All Fall Down: A Novel Read online

  “My man,” said Dan, thumping Dave between his shoulders hard enough to dislocate something. “How’d this happen? How’d we get so goddamned old?” As much as I liked Barry, I disliked Dan. Dan managed a consortium of parking garages that stretched from Center City to the Northeast and did what I thought was extortionate business, charging someone (me, for example) eighteen dollars for half an hour’s worth of time spent at Twentieth and Chestnut so she (I) could run into the Shake Shack for a cheeseburger and a milkshake. He and Dave had been fraternity brothers at Rutgers, and Dan was the kind of guy I could picture sitting on his frat house’s balcony, watching girls as they walked along the quad and holding up cards rating them from one to ten; the kind of guy who took it as a personal affront when a woman larger than his all-but-anorexic wife had the nerve to show herself in public.

  Said wife, Marie, gave Dave a peck on the cheek and mustered a weak smile for me. Marie was the kind of lady the Dans of the world ended up with: eight years younger than her husband, slim of hip and large of bosom. The hair that fell halfway down her back was thickened by extensions, human hair glued to her own locks, then double-processed until it was a streaky blonde. “Two thousand dollars,” she’d once told me, raking her bony fingers through her tresses, “but it’s worth it, don’t you think?” Marie worked as an interior designer, although in my head, the word “work” came with air quotes. She had a degree in theater and had built sets for student and community-theater productions before she’d landed Dan. Now she spent her time redecorating her girlfriends’ beach houses. She’d drive down the Atlantic City Expressway to Ventnor or Margate or Avalon with her Mercedes SUV stuffed full of swatch books, fabrics and trims and fringes, squares of wallpaper and samples of paint. Marie had offered to give me a consultation about our place after we’d bought it, and I’d been putting her off as gracefully as I could, knowing that eventually, for the sake of Dave and Dan’s friendship, Marie and her swatches would be a regular fixture in my life, and that I, too, would end up with shelves full of objets d’art, at least one statement mirror, one red-painted wall, and prints that had been chosen because they matched the furniture.

  “Should we open up the Beaujolais?” asked Barry, who’d helped me choose the wine. Dan had another glass of white. Marie pulled a Skinnygirl margarita packet out of her purse and gave it to the waiter. “Did you get a lot of feedback from the story?” asked Janet, after our waitress distributed menus and ran down the specials.

  I eased my feet out of my shoes, wondering where to start as I recalled some of the choicest comments—Fat load and Feminazzi and This is why alpha men marry women from other countries. “I need another drink,” I announced. I said it without thinking about it, and certainly without thinking about the quiz I’d taken in the doctor’s office, or the pills I’d been downing all day. Nobody looked shocked. In fact, nobody seemed to hear me.

  “I thought the story came out great,” said Barry. I glanced to my left, where Dave was sitting, and wondered if he’d heard. If he knew about the story, he hadn’t said anything to me yet.

  “The comments were a real treat.” As if by magic, my wineglass was full again. I lifted it and sipped.

  “Oh, God, do not tell me you actually read the comments!” Janet cried. “Please. How many times have I told you? You lose brain cells every time you read one.”

  “I know,” I said, nibbling at an olive. Certainly I did know how bad online comments were—I’d read enough of them, in stories about celebrities and politicians. But why me? Who was I hurting? Why even bother going after me?

  “Seems like it’s been good for business,” Barry offered. “Your post today got a ton of hits.”

  I managed a faint smile. I’d written a new version of my apology—sorry for offending you, sorry for the nerve of showing up unairbrushed, unretouched, looking like your mom or your sister or maybe even you.

  “You read it?” I was touched.

  “I read everything Janet tells me to read.” He leaned across the table to brush a kiss on Janet’s cheek.

  “As if,” she said, coloring prettily. Janet had confided once that Barry believed she was seriously out of his league, all because the guy she’d dated before him had been a professional athlete. “Never mind that he was a benchwarmer for the Eagles who got cut after three games, and that we only went out once,” Janet said. That single date had been enough to convince Barry that Janet was a prize above rubies. He treated her with a kind of reverence that might have been funny, if he hadn’t taken it so seriously. Janet never drove the car when they were together, never pumped gas, never lifted anything heavier than a five-pound bag of flour, and Barry never questioned her spending—on pricy shoes, on designer handbags, on a cleaning lady who came five days a week, meaning that the only housework Janet was responsible for was hand-washing her own bras, a task she refused to entrust to anyone else.

  “He loves me more than I love him,” she’d told me one morning while our kids splashed in her parents’ pool and we ate the bagels we’d bought, still warm, on South Street.

  “Really?” I’d asked.

  “I think, in every couple, there’s one who loves the other one more. In our case it’s Barry.” She looked at me from behind her fashionably gigantic sunglasses. “How about Allison and Dave? What’s the history?”

  I hadn’t answered right away. Dave and I had met when we were both in our late twenties. He’d been newly hired at the Examiner, where I’d worked since I’d graduated from Franklin & Marshall with a degree in graphic design. I’d always loved drawing and painting. When I was a teenager, every artist I discovered became my favorite for a few days or weeks or months. I fell in love with Monet’s dreamy pastel gardens, Modigliani’s attenuated lines, the muscular swirls of van Gogh’s stars, the way a Kandinsky or a Klimt could echo inside me like a piece of music or the taste of something delicious.

  I loved looking at art. I loved painting. But I’d been realistic about the world and my own talents, and susceptible to my father’s influence. “It’s good to have a skill you can depend on,” he’d told me during one drive into the city, where I was taking a figure study class at Moore College. My parents supported my dreams, but only up to a point. They’d paid for classes, for paints and canvas; they’d attended all my student shows and even sent me to art camp for two summers, where I had a chance to blow glass and try printmaking and animation, but they let me know, explicitly and in more subtle ways, that most artists couldn’t make a living at art, and that they had no intention of supporting me once I was an adult.

  Graphic design was a way to indulge my love of color and proportion, my desire to make something beautiful, or at least functional, to see a project through from start to finish, and still have a more or less guaranteed paycheck.

  So I’d gone to Franklin & Marshall and studied art and art history, supplementing my courses in drawing and sculpture with summer courses in video and layout and graphic design. The Examiner had come to a recruiting session on campus; I’d dropped off my résumé, then gone to the city for an interview, then gotten hired, at a salary that was higher than anything I had the right to expect. At twenty-two, with an apartment in Old City, I’d been the pretty young thing, with a wardrobe from H&M and the French Connection and a few good pieces from Saks, a gym membership, a freezer full of Lean Cuisine, and a panini press that I used to make eggs in the morning and sandwiches at night.

  After almost six years on the job, I’d met Dave. He had graduated summa from Rutgers and started his career at a small paper in a New York City suburb in New Jersey, where he’d covered five local school districts. After his second year there, he’d exposed how a school superintendent and the head of the school board were colluding to raise the superintendent’s salary. By his third year, he’d won a statewide prize for his stories about how the Democratic Party was paying homeless men and women to fill out absentee ballots. Then, at the Examiner, I’d been tapped to design graphics for his series about the mayor’s race
, fitting together the text elements with pictures and, online, with video.

  “Hey, thanks,” he’d said, bending over in front of my oversized screen as I’d shown him my first draft. “That’s really great.” Unlike most of the other, dressed-down reporters, he wore a crisp, ironed shirt and a tie. He smelled good, when I was close enough to notice, and I’d already appreciated his slender-hipped, broad-shouldered body and imagined myself folded against the solidity of his chest. He’d smiled at me—white teeth, beard-shadowed cheeks. “Can I buy you a snack item?” He’d walked me out into the hall to the vending machine, where I’d selected a bag of pretzels and he’d bought himself a bottled water, and we sat in the empty stairwell, exchanging first names, then work histories. The conversation flowed naturally into an invitation to meet at a bar the next night. Drinks became dinner at Percy Street Barbecue, where we sat over plates of ribs and Mason jars of spiked lemonade, talking about our parents, our schools, which bones we’d broken (his leg, my wrist), and our shared love of Dire Straits and Warren Zevon. We’d both been startled when our waiter had cruised by our table to announce that it was last call. We’d talked from six o’clock that night until two in the morning.

  Within a week, we were a couple. I imagined he’d only get more successful as time went by. Neither of us believed that newspapers were going anywhere or that, eventually, my funny, dashed-off blog posts would be more valuable than his ability to wrest a great (or damning) quote out of a politician or a criminal, to write fast on deadline, to think of witty headlines and slyly funny photo captions, or to bide his time for months, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, gathering documents, hunting down sources, doing the kind of reporting the Examiner ended up not being able to afford anymore. He would be the breadwinner, I would be the homemaker . . . only now, as I looked at him, with his eyes the same shade as Ellie’s and the circles that had been underneath them since her birth, I marveled at how everything had changed, and wondered if our marriage could survive it.

  • • •

  “Ma’am?” I blinked. The waitress stared down at me, pen and pad in hand. Somehow, my wineglass was empty. I’d had an oyster—Dan had ordered two dozen of them—and a single slice of bread, but nothing else.

  “Oh . . . um . . .” I fumbled for my menu, doing the quickstep between what I wanted (scalloped potatoes and slow-roasted pork shoulder) and what I should allow myself (steamed asparagus, grilled salmon). I settled on the stuffed pork chop.

  “Very good,” she said, and vanished. I turned back to Janet, who was gossiping with Dave and Barry about whether the pretty twenty-four-year-old pre-K teacher with the tattoos we could sometimes glimpse under the sleeves of her vintage blouses had actually worn nipple rings to Parents’ Night.

  The food arrived. I used my heavy steak knife to slice into the glistening meat. A puddle of juice pooled underneath the pork chop. I squeezed my eyes shut and made myself nibble a tiny sliver.

  “Not hungry?” Janet asked. She’d ordered the pork shoulder dish with a lot of garlic—per its name, Cochon was heavy on the pig—and the smell was making me queasy.

  “I think I already drank my calories,” I said. The truth was, I hadn’t been hungry much lately, a strange situation for a girl who’d always loved her food. Nothing looked good, and the effort of purchasing groceries, preparing a meal, setting the table, and washing the dishes seemed monumental. I’d heat up organic chicken nuggets for Eloise and keep the freezer stocked with Trader Joe’s heat-and-eat meals that Dave could prepare on the nights I was stuck at my computer, writing or editing or interacting with Ladiesroom’s readers. For myself, I’d grab a yogurt or a bowl of cereal. The irony of the Internet comments was that I was thinner now than I’d been in years, but I didn’t look good, and I knew it. My complexion had taken on a grayish undertone; my flesh—even if there wasn’t as much as usual—seemed to sag and hang.

  Janet touched my arm. I looked up, startled. We were good friends, but neither of us was the touchy-feely type. “Are you okay?” she asked quietly.

  I bent my head. “I’m scared,” I said quietly.

  “Of what?” Janet asked, looking worried. “What’s wrong?”

  “Hey, honey, can we get that Pinot down here?” Dan asked. I reached out and managed only to knock the bottle onto the floor. There were gasps, a flurry of fast motion, Skinny Marie thrusting herself away from the spill like it was toxic. A waiter and a waitress hurried over with rags. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. Nobody appeared to hear me. “Oh, this’ll never come out of silk,” Marie was fretting, and Janet was asking, “Could you bring us some club soda, please?” and Barry was patting Marie’s back, saying “No big deal,” and, from the other side of the table, Dave was looking at me with his eyes narrowed and his lips compressed.

  “It was an accident,” I said. My voice came out too loud, almost a shout.

  “It’s okay.” Dave sounded cool. “It happens.” Which, of course, was what we said to Ellie when she wet the bed.

  Eventually, the tablecloth got changed and the worst of the damage was mopped up. Marie had returned from the ladies’ room, where she’d fled with a carafe of club soda and an offended look on her face, and I’d apologized half a dozen times, my face hot as a griddle, wilting underneath my husband’s disapproval. I’d just tried to restart the conversation, asking Janet and Barry about the twins’ hockey season, a topic guaranteed to take up at least ten minutes of their time, when I heard Marie’s high-pitched voice from the opposite side of the table.

  “Did you all hear about that Everleigh Connor?” she asked. I looked up to see Dave pouring the last bit of the last bottle of red into his glass. Everleigh Connor was a reality-TV star who’d launched her career on one of those shows about the private lives of rich people—she’d been the teenage daughter of one of the face-lifted fortysomething moms who were the ostensible stars of the show. Then she’d appeared in a sex tape—she put out some statement about how the tape was a private memento she and her boyfriend had made that had been stolen from a safe in her house, but it was obvious that the tape had been made with a hired porn star, not a boyfriend, and that she, her mother, and their PR firm had managed every step of its release. From there, Everleigh had gotten and dumped a boyfriend in the NFL, landed a small role on a network drama, and had most recently become the Las Vegas bride of an eighteen-year-old pop star.

  “What happened?” I asked . . . Did my voice sound the tiniest bit slurry?

  Marie smiled. “You didn’t hear? OMG. It’s all over Twitter!”

  “What?” There. It was impossible to slur on words of one syllable. To reward myself for sounding coherent, I had another sip of wine.

  “She’s pregnant,” said Dave, directly to me.

  “They’re saying that she basically forced Alex to put a ring on it,” said Barry.

  Janet rolled her eyes. “My husband the twelve-year-old girl. ‘Put a ring on it,’ Bar? Really?”

  I looked down the table at my husband. He looked back at me, his eyes meeting mine, one eyebrow lifted, like he was daring me to say something.

  I felt as if I’d been slapped, having him give me that look, when I wasn’t the one sending dozens of chatty, flirty e-mails to someone who was not my spouse. I raised my chin, suddenly furious . . . and sober. Or at least it felt that way. “Honey, you should tell everyone about your big story. The one about the casino.” For months, Dave had been tracking down rumors about which consortium would be the next to put a casino in Philadelphia, about where they’d buy, what they’d build, which neighborhood could brace for the boom and the nuisance of dozens of buses loaded with slot-machine-playing, quarter-toting retirees and well-lubricated frat boys rolling through its streets each day.

  “Seriously, Dave-O, give me a tip,” said Dan. “We build a parking lot in the right place, we’re golden.”

  “Dave’s got all the best sources,” I said, my tongue loose and reckless. “Who’s that woman in the mayor’s office you’re always ta
lking with? Lindy someone?”

  From across the table I thought I saw my husband flinch, and saw hurt in his hooded eyes.

  “She’s a wonderful source, isn’t she?” I asked. “What’s the word . . . ‘forthcoming’? Is that it? You’re the word guy, right?” Janet was looking worried. Barry was, too. I got myself away from the table in a series of small steps: pushing my palms against the edge, unlocking my knees, levering myself upright, making my way carefully around my chair, squinting through the dimly lit restaurant past groups of laughing, red-faced men with empty bottles lining their tables, until I found the bathroom, a spacious stall for just one, thank God. I locked the door and, without turning on the lights, sat on the toilet and rested my cheek against the cool stainless steel of the toilet-paper dispenser, feeling stunned and empty and furious.

  There was a gentle tap at the door. “Allie?” Janet said, her voice a whisper. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “Just a little too much wine. I’ll be right out.” My heart was thudding; my temples were pounding. My purse was in my hands. My hands were in my purse. My new little blue friends were in their bottle. I shook one of them out into my palm, craving the comfort they would give me, the easing-toward-sleep feeling that would take away the scalding hurt, the shame of the way Dave had looked at me.

  Nobody knew this—not Janet, not my parents, not anyone—but after Dave and I had been dating for a little over a year, my period, typically regular, had failed to arrive. I was on the pill, and I’d always remembered to take it, but I knew, from my tender breasts to the way I woke up nauseated by the smell of coffee, what had happened. I’d freaked out and gone to Dave in a panic, watching his face turn pale and his lips tighten until they were almost invisible as I’d laid out the options: I could have the baby and place it for adoption. I could have the baby and raise it myself. Or we could get married.