Then he kept walking.
11
I walked all the way home. I walked down Central Park West and circled through Columbus Circle, winding down the Hudson River Greenway, all the way to Tribeca. It took me several hours. It wasn’t the first time I’d walked the city. But it might have been the first time I walked all that way focusing on the taxi lights twinkling in the circle past the Time Warner Center; the glittering lights of Chelsea Piers; the way Jersey actually looked pretty from across the river. I noticed all of it. It was as if one of those places held the answer to how to turn the last few days around—to get my career back—to find myself walking closer to Danny, as opposed to moving further away.
I walked into the apartment to hear the home phone ringing. No one in the world had the home line except for Danny. I felt a surge of relief run through me. I knew he wasn’t calling to say he forgave me, but maybe he was sorry he had been so hard on me. Which felt like an important start.
I picked up. “Danny?”
“No, it’s Sheila.”
Sheila. Our attorney. Danny’s words ran through my head. And the word I didn’t want to hear her say. Divorce.
I looked at the clock. “Sheila, can I call you tomorrow? It’s a little late.”
“It’s late because I’ve been trying the cell number I have for you all day but the voice mail is full. And no, it can’t wait until tomorrow. It’s urgent.”
“If by urgent you mean that you’re calling to say that Danny is filing for divorce, that’s the kind of urgent that definitely can wait until tomorrow.”
“He has not.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Because in New York State the law mandates a year of legal separation before filing. He has filed for that.”
“Great,” I said.
“But that’s not why I’m calling either,” Sheila said. “Are you aware your publisher has demanded that you repay the advance for your cookbook?”
Sheila was our personal attorney, not my business attorney. “How do you know that?”
“The money was deposited into a joint account that you share with Danny, and so we were sent a letter from the publisher that if he touched that money, he would be equally liable.”
I laughed. “That’s just bluster, Sheila. They’d have to sue to get the money, and Louis is never going to do that. That’ll take years and lawyers and he isn’t going to want to bother with all that. He is angry right now, but that’s not who he is. I’m telling you, he’ll calm down.”
“Either way, I advised Danny to give the money back.”
“Thank you for the loyalty.”
She
interrupted me, unimpressed. “. . . And he did.”
“He did what?”
“We transferred the funds this afternoon.”
I felt like I was going to pass out. That was all of our money. As in: Nothing left to pay the mortgage. Or the six-figure bill sitting on my credit card. “What’d you say?”
“I know that impacts your liquid wealth.”
“That was our liquid wealth.”
“Not for long,” she said. “There has been an offer on the apartment. And the buyer, who is being quite generous, wants to take possession immediately.”
I looked around the apartment—the last bit of solace I had. “That’s not possible.”
“It’s going to have to be,” she said. “Danny wants to divide all joint assets as quickly as possible. And the apartment is the largest one.”