The Inseparables (13 page)

For a month she sat with the possibility, turning it over in her head. At night, driving home along the Charles River, she could see the spire of his office building receding in the window behind her. She knew almost nothing about him. He adhered closely to the analyst's maxim of total opacity. Did his trim physique mean that he enjoyed the outdoors? Was he one of those fools who cycled around the city dressed up as though he was in the Tour de France? Did the piles of aggressively left-wing reading material in his waiting room mean that dating him would be like her freshman year at Columbia, when her boyfriend grew Vladimir Lenin's goatee in admiration? She only knew that Paul was divorced because his secretary had said something. Mysteriously, Oona could not remember what he looked like. An Internet search produced younger versions of Paul, versions in which he had hair. She hoped to find a profile of his somewhere, articulating a list of interests. At some point in the midst of all this curiosity she decided, why the hell not see what my therapist is like over dinner? Finally, she struck first. There was a Clive Owen retrospective at the Brattle. Some irresistible British accents. This seemed innocent enough. Paul's curt refusal came by way of an email:
I don't think I would like that.
But who didn't like Clive Owen? She was confused. What about her neck? Her necklace? Her pretty eyes? It was a confusing situation, she knew. So confusing, she told a coworker, that she thought she should probably see a therapist about it.

Then, a week ago, she found Paul waiting in her office when she returned from surgery. Enough time had passed, he told her. He was ready. He was in a suit and tie. She was in her black surgical scrubs, having just repaired a compact fracture to a man's arm. They were both standing around, smiling like fools. He kissed her gently on her cheek, and then on her mouth. They were the strangest two kisses of her life. He smelled of sandalwood and chewing gum. “Let me take you out,” he said. “Would you like that?” She did not remember what she said in response, but she remembered, there in her mother's bathroom, that tonight was the night they'd agreed that he would come and take her to dinner. She remembered giving him her address, writing it on the flip side of a page from an Rx pad.

At that moment she heard the sound of a car's engine in the driveway. Lydia went to the window.

“Who is it?” Oona asked.

“A bald man,” Lydia said.

She thought to tell Lydia everything. Wasn't this what mothers and daughters did? Erase, as they aged, the boundary between parent and child and become something close to friends? Or was this the exact opposite of what to do? Weren't there manuals to explain this next part of the parenting process? Craning to peek through the window, Oona saw a white Audi parked behind the house with its lights on. A moment later, Paul Pomerantz got out of the car and stepped onto the pebbled driveway.

“Who is that guy?” Lydia asked.

A second look out through the window revealed Paul coming up the walkway, moonlight bouncing off his scalp. Some men, it seemed to Oona, were able to achieve a more immaculate level of baldness, free of any wispy reminders of whatever glory their scalp may have once experienced, everything shiny, clean, and gleaming. Paul Pomerantz was one of these men: his baldness was exquisite and utterly complete.

“Mom?” Lydia said. “Mom, you're freaking.”

“I am not freaking,” Oona said, straightening herself, performing a quick diagnostic triage in the bathroom mirror. “I am definitely not freaking. I am normal. And not freaking.”

After Paul came to her office last week, they went for a short walk around the hospital. With the rehabbing, arthritic patients struggling to walk in the hallways and the convalescing cancer patients slowly managing their way to the hospital's art gallery, it had not been a romantic twenty minutes. They met the following day for another walk, this time outside the hospital, around the frozen serenity gardens, again for twenty minutes—all that she had between patients. A third walk, a day later, left her feeling thrilled. If she was being utterly blunt about it, she had been very thrilled. This was stupid, she had told herself, feeling excitement at the idea of a new man looking at her, even if it was only because that new man appeared to regard her less-than-perfect body with more enthusiasm than Spencer had managed in two decades. Maybe Paul lacked all the judgment and scorn and jealousy of her husband. Or maybe this was going to be entirely carnal. Who ever ended up married to her couples counselor, anyway? And why, really, was she thinking of marriage at a time like this, reaching out to hold Paul's hand in the foyer of the otolaryngology department? Of everyone who might have been able to answer this for her, it was Paul.

Outside, Paul had his telephone in his hand. Instantly she looked to her own phone. Lydia caught all of this.

“Oh,” Lydia said, seeing the phone light up. “He's here for you.”

Oona watched the snow alight on Paul's shoulders. What on earth was it that she felt for him? This warmth in her, this desire to be close to him, to know everything about him. What was this? And what was it, then, that she felt for Spencer if it wasn't revulsion? Weren't these the facts? Wasn't this the truth?

Lydia, meanwhile, was studying her face. “He's your boyfriend,” she said. “Isn't he?”

“No,” Oona said, which was not a lie.

“Your flushed face is reading to me like this guy is your boyfriend.”

“I have a date with him,” she said. “That's all I'll admit.”

Lydia smiled widely. “Him?”

Lydia came up beside her. They both peered out. He was in a beige overcoat and black slacks. He had on leather gloves.

“The leather gloves are creepy,” Lydia said. “He looks like a hit man.”

“Where's your father?” Oona realized, perhaps too late, that her husband might think it confusing to see his marriage counselor knocking on the front door of his mother-in-law's house.

“Oh, does he not know?” Lydia asked.

Downstairs the doorbell rang.

“He doesn't know, does he?” Lydia asked.

“I think your dad is in the garage,” Oona said. “I'm going to go tell Paul to get lost. Can you just go down to the kitchen and make sure, if he starts to come out, that he doesn't?”

Lydia smiled too widely. “Paul?”

Oona took the steps down to the driveway two at a time, passing, as she hurried, her husband's car keys, hanging on the hook by the back door. In her hand, her phone kept buzzing.
I'm excited,
the first message read.
Where are you?
This kind of joyful, albeit childish, display of affection—nobody had ever done this for her. Her father had done it for her mother, she knew. Right up until the end, he did it. All the love letters in the house. The constant cooking for her, the dancing with her, the incessant, almost magnetic need to be touching her at all times. When Spencer had been wooing Oona, he'd done it with the reserved nonchalance of someone waiting to see if a store clerk had his size of chinos somewhere in a back stockroom; if she hadn't been interested, he'd have probably shrugged it off and kept on shopping.

Outside, she found Paul at the door. Again, he smelled like sandalwood.

“Hey you,” she whispered.

Paul clutched both of her wrists. “I was
calling you.
”

“I'm sorry.”

Still holding on to her, he looked her up and down. “Do I have the wrong night?”

She looked out beyond Paul's shoulder at the slope of the meadow, which was frozen, and at the place where the flagstone had been, and at the barn, lit now by floodlights.

“I can't do it tonight,” she said. She pointed her chin toward the barn. “Spencer's here,” she whispered.

“Oh,” Paul said. His smile vanished. He let go. “I didn't know you two were speaking.”

“We went together to get Lydia from school,” she said.

“Lydia,” he repeated.

“Our daughter,” she reminded him.

On their first short walk through the hospital, she had learned only a few things about him. He was childless. He was from Texas. He had a fancy apartment. His ex-wife was a catalog model. He was a self-described Jew-Bu: some Jewish, some Buddhist. Also, he adored Stevie Wonder. This, aside from his choice of office reading material and, because it was there in the driveway, the make of his car, constituted every single thing she knew about him.

“So I should go?” he asked quietly.

“Let's reschedule,” she said. “Next week, maybe.”

“You're having second thoughts,” he said. “I can see it.”

“I'm not.”

She looked back at the barn. She could hear her mother laughing, and then Spencer laughing. It had always been this way: her husband worked to be so much more charming in her mother's presence than in hers.

“It's unconventional,” he said. “But not unheard of for this kind of thing to happen.”

“Paul,” she said. “Listen—”

“Your being nervous is perfectly relatable. In fact, I'm nervous!”

“I'm not having any second thoughts. I just—” She drew him close and spoke directly into his ear, her lips brushing his skin. “I can't be seen with you here.”

From behind the barn, in the direction of the kitchen, Oona heard footsteps on the frozen snow, and instantly she looked frantically for someplace to stash Paul. Could the promise of love or sex ever not make you feel young? This urge to keep it a secret—she'd felt like this when she was a girl, hiding her boyfriends from her parents, stuffing Alexander Closker in a broom closet, his erection covered up by the pink hat from her favorite porcelain doll. Paul, however, wanted to talk. He had that particularly expressive look of pain across his brow that always prefigured him saying something serious. She knew it from therapy. As the footsteps got louder, she turned to see Lydia coming up from behind the barn, dressed in her parka and her hunter-green Wellies,
The Inseparables
tucked under her arm. Oona knew that Lydia was only trying to get a closer look at this man who'd come to see her. As she passed by, Oona met her eyes and tried wordlessly to convey a plea for mercy. When Lydia was back inside the house, Oona turned back to Paul. The yard and the big field were silent. Snow continued to fall around them.

“Is that her?” he asked. “That's Lydia?”

“That's her,” Oona said, smiling.

“She's fifteen,” Paul said. “Isn't that right?”

Oona felt flattered that he remembered this. “Such an easy age,” she said, trying to joke.

“I can't imagine,” he said. “Sometimes I think I really missed out by not being a father.” He paused and looked around the dark, snowy fields, appearing to think deeply. “It's something I spend a lot of time wondering about.”

She didn't know what to say to this. Her therapist, opening up about his regrets and doubts, sounding very much the way she probably sounded in her sessions. “That's something we can talk about next week,” Oona said. She looked out nervously behind him, hoping that the next person who walked by was not Spencer. “Call me. We can reschedule. Same time?”

As he went to hug her, he stretched out his arms in a sign of innocence and forgiveness while trying to say something about how excited he'd been to see her, about how terribly nervous he'd been. Then, turning to go, Paul took a step toward the driveway and lost his footing. Oona saw it happening. He slid for a moment. Both feet in the snow and ice. He swung his arms out. Across the driveway, she saw Lydia in the kitchen watching through the window. When Paul's head smacked the hard frozen walkway, Oona yelped. She saw his head bounce. Instantly, she ran, and from the kitchen so did Lydia.

“I'm fine,” he said, already on his feet. He rubbed at his head. “Don't worry. I'm fine.”

She reached out to touch his head. “You're cut,” she said. “You're bleeding.”

He took off his gloves right when Lydia got there. “It's a small thing,” he said.

Already, Oona was replaying it in her head. The bounce. The blood on the ground. She turned, hoping her mother was not nearby. “This is the same goddamn spot, almost,” she said.

Lydia looked down at the ground. A tiny droplet of blood marked the snow. She smeared her boot into the drift, vanishing it. “You're right,” she said.

“Oh,” Paul said, blinking fast. “I see. This is where your dad—”

“We need to get you inside and sitting down.”

“I'm fine,” Paul said. “Really. It's just a cut.”

“No,” Oona said. She heard her voice catching. “After a skull fracture there's the lucid interval. You don't even know you're hurt. With my dad, he was fine for five minutes. Then,
boom,
everything changed.”

“You're overreacting,” he said.

After her father died, she had wondered so many times about what had happened here on the hill, about whether it would have made a difference if she had been the one who'd rushed out after him instead of her mother. After all, maybe she would have registered an uneven dilation of his pupils. Maybe she would have sensed evidence of intercranial bleeding. Or a quickening of his blood pressure. She wanted to ask her mother about whether she'd noticed any of this, but she knew this was an impossibility. These were the questions she could never ask, especially of someone who had expected, clearly, for her husband just to get up off the ground.

She took Paul's chin in her hand and moved his face up into the beam of house light. “I can't get a good look at your pupils.”

“I know you're having flashbacks. I can see it. Flashbacks are just manifestations—”

“Don't analyze me,” she said.

“This isn't what happened to your dad,” he said. “Even if it's the same spot.”

“I saw it. Your head bounced.” She touched his small cut. The bleeding had stopped.