The Ten-Year Nap Read Online Free PDF

a honk of anxiety.
    Leo Buckner was a big, blunt, thickset man, a commercial litigator with curling black hair and a slightly flattened, dazed face like a boxer. Right away in the beginning, after they met at the law firm, when they lay together after sex in the wet fluency of love and unalloyed joy, they sometimes wandered into rudimentary conversations about money: how much they each made and how much they hoped to make eventually. Neither came from a family with a great deal of money. Leo’s father had run a magazine stand in the lobby of an office building, and his mother had been a housewife. Though this was very different from Amy’s own childhood, spent with her sisters and their novelist mother and economics professor father, financially it wasn’t really that different at all. There had never been much money in evidence in the Lambs’ house, or at least what there had been was buried in plain sight, allowing the family to take annual trips to France, where they stayed in bad hotels and rented a Citroën that Henry Lamb, in a madras shirt, drove tensely along twisting mountain roads. The Lambs had been neither rich nor poor, and their money had quietly moved across their life.
    But that was back during a reasonable time. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the cost of everything was high and the relative worth of everyone had become public information. Money, unlike in the past, always showed itself in full. Amy Lamb and Leo Buckner lived with their son in this huge, homely rental building with a high turnover rate on the east side of the city. The awning read “The Rivermere,” though their avenue was situated near no river. The names of her friends’ buildings—the ones whose owners or management companies had had the vanity or energy to name them—mostly made no sense, either. One friend lived in The Cardiff, another in The Chanticleer. The lobby of The Rivermere was a virtual wind tunnel, so that the elevators occasionally had to be pried open, and the apartments were marbled and bright, ringed by big square windows that looked out upon the expanse of the city. The top floor of the building held the playroom where, when Mason was younger, he used to waddle through the carpeted space that, no matter how many air fresheners had been slapped onto the walls, retained an ambient diaper stink. Mothers and nannies sat on the carpeted window ledges, bored, calm, flipping through magazines or children’s clothing catalogues from Vermont, or else lightly chatting and trying not to inhale too deeply.
    When Amy and Leo had first moved in, the playroom had been a big draw. Of course, back then Amy had imagined in some deluded way that Mason would use that playroom forever. She’d pictured him as an eternal toddler, someone she could sit near and keep an eye on and occasionally take to a museum in the rain to see the Magrittes. She had not really understood that he would get older and tramp off into the world, and that the playroom would eventually go unused by him, taken over instead by a new generation of babies, who waddled and crawled and licked and grabbed and sat stunned in that sunlit, shit-tinged aerie.
    New York City was an island unreachable by most people in America, and somehow even the taint of horror and fear that had fallen over it in 2001 had given it a dented, temporary quality that made it seem even more valuable, in the way that fragility always increases the price of a thing of beauty. They had rented their apartment in its bulky, unbeautiful fortress at the height of Leo’s flushness as a lawyer. The Rivermere was for young families moving rapidly forward; no one was expected to stay in these overpriced rented apartments for years and years, and yet Amy and Leo weren’t able to buy an apartment elsewhere and leave.
    There were always alternatives to this kind of draining urban life. If you were determined to stay in the area, you could move to one of the other boroughs, as all the