I Regret Everything Read Free Page B

daughter’s unscheduled visit I assured him she had not been a problem. Ed was fifty and had the fleshy look of an ex-athlete.
    â€œYour billables for May were the same level as they were in April,” he said. Ed’s tone was beige but I knew that my April billables were more than acceptable. That was his setup. Now came the attack: “Kevin Pratt did well in May.” I nodded, giving nothing away. This was a favorite tactic of his. He would suggest that perhaps one was not performing at the highest level, stoke interoffice rivalries, and then wait for a reaction. In these moments I coped with his presence by composing nonsense couplets:
    Simonson was my savvy captor /
He spoke fluent Velociraptor.
    Then without another word he was gone, presumably to play the same kind of mind games with his daughter. Between Ed’s gamesmanship, Spaulding’s pheromones, and what I had discovered in the shower, it was difficult to concentrate. The rain had stopped so I told Reetika I was going for a walk.
    In Central Park two elderly violinists were playing a Bartok Duo. Wisps of steam rose from puddles. Pedestrians strode past. The only other people who stopped to listen were an older lady wearing a sun hat and clutching a WNET tote bag and a nanny whose charge was asleep in a pram. The music was lovely, the hurly-burly of the city faded, and for a few moments there existed no thoughts of meetings or clients, the future or the past, only the soothing tones of the timeless melody. When they finished I dropped a crisp twenty into an open instrument case and turned quickly away so the musicians would not see that I was weeping.

S PAULDING
The Iambic Pentameter Strategy
    T hat year went from heinous to outstanding and back to dreadful. My mother’s third marriage broke up so she was more unavailable than usual. My father was over a decade into his second one and no closer to divorcing this wife who treated me like I had the Ebola virus. Then there was the month I spent in “rehab” which was really a mental hospital but my parents insisted we call it “rehab” since being marinated in drugs and alcohol didn’t have the same stigma as crazy. Oh, and my older brother Gully who lived in Seattle where he was learning how to build sailboats only came to visit once while I was recuperating.
    I was living with my mother in Manhattan and planning to enroll at Barnard in the fall. It was good to be back in the city. I had gone to Spence until my parents divorced and they shipped me off to school in Switzerland. It wasn’t that they didn’t love me. But parents have their own needs and everyone’s needs were equally important as my mother explained to me after polishing off her third gin and tonic in the Swissair departure lounge when I was twelve and flying to Europe alone for the first time.
    My mother lived in the co-op on Riverside Drive that she and my father shared until she threw a kitchen knife at him one particularly festive Thanksgiving and he moved out. How she got full custody of Gully and me after that episode was something no one’s ever been able to explain and didn’t say a lot for Edward P. Simonson’s interest in having us around.
    In the divorce my mother’s big win was the apartment, a three-bedroom on the tenth floor of a doorman building. I hated it. Don’t get me wrong; the place was total real estate porn. Big rooms, lots of sun, a river view to die for, wood floors, all the original details. North of us the lights of the George Washington Bridge twinkled. But my mother was there with her four cats. What’s funny about this is that I’m an animal lover, but four cats for one person seems excessive. Oh, and I’m semi-allergic, which she was convinced must have been in my imagination. So, four cats plus my mother are five reasons I didn’t want to be there. Six if you count her boyfriend Dodd who was usually draped over the living room