Page 59 of Dirty Diana
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Emmy wakes me up in the morning by jumping on my bed, and I immediately regret drinking so much. My head feels like it’s stuffed with wool. Oliver must have come home when I was fast asleep and is already up and out of bed. I pull on my robe, reminding Emmy to be quiet when we pass Raleigh’s room so she can sleep in.
But Raleigh’s already up, too, sitting with Oliver at the kitchen table, both of them red-faced and sweaty. “You didn’t tell me Oliver was a runner.”
“I’m just starting again. Please. I could barely keep up.” Oliver refills her water.
“Well, I was grateful for the company. Thank you.” She gets up and pours me a cup of coffee. When she hands it to me, she pulls me into a hug. “But you’re the revelation,” she whispers in my ear.“Dirty Diana.”
I give her a squeeze, and when she pulls away, there are happy tears in her eyes. “I’m going to pack up and stay with my sister. She just kicked out her loser boyfriend, thank god, so it’s perfect timing. She’s a little kooky, if you can believe it—” Raleigh smiles, giving Oliver and me permission to laugh politely. “But at least we can wallow in heartache together.”
Chapter 18
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Most mornings, arriving at work is like walking onto the set of a cozy sitcom. Every setup is the same, every scene routine and consistent. When the elevator doors open on my floor, I’m greeted by familiar sounds: morning pleasantries, assistants typing, and somewhere, a printer jamming. Endless phone-ringing. The reception area smells like it always does, like lilies and lemon furniture polish. And still, despite how always-the-same it is, I feel a tiny flicker of shock every day that I’ve worked here for more than a decade.
This morning, I dropped off Emmy, and then on a whim stopped by Oliver’s favorite café. The one with the espresso he likes and that always has a line down the block. They take a painstaking amount oftime making each drink and no amount of people waiting makes them move any faster.
When we were dating, I would’ve waited in a line three times as long to buy Oliver coffee and a warm scone. Standing there, I think of all the little things neither of us do for each other anymore. Somewhere along the line, after Emmy was born, it was as if we made a silent pact—like we’d looked into each other’s overwhelmed faces, over the head of a newborn baby or maybe it was a tantrummy toddler, and quietly made a deal not to expect the small gestures. Like we said,Hey, I know you’re just hanging on, let’s do our best.Or maybe we never made that deal. Maybe Oliver has been quietly calculating the debt that my lack of small gestures is racking up, steadily building resentment. But where have his small gestures been? Have they not been there or have I just not noticed them? Has he betrayed me or have we both been playing by a completely different set of self-invented rules? When the barista hands over the coffee, I remind myself that I want to be the kind of woman who waits in long lines to make her husband smile.
I find Oliver’s assistant, Cara, at the copier. I feel terrible that one of the two coffees in my hand isn’t for her.
“Have you seen Oliver?”
Cara cuts her eyes in the direction of Allen’s glass-walled office, and when I turn the corner I see Oliver in there. He’s getting chewed out by his father while people in the cubicles out front try not to stare. Allen stands and strides over to Oliver, towering over him, still yelling. Oliver’s shoulders collapse. He does a lot of nodding but I can tell he’s somewhere else. I should have predicted this. I’ve noticed him absent from meetings and slow to respond on email, not returning clients’ calls. His head is clearly somewhere else, one of the only things we currently have in common.
When Allen finally sits back down behind his desk, Oliver rises and shuffles toward the door.
I follow him into his office. “What happened?”
“I fell behind,” Oliver answers quietly.
“How behind?” Our clients are wealthy and spoiled. Keeping any of them waiting never goes well.
“Very.”
“I can help.” I hand him a lukewarm latte.
“This isn’t your fault. I can do it.”
“The Aldon estate?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, good, I know the account. Let me help. What’s our deadline?”
“Yesterday.”
Shit. “No problem. We’ll get it done.”
“Diana, there’s weeks’ worth of work. I fucked up.”
“My day is light. We’ll fix it.”
—
We work in silence for a few hours, wordlessly passing receipts, letters, forms, and invoices between us. In the quiet, I think about distracting Oliver with a funny story about Emmy or even telling him that I’m dreaming up a new project. But the idea feels too new.
