Now You See Him (8 page)

L
UCY WAS WAITING FOR ME AT HOME WHEN
I returned from work looking like a blacked-out city. I swept into the house and saw her standing in the living room purposely dressed down in frumpy dark clothes, her face shuttered tight and her arms held at her sides. Not a photon of light would escape from that crunched mouth, those lowered eyes. And though I greeted her cheerfully where she stood, brushing past her with a breezy remark about the delicious cooking smells in the air, she sent the clear signal that the best thing possible, from her point of view, was that I leave her alone. If I could somehow cease to exist in the process, so much the better.

It had been two days since my afternoon with Belinda, and during that time Lucy and I had exchanged little more than the bare minimum necessary to sustain life. It was suddenly like being married to a swiveling, woman-size plate of green aquarium glass. From behind that glass,
I could watch the word bubbles drift upward from her mouth. I could see her fingers splayed slightly against the clear surface in greeting or good-bye. But all I heard was the faint, underwater hiss of her breathing.

During dinner that night, I remained extra animated, with the children especially, and I tried to catch a variety of small ripples of momentum from the boys upon which to float my way across the table and touch her with warmth. I was an old hand at this kind of redistribution of feeling, this sneaky intergenerational transfer. But on this night, as on the previous few, it was no dice. She was as skillful as I was at maintaining an open channel with the boys while keeping me out in the cold, and though I admired her virtuosity, the anaerobic withdrawal of feeling stung me.

All of this was especially sad because, buoyed by my transgression—a half hour of making out with Belinda in the car; an hour of excited chat in the restaurant—I was not only tactically happy, I
was
happy. I felt renewed in my marriage and I wanted her to know it. Pity is a vasodilator of the heart, just like love. And yet it’s not love, for it requires a loss of some sort to activate it. Lucy, without knowing it, had lost ground and become an object of my pity. And I, without understanding why, had felt the charge of that emotion and pronounced myself newly in love.

Over the next few days, I continued to observe my wife with fresh eyes, noting as if for the first time the bending grace of her figure, her gentleness and kindness with the children; her diligence in running a house whose cleanliness and order I had always taken for granted. Uncomplainingly, in the ser vice of our family she had shut down
her own career, and to this, as to so many other things, I’d been indifferent. The dailiness of cohabitation is like a rain of glass beads that wears away the larger perceptions of gratefulness and leaves behind only the chilly relicts of feeling. How could I have been so blind to the truth?

On the heels of this insight, I came to a decision. The decision, in so many words, was that I would act.

Once a month, Lucy spent the evening with her reading group, invariably returning from these evenings amiable and refreshed. Since that night was coming up, I chose it as the one on which to put my plan into action. I knew she’d be coming home that particular evening at seven, and instead of doing the usual thing (going out for Chinese with the boys, and bringing her back leftovers), I took off from work early, cut the boys’ after-school playdates short, fed them sandwiches and palmed them off on an amiable elderly widower who lived nearby and owned a vast collection of antique pinball machines. Then I cleaned the house myself. Afterward, I shopped and made dinner. These small routine actions of preparation were rehearsals of a sort, isometric exercises designed to keep my good spirits pumped. I was ready, waiting and in a great mood when I heard the lip of her Subaru crunch on the front driveway.

“Well, hello, darling,” I said as she came in the front door.

She had her battle face on; the eyes slitted, the mouth in a judging downward turn. Her eyes fell to the spatula in my hand. They rose to my apron and whisked quickly around the house. Then, nearly under her breath, she muttered, “You cleaned.”

“Yup.”

“And you…what…” She wrinkled her nose.

“Cooked? Yes, I did,” I said quickly, “chicken simmered with wine and portobello mushrooms, and a bottle of your favorite Chianti to go with.”

“I see,” she said, slinging her bag to the floor. “And why?”

“Why? Because I wanted to celebrate.”

“Celebrate?” She looked perplexed. “Celebrate what?”

“Us, for starters.”

Her perplexity deepened. I knew the modulations of her face so well I could see small muscles in her cheeks, rarely used, coming in to play.

“Us?” she asked.

“The one and only.” I made an embellishing motion with the spatula in the air.

She studied me for a moment. “Well, don’t you seem jolly,” she said. “Been into the cooking wine?”

“Come on.”

“Where are the kids?”

“They’re at Ferdie Pacheco’s house.”

Lucy commenced a small, somewhat tiptoed circuit of the kitchen, as if to assure herself that all was as tidy as it seemed. “That’s impressive,” she said, but in the same dead tone as previously. Then she turned and looked me full in the face for what felt like the first time in days. Inopportunely perhaps, but deeply, I was struck again by the wholesome symmetry of her features. Marathon stalemates have the advantage of absenting you long enough from your habitual tracks that when you return you can be surprised, as I was, by overlooked local pleasures. Lucy was beautiful.

“And all this is what,” she asked, “reparations of a sort?”

“Hey, it worked for the slaves, didn’t it?” I laughed in the silence, and spread my arms. When she didn’t say anything more, I lowered them and leaned forward. “Look, I admit I’ve made mistakes, taken some things for granted, okay? Probably little parts of me fell asleep over the years, and I feel bad about that. I want you to know,” I went on, “that I recognize how hard you work, and I want to honor it somehow.” I heard the slightly canned quality to my speech, and said more softly, “Remember how I used to cook for you, honey?”

She shook her head to herself, sadly, a dreamy half smile on her face.

“I’ve been seeing a therapist,” she said.

I felt a pang, deep in my stomach.

“Purefoy?”

“Yes.”

I loathed the bald, handsome, self-impressed Purefoy. We’d first seen him not long after Will was born, when we’d grown frightened by the high wave of incomprehension and dead-calm indifference that seemed to be hurtling toward us. Still holding my arms up, I slowly lowered them to my sides.

“Well,” I said, struggling to keep things light against a sudden sharp feeling of undertow, “I’m glad you’ve been talking to someone, because you certainly haven’t been talking to me!” In the ongoing silence, I went on, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. How about let’s have some of that wine you just accused me of drinking?”

“Fine.”

I poured the Chianti, and nodding her thanks, she took a sip, set it down.

“Nick?”

“Yes, honey?”

Her large made-up eyes, ringed with mascara, stared deeply into mine. “Why are you trying to end this marriage?”

“What?” I cried.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said.

“No, it’s not!”

“Oh, but it is,” she said. “The doctor and I are in perfect agreement on this. And all the signs point to it.”

“What signs are those?”

“I guess you know,” she ignored my question, “that Deirdre Friedrich saw you and Belinda Castor at Padi-Cakes?”

My heart began thudding against my ribs.

“Well, how nice for Deirdre Friedrich,” I said.

“She said that you two were laughing and carrying on like a house on fire. She used that very phrase, ‘house on fire.’”

“So?” I said, ignoring the persistent banging at my clavicle, “Is that a crime? I mean, come on, honey. I took her out for a cup of tea. It seemed the least I could do under the circumstances. We talked mainly about Rob, her career, and the pain she was in. The woman is kind of inconsolable right now. And yes, all right, I did my best to make her laugh—so shoot me!”

In the extended silence, my smile drying on my face, both of us then listened to the distinct sound of me swallowing hard. When her voice next came it was gentler than I’d heard it in a long time.

“Do you think I don’t know you, Nick? Do you really
believe you’re living in some little tree house of the mind, spying out on the world and the world can’t see you back?”

“What are you saying?”

“Please don’t pretend to be thick. I hate when you do that. For the last half year I’ve tried to find you, in that faraway place you’ve been living. Not only for the boys, but, you know…” I saw her lip trembling; I knew how much this was costing her, and I wanted suddenly to protect her—but against what? Myself? “For us. I love so much about you, Nick, that I think it’s going to kill me to say this, but I have to.” She took a deep breath, drew herself erect. “Why don’t you just admit you want out, and we can go from there?”

“Out?” I said. “What do you mean, Lucy, ‘out’?”

“I mean that maybe if you had more time to spend in that past you’re always mooning over, you’d be happier. And if you were happier, I’d be happier too, even if…we’d come to the end of something.”

“This is crazy!” I said loudly.

But she only gave me the sad dreamy smile again. “Is it? According to Dr. Purefoy, the inability to let go of the past is a classic diagnostic trait of depression. But you’re not even depressed, Nick. You’re just selfish. You’re literally too selfish to grow up. I think I’ve had enough of it.”

A stroke of something like sleep went through me, a hot, cardiac sensation of fatigue that caused me to sag against the counter.

“Please,” she said, and having discharged her weapon, she seemed visibly relieved, “can I have another glass of wine?”

Reaching robotically toward the bottle, I poured.

“You’ve made your position clear over these last few months since Rob Castor’s death,” she said. “Now I’m going to tell you
my
position. I’ve decided that I’m not going to stand in your way. If you want to leave this relationship, I will not oppose you.”

“You will not oppose me,” I repeated dully.

“Not even a little. There’s no use in your staying around in a situation you so obviously want out of.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“My parents have said they’d help out if necessary, and I can always go back to work. Of course,” she added, lowering her eyes as if in the grip of sudden modesty, “I remain open to any suggestions you might have to improve the situation.”

I realized I was now clenching my jaw, a kind of strap-like torque running up the sides of my head.

“However”—she raised her eyes—“you’ll have to be the one to initiate, Nick. It’s humiliating to have to run after you like a personal assistant just to get a live response out of you. I know that ‘communication’ is not what you’re especially good at. And I appreciate what you did tonight in cleaning the house and cooking. I appreciate what it might have to say about you showing up generally. Thank you. But a few good gestures do not a new life make.”

The breezy tone of this last phrase, imported to show that she was detached from it all, made me feel worse. I loved her. Now, in fact, more than ever. Couldn’t she see that? Didn’t that mean something? Not knowing what else to do, I turned away, toward the stove.

“There is one place you
could
start, that is if you’re interested,” I heard her say.

“What’s that?”

“I think you know.”

“A vacation?”

“No.”

I turned back around to face her. “Lemme guess. Purefoy.”

“That’s right.”

“Dear God.”

Had it been a dozen times that we’d gone there, a small, cowed couple, grateful for the crumbs thrown from his Olympian height? I couldn’t remember how many visits we’d made, but I distinctly recalled the hissing wave sounds of his white-noise generator; I remembered the long silences in the oak-paneled office, the tactfully placed box of tissues, and the air of pretend normalcy beneath which, it was implied, abysses of nighttime dysfunction might be opened up to the healing, vitamin-packed light of day. Despite his studied neutrality, it had been my impression that the doctor disapproved of me in some way that surprised even himself. I did not want to see Dr. Purefoy.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Your call.”

I returned to preparing dinner, feeling as if tackled by a new gravity of sadness, and was just plating the food when Ferdie Pacheco returned early with the kids in his loud pickup truck. They piled into the house, and Lucy rushed to see them, and their obvious happiness in each other, something I’d approved of wholeheartedly and enabled as a foundational fact of our marriage, made me feel utterly
wretched tonight. The emotional lockdown between us might have softened a bit as a result of our recent conversation; some warmth might have crept back in; but it was accompanied by a grim climate of finality anchored to an ultimatum. The boys were eager to show her some bauble that Pacheco had given them, and she followed them upstairs to their rooms without even a glance in my direction. I sat for a long while in front of the ebbing heat of my dinner, trying to digest what had just happened while listening to the familiar whooping hilarities proceeding from above.

I
LEFT FOR
M
ANHATTAN EARLY THE NEXT
day. It was a Saturday, and I had no other pressing plans—save the one of getting some distance from my own family. About twice a year I drove down to New York, each time returning reliably refreshed from having hitched a ride on the sights and sounds of the speeding city. On impulse, I had called Mac the night before, while Lucy and the kids were still cavorting upstairs—she’d eventually returned to dinner, apologetic for having left the way she did—and had asked if he was available to pass a few hours. He’d said yes immediately, and then after a pause, asked if I’d heard the “big news.” He’d received what he called “a juicy contract” to write the “definitive” book on Rob. As a result, he’d managed to rent, for a month, Rob’s “horrendous” Chinatown apartment, which would help him “enter the mind of the madman.” His voice was high and thin with excitement as he told me his news. Would I like to see him at Rob’s place?

Standing in the house still in my absurd apron, feeling tender and sore, I hesitated a moment, wondering if I was up for it. Then I told him yes, I would, and I congratulated him a little rotely on his good fortune. I’d never trusted Mac completely, neither as a child nor as an adult. Up until high school he hadn’t been nearly as close to Rob as I had. Later in life, he would be bound to Rob by style and affect and by the fact of writing too, but back in the early years of our lives, when the deepest chords were struck, he was just another roly-poly kid with a bad haircut and grass-stained pants. I had the inside track. I knew the secret tender things about Rob that no one else did. And I always would. Why, then, was it Mac grabbing the glory?

It was still dawn when I left the house. After three hours heading south in the blank box of the interstate, I entered New York by the Saw Mill River Parkway, twisting my way through the woods above Manhattan, and then driving down the West Side Highway. That first view of the city always struck me as something grand, nearly patriotic, with the big silver ripple of river alive with moving boats, the low-slung frame of Jersey on the right, and the heavy, leaden mass of buildings rising on the left and filled with cells of gloomy promise.

What was my promise? I was a man in a teetering marriage and a dead-end job whose future seemed to stretch before him in a succession of endless repetitions. As I threaded the big car through a series of narrowing highways, I consoled myself for these gloomy thoughts with unflattering recollections of the way Mac’s professional personality had formed over the years, the lumps in it
slowly smoothed out over repeated cycles of adaptation. At first, when he began writing for national magazines as a celebrity profiler, he made a point of being very haughty to us, his old school chums. He did this while still sucking up to the people useful to him, and this unstable balancing act between servility and pissiness seemed to prefigure the evolution of a truly awful person. He’d taken an apartment in downtown Manhattan somewhere, and on the rare occasions he came back to Monarch he made a point of either showily ignoring us, or, in a way I’ve since learned famous people do, being so over the top and effusive in his greeting that its obvious falsity is a different but equally offensive slap in your face.

By the time we were hitting our early thirties, success and having kids had softened him somewhat. Over the last year or so, his mom had been ailing, he was often in Monarch, and he’d opened himself up to us, his townies, by being the bearer of news about Rob. Since Rob’s death, he’d been even more candid and thoughtful—with me in particular—than ever before. Yet somehow this didn’t make me trust him. I knew that Mac had his own problems in life. I’d heard from other people that he’d developed a certain bitterness about the way in which, no matter how successful he was, it was still expected of him that he spend his days as a journalist applying rouge to the reputations of the rich and famous. He could be the dinner partner of real success, or be the roommate of success, or belong to the clubs where success sweated and worked out. He could watch success from up close and maybe even fuck it now and again, but he was never quite able to
be
it.

I turned off West Street, continued driving downtown.
Eventually I found myself threading streets that grew increasingly tight and crooked, like the sentences of some ancient document. Winding around Canal Street for a while, I parked finally in front of a small, shabby apartment house. The name of the street was Grand. I checked the address one last time and got out, rang the doorbell and was buzzed in.

Stepping into a dim entryway filled with the brackish smells of old cooking, I heard my name being called. I looked up through the boxed spiral of landings, and saw Mac’s tiny face peering down at me from several floors above.

“Nicholas, my man!” he cried, his voice echoing down the stairwell.

“Mac, how are you?”

“Dandy. Come on up.”

I began to climb the ancient sagging stairs. “Jesus, are you sure this will support my weight?” I asked.

“Well, you are a weighty kind of guy,” cried Mac. When I got to the top, we shook hands. He was wearing jeans cut so as to emphasize his bulging thighs and he looked bigger up top since we’d last gotten together a few weeks earlier—weight lifting, most probably. His hair was waxed or gelled out into millipede spikes, and the skin on his cheeks had the rosy waxen cast of a man who’s recently received professional spa attentions.

“I didn’t know they let family men this far downtown.” He slapped me on the back.

“Ha,” I said. “Christ, did he actually live here?” We were walking down the hall. Moldy ferns of bubbled paint crawled up the walls; the grimed tiles underfoot were half
missing; a strong urinous smell accompanied our progress. “I’m not sure that the word ‘live’ is correct,” Mac said. “But this is where his body spent its last few weeks of life.”

We entered the tiny cavelike apartment. Dozens of coats of white paint over the years had cocooned it in a kind of caked, sheltering softness. Off to one side, the kitchen was a mere nutritional indentation against a wall. A sink bore a big exploded brown stain in the center. I didn’t want to look too closely. We completed the tour by entering the bedroom. The door was stuck closed on the repeatedly painted jamb. When it popped open, brilliant light flooded the whole apartment from the sunshine angling in over the Manhattan Bridge. It passed through a lattice of rusted window gates on its way. The place was a jail.

“You’re paying to be here?” I asked.

“Field research,” said Mac, with his half smile, “is a costly kind of thing. If nothing else”—we went back out and he opened the tiny ancient fridge, dark with beer bottles—“my advance will keep me in Strolsch for several years to come.”

He retrieved two beers, and presented one to me with a frontal push of the beer into my hand. We clinked bottles.

“To our dear pal,” I said.

“‘Hid in death’s dateless night,’” Mac intoned. “Have a seat, Nick.”

At the kitchen were two mismatched ladder-back chairs. I sat in one, trying to smile at Mac, my mind whirling.

“You look upset,” he said, staring at me keenly a second.

“Yeah, well, I guess I am. I mean, I knew he was down
on his luck toward the end, but Christ I had no idea that it was…like
this
. I might have been happier without knowing, actually.”

“I hear you, pal. It was like he wanted to punish himself.”

“Was it,” I gestured vaguely, “just like this when you found it?”

“More or less. Chin, the scumbag landlord, took most of his stuff, I think, including his Grundig shortwave and his rose-quartz collection and who knows what else. But I did get the book.” He nudged with his chin toward a Sears bag on the floor.

“The book?”

“The diary. Shirley got it actually, probably because it was just in a shitty loose-leaf binder, and Chin overlooked it. I bought it from her. Wanna see it?”

“Yes,” I said instantly, “I do.”

He reached into the bag and withdrew a loose-leaf binder, thickly stuffed with what seemed hundreds of pages. On closer inspection it appeared to have been covered in bark of some sort, with holes bored through the covers, and twine twisted through these holes.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“Some shamanistic thing,” said Mac, handing me the notebook and shaking his head. “Rob was so
Serpent and the Rainbow
sometimes it drove me nuts.”

He went to the beer vault, opened it and got another. “I’m going to go take some notes on the view out the bedroom window.” He saw me looking at the diary. “Go ahead, read it”—he turned away—“it won’t bite. At least,” he added with a laugh, “it hasn’t yet.”

With a certain trepidation I opened the rough covers. In block letters were the words “My Final Resting Place,” with some shakily drawn flowers below them. On the next page I saw the familiar script, but more sloppy and urgent than I remembered. I looked quickly around the room, as if to alert the ghost of Rob to what I was about to do, and then dropped my eyes.