The Inseparables (15 page)

“Are you upset over a man?”

She wiped at her eyes. “A boy,” she said. “Just a boy.”

He grinned. “Don't let a boy—”

She waved her hands. “I know the speech. Thank you, but I've heard it.”

“It's a good speech,” he said.

“I just got it from my mom earlier today. So I'm all caught up on the motivational rhetoric.”

“Well, she knows what she's talking about, then, your mom.”

Lydia rolled her eyes.

“I was the same way with girls when I was that age,” he said.

“A sociopathic voyeur?” she asked.

He laughed. “Not exactly.”

“Weeping in an attic with your mother's boyfriend?”

He didn't smile. “I'd like a girl and then they'd find out and then I'd be merciless and cruel to them.”

She screwed up her mouth. “So you're a mind reader now? What makes you think that's what it is?”

He shrugged. “Other than the fact that I heard you talking, and that you were three feet away, you need to know that this is a kind of ritualistic male impulse to tear the female down.”

“Is it a ritualistic male impulse to invade a woman's privacy?”

“All I'm saying is that he'll work through it. The impulse, that is. Or most of us do.”

“So you're saying that all I need to do is wait until middle age, and then maybe I'll figure out which tiny fraction of men are decent and which are sex criminals.”

“I forgot,” he said. “You were at that school for very smart people, weren't you?”

“This is not important,” she said.

“Kids who are very intelligent often suffer from stunted emotional lives.”

“That's a very obvious thing to say,” she said. “People pay you money for this?”

He put the magazine down on his lap. “Love is always complicated.”

“Who said anything about love?” she said.

“What word do you want to use, then?”

“I have the sinking feeling that we're therapizing,” she said. “Do I need to have made an appointment with you?”

He smiled. “Okay. I can shut up and take a hint and mind my own business. It's okay. I just figured that if we were going to be prisoners together, you and me, we could talk.”

“We can talk about your problems,” she said. “I bet they're more fascinating than mine.”

“Who said I had problems?”

Lydia's eyes widened. “This situation we're in at the moment does seem kind of problematic for you.”

He offered a reluctant smile.

“I would say that my father would kick your ass—”

“Oh, I don't think that's true,” Paul said. “I highly, highly doubt that would happen.”

“Don't do that,” Lydia said. “Don't smirk. He's nice. He's good. He's a good person.”

“You're just like her,” he said. “It's uncanny.”

Lydia shook her head. “Since you're dating her, you should probably not say that to me unless you want me to think you're a potential predator.”

“It's true. It's really quite something. Pardon my saying this, but it's almost creepy.”

“
Creepy?
She's my mother! I'd hope we were alike.
This
is creepy,” she said. “Me being here in this attic. Wrapped up in blankets together.”

“Come on,” he said. “It's not that bad.”

“You're reading a twenty-two-year-old
Redbook.
And you have blood all over you.”

He looked down at his shirt. Before her mother clotted the cut, a steady stream had trickled down the back of his head to his neckline. “It was a cheap shirt anyway,” he said.

For a moment she worried he would take it off, but he merely unbuttoned a few buttons and craned his neck back and forth. Earlier, she'd had to back up his car onto the main road by the river so that her dad wouldn't see and figure it out. Inside, his Audi was beautiful and leathery and heavy with cologne, a bottle of which she found in his glove box, along with a prescription for Klonopin, an aerosol spray can of breath freshener, and a notepad onto which he'd written,

“We don't know each other, really,” Paul said. “Your mother and I.”

“Except for therapy.”

“Well, I know
about
her, I suppose.”

“But she doesn't know you,” Lydia said.

“Not much.”

“Well, that doesn't sound creepy at all.”

“Excuse me?”

“I meant, isn't that why this is unethical?” she asked.

He took a moment to think about this. “We've waited the appropriate length of time to avoid scrutiny.”

Lydia smirked.

“I had a date planned,” he said. “A first date. That's all. It's innocent.”

“I'm guessing your date didn't involve a head wound?”

“Italian food. Italian movie. Then, for dessert, gelato in the North End.”

“No matching brown shirts to complete the theme?” she asked.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes joking is a form of panic.”

“Oh, you're ruining the fun of me keeping you prisoner,” she said. “And besides, I dozed off during the lecture on
The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious.
”

Her phone buzzed. Although she didn't want to, she looked down. This was far worse than a habitual tic or a magnetic attraction to abuse. For days she had promised herself she wouldn't read any more of the messages, and then, because she could not help it, she dove back in for more. She found the chain. Even more people had chimed in. She closed her eyes.

“You should know,” Paul said, “that humiliation is a by-product of high school.”

She looked up.

“I heard you yelling through the walls. You want to tell me what happened?”

“Not even remotely.” She felt her phone buzz and her eyes well simultaneously.

Footsteps came up the landing. For a moment Paul looked genuinely worried it might be her father. Her mother opened the door.

She pointed at Lydia. “Dinnertime,” she said. To Paul, she held up a finger. “I want you to wait thirty minutes. Then I want you to go down the stairs, take a left, and go out the back door. Don't close it. Just run. Wait an hour and I'll call and come meet you.”

In the dining room, Oona found the table already set and her husband, with his hair freshly slicked, pouring wine into paper cups. Evening had fallen. Burning applewood made the house sweet. Outside, on the road, the city plows scraped against the pavement, making high parapets out of the snowdrift. She had come down from the attic behind Lydia, and they both stopped at the foot of the stairs to witness this: her mother lighting a pair of paraffin candles, takeout Chinese containers arrayed in a circle, wooden chopsticks at every place setting. Spencer stood upright when they came into the room, smiling as if they had just caught him and her mother in the middle of some private joke. Perhaps Lydia was thinking the same thing she was thinking, which was, at once, that this felt delightfully familiar and that this was an inopportune time to feel a pang of nostalgia for better days.

“The glassware is in boxes,” Spencer explained, holding up a paper cup full of Chablis, candlelight warming his face. “So it'll be like when we were in graduate school.”

At the end, right before she left, he'd done this. He'd tried to appeal to her memory, conjuring up those first months in 1996 when they were first together, when the future seemed gloriously sunny. Accordingly, he was always playing Pearl Jam for her on the car stereo after counseling, or else dialing up Bridget Fonda movies on the flat screen at night, thinking, perhaps optimistically, perhaps witlessly, that she would regain some lost passion for their marriage in the middle of listening to an Eddie Vedder ballad.

“What do we do?” Lydia whispered.

“Say nothing,” said Oona. “Do nothing. Be normal.”

“He's going to get caught running out.”

“He will not.”

“Do you want my opinion on him?” Lydia said, continuing to whisper.

Oona shook her head. “Not really.”

“Here it is anyway: you can do much better.”

The food was from the Palace, her mother said, a tiny takeout hovel in town with a picture-on-the-wall menu. Her mother had shed most everything of the old world that had made her Henrietta Horowitz. The Yiddish: forgotten. The answers to the Four Questions: unknown. But this—the fervor for Chinese food, the favorite cuisine of every lapsed, secular, North American Jew of a certain age—this remained. Something about the heaping saltiness of the food clearly summoned ghosts. Her mother could hold a wonton on her tongue, and suddenly the whole long line of Horowitz aunts and uncles, dead for eons, would flood her. Like her dad, Oona couldn't stomach the stuff—unlike Spencer, whose Jewishness was equally lapsed and who, if she was being honest, had some of her mother's humor and panicky inclination to dread. This had never been lost on her, however odd it was to consider that she'd married and slept with and made a home with a man who reminded her so much of her mother.

Paul had found these particular facts predictably fascinating. She thought of this as they sat down to eat. With every creak overhead she looked to Lydia, who promptly met her eyes with a wry smile, as if to say,
Look at what you got us into.
Or:
Isn't this fun?
Or:
Really? Him?

Dinner was mostly quiet. She did not know how to do this: eat with your soon-to-be ex, your rapidly maturing whiz kid daughter, and your mother, flanked by moving boxes and dozens of pristinely pink copies of her book, and also with your maybe boyfriend stashed away upstairs in the same spot where you had stashed away your priapic adolescent boyfriends. Thankfully, everyone else seemed equally at a loss. They emptied greasy noodle-filled cartons in silence. They reduced to bones a box of deep-fried wings, with a salinity content that rivaled the Atlantic's. Her mother tried to start a conversation by mentioning how they had drunk vodka out of paper cups when they'd first moved here. Tonight she'd finished a few such cups of wine. Lydia, ever shrewd, had countered, “Weren't you pregnant when you moved here? If so, that totally explains my mom in so many ways.”

Fortunes were dispensed joylessly but not, for each of the family, without a foolish moment of optimism. Spencer held his in his hand, smiling.
“Your family is one of nature's great masterpieces,”
he read. “How about that!”

When they finished dinner, her mother took Lydia into the kitchen to do the dishes, leaving Oona alone with Spencer. The setup was obvious. She was used to the meddling in her separation. When people discovered that your marriage was failing, or about to fail, every odd stranger wanted to impart advice to you, some of it foolishly New Age (learn to find contentment in every moment), some of it indecently sexual (learn to fuck more often), and only some of it useful (get a separate bank account). She sat by the big window. Spencer sat just beside her. He'd refreshed his cologne, she noticed, and his watch face looked newly polished. She'd bought him the cologne, just as she'd bought him the wristwatch, the hair products, the dye for his temples, the golf clubs in the back of the Toyota, the pajamas he slept in, even the Viagra for his cock. All of her money had slowly, year by year, driven him mad. He had assured her it was not the case, had insisted that he was still the same congenial liberal kid from Chevy Chase who was fine with a woman earning all the money—better than fine—but she knew the truth.

He quit the law firm their first year in Massachusetts. He showed up that day at the hospital in his suit, weed smoke on his skin and hair, having just done it. “I told them I was out,” he said, taking her, kissing her, patients watching, orderlies rushing by, cardiac monitors beeping. He laughed and smiled and jumped for joy. “Now I'm free!” They had talked about this happening, but only briefly. Leaving his job was a theoretical possibility in the same way that it was also theoretically possible that Oona might win the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Put simply, they needed his money. Without it, she would have to take on more patients, work endlessly, never see her child. For all of that year he'd been in a cubicle forty stories up, litigating a dispute between two petro giants, while Lydia languished at a day care miles away, in Crestview. This was how he imagined it, at least—his baby wasting away,
Midnight Express
–style, in a nursery as gloomy as a Turkish prison—when in reality the Crestview Child Care Center was plush and fine and run by a team of lovely women who read to the babies and put on fantastic puppet shows. Nightly, Oona would stop by the firm to rouse Spencer with banana and peanut butter sandwiches, or with chickens roasted the way her father had taught her: simply, with lemons and salt. Or better yet, she would visit him on weekends, toting Lydia, and inevitably he would become convinced that Lydia didn't recognize him anymore. “I've been gone so much,” she remembered him saying. “She thinks every guy in a suit is me.” He dreamed up impossible fantasies. He wanted to run away to a cheap town in the Midwest. Let's be poor, he told her. How much do we really need, anyway? Isn't the point of all this—love and family and fucking togetherness—isn't the point that we occasionally see each other?

Behind him ice froze over the holes in the window screen. For a few minutes they were silent. She kept trying to look past him to see a trace of Paul as he ran out. She tried to think of what exactly she would say if Spencer found out. Was there ever a real reason to have your therapist visiting you at home, late at night? Then she tried to imagine the two of them fighting it out, maybe here in the dining room.

When she tried again to look past him to the walkway, he smiled.

“I like this,” he said.

“Which part?” she asked.

“All of it. Eating a family meal. Being here. You and me. Talking. Like humans.”

She sank a little in her seat. Instinctively, she looked up at the ceiling. “I really didn't think the next time I saw you would be for something like this,” she said.

“You look nice,” he said.

She picked up a spoon, greasy with duck sauce, and searched out her reflection. “I do? How is that possible?”

“The white streak in the hair,” he said, pointing, almost touching her head. “I like it. It's elegant.”

“I was hoping it was more intimidating than elegant.”

This made him laugh. He finished more wine. He began to say something, then stopped.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don't want to ruin the night. I should be quiet.”

She waited for him to talk.

“It's just that it's been bad without you,” he said. “Very bad. Real fucking bad.”

“I know,” she said. Which she did. For the longest time she had been almost biologically attuned to his emotions. After leaving the law firm, he grew bored. He missed her even more. He yearned desperately to have conversations with other adults. She tried to rectify this. She called, video-chatted; she flooded the house with consumer goods, with enormous televisions; she rushed out on her short breaks to meet him for coffee in the hospital cafeteria; she blamed herself; she lost sleep; she grew her hair out; she bought ridiculous crotchless lingerie. None of it was enough.

“I meant what I said in the letters,” he said.

“Which letter?” she said.

“All the letters. Every one. The ones you read and the ones you didn't.”

“I have all the letters,” she said, which was different, she knew, than saying she had read all of the letters.

“I'm a single man in my forties living in the suburbs. That's almost certainly a very specific circle of hell, I think.”

“But you can move anywhere you want,” she told him, knowing already that he had stayed in Crestview, in the house they had built, because he was convinced that their separation would end, and that she would come home.

“Would it be awful if I said out loud that you were my best friend?”

Before the separation, she had regarded his open sentimentality with suspicion. It was his big character flaw, she contended, the idea that emotions became more potent the more dramatically you conveyed them. But her concern for him was hardwired into her. Six months apart and she still felt the urge to do something about this—his sadness, his misery, his loneliness, his every daily problem. Immediately she reached to touch his wrist. Touching Spencer like this was habit. With her fingers on him she could feel his heart beating. Was there ever a way, she wondered, to do this, to express concern for a person, a man, without it constituting crossed signals?

“Did you help my mother in the garage?” she asked, trying to find a different subject, something, anything, less troublesome. “Did you help her find whatever it is that's gone missing?”

“I just took it too far, didn't I?” he asked. “With the best friend thing? Was that too much? I've been rehearsing things to say to you. I do it in the car, driving around town. All day, sometimes. Imaginary conversations, in which I am usually very funny and charming, and in which you remember what it is you originally liked about me.”

She thought, if I smile, it will be a cruel smile, a lying smile, especially with Paul upstairs, especially in light of Spencer talking about how she looked nice, and how much he appreciated the new white streak in her hair. She also thought, if I pout at him or express any kind of pity toward his emotions, which are real emotions, surely it will be just as bad.

She drank.

In the beginning they told each other everything. Openness was healthy, they assumed. Secrets were stifling. Better to know what you're up against than to let unaired grievances fester and turn malignant. Not long after they moved to Crestview, she and Spencer began to keep a record of their secrets. They did this by habitually filling an empty drawer in their kitchen with small scraps of paper onto which they'd written the things they were most afraid to tell each other. Their friends found this charming, or at least obnoxious enough to lie about:
You two. Holy Lord, you're so adorable. A drawer of secrets! Who does a thing like that?
Surely by committing to paper their most deeply held secrets and wishes they would ensure a bulwark against repression. Mostly they believed this. In moments of weakness, when they no longer believed, they read books on believing. This was something they shared: an unhealthy faith in the written word, or at least a preference for the self-help section of their local bookstore. No other couple they knew could boast of having digested more self-help than she and Spencer. The sheer surplus of words buoyed them. We will make mistakes, they told each other. We will take each other for granted. We will at some point find each other repellent. We know these things and we are stronger because of them. The experiment was short-lived. The first wishes were typical and often lovely.
A week with just you in Venice and no babysitter or baby monitor or grandparents.
By the next year, they had begun to startle each other.
Cocaine.
It was clear the spirit of the plan had quickly soured. She thought of this now. The drawer in the kitchen had long since been taken over by knives. Surely this meant something.

He smiled. Lydia came in and out of the room, clearing more food. He watched her.

“She got even smarter,” he said.

“She'll be fine,” Oona said hopefully.

“She's better than both of us,” he said.

“That's not a very difficult thing to accomplish,” she said.

Spencer turned to her. “You should come home with me when I take her back.”

“See? That doesn't sound smart,” she said.

“We could get the team back together. Have a movie night. Watch something scary.”

He always did this—substituted the word “team” for “family,” as if the whole business of cohabitation and occasionally fucking and more than occasionally feuding with each other was equal to the dynamic one finds on a football squad.

“You don't want to come home at all?” he asked.

“I do sometimes,” she admitted, and it was true.

She had driven by the house, more than once, in the dead of morning, and parked outside in the dirt beneath the pin oak while the lawn sprinklers soaked the yellow siding. She thought that if she regarded the house the way a spy might, she could gain some perspective on what she had given up. This felt like a revoltingly sappy thing to do, to say nothing of how unwise or misleading it would be if Spencer discovered her. By the third time she'd done it, she had to reckon with the facts. Separating had confused her. She missed the place. It was a big ugly house, built in a period of outsized ambition and youthful recklessness. She had poured untoward amounts of energy into each decorative choice. The siding, for instance—she had deliberated over so many dozen shades of yellow before picking this one. Canary yellow. Hay bale yellow. Hawthorne yellow. The same went for the lawn sprinkler and the type and strain of grass it watered. The sheer pomposity of the neighborhood implied that everyone had the same hopes she and Spencer had: domestic bliss, suburban perfection, passable color coordination.