The Inseparables (20 page)

From the outside, Witherspoon's did not seem like the kind of place that might accept stolen things or fence them or attract the kind of buyer interested in getting a deal on a pilfered piece of damaged folk art. Henrietta had expected a pawnshop. Instead, Witherspoon's gave off a kind of shabby Francophone glamour, with its gray-and-navy-striped awning and its window boxes planted with ice-hued cabbage. This was miles from home, in a shop on the edge of the city. In the window a Cézanne rip-off and a baroque brass candelabra shared space with a studded orange-sherbet-colored settee. Henrietta was no expert, but in her experience this was the exact store window of every antique store everywhere. She'd come here because Jerry Stern had told her to. His message was brief:
Try Witherspoon's. I can't promise anything.

A big man, looking somewhat close to her in age, met her at the door wearing white suspenders and a huge untamed mustache.

“I'm wondering if you can help me,” she said. She approximated the size of the weathervane with her mittens. “I'm looking for a little woman—”

Before she could finish, the man's mustache rose, a sly grin underneath. “That makes two of us.”

“No,” she said, laughing. “It's a statue. Sixteen inches. Made of copper.”

He put a hand to his face, absently or nervously scratching. His mustache looked capable of swallowing his fingers up to the knuckle.

“It was part of a weathervane,” she explained. “Not the whole thing. Just the top part. The ornament. It looks like a very small statue.”

The man shook his head, which she expected. She did not know exactly how to go about doing this. Had someone in fact come to her house and taken this thing, and then sold it here, to this stuffy place, with its awning and its reams of dust and its mustachioed clerk? Would it just be on the shelves? Was there some secret patois that thieves used?

“We have a few roosters in the back,” he said, smiling. “Maybe a lady got in without me noticing.”

“Can I look?”

The air inside was musty: damp library books and potpourri and the latent hanging reminder of a morning cigarette. On a bar cart inlaid with cracked mirrored trays, a Lalique decanter needed to be washed. Overhead, a Neil Diamond song played in French. There were two rooms, Henrietta saw: one with rings and watches and gold earrings, and another with furniture and pastoral paintings, most of them pictures of fat peasant girls hoisting hay bales or milking goats on their knees. She paused for a long moment in front of the best one of these: a river scene, with a farmhand jamming his pitchfork deep into the earth while surveying, or admiring, or planning to sexually menace a young woman washing her laundry in the water. Henrietta would have lectured for ninety minutes on this picture back in New York. The pitchfork as a substitute for a cock. The artist's insistence on making the woman's skirt dirty and, by way of this choice, reinforcing the inherent filthiness of female sexual desire. Ideas like this came to her all the time. Some better than others. When the money finally evaporated, she'd tried to get a class or two. In Boston, she thought, this wouldn't be too hard to do. There were more places here to study than there were to get a decent chicken taco. But she'd been turned down everywhere. Her ideas might have become commonplace now, but the crucial fact remained that her book was still an embarrassment.

“Here are our weathervanes,” the man said, opening a small cabinet to two roosters, one codfish, and a wooden racehorse with a crack through the middle. He quite obviously took great pleasure in this small menagerie. Finally, he took the codfish into his hands.

“They're charming little things,” he said, petting the fish across its scales. “And valuable, too.”

The fish's dead metal eye glared at her. “No women?”

“You sound just like my mother,” he said.

“I had this on my house, you see,” she said. “A storm blew it off.”

“And so you've lost it,” he said.

“In a sense.”

“And then how would it end up here?” he asked.

She tried to keep herself from flushing with color. She used to be a skilled liar, but it was an old talent, rarely used now. “I moved houses,” she said, trying. “And I've always liked that thing. And I've been searching all the antique stores in the city, hoping.”

“Well, the codfish could work,” he said, bouncing it in his hands. “This guy seems capable, don't you think?”

Against the back wall, a humidifier buzzed. A fat gray cat emerged, waddling through the room. On the shelves behind her were tiny wooden curios ready for sale. Birdhouses, walking canes, clockfaces, everything tagged.

“There's no back room?” she asked.

“No back room.”

“No basement?”

“Not with anything good in it,” he said.

She followed the man back to the front of the shop. The dust made her sneeze. More French Neil Diamond played. The cat ran out in front of both of them.

Up front, a small television balanced on a wooden stool. On the screen, Henrietta saw a family out in the sunshine flying kites as part of a pharmaceuticals ad. She always noticed families on television these days, families looking healthy and lovely and engaged moment to moment with the world and doing obsolete things like flying kites.

“I feel like I know you,” the man said.

Henrietta was wearing a long winter coat, which was black and wool and old, and she had sunglasses pushed up through her hair like a headband. Oona called this her
look of intentional anonymity.

“Do you live in the neighborhood?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said.

“Are you famous, then?”

“Most definitely not.”

“No, I've seen you. I'm sure. Maybe on the news?”

She shook her head. “My rule is that if I'm on the news then something horrible has happened.”

This charade had always bothered her. As with all things related to that semipublic part of her, Henrietta maintained a gnawing ambivalence toward whatever remained of her fame. She always underestimated it, or overestimated it, or denied it. What was she supposed to say?
You may have heard of me: I'm the woman behind the diagram with the pubic hair.
Or:
Your mother read my book in the bathtub with the door locked.

They walked to the front counter, which was a glass cabinet full of engagement rings and pocket watches. She left her name in the event that something close to what she'd described came into the shop. Standing near the door, she could hear the electric hustle of the Green Line trolley as it ran up into the city and then back out toward the reservoir in Chestnut Hill. She took a moment to look. It was midday. This was the way she'd come, on the train from Aveline that ran aboveground for miles, through the white forests and the frozen school ball fields and into the city. During their first week living in Aveline, Harold had taken her on the train for the first time. She was eight months pregnant. He wanted to show her how easy it was to get into town. He wanted her to know that he had not marooned her. They went from their house all the way to the beach, she remembered. Think of that, he said: country, city, ocean. All of it is so close.

In the corner of the top shelf, Henrietta saw a black velvet box displaying two silver pens.

She did not need to look very closely to know that these had been Harold's. His name was printed on the front of the box in white lettering. She'd paid extra for this. She had bought them for his thirty-fifth birthday, thinking foolishly that he might use them to write recipes. Not just one overpriced pen, but two. It became a joke between them, these kinds of gifts. Monogramming, personalizing—the strident attempts at ascending social class. He claimed to love the pens but had never, not once, ever used them.

“Could I see those?” she asked.

He gave her the box happily. A white tag hung from the corner. Five hundred dollars, it read, which was four hundred more than she had paid for it.

She opened her purse to buy the pens, but she knew she could not. There were credit cards, but they were maxed, and there were checks, if anyone still took checks, but those would bounce. There was Oona's credit card, slipped in there a few weeks back, without mention, as a kind of prompt:
Quit being so proud and use me.
But she could not.

He always wanted something like knives for his birthday. Knives or trips to New York to eat at Jean-Georges, and she always did this instead—silver pens and tie clips and driving gloves.

“Can you tell me who brought this in?” she asked.

The man shook his head. “I don't keep names. I'm sorry.”

“Could you tell me at least how long ago you got this?” She thought of Jerry, cleaning out everything in Harold's closet, in his office, in the series of shoe boxes he kept stacked in the basement and in which he stored all the letters his parents had sent him at summer camp, their postcards from Europe, their birth and death certificates. She hadn't checked over anything.

“Oh, well, I've had those for a while,” he said.

“A while,” she said. “Is that a month? A week?”

“Oh no,” he said. “At least a year. Eighteen months, even. I know because they're right here where I sit. I see them every day. You're the first person who's ever even asked to see them.”

Lydia and her father drove home wordlessly. The same path, gunmetal-gray sky, the river black and mud-clogged, and the street white with road salt. His humiliation was a third person in the car. What could you say to anyone after this, let alone a man like your father, previously proud, maybe a little too addicted to weed, but still, generally mostly decent? Was there anything to say? Lydia drove too timidly, too slowly, traffic accumulating behind her, the car's weight and force and power increasingly threatening. Her father held a wad of napkins to the stain on his coat as if he were applying pressure to a bullet wound. She put
A Love Supreme
on the disc player. He preferred jazz, intricate rhythms, the kind of music that made no sense to her. She let it play, hoping it might rouse something in him. Also, it occupied the silence. A hockey game in town made the trip slow. At each stoplight she searched the faces that filled up the crosswalks. Every man, she guessed, was better than Charlie Perlmutter or Paul Pomerantz. Each of them. All of them. Dozens of them moving in packs across Commonwealth, Beacon, Huntington, Congress, Atlantic. Why did men move in such huge groups?

Back home, her father put on his black apron and cooked them lunch. Linguine and clams. Her grandfather had given him lessons and he had become over time a very good cook. She watched him, hoping for inspiration about how she might fix this, what she might say to make it better. All the typical words of consolation felt hackneyed and worthless.
Forget that
guy. Visualize happiness. Maybe think about not being stoned all the time.
The noise of his knife against the cutting board was immense and angry. Bowls appeared, stuffed with parsley he had savaged. Lemons were juiced. Clams shucked. More Coltrane on the in-home wireless. They ate in silence with a soccer game on in the background. Some Spanish team full of beautiful men sprinting around in the honeyed sunshine of Valencia. He ate with his mouth ajar, a continuous open passageway for his fork. He finished a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. Sports consumed him so deeply and so hypnotically that she felt, watching him watch these men run, a deep jealousy of his capacity to disappear into something meaningless. He roused only when the action commanded him to. On the screen a tiny, beautiful, black-haired Spaniard scored a goal and then took off his shirt to reveal an abdomen cleaved into so many tiny squares. Accordingly, her dad, in his drowsiness, lifted his own shirt. “I've become convinced that I don't have those things,” he said, looking at her, and then at his own belly. “The square things. Abs? Like, I think we could hire an archeological expedition to dig around there, and I don't think they'd come up with anything.”

She blinked at him.

“It's okay to laugh at my jokes,” he said.

It had been, by any measure, a bad day. Cuckoldry, disgrace, spilled coffee, ruined camel hair, indignation. And for her, the continued threat of more leaked pornography. How could she laugh?

Across the room, she found her reflection in a hanging bistro mirror. A cheesy decorative touch made by a neo-Georgian decorator her mother had hired, it hung as a divider between the culinary badlands of their kitchen and the trophy room of their library, filled even now with the self-help paperbacks her parents hoarded—books with titles like
Thinking: A Graphic Novel
and
Role-Playing Exercises to Cure Your Panic.
Years ago her mother had become convinced that the true path to happiness lay in creating a lovely home. Perhaps this was something she'd read about, maybe in an instructive guide to homemaking that promised a replenishment of the soul, or perhaps this was merely the predictable response to having grown up the way she had, alongside the pink shadow of her mother's book. But there was a problem: the home she'd made with her husband was a dump. The decorator had left their house full of velvet chaises, brass sconces, and a since-removed Rembrandt print that showed a fifteenth-century autopsy. The kitchen light against the mirror erased the contours of Lydia's face. It made her look like an old person trying to look young. She used to believe that a person looked different in each mirror she came across. Small variations, subtle changes, the shape of an eye. She wondered sometimes about the ancient people of the Bible, how in the desert there was no water or mirrors, and no way to see what it was you looked like exactly, except in the flickering, tiny reflection of another human's eye. You would need to really hold on to someone to truly see yourself.

She and her father both looked out to the backyard. The members of the Singh family were on their deck grilling octopus and slamming the hell out of a badminton birdie. Priya Singh, resplendent in azure Gore-Tex, equipped with a wicked forehand, the current Crestview High champion of being effortlessly good at shit, caught Lydia staring across the fence and waved. They had been best friends when they were young but had grown apart—Priya to boys, field hockey, and pop music, and Lydia to Hartwell.

“Wave back,” her father said.

“Maybe first we should talk about what happened today,” Lydia said.

“Just wave at your neighbor.”

“We don't know what happened up there in his apartment, is all I'm saying. They could have been having coffee.”

“Coffee? Is that a metaphor for sex? Or maybe a euphemism for some new illegal therapeutic technique in which psychologists sleep with their patients?”

Priya stood at the fence. Lydia's father turned to her.

“I'm waving with my mind,” Lydia told him. “I assure you.”

“She's being generous and nice. So wave with your hand so that you don't come off as an alien.”

“Oh,” Lydia said, waving with mock happiness. “Priya Singh believes me to be a hundred percent alien, I assure you.”

“She's happy to see you. And she might turn out one day to be your best friend again,” her father said. “And it all might hinge on this very moment. You waving at her.”

“Explain to me a scenario in which that beautiful girl over there becomes my best friend.”

“Is it so outrageous?”

“She's beautiful in that stupid, hideous coat. Nobody could be beautiful in a coat like that. Gore-Tex is a natural beauty reducer. So, yes, it is outrageous. In another context, with another person who is not me, it might not be.”

“Do you have to go someplace to special-order teenage self-loathing like that? Or does it just happen that on your fifteenth birthday a stork appears in your window in the guise of Morrissey, and he touches his beak to you, and then gloomy clouds fill the sky and you're miserable until you're thirty?”

“That would make a great children's book,” she said.

“You're just as pretty as she is,” he said.

“Seriously, write that book. Make millions.”

“She could be your maid of honor at your wedding. I could see a version of the future in which it isn't so outrageous. People crop up places.”

“With all this awesome marital happiness around me—I can't wait.”

This hurt him, she knew. He'd kept the wedding photos up as well as the picture taken the moment they'd met each other at the party in Tribeca. While he'd ditched the bed, he'd kept the photos. At first this had seemed a sentimental touch, a reminder of happier times. Lydia wondered, though, whether this was simply a cruel way to remind him of his new reality.

“Don't let the present trouble sour you on love,” her dad said.

She laughed. “My present trouble or your present trouble?”

He didn't want to answer. Outside, Priya Singh continued to wave. Lydia's father's eyes were bloodshot, his hair standing on end.
Please play along,
he appeared to be saying.

“Hypothetically speaking, where will I be living when Priya Singh happens to just crop up?”

“Let's say that in this version of the future, you're living in Chicago.”

“Chicago? I've never heard you say anything about Chicago.”

He screwed up his face. She wondered whether this was where he was planning to go when everything finally fell apart here. “I like Chicago. It's a good city. Not as showy as New York. Or as vapid as L.A.”

“What am I doing in Chicago, then?”

He squinted at her. She knew this game. Occasionally she got a glimpse of the kind of life her parents had imagined for her. A slim, cheerful-looking fifteen-year-old waiting in line for a skim latte, having come from rehearsals for the school production of
Into the Woods,
the script under her arm—this urbane young woman, looking healthy, ruddy-cheeked, looking positively well-adjusted, this woman and all the young women like her, invariably elicited pangs of quasi-nostalgic longing from her parents.

“You're an actress,” he said.

“Ooh. No. That won't happen.”

“A fashion designer?”

“Again, no.”

“I don't know what you want to do when you grow up.”

“Do I have to choose right this instant?”

“Okay,” he said, searching. “You own a hip little coffee shop. You know, cupcakes in the display case. And Stevie Nicks on the stereo.”

“Do I serve alcohol?”

“Do you want to serve alcohol?”

“Knowing my childhood, probably.”

He didn't find this funny. “Sure. Alcohol. Whatever.”

“I'll agree to play along, then.”

“But only really expensive alcohol,” he said.

“So this is for rich people?” she asked.

“Unemployed former attorneys, mostly.”

“This actually sounds like a good business model. You're full of ideas tonight.”

“So, one day, this young woman comes to visit.”

“Is she, perhaps, South Asian, and wearing a tight blue Gore-Tex coat, and is she maybe holding a plate of grilled octopus in one hand and a badminton racket in the other?”

“You're working the counter. It's been a tough day. Something's off.”

“Money trouble?”

“Maybe illicit pictures of you have turned up online and derailed your fledgling congressional campaign.”

Lydia threw up her hands.

“Okay,” her father said. “Too soon to joke.”

“You can never ever joke about this,” she said. “Ever.”

The moment stung. Her father waited at the table for her anger to pass, something she knew he was doing and which, in retrospect, she probably should have allowed. Instead, she leaned back and crossed her arms against her chest. He sighed and got up to wash dishes, leaving on the table his new phone—black, gleaming, and reflecting back the image of a happy, waving Priya Singh.

A few things occurred next.

One: Lydia reached immediately for her phone and found herself within moments scrolling frantically through all her accounts and feeds and inboxes. While doing this, she considered the fact that she had been, for the past two hours or so, at least, completely off-line, a stretch of time that was practically equal to the Victorian epoch. She scrolled her fingers across the smudged glass, past all the new crude messages and the come-ons.

Then she stopped.

Her father had the water on.

First, a short message delivered by email and text:
New Jersey really is wonderful this time of year. Too bad you didn't show. I warned you.

Then, in her inbox and online: a pair of pictures from the night she had gone to Charlie's bed. In the first, they were together on his unmade, fetid mattress, as if to dispel any rumor on campus to the contrary. His hand rested on her bare thigh, her skirt pushed up. Behind them rain hung in fat beads on the window screen. He had, it was easy to see, taken this picture himself. His arm was outstretched. She had not noticed. She had, senselessly, been trying to enjoy herself.

The second picture was more simple. Just a photograph of her underwear, her pink underwear, taken, clearly, up her skirt.

The final thing that happened was that a horrible noise escaped her.

“You all right over there?” her father asked.

Priya Singh had jumped the fence and was on the deck, waving and smiling and at that very moment knocking on the window. He thought that was what the scream was about.

Lydia slid the phone back across the table. “I'm perfectly fine,” she said.