The Ten-Year Nap Read Online Free PDF Page A

we’re doing now. And I could get used to it.”
    But they both knew that this wasn’t really true; the siren song of their own lives already quietly urged them back. They had taken their BlackBerries with them up here to this small spa in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and both of them had received text and voice messages from husbands and children, asking rudimentary household questions and sending electronic bursts of love and need. The weekend was a relief, but it also began to seem a little long. They had sat at a table in the balsam-paneled dining room, with the mountains visible like a sketch through the windows and the din of other women’s voices all around them. Sparse leaves of salad were strewn across plates as though blown there accidentally. A couple of women at a table in the corner were on a juice fast, sitting stoically before a decanter of sea-green fluid.
    “There are times,” said Jill from her bed that night, “when I feel as though Donald and Nadia are completely helpless. I know it’s mostly my fantasy, but I feel as if they can barely survive in my absence. That it’s like I’m leaving newborns.”
    Amy had nodded. In the span of ten years, this was actually the first time that Leo and Mason had ever been alone together for an entire weekend. Whenever they were supposed to go off for a few hours without her, she always dutifully sent them with the things they needed. They had come to understand that whatever they required would just magically appear before them. So when they became thirsty on an outing to the park, they reached into the cooler she had given them and pulled out a bottle of lurid blue or orange sports drink she had placed there. If Mason skidded on the ground and opened a window of skin on a knee, Leo could ferret around in the room-temperature compartment of the cooler and dig out the Band-Aids and the tube of antibiotic ointment that Amy had provided. She would pack provisions for an entire brutal winter if she had to. Always, her husband and her son would find them and use them, and always they would expect to find them.
    Now, in the apartment in the morning, the darkness of the hallway ran like a tributary into the living room, becoming a glazed pool of light at this early hour. The apartment was too expensive, but Amy took her cues from Leo, who attended to their finances in the tiny study, the place where her mother would sleep when she came to visit in the winter for her women’s conference. Leo often sat at the rudimentary desk that the catalogue called Sven, which housed all the bills and invoices in its pigeonholes. As long as Leo didn’t throw his hands up, saying, “We’re fucked,” then they could keep going on like this. Amy didn’t want to know all the specifics about their financial situation, or at least she preferred to clothe herself in a loose understanding of what they could and could not afford. The apartment was “a nightmare,” Leo sometimes said, and yet they managed. The spa weekend, however, had been “doable.” She often turned to him for such cryptic pronouncements and vague reassurances.
    Once she started looking with any depth at their money, she became anxious and quickly backed away from her own curiosity. She knew this was childlike and irresponsible, but it had become a habit. Money was one of the topics that had been quietly worked out over time in their marriage, just the way their sexual life had been too. In the beginning, they had been commendably open with each other, listing all the people they’d ever slept with. “Give me their names, I’ll kill them one by one,” Leo had told her, and to Amy’s surprise this had pleased her. They said what they liked and did not like in bed. Humiliated but brave, he had admitted that he liked his nipples “you know, sucked a little,” for starters. “I cannot believe I just used the word ‘nipples’ and ‘sucked’ to describe myself ,” he had then said, laughing with