All the performances were sold out, even this Thursday one, but she didn’t see him, not even when the lights came on at the end. She must have imagined his eyes on her.
The small cast got a long standing ovation and flowers. Larissa and Jared had made up, had come to a truce. She apologized, he bought her roses and chocolates. “Are we really not going out to dinner for Valentine’s Day?” It was like he couldn’t believe the confluence of events that would make the closing night of
Godot
fall on Valentine’s Day.
“How can we, Jared? The play is at seven, and at ten, we have the wrap party.” She told him they would go to dinner on Sunday; the celebration would be a day late. But on Sunday, they took the kids to Watchung Mountain and went sledding. They were gone all day, and in the evening as they were coming back, it was inconceivable that they should go back home, drop off the kids, and then go out to eat by themselves. It was already so late. They found a perfectly nice hibachi steakhouse in Mountainside and had a lovely family dinner with their chatty and tired children.
On Monday after Valentine’s Day, Kai had one hundred and forty-four red roses for Larissa at his place, twelve for each month he had known her. They were scattered around the room in twelve glass vases, on the nightstand, on the coffee table, on the counters, and two vases on the floor by her side of the bed. She now had a side of the bed, like she belonged here on Sunday morning. It was near the open window from where the distant oceans waved their salty winds into her gasping mouth.
They had a belated Valentine’s Day celebration of their own, with rainbow sushi, chocolate cherry-chunk ice cream, excellent espresso, another bottle of bubbly. They had love, not dry silent kisses, not sleep; they had wild fires and shining
naked unmasked storms. They tasted from flame-trees while cast out of Eden, but yet, oh but yet, why did it feel like bright and bitter Eden?
“Larissa,” Kai began, his excited eyes burning, his breath shallow. “On Route 66 there’s a town.” He rose on his elbow to look down into her face. The roses in vases framed his brown-blond head in red.
Why did she go numb in the fingers? She tried not to close her eyes, not to turn away.
“In Arizona, near Flagstaff, in between the mountains and the canyon, away from the desert and the forests, there is a little town.” He paused. “Not too far from the Canyon. Wouldn’t it be great to open a tour company? We’d make so much money. We’d buy a little bus, maybe a 1936 Yellowstone bus, with a tarp roof and a big old wheel in the back.”
“Buy it with what?”
“What do you think I’ve been doing with my commissions? Everything is in the bank. Anyway,” he went on, “we’d charge twenty bucks for a roll around the Grand Canyon. We’d go out three times a day, in the early morning, after lunch, and at sunset. Wouldn’t that be something?”
She didn’t say if it would be something. She said, “What happened to touring Jersey?” She wanted to mention the Second Watchung Mountain, and how the snow glinted, all packed down by sleds and snowboards and how Michelangelo beat his older brother in a race and thought it was the greatest day of his life.
Falling back on the bed, Kai flung his arms behind his head. “Nah. I want to ride my bike on the great prairies, in the distances between the seas.” He paused. “With you on my back.”
“Like a little monkey,” she said quietly.
His hands caressed her hips. Rolling over, he kissed her arm, the side of her breast. “Do you want to know the name of the town?”
“Is that the important thing?” She glanced at him. “The name of the town?”
“It’s not un-important. Names of towns define the life within. Summit. Mountainside. Paradise Falls. The one in Arizona happens to be called Pine Springs.” Kai smiled, his infectious toothy smile lighting up his face like Christmas windows. “Doesn’t that sound great?”
She didn’t know. She couldn’t say. There were plenty of pines in Jersey. Millions of them. Pine Barrens. There was the Great Swamp. There were springs in Jersey. No canyons, but there were mountains.
Love, sushi, coffee, cold Cristal, bare beautiful Kai. He was sheepish, wrenchingly endearing. “Larissa, hear me out, okay? I don’t want you to shake your head, or talk, or say anything.”
Not to worry, she wanted to say. I won’t shake my head or talk or say anything. Her voice was in her heart and her heart was in her stomach and couldn’t be heard from the black deep.
“The dude with the wife who ran into us on the street? Doug Grant? He was going on and on to me about his trip to the Australian outback.” Kai grinned. “Apparently, he went on a five-hour tour in saddle country near a place called Jindabyne, southwest past Canberra, near nowhere. He went in a modified Jeep.” Kai’s fingers were caressing her leg, down and up from the shank to the flank. “So it got me thinking. We could have a Jeep, a safari jungle Land Cruiser for cheap, and we’d take tourists out to the bush and narrate about the snakes and the land, and rocks, and some such.”
“What?” she breathed out.
He put a finger to her lips, jumping up into a lotus position, his face shining with excitement. “You said you wouldn’t say anything till you thought about it.”
“Thought about what? Australia? Are you kidding?”
“I’m not.”
“We know nothing about Australia.”
“We’d learn. And I know a little. What do you think I’ve been doing while waiting for you?”
“Obviously going insane.”
“Yes,” he said. “Insane for you. We’d go on a vagabond adventure. Canberra or Alice Springs, or a place in the outback, a wilderness called Mungo. Doesn’t that sound exotic, fantastic?” Kai squeezed her hands, brought his face down to them, kissed them, put his head into her lap. He was so close.
“Kai—”
His mouth was at her mouth, stopping her. “Ah, ah. You said you’d think about it, not speak about it. Come on, the Kai & Larissa Tour Company.” He laughed with joy. “Doesn’t that sound awesome?” He kissed her face, her hands, her lips. “Yes, my love,” he whispered. “Is that the grandest plan or what? I’ve saved a lot of money. You won’t have to worry about a thing. I’ve been salesman of the month for nearly a year. One more month, maybe two, and I’ll get my own Jag. I’m that good. Then we could sell it back, get another sixty, seventy grand. And you must have a little money, but even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. I’ll take care of us, and when our business starts making money—”
“Kai…”
“Yes?” The whites of his teeth, the whites of his eyes were inches from her stunned face. “Close your eyes and imagine it. Tell me you can’t. Tell me you can’t see it vividly?”
“Kai,” she said in a faltering, frightening voice that didn’t come from the voice box, but from somewhere deeper, from the small provenance of all life. “You own my heart, but…”
“There is no but after that,” Kai said. “
But
is not allowed after those words. You may speak only of love. I can’t believe I’m worthy enough to be loved by you, Larissa. I didn’t think I was worthy of much, of anything. But to have
you
, how much the gods must think of me. So please. Don’t say
but
.”
She said nothing. It was time to go. Michelangelo wasn’t going to pick himself up from school.
“What about my children, Kai?” she whispered, barely audible even to herself. The curtains were open, and through the open sunny windows she could hear King Street traffic near the railroad. It was cold. She was burning.
Lowering his gaze, he swallowed and raised his shoulders in a faint question. “Pine Springs then?” he said. “In Oregon, I have a buddy, Roland, who told me the Louis and Clark Trail winds through the forests to the ocean. We could do a sightseeing tour. That would be something. In Colorado, we could do skiing tours through the Rockies. I can’t ski to save my life, but so what? What about the Badlands? The Montana rivers? We could teach the tourists how to fly fish.”
“But fish don’t fly.”
“Ha!” He clapped his hands at her. “We don’t know how to do anything. Isn’t it grand? I once didn’t know how to sell cars or lay paving. But we’d learn. My friend Don lives in Missoula. He said he would help. Or, in Northern California we could do a Redwood forest tour and live on the Pacific bluffs.”
“You have a friend there, too?”
He kissed her. “Who do you think comes to Maui? Tourists. I help them out, get them the best sushi, the best mangos, fragrant flowers for the missus, and as a result I got friends all over the world.”
“Not in Australia.”
“Yes, in Australia. My buddy Bart lives near Canberra. He owes me a solid for hooking him up with a chord progression that melted his girl Bianca’s heart. Now they’re married.” He rattled her a little, ruffled her hair. “Doesn’t it sound incredible?”
She said nothing.
Time to get dressed. Despite the terror in her heart, or
perhaps because of it, she wanted him again, and as she was pulling on her Theory black slacks, a vile thought flickered by: if I went with him, I would have him again. Any time I wanted.
They kissed, bounded downstairs. He hopped on his bike, put his helmet on. “Larissa,” he called to her.
She turned around.
“What I want is for you to get on my bike, and for us to roar down Main Street together, and not be afraid. You’ll think about what I’ve asked you, won’t you?”
“And of nothing else.”
Larissa couldn’t even see Main Street as she drove home. She blundered through two red lights and a stop sign, nearly crashing into a van that had the right of way. The screaming horns barely registered.
1
Heart Strings and Alice Springs
L
arissa found a doctor in Madison. He did not come with a recommendation. Because Larissa couldn’t
ask
for a recommendation. He came from the Yellow Pages. She chose him because she liked the tag after his name. “Dr. Kavanagh: Specialising in depression and matrimonial difficulties.” As if the two went hand in hand. Like lovers.
She
turned out to be a tiny, superbly dressed, exquisitely wrinkled woman in her early sixties, clearly a smoker, whose eyes were too sharp for Larissa’s liking. Larissa would’ve preferred her clinical help to be dull and opaque.
She didn’t know how to feel about the issue of the doctor’s sex. Would a woman be more or less sympathetic? She sat down on the leather couch, eyeing the doctor unsympathetically. Kavanagh sat in the task chair, twisted into a yoga pretzel, legs tucked under her. And is that what Larissa was hoping for? Sympathy?
She didn’t know what she was hoping her. She was in a fog of blind confusion and she wanted a nanosecond of clarity—so she could see either what was around her or what was in front of her. She couldn’t see anything besides him.
They spent twenty-five minutes on the vapid minutia of her life.
“Where were you raised?” the doctor asked.
“Here. Well, there. Piermont, on the Hudson, just under the Tappan Zee Bridge.”
“I know where Piermont is, I used to have a practice in Nyack. Where are your parents?”
“Divorced. Dad moved away. He’s dead now.”
“When did they get divorced?”
“I was twenty.”
“And did you say you were the youngest of four?”
“Yes.”
“So, when they split up, your parents must have been…?”
“In their late fifties, yes. Too old to get a divorce, I know.”
“Hmm. You’re never really too old for hate. Or love. Where did you go to school?”
“NYU. Theater.”
You’re married? How long? How many children? How old? What does your husband do? Where do you live now? Are you religious?
“Not really,” Larissa said. “I’m ambidextrous. My parents taught us to study things carefully, have an open mind, examine everything, then make our decisions. They were highly educated and, I believe, agnostic. That’s how they raised us.”
“You
believe
they were agnostic?”
“They had a curiosity about metaphysical things, but were too skeptical and intellectual to lean one way or another. They believed in science, in culture.”
“They
believed
in science?” The doctor paused, squinting. “What about now?”
“What, me or them?”
“You, Larissa.”
Larissa thought about it. “It’s just not part of my life.” She remembered Ezra. “I have heated discussions with my friends
about ethics and meaning and whatnot. But just devil’s advocacy, you know?”
Dr. Kavanagh studied her, as if she didn’t know. She remained inscrutably blank. “Tell me why you’re here.”
Finally, twenty-five minutes in, the question Larissa came to have answered, and now that she was asked, she had nothing to say. Her mouth went dense and dry. She didn’t know how to begin. She grew uncomfortable, started to fidget, to chew her nails, the skin around her fingers.
“You seem agitated.”
“I’m not agitated.”
“No?”
“No. What I am is…” She trailed off. What was she? Larissa didn’t know what to say. There was no beating around the bush. What could she say? Start at the beginning? It was too tawdry. What about now, it wasn’t tawdry now? It was all decent?
Decent: moral, good, kind.
Tawdry: cheap, gaudy finery.
Yes, that’s what it was. Glad rags dressed as ceremonial dress.
“I’m involved with a man who is not my husband,” blurted Larissa. It was an emancipation to speak. She started to cry. Kavanagh was quiet. Nothing on her moved except a hand extending a box of tissues.
“How long?”
Not long enough. Unacceptably too long. “Months.”
“Two months? Six?”
“A year.”
Kavanagh whistled. “That’s a long time for an affair.”
“I didn’t say it was an affair. I said…”
“Yes, yes, I know. Has the husband found out? Is that why you’re here?”
“No. And no.”
“No?” Kavanagh seemed surprised. Was she alluding to Jared’s blindness? “How do you feel about it?”
Larissa blew her nose. “Feel about what?”
“Your relationship with this man. Your marriage. Yourself. How do you feel about what you’ve just told me?”