She’ll leave her phone here so they can’t track her. If they ask, she’ll say she went to see a friend, though Will is more Gust’s friend than hers. His best friend. Harriet’s godfather. She hasn’t seen him in months, but during the divorce, he said to call if she ever needed him.
The cameras shouldn’t detect any suspicious behavior. She doesn’t change into a dress or comb her hair or apply makeup or put on earrings. She has faint stubble on her legs and underarms. She’s wearing a loose red T-shirt with holes and denim cutoffs. She slips on a green windbreaker and sandals. She looks like a woman who can’t be bothered, a woman with little to offer. The last woman Will dated was a trapeze artist. But she doesn’t want to date Will, she reminds herself, and she’ll return at a decent hour. She just needs company.
* * *
By any reasonable estimate, he shouldn’t be home on a Saturday night. Will is thirty-eight and single, an avid online dater in a city without many bachelors his age. Women adore his gentle demeanor; his tightly curled black hair, now flecked with gray; his thick beard; the pelt of chest hair that he jokingly claims is evidence of his virility. He wears his hair tall at the crown, and with his tiny wire glasses and long nose and deep-set eyes, he resembles a Viennese scientist from the turn of the twentieth century. He’s not as handsome as Gust, has a softer body and a high voice, but Frida has always loved his attention. If he’s not home, she’ll consider herself lucky. She’s not sure she remembers the cross street or the house number, somewhere on Osage between Forty-Fifth and Forty-Sixth, but desperation is its own beacon, leading her to the correct block, to a parking space a few doors down from Will’s apartment in West Philly, where he rents the first floor of a crumbling Victorian in Spruce Hill. His lights are on.
They used to joke about his crush on her. The time he told her, in front of Gust, “If it doesn’t work out with this guy…” She recalls his compliments as she climbs his front steps and rings the bell. The way he’d touch the small of her back. The way he flirted when she wore red lipstick. As she hears footsteps, she feels hope and despair and a surge of wildness, a terrible wildness that she thought was gone forever. There’s nothing alluring about her except her sadness, but Will likes his women sad. She and Gust used to chastise him about his terrible taste. His broken birds. An aspiring mortician. A stripper with an abusive ex-boyfriend. The cutters and poets with their bottomless wells of need. He’s trying to make better choices, but she hopes he’s still capable of one last mistake.
He answers the door, smiles at her, bewildered.
“I can explain,” she says.
They used to tell him that he’d never land a decent woman if he kept living like a college boy. There’s a visible layer of dog hair on the couch and carpet, only one working lamp in the living room, piles of newspapers and mugs, shoes kicked off in the doorway, change strewn across the coffee table. Will is on his third advanced degree, a PhD in cultural anthropology, after master’s degrees in education and sociology and a brief stint in Teach For America. He’s been in the doctoral program at Penn for nine years, plans to stretch it to ten if he can get funding.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” he says. “I would have—”
Frida tells him not to worry. Everyone’s standards are different, and if she had standards or scruples, she wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t say yes to a bowl of lentil stew or a glass of red wine, wouldn’t sit down at his kitchen table and tell him, in rambling gushes, about her very bad day and the police station and losing custody and the men coming to her house and touching everything and installing cameras, how for the last few nights, she’s hidden under the covers so she has some privacy when she cries.
She waits for him to get angry on her behalf, or if not, to judge her and ask how she could have been so stupid, but he remains silent.
“Frida, I know. Gust told me.”
“What did he say? He must hate me.”
“No one hates you. He’s worried about you. I am too. I mean, he’s definitely pissed, but he doesn’t want these people messing with you. You need to tell him about this panopticon bullshit.”
“No. Please. You can’t tell him. I don’t have a choice. These people are like the fucking Stasi. My lawyer said this could take months. You should have heard the way they talked to me the other night.”
Will pours them more wine. “I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to call you.”