Page 78 of Still Me
Her resentment at the relentless charity circuit had grown ever greater. She had stopped trying to be nice to the other women, Michael told me, in whispers over snatched coffees in the kitchen. She just sat, beautiful and sullen, waiting for each event to be over. “I guess you can’t blame her, given how bitchy they’ve been to her. But it’s driving him a little nuts. It’s important for him to have, well, if not a trophy wife, someone who’s at least prepared to smile occasionally.”
Mr. Gopnik looked exhausted by work and by life in general. Michael told me things at the office were difficult. A huge deal to prop up a bank in some emerging economy had gone wrong and they were all working around the clock to try to save it. At the same time—or perhaps because of it—Nathan said Mr. Gopnik’s arthritis had flared up and they were doing extra sessions to keep him moving normally. He took a lot of pills. A private doctor saw him twice a week.
“I hate this life,” Agnes said to me, as we walked across the park afterward. “All this money he gives away and for what? So we can sit four times a week and eat dried-up canapés with dried-up people. And so these dried-up women can bitch about me.” She stopped for a minute and looked back at the building and I saw that her eyes had filled with tears. Her voice dropped. “Sometimes, Louisa, I think I cannot do this anymore.”
“He loves you,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
She wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand and shook her head, as if she were trying to rid herself of the emotion. “I know.” She smiled at me, and it was the least convincing smile I’d ever seen. “But it is a long time since I believed love solved everything.”
On impulse, I stepped forward and hugged her. Afterward I realized I couldn’t say whether I’d done it for her or myself.
—
It was shortly before the Thanksgiving dinner that the idea first occurred to me. Agnes had refused to get out of bed all day, faced with a mental-health charity do that evening. She said she was too depressed to attend, apparently refusing to see the irony.
I thought about it for as long as it took me to drink a mug of tea, and then I decided I had little to lose.
“Mr. Gopnik?” I knocked on his study door and waited for him to invite me in.
He looked up, his pale blue shirt immaculate, his eyes dragged downward with weariness. Most days I felt a little sorry for him, in the way that you can feel sorry for a caged bear while maintaining a healthy and slightly fearful respect for it.
“What is it?”
“I—I’m sorry to bother you. But I had an idea. It’s something I think might help Agnes.”
He leaned back in his leather chair and signaled to me to close the door. I noticed there was a lead glass tumbler of brandy on his desk. That was earlier than usual.
“May I speak frankly?” I said. I felt a little sick with nerves.
“Please do.”
“Okay. Well, I couldn’t help but notice Agnes is not as, um, happy as she might be.”
“That’s an understatement,” he said quietly.
“It seems to me that a lot of her issues relate to being plucked from her old life and not really integrating with her new one. She told me she can’t spend time with her old friends because they don’t really understand her new life, and from what I’ve seen, well, a lot of the new ones don’t seem that keen to be friends with her either. I think they feel it would be... disloyal.”
“To my ex-wife.”
“Yes. So she has no job, and no community. And this building has no real community. You have your work, and people around you you’ve known for years, who like you and respect you. But Agnes doesn’t. I know she finds the charity circuit particularly hard. But the philanthropic side of things is really important to you. So I had an idea.”
“Go on.”
“Well, there’s this library up in Washington Heights which is threatened with closure. I’ve got all the information here.” I pushed my file across his desk. “It’s a real community library, used by all different nationalities and ages and types of people, and it’s absolutely vital for the locals that it stays open. They’re fighting so hard to save it.”
“That’s an issue for the city council.”
“Well, maybe. But I spoke to one of the librarians and she said that in the past they’ve received individual donations that have helped keep them going.” I leaned forward. “If you just went there, Mr. Gopnik, you’d see—there are mentoring programs and mothers keeping their children warm and safe and people really trying to make things better. In a practical way. And I know it’s not as glamorous as the events you attend—I mean, there’s not going to be a ball there, but it’s still charity, right? And I thought maybe... well, maybe you could get involved. And even better, if Agnes got involved she could be part of a community. She could make it her own project. You and she could do something amazing.”
“Washington Heights?”
“You should go there. It’s a very mixed area. Quite different from... here. I mean some bits of it are gentrified but this bit—”
“I know Washington Heights, Louisa.” He tapped his fingers on the desk. “Have you spoken to Agnes about this?”
“I thought I should probably mention it to you first.”
He pulled the file toward him and flicked it open. He frowned at the first sheet—a newspaper cutting of one of the early protests. The second was a budget statement I had pulled from the city council’s website, showing its latest financial year.
