The Future of Love

by Shirley Abbott

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

"[An] impressive first novel . . . Abbott's nuanced take on New York after the fall is spot-on, reminding us that love is about survival as well as loss." —People

Set in New York in 2001, Abbott's debut novel invites us into the lives of good people grappling with the hard choices and the sacrifices they must make to find love. In the manner of a contemporary Edith Wharton, Shirley Abbott exposes the inner lives and the tangled relationships of eight characters—before and after New York's tragedy—and forces both them and the reader to see the world in a new way.

Having assembled a smart, compelling ensemble, reminiscent of HBO's Six Feet Under, Abbott allows us to see the possibility of happiness even as the city itself is tested. With humor and profound empathy, she has crafted a novel that runs deep into the heart of our need for commitment from friends, lovers, and family.

Release date: March 25, 2008

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

BY SEPTEMBER THE grass of Riverside Park had been trampled to gray. Dead leaves (a few, only a few) rustled on low branches. He had his little girl in tow and was trying to make the best of things, in spite of his situation and the spike of pain in his left temple. The path to the playground sloped downward: he dug his toes in. The high residential façades of Riverside Drive facing the cliffs across the Hudson River were as harmonious and pleasing as certain glorious stretches along the Seine and put him in mind of Paris, where he’d spent a few months as a college student. (A positive thought. Yes. Surely.) The carefully planted esplanades and lawns in the park displayed a seasonal ripeness: city soot, a scattering of empty potato-chip packages, and an occasional smear of dog feces. Nearly everybody scooped these days, and poop existed in pretty much acceptable quantities. Still, it paid to look where you stepped or unfolded your picnic blanket. The river was no longer the cloaca maxima of New York state. The EPA had done its job upriver, and a new sewage plant was in place up around 135th Street. One could measure a civilization by how well it disposed of excrement. Soon, according to the New York Times, the water would be safe for swimming; he already saw a canoe. Far above, a jet plane followed the channel northward. Traffic flowed on the double decks of the George Washington Bridge, and the morning light glinted off hoods and windshields, brilliant processions on the great span of steel.

Mark Adler planned to spend the day, or most of it, with his daughter at the playground. Pulling a battered wooden dog that quacked as it went, she bounced beside him, her brown hair thick as wild nettles, her toes in teal blue plastic flip-flops. The toy skidded over onto its back, and Toni patiently stopped and set it upright. “Now, doggie, don’t get hurt. Come along. Don’t cry.” Mark held the stroller tightly with its cargo of sand pail, shovel, peanut butter sandwiches, two bottles of water, a box of tissues, a towel, and an extra pair of panties for her, just in case. It was a plain, light, proletarian stroller, a jalopy among the SUVs of infant transport that now clogged supermarket aisles and clothing stores and museums, took up entire elevators.

He himself had grown up north of here, at the end of the epoch when nosy landladies were still renting out rooms by the week to newcomers from Europe and the population was heavily Jewish. All that was history, one from which Mark felt utterly disconnected. As a child he had played in the same park system, though not the same park, to which he now escorted his daughter. His German-Jewish grandparents had changed their name, assimilated, and stagnated. His dad and his grandfather had both worked as guards at the Metropolitan Museum, and each had died of a heart attack at age fifty-nine, a Teutonic orderliness that their descendant hoped to escape.

Mark sucked at his water bottle and swallowed another ibuprofen, his third since arising, hoping it would soon ease his head and the agony between his shoulders. His innards had been too acidic even for soft-boiled eggs, the result of Scotch with the late late movie, all alone, while his wife and daughter slept. Meryl Streep was a doctor in a posh New England town, and her son had murdered a girl, and Meryl was protecting the guilty little bastard. It had felt good to be drunk and deep in somebody else’s dilemma. But it had destabilized his gait and turned his hand into a bear’s paw so that he had clatteringly knocked over Maggie’s open bottle of herbal shampoo and the water glass at 2 a.m. as he groped for a toothbrush, creating a puddle of aromatic glop and broken glass that he dared not leave until morning, and of course he had cut himself cleaning it up. Why had she left the bottle on the sink? A long car trip tested a marriage, but sharing a bathroom was worse. Maybe he could be a better husband if they ever had separate bathrooms. Separate bedrooms.

Wait. Positive thoughts. He must count his blessings. One: his little Toni was a picture in a dotted-Swiss sundress over a bathing suit for the sprinkler in the park. A small grosgrain hair bow rode the pile of curls. Maggie believed in hair bows. Toni had always stopped traffic. Cute! A woman in the supermarket yesterday had advised him to get the child a modeling job. “Lots of money in that, and the child is sooo gorgeous.” Where did the crones of the upper West Side pick up such ideas? And yet, what was he doing for her? Maybe he ought to send her out to work. He should have been able to take his family to the Hamptons in July and August. On hot Saturdays, instead of moldering in Riverside Park with its grimy sandboxes, he should have parked his new Range Rover at some members-only beach lot in Easthampton, and then guided his little family toward the shore, setting up the beach umbrella and opening the hamper, answering the smiles and waves of neighbors. No grime out there, no leaves black with soot, no concrete slabs sticky with Popsicle goo. In the Hamptons, dogs probably did not defecate.

A year ago he’d been an account exec at Grumple & Co. And had he not done their bidding? Worked long hours? Compromised and then forgotten whatever shreds of integrity he might have possessed? Pretended to be evaluating mutual funds when in fact he was merely arranging artful kickback schemes and hoping for a bonus? Neglecting the small investor, greasing the wheels for the large? His boss’s boss appeared regularly on Louis Rukeyser’s show on Public TV (paid for with the contributions of Viewers Like You), hyping the stocks he was dumping into his clients’ portfolios while the smart money went elsewhere. Maggie had asked what a price target was, and he had explained that price targets were the product of much thought and research, no, in fact, they were a come-on, a wild guess, a con game, and the so-called little guy may easily be misled, but such was the nature of the business. Little guys should not trust big guys. Little guys should be looking out for themselves. Or putting their money in bank CDs. Only that wasn’t what the ads said. The ads showed a kid graduating from college, clutching a diploma, with two proud parents at his side, all because they had done financial planning with hardworking account execs like him at Grumple & Co.

Mark had been ejected from that picture at precisely 10:30 a.m. one September Friday, when 25 percent of the staff was laid off. He had worn his gray suit to work that day, with the black loafers and the red print tie, had gotten in early because he meant to finally do something for that old guy who wanted to cash out the $21,000 in his IRA, and Mark had let the request sit in the basket for two months, being preoccupied with larger problems, and everything had gone down and there was only $17,000 and the man was threatening to report him to the SEC or sue Grumple. He had thought the summons to his boss’s office had to do with this matter, but no, not at all. Those executive eyes, usually so warm and friendly, were cold and opaque. He remembered hearing “Please sit down” and “Have to let you go,” followed by “Pack up and be out of here in twenty minutes.” They gave him some kind of paper to sign—he hadn’t been sure what it was. And a check for the salary he had coming, up through the previous day. There was severance, denominated in some way so that he could start drawing unemployment after three months. It was tagged as a layoff, not a firing. They reminded him once more that he no longer had access to the server, that his e-mails, address books, and all paper files had been impounded as the property of Grumple & Co., and that he was entitled to take only his personal possessions, whatever they might consist of. He was told, once more, that he had twenty minutes to clear out.

He did not remember cleaning out his desk. Indeed, perhaps he had not cleaned it. At Madison and Fifty-ninth Street half an hour later, he had stumbled, unsure where he was going or ought to go. And right there on the street, in broad daylight, he had begun to cry. So noisily that it attracted some attention, though no one stopped to inquire what the trouble was, since a grown man in a suit and tie weeping aloud on the street could only be a lunatic. Had anybody asked, he would have said that he was ashamed to go home before lunch. That it felt like third grade when he had broken out with chickenpox and been sent home by the school nurse. That his daughter would come home at three with her babysitter and his wife at six, and what would he tell them? Daddy’s lost his job. And thus had he entered purgatory, a land where your closest associates, your drinking buddies, did not return your phone calls. The doors were locked.

Forget it, he was counting blessings.

Number two: the daily disgrace of joblessness might well be behind him, for on the coming Tuesday he was to interview at the biggest investment banking house in New York, his first crack at a real job in over a year. Of course, he had not been utterly idle. He had become the chief babysitter, and Maggie had fired the shy Honduran girl with no green card who’d been their part-time nanny. He had worked off and on for the last six months in Hammond’s Fine Wines and Liquors on Broadway. They had paid him off the books, at first, so his unemployment checks would keep coming, and they put him on part time when unemployment ran out. In fact, unemployment had paid a little better than the job, but he liked the work, lugging boxes from storage in the cellar, stocking shelves, telling customers which red wines to try. It was a relief to be doing something physical. He liked his boss, a genial type, a born New Yorker like himself, who at least was not cheating people. He liked his customers. Mostly. He even liked the poor, old, stinking, stubbly guys who came in for a half pint. A supply was kept near the register so the bums didn’t wander around the store. He treated them square. Would “sir” them as they counted out their dimes. There but for the grace of God.

He had applied for the job after a fight with Maggie. She said he had to do something, anything, retail sales, whatever, bag groceries, he could not just househusband anymore, because it was killing him, killing her. Plus, he never even did any laundry. She claimed he was terminally depressed. That he was making her terminally depressed. She accused him of not reading the want ads or looking on the Internet. (Not one response to any of his scores of e-mailed resumes had ever materialized. Unless you counted the autoresponses. Not one nibble. And yes, he had quit looking, and she would have quit, too.) Maggie said her mother would help out if they needed extra babysitting, but he had to do something or she was going to leave. So, okay, he had shut down the computer and gone over to Broadway to the liquor store. He got the job over another applicant who had clerked at Astor Place (a much better store) for two years but was short and fat and had acne. It never hurt, whether you were selling mutual funds or booze, to look like Michael Douglas, and Mark even had the hint of a cleft in his chin. It had felt so good to hear “Yes, when can you start?” Selling booze was more interesting than clerking at the Gap, for example, and required less training than driving a cab. And he knew a thing or two about wine.

It had been embarrassing, at first, lugging bottles off the shelves for Toni’s playmates’ parents, people he had in some cases entertained as dinner guests, or been the dinner guest of, back when they could afford dinner parties. People he had worked side by side with, as peers in fund-raising, at the Parkside Montessori Street Fair, where they all good-naturedly got out in the lovely spring weather, under the flowering trees, and raised a few thousand dollars for scholarships, just to keep affirmative action alive at the private nursery school level. He and Kevin Parker had hauled a kid-laden trolley up and down the street, a buck a ride. These days Kevin Parker was asking him, with only a hint of irony, to recommend a Burgundy, or what he thought would go with salmon, or which single malt was really worth the money. Maggie had at least pretended to be proud of him for having a job, though she never brought Toni into the store.

Most of these snooty parents at Parkside had never had to socialize with a liquor store clerk. In a liquor store in Gentry Land, a clerk needed to talk the talk. Mark had read up, and soon became an expert on red Bordeaux. He talked about “tannic structure,” and compared the flavor of a certain vintage to chocolate, and told his customers that the 2000 was better than the 1999 but not as long lasting, talked of currants, plums, and tar in the taste, and of a lovely glycerinlike mouthfeel. He said solemnly that something was a “killer buy,” or that it could be “attacked now, with no cellaring.” As with stocks and bonds, you promoted belief and people gave you money, only with wine they had the pleasure of drinking their purchase. Sales improved. He got a small raise, more hours. Maybe he was meant to be a liquor-store clerk, a wine missionary among the yuppies. Every man an oenophile. Too bad it did not suit the expectations of his wife, editor of prize-worthy debut novels.

They approached the entrance of the baby park, and Toni broke into a joyous skip, abandoning her doggie. Mark lifted it by the leash and dumped it in the net bag that hung from the stroller.

Blessing three: this was a very good baby park. New landscaping, rubberized pavement under the swings and jungle gyms, and a whole herd of little bronze hippopotami. The toilets were perpetually stopped up, of course, but that was the curse of all kiddie parks. He wouldn’t be living in this neighborhood at all without their rent-stabilized apartment on West End Avenue, acquired through a connection of his mother-in-law’s. A dabbler in Marxism in his college days, he found it easy to think full time about money. The baby had caused this. The damn schooling. The public schools in this neighborhood were a few cuts above the prison system. He and Maggie gnawed themselves bloody about the future. Instead of curling up around her back, slipping his hand under her nightshirt, he would lie in bed, body rigid, dick soft, and opine, “Maybe she could do elementary school at P.S. 75. It isn’t so bad. What matters is junior high, and we could save the money for that.”

“No, what matters is early childhood. I guess we’ll have to turn to my mother.” Toni was only four. She could stay at Parkside through second grade, though the best people usually moved on to Brearley or Trinity by first grade. Sometimes Mark imagined Toni whizzing through junior high, up on Amsterdam Avenue, with top grades, energizing her classmates, winning the Westinghouse Science Award. He’d go to cocktail parties and tell his friends who were breaking ass to get $20,000 per to hand over to Dalton, “She’s doing great in public school,” and all those people would die of envy. But it was only a fantasy. They both knew that Antonia Pleasance Adler could never attend schools whose graduates came out equipped chiefly for retail jobs and burger flipping or screwing up your application at the Motor Vehicles Bureau while you waited an hour in line.

He watched Toni run straight for the sprinkler and wet herself down without taking off her dress. “Toni,” he called. “Come here.” She ignored him, and what of it? The dress would dry. He’d take it off her later. He sank down in the shade on an empty bench. Lots of daddies came to the park, but today the population was sparse—nannies, a couple of moms, a few kids. Everybody still on Shelter Island. In the Adirondacks. The Poconoes. The Hamptons. Dutchess County. The gazetteer of success. He sighted around the enclosure for one face, the one face he longed to see, or feared seeing. But she was not there. Just as well. He was in no shape to talk to Sophie. And yet if only Sophie would appear!

The sprinkler spurted, and a dozen children in swim trunks and ruffled britches danced around it, catching the spray in their buckets and wetting their heads. The heat was a good sign, perhaps. A surge of optimism told him he would get that job at Morgan Stanley, they would ask him to start work right away. And then the year would finally begin, as years were supposed to begin, in September, and the failures would drag on no longer. The leaves would turn red and fall decorously off the trees, not just hang there, dry and whispery. He would go out every morning in a new suit and tie, on his way to Wall Street. Maggie could quit her job if she wanted to. They’d move to goddamn Mamaroneck. Would he find, with a few months’ pay in the bank, that he could still love Maggie?

But at the bottom of the picture, like the cellar in a child’s drawing of a house, there was another idea. If he did get the job, could he not escape this marriage altogether?

In the quandary his life had turned into, he often fantasized about his mother-in-law’s death. That apartment of Antonia’s was the main thing…. They could live in it, sell it if Maggie insisted on this stupid move to the stupid burbs. An apartment on a great street in a hot part of town. Hard to perceive Antonia and Fred as wealthy, really, just an ordinary New York couple, comfortably off, the old man had had a good job at the newspaper, which was not only the most important paper in the whole world but also had pension plans; the old lady, too, had worked and saved money. His mother-in-law had never invited him to evaluate her investments, but he would know how to handle them. Maggie’s dad had been dead over a year. People said widows didn’t survive long. Another positive thought. He had begun hoping, secretly, guiltily, for signs of morbidity in Antonia, pricking up his ears when Maggie reported that her mother had seen a doctor in July.

“Anything serious?” he had asked, adding, “Is she okay?” But Maggie had given him an ugly look. Ah, God, how vile he felt, and was. It was disgusting to be counting on your wife’s inheritance. And yet, did that not have a long literary pedigree? How many novels had been written about just that? The heirs languishing, mending their gloves, counting the years, and finally … apoplexy … catarrh! The black armband, the downcast eyes at the reading of the will. He had admitted freely to himself when he married Maggie that her parents’ wealth was a draw, a compensation for her plain face and anxious temperament.

Toni stood at her father’s knee, dripping. “Daddy, it’s all just babies here. Nobody to play with but babies. I miss Brittany.”

“Yeah? Where is Brittany these days?” Turning her around, he unbuttoned the sundress and pulled it over her head. The hair bow, he noticed, was gone. He found the towel and rubbed her head with it.

“Still in her country with her mom.”

“Her country?” Was his the only Parkside Montessori family that lacked a country house?

“Her farm place in the country. Way away. She says it takes a really long time to get there. They have a horse and a pony. No, a foal, a baby horse. She said she would take me there sometime to see the horse and the foal. I think I will just sit here with you.”

“But, Toni, the babies will make fine playmates. Look at those little boys over there—twins, I bet you. They need you to show them how to play in the sand. Run along, honey. What’s the point of coming down here if you sit on the bench with daddy? We could have just stayed in front of the TV.” That’s what he had wanted to do. She could have watched reruns of Sesame Street, and he could have napped.

“Yeah, but mommy said no TV.” She had his bone structure but Maggie’s wild hair, the hazel eyes. “I wish we had gone to Grandma’s with mommy. I hate it here. I’m so hot. You don’t smell good. You drank that whiskey last night.” Her eyes darkened, and she scratched a scab on her shin until the longed-for droplet of blood appeared. How did a kid that age notice whiskey? She had been asleep.

“I’m bleeding.” She put her red-smeared finger into her mouth.

“No, you aren’t bleeding very much. You scratched it yourself, didn’t you? I didn’t drink much whiskey. Anyway, how would you know? Run play in the nice water. Daddy needs a nap.”

“I don’t like it when you nap in the park. What if a bad man came and told me to get into his car and kidnapped me?”

Okay, he couldn’t nap. What if she did get kidnapped, just because he had the worst hangover of his life?

“Honey, I am not going to let a bad man run off with you. I don’t really nap. I just rest my eyes a bit. I watch you through my eyelashes like this.” He leaned his head back, squinting. “See, there’s always a little opening for my X-ray vision.” She giggled. “And I am not going to drink any whiskey tonight or any night. That’s a promise. Now run on and have some fun. We’ll get you a Popsicle when the man comes. I remembered to bring some money this time.”

He, too, would eat a Popsicle. Maybe it would be the magic turn-around moment in this hangover. The chill of the Popsicle, the sweetness, would go right to his headache and drive it out, as the ibuprofen failed to do. This was the last hangover. No booze tonight. No more booze ever. To what do you attribute your long and successful life, Mr. Adler? To forswearing alcohol when I was forty. Right after that, I got a job at Morgan Stanley, where I rose to a vice-presidency. I purchased a house for my family in Amagansett, a heartbreakingly old-fashioned and fragile house, so authentic it should have been in a museum; so endearing that our friends, such as they were, nearly died of jealousy. We lovingly restored it, put in a retro kitchen and period linoleum. My wife bakes bread every week.

“Look, daddy. Oh, look. It’s Ashley. I can play with Ashley!”

And yes, there she was, materializing out of sprinkler mist. Ashley. From the other side of the park, walking past the sprinkler and the little bronze hippos, between the benches, around the parked strollers, a tall slim woman in jeans and an I Love NY T-shirt was leading the little girl by the hand. She bent toward the child, and her shining black hair fell over her face. Ashley, Kevin Parker’s kid, glanced upward happily.

Blessing number four: Sophie, beautiful, kind, loving, desirable Sophie, Mark thought, a perilous, double-edged blessing.

“Hi, Toni, hi, Mark.” Ashley and Toni greeted each other rapturously, like society matrons at lunch, kissing and squealing, and ran hand in hand toward the sprinkler. Sophie sat down on Mark’s bench. Like a surfer on the crest of a roller, he was consumed by happiness. Things were going to go right.

THE TEAKETTLE SHRIEKED. She took it off the burner and discarded her New York Times in the recycle pile, next to the glass bottles. She located the tea bags—herbal tea for Maggie, peppermint, apple spice, Yogi, chai latte—threw a few packets into the water, set the pot to steep. Two dollars’ worth of designer water to make tea because her daughter was afraid of tap. New York City water had, among the urban “greens,” been reclassified as a toxin, the subtext being that you couldn’t trust the government because it didn’t care if the water gave you cancer. With Bush in charge, the “greens” might be right. Antonia could just have lied about the water. She could have said she still believed it was disloyal and wasteful and undemocratic to drink bottled water rather than tap. But she wanted to be honest with Maggie, even about drinking water. She would use the Mountain Spring. At least they were of the same mind on greenhouse gases.

A bit of finery was needed, some linen napkins for a proper tea party, and Antonia excavated a couple of bulging drawers. She must clean out this kitchen, the middens of Ninevah and Tyre. She found a stack of yellow napkins in the middle drawer under a blue tablecloth, needing washing perhaps, a bit faded at the fold. Under the napkins, like maggots under a bird’s corpse, lay packets of coupons bound in a rubber band. Fred. She would never rid herself of the Things of Fred. Fred the prudent, the methodical, belt-and-suspenders, literal, practical Fred, the compiler of coupons for various loathsome cheese spreads and artificial whipped cream and vanilla wafers. Cereal fortified with vitamins, and nobody ate it. Fred would shop just to use up the coupons, and load the cupboards with stuff that fell out on you when you opened the door. And he cooked, too, or at least made a lot of pasta. An evolved husband, she supposed, before the term had been invented. Everybody had loved him, and she loved him the way they all did: generally, because he was too good a man to find fault with. “You are so lucky to have such a husband,” Helen Mulcahy had never failed to whisper at the little dinner parties Antonia gave for Village friends long ago. Oh, yes, very lucky. The day after Fred died, Antonia began throwing things out. She took off her rings,. . .