed the next night, he lifted his cell in my direction. 'She wants to talk to you.'
Fuck, I mouthed. It was a quick conversation. Barbara gushed about how exciting this was, how pleased Rusty and she were that Nat and I seemed to mean so much to each other. Wouldn't we come and let the two of them share our happiness for just an evening? Like a lot of brilliant people with problems, Barbara is great at putting you in the corner. The easiest thing was to agree to a week from Sunday.
I held my head in my hands afterward.
'I don't understand this,' he said. 'You're one of the cool kids. Little Miss Social Skills. My mom has been telling me for a year and a half to ask you out. You're the first girlfriend I've had she approves of. She thought Kat was weird and that Paloma was a bad influence.'
'But how's your dad with this, Nat? Don't you think this will be strange for him?'
'My mom says he's completely cool and totally thrilled.'
'Have you actually talked to him?'
'He'll be fine. Take it from me. He'll be fine.'
But I cannot imagine that Barbara's enthusiasm about Nat and me, or the prospect of seeing us together, can do anything but set Rusty spinning. And as I fear, today at work, when I slip in to check my personal e-mail, my heart jumps to see two in my in-box from Rusty's account. When I open the messages, they weirdly turn out to be read receipts on e-mails I sent in May 2007, sixteen months ago.
It takes me a while to piece things together. During my time with Rusty, I was the one who booked the hotel rooms, since he couldn't use his credit card. I would forward the online confirmation to him, receipt requested so I knew he'd gotten word and did not have to bother to reply. I often dispatched these messages in a series-the initial confirmation, a reminder that morning, and then a last e-mail giving the room number once I had checked in. Because I was getting the acknowledgments, I realized that often the only message he was opening was the last one, which he looked at on his handheld on the way over, without having to chance reviewing the other e-mails with somebody around.
The two read receipts that arrived today are from those e-mails that went unopened last year. At first, I take this as a kind of perverse stalking, an effort to remind me where the two of us were not all that long ago. But with another hour's thought I realize he may not even know the messages are coming to me. When you open an e-mail on which the sender's requested a receipt, a little pop-up appears, warning you that the notification will be sent. The pop-up also contains a little box to check that reads, 'Don't show this message again for this sender.' He probably chose that option long ago. By the end of the day, I decide there may be a positive spin here: Rusty is finally doing what he should have done sixteen months before and deleting all my messages. It's a sign he's moving on, that he is happy to let Nat and me be.
The next morning by ten, there are three more. Far worse, I realize that deleting the messages wouldn't trigger the receipts. The point is to show the e-mail was read. It is a disturbing, even sickening, image, of Rusty in his chambers, reliving these details. Feeling there is little choice but to have it out with him, I pick up the phone and dial his inside line. It rings through and is answered instead by his assistant, Pat.
"Anna!" she cries out when I say hello. "How are you? You don't come around enough."
After a minute of pleasantries, I tell her I have a question for the judge about one of our cases and ask to speak to him.
"Oh, he's been on the bench all morning, honey. He went up more than an hour ago. They have arguments back to back. I won't see him until half past twelve."
I have the self-possession to say to Pat that I will call Wilton, my coclerk, for the information I need, but when I put the phone down, I am too panicked and disoriented even to take my hand off the receiver. I tell myself I have gotten this wrong, that there must be another explanation. On my screen, I examine the read receipts again, but all three were sent from Rusty's account less than half an hour ago, when Pat says he was on the bench and nowhere near his PC.
And then it comes, the dreadful realization. The catastrophe that was always in the offing has happened now: It's someone else. Somebody is systematically reviewing the record of my meetings with Rusty. The hotels. The dates. For a breathless second, I fear the very worst and wonder if it's Nat. But he was himself last night, gentle and utterly adoring, and he is too guileless to keep this kind of discovery to himself. Given his nature, he would just be gone.
But my relief lasts no more than a second. Then I know the answer with an absolute certainty that turns my heart to stone. There's one person with the savvy to invade Rusty's e-mail account, and the time to be making this painstaking inspection.
She knows.
Barbara knows.