The Inseparables (19 page)

For a while they waited. This had become a stakeout. Her father went across the street for sticky cinnamon donuts and scalding coffee. If they were going to wait, he told her, they might as well wait with some food, or at least something sweet and satisfying and terrible for you. Alone in the Toyota, with its silent climate system humming, Lydia surveyed the silver walls of the Aquarium, watching the streams of families coming off the MBTA and lining up outside, everyone holding hands, whole masses of humanity ready to see the fish in their fish tanks. The hand-holding moved her. It was the exhaustion, or the proximity to heartbreak. Toddlers ambled uncertainly across Atlantic Avenue in search of penguins or manatees or razor-nosed dolphins, oblivious to the hazards of traffic and urban life. Young couples, old couples, tourist couples. She could remember reaching for her father's hand. It was always her father, for the unavoidable fact that her mother was always at work, too far away to reach. Some future therapist, she knew, would delight at hearing it put this way. She still suffered the instinct to reach for a hand when crossing a street. She had reached for Charlie's hand in this way, grabbing it once while sneaking out of Hartwell and into the town center. This was at the beginning, when he was kind. They were in the forest that separated the school from the town. He had taken her hand freely. A teenage boy, she had learned, will take whatever physical contact he is given, but Charlie had regarded it with some confusion. Her small hand gripping his as they ran out through the campus forest and out to the state highway—intimacy stripped bare of any sexual context had clearly mystified him.

She checked her phone and found, waiting for her on the screen, a fresh message from Charlie, delivered five minutes earlier.

Then, a minute later:

The picture was a crime, she had decided. He had wanted to curry favor with his idiotic gang by scintillating them with her body. Her bare breasts were a form of currency that he had and wanted to trade for something like coolness or friendship. He wanted to shame her. That was the kind of boy he was. The boy who connects the nudity of his own body with shame, and who assumes that everyone else must feel the same way. This was the boy who had not been willing to take his own shirt off when they were together in his bed, while he played R. Kelly's “Ignition (Remix)” on repeat, afraid to show her that he had a divot in his chest, pectus excavatum, cobbler's chest, an indentation deep enough to hold half a cup of water. Here was the root cause of his sexual anxiety, this divot, the reason why he needed the lights off, why when she had deigned to rest her hand on his chest while she kissed him, something that she thought people did when they kissed, he had flinched beneath her.

She clicked around, checked all her accounts, her feeds. She looked for new pictures. She suffered competing impulses. She knew that there were no other pictures of her out there. Nothing else to leak or hack or steal. She had taken only the one. But then, looking at the glint of the glass on the lens, she remembered his warning:
Assume that someone's watching you all the time.

She composed a message back, struggling for the exact right words. She settled on this:

The irony of her ever taking a picture like this was that she had been so reluctant to be naked in front of anyone, ever. Here was a fact of the kind of place like Hartwell: public nudity was endemic. Girls walking back from the shower, towels slipping. Roommates changing out in the open. The Danish catalog models slept nude in exorbitantly expensive Frette linen, or else they occasionally set up impromptu figure drawing classes in the common spaces, one of them posing, the rest sketching. They sent nude selfies preprogrammed to self-destruct with such a dizzying regularity that Lydia felt foolishly prim. Which was why people thought she was an alien—because she would not change in front of them. “What's the big deal?” one of her roommates had asked. This came directly following a dorm-wide meeting during which everyone in Rosewater agreed to ban the color pink. No pink clothing, toothbrushes, underwear; no salmon-colored phone cases, pink being the color of conformity, of Barbie, of a widespread assumption of girlish insipidity. It seemed ridiculous now to admit that she'd taken the picture because she was curious, or because she'd felt some vague invidious peer pressure to do what everyone else was doing, or even because of the simple fact that her body was relatively new and potentially beautiful and that she hoped to be able to age without the heaping shitloads of shame everyone else she knew felt.

The chime of Charlie's new message startled her.

She was quick with a response, and already she could see him typing on the other end:

In the car, she had to hold the phone against her knee, she was shaking so hard. She considered the photograph. She'd made it at three in the morning, alone in the shower. She'd gotten high for the first time that night. Not that it was an excuse. She had been out in the woods with Charlie, sneaking around on the lip of the ridge that looked out at the valley and Mount Thumb. Barn owls were hunting. He told her that they mated for life. Just like black vultures. Just like termites. He connected his phone to wireless headphones that they each wore, and as they went up through the underbrush he put on his kind of music for her. Ambient wind rushes of digital noise. Washes of color. He gave her a pill. She took it without thinking. They sat on a white rock and waited for it to hit. He knew the names of all the bugs in the mud, the Latin name for the tulip tree.

“Termites mate for life,” he said, dazed. “Think about that shit.”

Earlier they had sat through a lecture on the biology of thought. Images of the brain, adult and teenage, were broadcast to their laptops.
Notice,
the teacher had said,
how incompletely formed so much of the teenage brain is.
An animation of the prefrontal cortex lit up in indigo on their screens. The lack of development here indicated, among other things, an increased tendency toward risky behavior. She and Charlie had messaged through this.
Fuck this, my brain is beautiful,
she had written.
Fuck this doctor and her stupid slide show of brains.
The blinking indigo was supposed to explain everything about her teenage personality. The foolish impulsivity. The poor choice in hiking partners. The ingesting of unknown pills when your father was very clearly a drug addict.
I want to fuck your dumb brain, Lydia,
Charlie wrote. The answers to everything about herself were medical, physical, concretely real.
How about you just give me a picture of your hot naked brain?
This was the reason for all these end-time feelings. No invasion of privacy had ever been this bad. No betrayal of trust had ever been this severe. Her head was a wastebin filled with the stuff. The surfeit of dopamine. The equal measures of heartbreak and blood lust.

On the white rock he had put his hand in her hair and then kissed her, and this was her very first kiss.

One last chime:
Come to New Jersey. Your offer expires at the end of the day.

Lydia remembered a lecture her mother had given her before her first day at Hartwell. They were in the car, waiting outside her dormitory, and all the girls were coming out and going in, everyone looking supremely confident and acne-free and blond. People make mistakes, her mother had said, out of the blue, anticipating, it was clear, everything that was about to happen, perhaps for both of them. People get lonely. People act foolish. People sometimes find other people attractive physically even if they don't find them particularly attractive personally. People are occasionally capable of extreme cruelty. This doesn't mean that people aren't capable of good deeds and trust and redemption. All of this had been a poorly articulated way to tell Lydia not to sleep around, and Lydia, ever shrewd, had leaned against the car door and said, When you say “people,” you really just mean you, right? She hadn't meant anything by that at the time. It was just a way to fight back. One learned the language of insults before learning exactly what they meant. Looking back, her mother's speech, and the insistent don't-fuck-with-me look she had given Lydia, suddenly took on an entirely new dimension.

The face of the Intercontinental shimmered, the glass reflecting back the sky above the harbor, sun-white for the instant. She tried to imagine her mother up there, fifty stories high, having embarked on this sudden new life with this strange new man, months of therapy and weeping into aloe-infused tissues having evolved into this—whatever this was. A new coupling, a spate of self-sabotage, a needlessly cruel way to sever a marriage. It was a fine building, Lydia could see, a combined hotel and condominium complex, with doormen dressed like sentry, and bellhop carts loaded high with monogrammed Italian luggage. Outside the front doors, a stream of wealthy-looking people lingered without any obvious purpose—people smoking, people reading the
Financial Times,
people looking blankly out at the ocean.

She saw her father across the street, waiting to cross at a stoplight, wind bothering his hair, coffee and a bag of donuts and a newspaper balanced precariously in his hands. He wore his camel hair unbuttoned in the sea breeze, open to an untucked dress shirt and a pair of jeans torn at the knee. He looked up at the building with some mixture of distress and resolve and envy at its obvious sleekness, its imposition on the skyline, its militant blackness, as if the building itself had come and taken his wife away.

In the bright light he looked healthier and younger and, for an instant, unlike a father. Just a guy on the street balancing coffee, donuts, and a newspaper. Earlier they had argued about the picture. He needed to do his due diligence as a father, she knew. But still: “How am I supposed to react to this?”

“With compassion, maybe.”

“I have compassion, I do, but I also have feelings. And anger. And worry. And anxiety. And enormous concern. And you're my kid. My little kid. You don't remember that person, but I do. You don't realize that. Ten minutes ago we were getting lunch in the restaurant across the street. You gave names and detailed family histories to all your stuffed animals. I still remember all of that stuff. How the hippo's best friend was the owl. How the owl's brother was somehow a lion. You get that, right? I will never not remember that stuff. The genealogy of your stuffed animals is imprinted in me. It was, like, ten minutes ago to me.”

“You're high all the time,” she had said. “That affects your sense of time passing.”

He'd put his face in his hands. She was hurting him. “Please say something to reassure me,” he said.

She touched his arm. “I'm fine.”

“Say something else.”

“Don't worry, Daddy.”

Paul Pomerantz stepped out from the front revolving door of the Intercontinental. Watching her father watch this man, Lydia felt a stab of guilt for having helped hide Paul away in the attic last night, and a deeper stab of guilt, maybe a lifetime's worth of guilt, for everything she had ever done to him. Her poor dad. Her fucked-up stoner father. Paul wore a knee-length herringbone trench with a red scarf coiled tight around him like a fashionable neck brace. The valet had pulled around the same sleek, polished Audi that Lydia had sat in last night. For a moment they both watched him, she and her father, each probably thinking the same thing: nice coat, nice luxury condo tower, nice car. In a way, Lydia could see the appeal. He was not terrible-looking. He had a decent smile, a dignified nose. The kind of face you saw on a foreign coin. He made a joke with the valet and the valet laughed. The same yellow gull went by and Paul stopped to watch it. Look, Lydia wanted to say. He's alert to nature, he likes birds, he makes jokes with the valet, he's probably nice! Take some notes!

Her father had realized his chance. He headed toward Paul.

From inside the car Lydia cried out, “Dad, no.”

Her father rushed forward with purpose. Foolish, idiotic purpose. Paul, meanwhile, had one foot inside his Audi. He kept talking to the valet. Maybe an impromptu therapy session. Lydia got out of the car. Family didn't let family do shit like this. Her father began shouting something. Lydia was too far away to hear. This clearly was not the confrontation her dad had imagined. Paul nodded and smiled. His graciousness looked studied, entirely fake. She had seen this in Charlie Perlmutter after everything turned. Weaponized warmheartedness.

Her father became startled by something. Paul took a step toward him, his hands up, as if to say,
Let's talk it out, buddy. Let's you and me work it out, pal.
Lydia escaped back to the car. She had a preternatural sense for someone's inevitable embarrassment. She let out a small moan.
Come back,
she said aloud, inside the Toyota.
Come back, Dad. Let it go.

Paul came closer. Her father stood on the corner of Atlantic Avenue. The ocean lay behind him. He looked dignified, she thought, in his camel hair. Snow fell lightly. This was when her mother appeared. She pushed through the revolving door, onto the sidewalk, her hand already up for a taxi. Lydia saw her a moment before her father did. Her mom's coat was open to the same clothes from last night. Even from across the street, Lydia could see her mother's exhaustion, the wear on her face. She had sunglasses on, crooked across her nose. When her dad saw her, he froze. From inside the car, Lydia thought she saw her father say the word
Honey?
or
Sweetie?
Right then, he dropped everything. The paper. The dozen sticky donuts. The cups of coffee. All of it ran down the front of his coat.