ELEVEN
Georgiana
After the conference in D.C., Georgiana sent Brady one text. It said, “I know you are married.” She then turned off her phone and spent three days in bed, not sleeping but not quite awake, hurting and broken. On Monday morning, unable to hide any longer, she woke up at seven, showered and dressed, and packed her lunch for work. When she walked out of her apartment building, Brady was standing by the stoop holding two paper cups of coffee. She accepted one, barely able to look at his face for the pain it caused. They walked to the Promenade and sat on a bench to talk. It was clear and warm, and runners zoomed past them, nannies with strollers fed their small charges croissants out of wax-paper bags. Down the bluff, beyond the piers, the ferries chugged along the river, and a big orange barge sounded a mournful horn, as though complaining about all this life carrying on when Georgiana’s heart was broken.
She felt hollowed out, her temples throbbing, her stomach tight, and she held the coffee in her lap. She couldn’t imagine finding the strength to lift the cup to her lips.
“I’m so sorry, George,” Brady started. “I thought you knew. And then by the time I realized you didn’t I had no idea how to tell you. It felt too late.”
“How would I have known? You never said anything.”
“I know, I know. But I thought everyone at work knew. Amina used to work here. She was a project manager, and then a few years ago she got a job at the Gates Foundation in Seattle and had to take it. The plan was that I would try to get hired there too, or find another job and move, but I didn’t want to. I love New York. I love my job. So we’ve just left it this way. I live here, she lives in Seattle, some weekends she comes here, some weekends I go there.”
“So your malaria conference in Seattle was a trip to see her?”
“Well, no, I had the conference, but I stayed with her.”
“And everyone at work knows about her. That’s why nobody knows about us.”
“I’m so sorry, Georgiana. I can’t explain why I lied to you. I just didn’t want it to end.”
“Do you love her?”
“I do. But I love you too.” Brady was looking at her intently, his fingers white as he gripped the edge of the bench. Georgiana shook her head and stood, walking alone down Columbia Heights to the office. She stumbled up the mansion stairs, through the great hall, past the grant team, and into her tiny maid’s room, where she turned on her computer and spent the next several hours staring at a leaf stuck to the window.
She didn’t get up from her desk all day, not even risking a trip to the kitchen or bathroom, where she might see him in the hall. The next day was Tuesday, and instead of playing tennis with Brady in the park she left early, changing into her running clothes and heading down to the Navy Yard, through the never-ending construction of Dumbo, drowning out her thoughts as music pounded through her earbuds. She couldn’t sleep, she was literally sick with despair, so she ran in the mornings before work, grinding out five miles before seven, then another three or four in the evenings, until she felt shin splints starting and a tightness developing in her hips.
Lena had been traveling with her boss all week, but on Friday night she came over with two bottles of wine and a pizza from Fascati’s. They sat on her roof deck and watched the sun set over Staten Island, and Lena put her head on her shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Georgiana. He’s a fuckboy.”
“The thing is, I can’t make myself believe he is. I was so sure he fell in love with me.”
“But he lied to you. That whole time he was hiding this huge thing. Have you seen him?”
“I saw him across the hall a few times today but just put my head down. I can’t look at him. Not because I’m so angry, but because I still want him so much. It’s humiliating. How could I be so pathetic?”
“You’re not pathetic, Georgiana. You’re heartbroken.”
Of course, Amina had been there all along if Georgiana had just known where to look for her. In the tiny maid’s room, Georgiana was surrounded by back issues of the company newsletter, years and years of stories about TB screenings in Solomon Islands, reproductive health in Haiti, an oral cholera vaccine program in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As Georgiana pored over the archive, she saw Amina’s photo again and again, her name in the tiny captions. Amina teaching in a classroom, pointing at a colorful anatomy drawing. Amina with a clipboard, crouched over a cooler, counting doses of medication alongside a man in a khaki vest. Had Georgiana known about Amina on some level? Had Brady been fooling her, or had she been fooling herself?
The next Tuesday after work Brady caught up to her as she was walking home on Hicks Street. “Can we talk?”
Georgiana felt the blood rush to her face and a painful ache that shot from her throat to her groin. She nodded and took him back to her apartment. As soon as the door closed they began to kiss. She met his lips hungrily with her own, tears streamed down her face, but she didn’t stop. She cried and kissed him and pulled off her shirt and her bra and her pants. He kissed her neck and her stomach and lay her across the bed and went down on her. She was overwhelmed by him, by getting to touch him when she was so sure she never would again. He entered her and she kissed him again, and then they finished and lay spent and silent in her bed as the sun set. They ate cheese and crackers for dinner like invalids and slept curled together in a knot, and Georgiana felt it was the first time she had truly rested in a week.
Soon it was as though nothing had changed, but something had. In a strange way there was a new intensity and seriousness between them. They stopped playing tennis together—it felt like a waste of time when they could be alone—and instead they spent hours and hours in bed. Brady was tender with her, combing her hair from her eyes, sometimes looking at her like he was afraid she was going to melt away beneath him. It was impossible to know how it might end. Would Brady leave Amina? Would Georgiana spend her entire youth desperately in love with a man whose heart resided thousands of miles away? They never spoke of it. When they were together Georgiana was too afraid of breaking the spell and watching him vanish like smoke.
Brady’s apartment didn’t feel like another woman’s apartment. The first time Georgiana went over she was nervous, sure there would be a dresser covered in perfume bottles, framed photos on a shelf, tampons and makeup in the bathroom. And while there were tampons under the sink, it was not the home of a woman. It was Brady’s. Full of maps and thick rugs that he bought in Morocco, a brass Buddha from Cambodia, a neat row of basketball sneakers and running shoes by the door. His refrigerator was full of beer and hot sauce, a bicycle hung from the wall, his bed was made with a neat blue coverlet, and his bedside table was stacked with biographies. Georgiana wondered how it had looked before Amina moved out. Did they have wedding china she took to Seattle? A set of champagne flutes? A crystal cake stand that no single, takeout-eating man would ever think to buy for himself? She wondered if the apartment in Seattle bore traces of Brady, if there was a stick of Old Spice, a razor, a box of condoms.
She couldn’t bring herself to think about that part. The fact that the person she loved was also having sex with someone else. They knew better than to discuss it, but it was a certainty she lived with. When Brady came home from a weekend in Seattle, she had to bite her tongue, had to pinch herself to keep from thinking about him lying on top of his wife, kissing her face and holding her hand, both of them slick with sweat.
Sometimes Georgiana felt she was trying to memorize Brady, preparing for him to disappear and leave her dreaming about the small freckles on his back. But other times it felt like their future together stretched out before them, and she saw Brady trying it out and flirting with that vision of life. They had discovered that they both liked to sleep the same way, with the big and second toe of one foot locked around the Achilles above the other foot’s heel. “If we had babies I bet they’d like to sleep that way too,” Brady said.
“If we had babies they would be pretty great athletes.” Georgiana smiled.
“I’d want them to have your hair.”
“I’d want them to have your face.”
“I’d want them to have your breasts.”
“That might be awkward if they were boys. Tiny little baby boys with a woman’s breasts.”
“I would love them anyway,” Brady promised solemnly. “Our tiny little baby boys with beautiful breasts and long brown hair and man faces with five o’clock shadows.”
When Amina came to visit, and Georgiana couldn’t spend the weekend with Brady, her entire body thrummed with misery. She went to dinner with Kristin and Lena and tried to listen as they discussed Kristin’s boss, who was always wearing AirPods in meetings; she played tennis with her mother at the Casino and they had lunch afterward at the apartment, sitting silently as her mother read Cord’s Yale alumni magazine with a highlighter, looking for the offspring of social acquaintances. When Darley asked about Brady, Georgiana shrugged, mumbling something about things petering out. She couldn’t tell her sister that Brady was married, couldn’t tell her that she was knowingly sleeping with someone’s husband.
On Monday Georgiana awoke happy: Amina was leaving and Brady belonged to her again. When she passed him in the hall on the way to the library, he reached out and squeezed her arm and they grinned at each other like idiots before swiftly scurrying along in opposite directions.
Now that Georgiana was listening, Amina was everywhere. At lunch Brady’s friends from the first floor mentioned Seattle all the time in conversation; they referred to him in the second person plural, asking, “Are you guys going back to Maine for Memorial Day?” or “Are you guys leasing that Prius?” Their colleagues knew Brady so well, while Georgiana felt they barely even knew her name.
Nobody at the office ever asked Georgiana’s weekend plans or even commented on a new sweater. They were friendly, but they weren’t her friends. It was mind-boggling in some ways. She had grown up in Brooklyn, in this very neighborhood, and yet the men and women in her office barely resembled those she knew in her real life. While her parents played golf, her coworkers did yoga. While her parents and their friends vacationed in Florida, her coworkers vacationed in Ecuador and Costa Rica. It was BMW versus Subaru, Whole Foods versus farmers market, shiny wingtips versus Birkenstocks with socks. There was one woman named Sharon, who worked on the first floor. Sharon had short gray hair—not fashionable icy gray but the yellowish gray of the unkempt; she wore linen that always seemed to be wrinkled and creased around her waist and armpits; and she was frequently coming up and giving people unsolicited back rubs. Georgiana knew she was a nice person, and yet she found herself waiting with vague horror for Sharon to finish rubbing her shoulders and move on to someone else. There was another woman, Mary, who had a glossy blond bob and always smelled of French perfume but exclusively wore clothing she had bought in Nepal—silk harem pants with a dropped crotch and embroidered tops. She wore a pin on her jacket that said free tibet and had a small plastic Buddha with a cell phone on her desk. There were men with long, gray ponytails and small John Lennon glasses. There were women Georgiana’s age with pierced septums and astrological tattoos. Georgiana would no sooner get a tattoo than shave her head.
While it would be easy to attribute her lack of work friends to cultural difference, it was also because of Brady. How could she entertain a real friendship when her entire work life was a charade, the exact place she needed to be most careful, the nexus of her and Brady’s terrible secret? Ever since the conference in D.C. she felt that Meg on the grant-writing team was trying to befriend her. When Meg saw her at the lunch table, she sat next to her; they chatted amiably about Meg’s deadlines, about Meg’s schedule, about Meg’s upcoming trip to Pakistan. Typically, only project managers were on-site, but they were competing for a massive new ten-year grant in women’s health from USAID, so Meg was going along to get a leg up on the proposal. It would be her first time in-country, her first time in the Middle East, a huge step for her career. It did not go unnoticed by Georgiana that they only talked about Meg at these lunches, but in some ways that made the friendship easier. Georgiana didn’t have to squirm when discussing her weekend plans (“Oh, I plan to have sex four times and eat Thai food naked with our colleague, Brady, remember him?”). Georgiana knew that her relationship with Brady was creating little barriers between her and her other friends too. Lena and Kristin thought she’d broken up with him when she found out about his wife. She lied when she was spending Saturday nights with him, claiming that she was helping babysit Poppy and Hatcher, that she was tired, that she was not in the mood to go out. They worried she was depressed and tried to talk her into joining them, but she closed them out and silenced her phone. Lying to Darley was logistically easier, since Darley was too busy with her kids to beg her to go to any parties on weekends, but the shame she felt knowing how much Darley would disapprove made her preemptively annoyed at her sister. Just because Darley was lucky enough to have met the love of her life in business school didn’t mean it was that simple for the rest of the world. It was easy to feel high and mighty about the sanctity of marriage when you’d never fallen deeply and painfully in love with the wrong person.
When Georgiana found out Brady was going on the Pakistan trip, she was irritated. “Weren’t you just gone?” she asked with a vague whine in her voice.
“I haven’t been on a project in months. It’s the best part of the job—getting out in the field.”
“How long do you think you’ll be there?”
“Probably a month?”
“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Georgiana pouted.
“Then count yourself lucky.” Brady kissed her on the nose. “Put WhatsApp on your phone and we can talk all the time.”
The weekend before Brady left, they barely got out of bed. They laughed and joked that they were sex camels, storing up all the sex they could in their humps before Brady went off to the desert. On Sunday when Georgiana came out of the shower, Brady guiltily hid something behind his back.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m writing you notes,” he admitted. “I’m going to hide them all around your apartment so that you find them while I’m away. Now either close your eyes or go back into the bathroom.”
Georgiana grinned and retreated to the bathroom to comb her hair in front of the mirror, listening to Brady move around her living room, lifting pillows and opening and closing drawers. That night after he left, she found one in the pantry, taped to the bread, that said, “You have nice buns.”
Four days after Georgiana kissed Brady goodbye, the company founder called an all hands meeting in the second-floor dining room. When Georgiana walked in, she could immediately tell something terrible had happened. People looked stricken, confused. Sharon, the receptionist, was clutching a tissue and wiping her nose as tears leaked down from behind her glasses. Somehow, Georgiana knew. It was about Brady. She could feel it whoosh through her, a cold pain that shot down her arms, shot through her stomach. The founder’s voice cracked as he spoke, a sob caught in his throat. He told them that Meg from grant writing, a project manager named Divya, and Brady had boarded a flight from Lahore in the east of Pakistan, bound for Karachi. The pilot reported technical difficulties, and the plane turned to go back to Lahore. Thirty-five miles outside the city the plane crashed. There were no survivors.
When Georgiana heard the words “no survivors,” she had to put her hand against the wall to steady herself. Her vision narrowed to a tiny pin of light, and the floor seemed to go sideways under her feet. She felt the old wallpaper against her palm and stood in the dark, unsure if she was standing or falling. When the pinprick opened back up and she could see again, all around her people held hands to their mouths in horror. Georgiana couldn’t look at anyone. She couldn’t go back to her desk. She quietly walked down the stairs and through the foyer and out onto the street. She didn’t know where she was going.
Brady had died. His body, his freckled back, the toes he slept with latched to his ankle were all burned to ash somewhere Georgiana had never seen, would likely never go. She would never hold him again; she would never be able to see his face or kiss his mouth or even mourn over the body she had worshipped with such fervor. She stumbled up the stone steps of her childhood home and used her keys to get in. She was crying too hard to breathe or see, and she dropped her bag in the hall outside her room and crawled into her closet. She pulled her clothing from the hangers and buried her face in the musty fabric until she couldn’t breathe. She kicked at the wooden beaver she had hidden. She had been a child, a stupid child, but Brady had seen her. Her love for him had filled her with shame, but also with a power that burned hot and bright. And now he was gone, and she would never feel that power again.
Georgiana cried until her stomach ached, until she could no longer see, until her face was swollen and her skin was mottled. She didn’t know how many hours had passed when she heard a thump on the stairs and slowly the closet door opened. It was Sasha.
“Georgiana, what happened? Are you all right?”
“I did something terrible,” said Georgiana. And she told her.
