The Inseparables (16 page)

As much as her mother had wanted her to become a firebrand or an artist, or at least somewhat competent during a dinner conversation about, say, Susan Sontag's “Notes on Camp,” Oona had become resolutely bourgeois. The luxury skin care, the occasional macrobiotic diet, the spin classes, the opinions on which brand of leather-ensconced turbo-dieseled German sedan was best. Not long ago she had installed a $5,000 bathtub. Environmentally disastrous, it required 242 gallons to fill, but when the bubbles were going, the effect was not unlike being pleasantly awash in the ocean. She bathed at the end of every workday, six times a week, no matter how long a day she'd worked. She researched the best luxury bubble baths. She did the research while soaking in other luxury bubble baths. It was important to note, however, that she harbored doubts about the ethics of all of this. On the Internet she'd found some statistics: 242 gallons of water would last the average horrendously impoverished African family forty days.

Dutifully she tacked a reminder note to her vanity.

What did it mean that this was what she thought of when she thought of home? To lie with just her eyes above the water, and everywhere around her the white splash-and-bounce of the jets! Was this so bad?

Spencer leaned forward. His good cologne wafted off him. This felt like a crude way of weakening her conviction. He knew that she loved this smell.

“Then come,” he said, smiling, more good cologne wafting. “Come home and just be there in the house with us. Give it a week. Stay there while Lydia is home.”

The real question was whether or not she missed him, which she did, periodically, at night, mostly, lying here in her childhood bed or, more mysteriously, alone sometimes in her car on the part of Route 9 full of shopping malls and fast-food restaurants and auto dealerships. He had terrifically bad taste in music, and more than once she had found herself listening to some abstruse forty-minute vibraphone solo with something like longing in her. He thought the Real Oona was gone, but the same could be said for him as well. Maybe she had left him in New York, in the apartment where they had lived when Lydia was an infant. Or maybe it went back further, to the restaurant on 2nd Avenue where he had first charmed her, to Veselka, to that first plate of pierogies. The whole project of marriage, she thought sometimes, was a constant labor to indulge the evolution. You met your husband at a party in Tribeca when he was twenty and you were twenty-one and you found his knowledge of books appealing and his apparent ability to accurately label on a map every country in Europe mildly impressive, and then, somehow, you were living three hundred miles north in a stucco split-level with zoned heating and central air-conditioning and a three-car garage, and his daily life consisted mostly of getting high and listening to Ornette Coleman. These last six months she had practically disallowed this kind of thinking. Who really gave a shit whether anyone ever missed anything? She said this to herself sometimes while running a scalpel through a patient's leg. Spencer's evolution was a downward trajectory. It seemed to her that if you made the decision to leave a man, then you left a man. Equivocation only worsened things. She knew what he wanted her to say. To Spencer, missing someone meant loving someone, in the same way that, to her mother, worrying about someone meant love.

Just then she saw a flash of white in the yard. Paul sprinted out past the garage. Moonlight bounced back off his precious bare head. She watched as he awkwardly hurdled the split rail and booked it for the road. When she looked back at Spencer, she saw that his right eye was dilated. She leaned in close enough to smell his clothing. Only now did she realize that he was high.

“Of course,” she said.

“Of course what?”

“When? When could you have possibly gotten high?”

“I'm not high,” he said.

She took out her penlight and flashed it in his eyes, watching the slow response of his pupils. “Spencer,” she said. “Why would you ask me to come back with you when you were like this? I thought you were clean and sober. I thought you had almost three months.”

“Clean and sober implies some deeper problem. Which, as you know, I refuse—”

Overhead, the ceiling creaked. He reached out and touched her hair, swinging a loose strand behind her ear, something he had done hundreds of times before.

“I think you probably shouldn't be touching me,” she said.

“Oona—”

“It's just important for us to erect boundaries.”

“Erect boundaries,”
he said. “You sound like Dr. Paul.”

She felt warm. In the other room, she heard Lydia laughing.

Some restaurants die quickly. Interest wanes. The food becomes underwhelming. Reviews are poor. For Harold, the end was slow and grueling. The Feast closed at the end of the Great Recession. By then it was a curiosity, a stopover for drunk students flush with their parents' money. It had become a museum of butter. People wanted to eat like birds and Harold didn't know what the fuck to do with people like that. Vegans? Pescatarians? People who wanted to see the nutritional information for foie gras? People who asked if he could prepare a quiche without butter or eggs or salt? Who were these people? Diners suddenly spoke like chefs. Meat was not meat anymore. Meat was “protein.” Vegetables were “product.” Your average eighteen-year-old Boston University student came in full of uncompromising ideas about what French food ought to taste like. People watched five episodes of a televised cooking competition or read a book about the dangers of monoculture and thought they knew what they were talking about, or worse, they came in wanting to loudly proclaim their most entrenched convictions: the country's belief in food as art was evidence of a civilization in decline; the French domination of culinary culture was outdated and overly Eurocentric. Can I see the chef? Harold heard night after night. Henrietta knew this because after Oona went away to college she had worked with him, mostly at the front of the house, seating people, or sometimes upstairs in the office, ordering linens or sundries. An early life spent lecturing on Germaine Greer and Shulamith Firestone, and now she endured the questions of food-obsessed cultists. Who are your vendors? Were there pesticides involved? Could you explain how the body digests gluten? Could you make a heart-healthy version of this madeleine? What did she think about the emotional life of geese raised for foie gras? Were these eggs laid in happy circumstances, did she know? Harold had tried, in those last weeks, to explain that what he did was no different than what all these new celebrity chefs were doing: “I was doing farm to fucking table before Dan Barber learned to chew.” He said this to a customer one night when it became clear that the Feast was doomed, and when for weeks it had been empty, when every night they poured down the drain masterpieces of béchamel and velouté. The customer turned out to be a food blogger, and the outburst went out into their tiny world as evidence that the formerly great (or at least good) Harold Olyphant had turned into the currently bitter Harold Olyphant. The Feast closed a week later.

Henrietta thought of this as she went out for firewood down across the yard. It was late, near midnight. The house was empty, the yard moonlit. For a moment earlier, with everyone inside, with food being served, it felt normal again. She crossed the meadow and went through the rows of apple trees. He had planted these the first winter. One to the left of the house, one to the right. At the fence line, she undid the latch on the hut. She was down to the last dozen logs. Just after the Feast closed, this was what he did, dark to light, out here with an ax—not exactly the most subtle display of aggression. She would watch him all day with that dumb ax, over and over. He had nothing left to do and so he chopped wood. They were hurting for money. She handled the bills and saw the accounts dwindling. They went without insurance. They mortgaged the house, and then, so quickly, fell behind on the loan.

What had bothered Harold most was that he had to get rid of his animals. All the chickens, the goats, the dairy cows—they sold everything to a farmer in southern Vermont who had the land and the money. All that was left was Dougie. Henrietta usually went to feed him twice a day, on Harold's old circuit, first thing in the morning and then again after midnight, but today, with everything going on, she had not yet come to see him. Dougie had been a gift from his sous chef years before the restaurant began to slow—another bird to add to the collection. A few years ago, Lydia had painted Dougie's name on the wood of his pen, and this, this yellow paint, this delightful child-scrawl, was the first thing Henrietta saw as she came up over the hill toward the pen. The last night Harold was a living, breathing person, he'd been prepping to use Dougie for his coq au vin. Usually he'd starve the bird before slaughter in order to use the organs, and in order for those organs to remain unsullied by food and grain and shit, and Harold had done this, but not without some twinge of guilt. Henrietta watched this happen. He had hedged at the gate. He'd done it hundreds of times, a simple thing. Here, though, he couldn't go through with it.

“What?” she asked. “Harold, what?”

He turned to her and tried to talk.

“You don't want to cook him?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, I do.”

She waited for him to make a move. “We don't need to cook Dougie.”

“Don't call him by his name.”

“Let's just go to Whole Foods,” she said. “Get an anonymous chicken. A dead chicken.”

“Fuck Whole Foods.”

The thing was, Dougie didn't run. Harold had his hatchet with him, blood on the blade. When animals sensed this they always ran, or else tried to run, but not Dougie, who had never struck Henrietta as an especially bright bird, or really a bird possessed of any of the anthropomorphics people affixed to roosters: cranky, mean, bullyish. Dougie merely looked up at Harold, his eyes fixed on him, a disapproving look of judgment on his tiny, red face.

“Come on, Dougie,” Harold said, girding himself. “Time's up, little guy.”

Another minute passed. Harold didn't move.

“Do you want me to grab him?” she asked, knowing the answer already.

“I'll grab him.”

“You don't want to do it. I can see it.”

“Hi, Dougie,” he said, crouching. “C'mere, Dougie.”

Yet another few minutes went by. He loosed his grip on the hatchet.

They'd had dogs and then the dogs died, and then they'd had cats and the cats died. All that was left was Dougie, and this was the problem: the bird was his pet. Harold loved him, and Henrietta was fairly sure that Dougie loved him back. There was no way to prove this, to quantify their shared affection, or whatever it was: respect for making a go of it here, in the cold, on this tough earth, this farm, with its sweet, subtle rolling slopes and its goldenrod and, more than anything, its silence.

Henrietta stood at the gate to the pen, watching Dougie as he searched desperately for food. He was a big red bird, with white around the face, and something like a hint of a smile in the feathers around his beak. She did not know whether he registered Harold's absence at all. In the mornings they had a routine in which she would hold the feed and he would run and sing, and it was true that this goddamned bird had a brain and a personality, and he had feelings, and at this very moment the bird looked at her with an expression that could not be construed as anything but affection.

They would completely rearrange this place, surely. Subdivide it. Pack it full of condos. A multiplex. Put up a Starbucks. She rubbed her boot in the dirt. Her dirt. There were only two real options for Dougie. She could kill him for food, for the coq au vin that she knew at this point how to make exactly the way Harold would have. Or she could sell him to the same farmer to whom she had sold everything else. That farmer would then, naturally, turn Dougie into food. It was fair to say that the development company that bought this place was not interested in birds, and she did not legitimately think she could take Dougie with her to her new apartment. Roosters did not fare well on wall-to-wall carpeting.

Dougie, for what it was worth, gave the impression that he knew all of this before Henrietta did. He began singing, chirping, yelling, running.

If you kill me, Dougie seemed to say, then you will be the last bird left here. Not me: you.

The road back home from her grandmother's was empty this late. Polluted moonlight fell through the thicket of sycamores. Signs on the curbside warned against jumping deer or deaf children. Lydia was at the wheel because her dad was high. It had happened at some point before dinner. When they pulled away from the house in Aveline, she wasn't sure, but maybe her dad was weeping silently to himself. They made it to the intersection of the main road, where the traffic was fast and steady, before he admitted that it was best that he not drive.

“Are you fucked up?” she asked.

“Generally?” he asked. “Or actually?”

Although she'd had lessons at Hartwell, her dad gave her pointers as they went. He put his hands on her hands, making an already dangerous situation more dangerous. Don't be nervous, he said. Go slow, he said. Both hands, he said, and still she went faster than he wanted. The towns close to the city blended together into a long stretch of Catholic churches and chain bakeries, rotted siding and concrete wrecked by a season of winter salt. The city this late was a flood of students. Boston could be best understood this way, as a collection of campuses masquerading as neighborhoods. It made sense to her now. From the direction she was traveling, northeast to southwest, the students she saw were, according to the school rankings, incrementally less intelligent and promising than the students she had just passed. “This is nice,” he said, his voice low and flat and far away. They passed a forest. “Just don't hit the trees,” he told her. She turned then and saw that he was laughing to himself. “I just told you not to hit the trees. God, I'm father of the year.”

Because her hometown was perfectly situated between two interstate highways, Lydia had always thought of it as a luxurious truck stop. Everywhere, from every lawn, a distant, invisible humming rush of traffic buzzed. She blamed herself sometimes for the fact that they had moved here. You had a child, you forsook your curated urban exploration, and then you moved to the suburbs. This was the natural order of white middle-class life. The idea that they all might have stayed together on the Upper West Side, in their delightfully sunlit apartment where she'd been a baby, with their cats and their Jacques Pépin cookbooks, had never been a real possibility. Cosmopolitan children were eerie, her parents had decided: overly adjusted to the adult world, too familiar with crime statistics and contemporary art installations, and indecently suspicious of open spaces. But secretly, her parents adored the parceled order of the suburbs. Their shared fondness for the smell of cut grass was a dead giveaway. Whatever urbane dreams they had for themselves they'd gladly traded for what Crestview had to offer. High oaks. Native grass. Salamanders. Laws against unsustainable species of wood, bottled water, tobacco products, plastic grocery bags, and public displays of religious affiliation. Pulling into the driveway, the electric garage door rising promptly, Lydia suspected that her parents had probably made a poor choice.

Once inside, her dad helped her bring her big suitcase to the second floor, where she noticed that the guest room door was open and the bed unmade. She stopped.

“Are you not sleeping in your old room?” she asked.

He put down the suitcase. “I can't sleep in there,” he said, pointing up the hall.

“It's just a room, Dad,” she said. “Just because she's not in the bed—”

“No,” he said, opening the door to the master suite, revealing a big blank space. “I literally can't sleep in there anymore.”

She turned on the light. The room was basically empty. “Where's the bed?”

“I may have gone a little overboard when your mom left,” he said.

She walked into the room. Her parents' wedding photos were still aligned on the dressers. Everything was serenely beige. “You junked the bed?”

“At the time,” he said, “I thought I was making an intelligent choice.”

“How is that possible?”

“I thought sleeping on the floor would be a healthy way to punish myself.”

She turned and looked at him and he leaned against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets.

“Please don't tell your mother,” he said.

Lydia found sleep impossible. Her old bed felt uninviting. The linen chafed her. She changed the sheets, discovering in her closet the same cartoon-covered
Sleeping Beauty
bed kit that her father had picked out for her when she was younger, despite her grandmother's constant protests about admiring princesses. These are not the ideals you should value, her grandmother had told her. Dynastic power, jewel worship, the reanimating capacities of Prince Charming's lips—none of this will help you. Lydia was four years old. Alone with them now in the darkness, her stuffed animals seemed to regard her with some new scrutiny, as if they, too, had seen the picture and could not believe she'd done it.

In the morning she woke to the smell of her father's smoke, a trail of it snaking its way up through the vents. She found him in the garage, with the door open to the neighborhood.

“Did I wake you?”

“Doesn't matter,” she said.

“Did you sleep?”

“Not well,” she said. “You?”

“Not at all, really.”

“Upset?” she asked.

He pinched the end of his joint between his fingers until the cherry went out. “Your mother's in love with our couples therapist,” he said.

Lydia nodded. “You know?”

“I know.”

“I don't think ‘love' is the right word,” she said.

He winced. “How long have you known?”

She shrugged. “Not long.”

“I don't know what to do.”

“I don't know either,” she said.