The Inseparables (22 page)

She could not say aloud just how badly it wrecked her to see this. When she met him, he had dreams of this place, fledgling sketches, delirious visions of honey-glazed bread, place settings already imagined. He had never been a man who had desired anything else but to have his own shop. On weekend mornings, on his days off, he would wake early to cook in their tiny galley kitchen. He was in his twenties then, working in New York, already practicing recipes. She would wake to the smell of caramelized sugar, or roasted duck. Her young husband, sweat-stained in an undershirt, rolling out salted flour on their small square of countertop. She would come groggy to the breakfast nook, and he would feed her the most ridiculous treats first thing in the morning. Butter-poached oysters. Fried artichokes.

In the harsh kitchen light, he looked diminished.

“Tomorrow will be better,” Henrietta said, overruling him, ordering the food cooked and bagged, some of it frozen. She took him into the back office, leading him by the arm, her wrist tight against him like a handcuff. She paused when they were alone, and then spoke slowly. “Look, either you change this place, cook something different, or it dies.” They'd had this conversation before. They had no more money.
Let me get some money, then. Let me borrow some.
They'd needed more than money, though. A new menu. Better music. She'd gone, just recently, around town to see how others were doing it. Rock music in the dining room! People eating in rooms deafeningly loud with drums and guitars! Scallops and a light butter reduction and Bruce Springsteen groaning on about New Jersey! Foie gras and Keith Richards! Bone marrow and Cabernet Franc and David Bowie! Molecular gastronomy and electronic dance music! Less butter! The dining rooms were all bright and open. The Feast was dark, red and burgundy, the only brightness the white of the tablecloths, which were frayed, almost all of them, the dim lighting scheme hiding the worst of it.

Philippe came into the back room carrying the veal stock. “Chef?” He looked down at the big pot, the broth sloshing. “I'm sorry. There's soap in it.”

“What?”

“Some of the boys,” Philippe said. “They had a sponge fight.”

Harold got up to see. Philippe lowered the pot. An oil slick atop his stock. Two white peaks. A hint of bleach. He took the pot from Philippe and went out into the kitchen. The cooks were lined up against the stove.

“Who did this?” He was losing his composure, she knew. Having an animal killed and then throwing it away—it was getting to him. “Who did this? I demand to know!”

“It's fine,” someone said, a young cook, blond, possibly Swedish. He got his people from the most unlikely places these days. “Just boil it off.”

“Leave,” Harold said, pointing. “Don't come back.”

The Swede left. Harold put the stock on the floor. “This was an animal,” he said, beginning softly. “This was an animal. It was brown when it was a baby. Brown with white spots.”

“Harold,” Henrietta said, whispering, pulling on his sleeve. “Don't do this.”

“It was a lovely animal, and the only reason this isn't an animal any longer is so that it could be food. Something to feed to someone. That was its purpose.”

“Chef,” Philippe whispered behind him, “you need to stop. No one will come back to the kitchen after this.”

He turned, pointed. “You too. You're fired. Get out.”

Philippe stood, indignant. “I refuse.”

“Fine,” he said. “You drink that, then.”

“What?”

“Get down and drink it if you think I'm being crazy.”

“You're joking.”

“I'm not joking. Drink it.”

“You're crazy.”

“Get on the floor and drink the stock!”

“Stop.” Henrietta put both of her hands on Harold's shoulders. “Let's get you to sit down. You're tired.”

“No. Philippe! Get on your hands and knees.”

“Fuck off, chef.”

“Get on your fucking hands and knees and drink this fucking stock, Philippe! Do it! Drink it!”

He kept yelling and Henrietta picked him up off the ground as if he were a child and dragged him back into his office. “I'm just asking you all to respect this!” He wept. “This was an animal and now it's just liquid with soap on it. What is wrong with you people?”

All night she worried that more pictures would come. Lydia sat up in the dark, sleepless, snow outside and plows circling, her phone flat on the comforter.

This was her girlhood bedroom. Stuffed animals lay piled up on top of her dresser. Had it always been so pink? Pink walls, pink sheets, pink curtains. Everyone's childhood bedroom was a museum while it lasted. In Lydia's mind, there should have been a chronology attached to the wall of hers in the form of a gallery plaque.

Twelve years old: She'd scrawled her favorite melodramatic song lyrics directly onto the walls. Her taste in music, she saw now, had evolved by hairstyle, from conservative to ecstatic: Morrissey to Robert Smith. Thirteen years old: Above the bed, pasted over the glow-in-the-dark constellations, were an array of shirtless male models advertising cargo shorts and body razors. So much hairless flexing. In the beginning, she had believed, of course, that grown men were supposed to be as sleek as a porpoise. Fourteen years old: Stevie Nicks records. And then, because of those Stevie Nicks records, there were horoscope clippings tacked to her dressers, all of them foretelling a good month/a good year/a spate of good romantic fortune. Fifteen years old: Preppy culture. Tennis sneakers. Julie Christie movies. The existence of the nation of France. Boarding school novels. Tripartite wool scarves. She locked the door.

She held the phone in her hand, refreshing every account and inbox, one after the other, hour after hour.

Finally, near morning, the videos came. There were two of them. The first arrived just after sunrise and in it she was walking, innocently enough at first, across the Hartwell quad beside Charlie, his voice faint in the background, Vermont in September, breeze-bothered maple trees at the edge of the frame, a shard of the navy collar of her uniform, but mostly just her ass as she walked on ahead of him, believing that he was behind her just fiddling with his phone. He zoomed in on her as she went across the field, getting close enough to trace the contour of her underwear as it pressed against her skirt.

In the second video, she was in his bed, lying down, his navy sheets ruffled beneath her, a few buttons undone on her blouse. She was reading something on her phone. R. Kelly played in the background. He zoomed in, this time between her legs.

She sensed that things would get worse, and they did.

She received a link from an anonymous address for a website where she found her original picture from the shower house at Rosewater, available to download for a fee. Now she was for sale.

Just then the garage door opened beneath her, shaking the house, and she rushed down from her bedroom to the carpeted landing, shouting uselessly for her father as his car pulled away. Just the word made her fill with helplessness:
Daddy!
A word she used only in distress. Lost in the department store. Separated at Gloucester beach. Or standing as she was at this instant, in her empty garage. He had left a note on the kitchen counter.
I need to go out. I'm sure you'll enjoy the time alone.

The train from downtown Aveline deposited her a block from the front door of the hospital. She wanted her mother. It was early enough for her shift not to have ended. Lydia knew her way. Up the glass elevator to orthopedics, the city emerged in parallel stripes of ice behind the pines and the reservoir and behind the white steeples of the Unitarian churches. No one ever liked the hospital. She understood. She realized that for most everyone, the hospital, with its chapels and rooms full of weeping relatives and its garbage bins full of wilted carnations and its basement morgue, was a miserable place. But the hospital had always calmed her. This was where her mother was.

Down another glass corridor, past the nurses' station, Lydia let herself into the empty office, a simple cluttered room full of family photos and plastic replicas of the hip joint. She waited. An hour passed. She found a lab coat hanging on a hook on the back of the door and put it on and felt glad that it smelled like her mom.

The reality of having an orthopedic surgeon for a mother, even if that mother was, according to a recent online survey of Boston-area physicians, the forty-second-best orthopedist in the city, was that her mom often needed to rush off somewhere to tend to someone else. This was not particularly interesting to anyone but Lydia, nor was it at all an original complaint to have a busy parent, especially in this new economy, and especially when you went somewhere like Hartwell, where everyone's parents had all but deposited them for safekeeping. But facts were facts. Her mother's ever-improving array of pagers and cell phones and homing devices became over time a fourth person in the family, a second child. Lydia, when she was young, probably worryingly young, affixed human qualities to her mother's phone, calling it Chimey after the way it dinged and beckoned for her mother's attention. During her first- and second-grade years, Lydia had full-on conversations with the phone.
Hi, Chimey, today I went to school.
Hi, Chimey, today is Valentine's Day.
That sort of thing. It had brought her mother to tears more than once.

After an hour, Lydia left the office in search of her mother. It was a rule of hospitals, she had discovered, that the worse a potential malady was, the more serene and beautiful and full of glass their attending departments were, so that ophthalmology was drab and beige, and maxillofacial surgery was even more drab and even more beige, while pediatric oncology was a veritable forest of floor to ceiling windows and urban panoramas. Every available wall space that was not taken up by windows was filled with delightful murals of
Sesame Street
characters. She stopped for a while here to consider the juxtaposition of the wildly beautiful surroundings and the terribly ill children. She crossed several skybridges. Down below, ambulances idled. The city sky dimmed. A hulking potted indoor palm brushed the glass roofline between hematology and sports medicine. This was the centerpiece of the hospital's last renovation, completed when Lydia was a girl. Plaques and portraits hung in the anterooms attesting to civic largesse. At the time, this was evidence of the hospital's institutional optimism: the vestibule, the views, the new white paint, and the luxury of a palm tree here in Massachusetts. A doctor had put it to Lydia this way:
If we can grow a palm tree in this place, we can sure as heck keep people alive.
She'd come to the opening party, where her mother's boss had cut a ribbon with a comically huge pair of scissors. Doctors delivered speeches in which they claimed that this clinic would rise to the vanguard of American health. Diagnostic capabilities would exist under this roof that would not exist anywhere else. Boston was a city full of world-class hospitals, and they, that night, were supposedly witness to the newest member of the class. Also, they had refurbished the cafeteria! She remembered her mother, in a new yellow dress, clapping enthusiastically. To keep Lydia quiet, her mother had given her a real stethoscope to play with. All night, while the adults drank, she circled the room, listening to their hearts beating.

When she became afraid that her phone wouldn't stop buzzing, she turned it off, but then light from the windows caught the camera lens in a way that unsettled her, and so she went to a restroom and put the phone on the ground and stomped on it until it came apart beneath her boot, and then, when there was nothing but a pile of pieces and shards, she stepped on those pieces and shards until there were more pieces, and then, because Charlie Perlmutter had finally succeeded in terrorizing her, she threw everything into a toilet and flushed.

The first floor of the hospital was more or less a municipal triage unit. Gunshot victims, tractor-trailer jackknives, city bus crashes. In the big waiting room, the chaplain stood at reception. An orderly ran a wet mop over a streak of something that was either vomit or blood. At practically every moment, an alarm sounded, beckoning experts or forestalling death. A chorus of bleating chimes. Behind the hospital, cars gathered in the lot of a cathedral built against a hill. You could hear the bells through the heating ducts.

One thing about a hospital: you could cry in public here and no one looked at you twice.

At the nurses' station she introduced herself, her face probably red and wet, her hands shaking. “I've been waiting for quite a while. Can you tell me when my mother will be out of surgery?” she asked.

The nurse looked confused. She stood up, touched Lydia's hand. “Honey,” she said. “Your mom's not in surgery. She's not here today at all.”

Lydia gripped the counter.

“Is there something we can help you with?”

“What do you mean?” Lydia asked. “She's always here. Where is she? I need her.”

Before everything with Spencer began to come apart, Oona did not believe that a mature, grown woman could ever be unsure about something so serious as falling out of love with someone. Falling in love seemed like something powerful enough and vaguely mystical enough to be confusing. But deciding one day that you needed not to sleep in the same bed as someone, or endure his whims or tempers, and that you needed to become effectively no better than a stranger to that person—this had always struck her as rather cut-and-dried. You decided, you left, you became for some period of time a villain. Answering to any doubt about these facts only meant that you were willing, still, to subordinate your happiness to someone else's. But after yesterday, with her husband standing in the middle of traffic, with his favorite coat ruined, and with Paul standing perhaps a little too proud in front of his luxury condominium tower and his luxury German sports car, she could maybe admit that being a villain did not suit her.

So there was this: overnight she had become full of tenderness for her husband. Or full of doubt. Or swelled with pity for him. Or maybe it was something simpler. She missed him. Awake at night in her girlhood bed, alone in the dark, in the room beside her dreaming mother, she took inventory of the past few hours. Making a diagnosis was easy. The experiment was over. The separation had failed. She had tried someone new and come away from the experience feeling disgusted. In the shower she'd scrubbed Paul off her skin as assiduously as if she was trying to sterilize herself for surgery. Afterward she tried to imagine her marriage as a bone she needed to repair. A knee or a hip or an elbow shattered in a crash. This was the only way it could make sense to her. Find the injury. Make a cut. Fix everything. The remedy felt obvious. She wanted to be home again, on their quiet street, in their yellow house, in bed, back beside Spencer, where she had been since she was twenty-one years old. She longed for normalcy, for the regular morning, for the routine of married life. She wanted to not feel Paul on top of her, or hear his bestial grunting in her ears. Spencer was right. It
had
been nice eating a family meal. She and him. Talking. Like humans. Perhaps nice was as good as you could bargain for after twenty years of marriage. Maybe this was the problem. Maybe she'd been bargaining for something better than nice, and maybe nice—something easy, something comfortable, something normal—maybe this was better than someone new.

In the morning, first thing, she called him, and he came straightaway from Crestview. They met at a restaurant near the river. As he snaked his way around the café tables in one of his old coats, she sensed some revitalized hint of purpose in the way he walked. He looked rested and cleanly shaven and sober. When he got to the table, she stood up and found that she didn't know what to do—kiss his cheek, hug him, or do what it was she ended up doing, which was shake his hand. The books on divorce and separation said nothing about the simple things.

“I've been thinking about what I want,” she told him, “and what I want is to come home with you.”

At first he didn't speak.

“This is exactly what you asked me to do the other day,” she reminded him. “And every week before that for the last six months.”

“I remember,” he said quietly.

“You don't want me to come back?” she asked. It surprised her how desperate she sounded. “Did you suddenly change your mind?”

“You fucked our marriage counselor,” he said flatly. “So yes, I changed my mind.”

Suddenly Spencer seemed far away from her. She felt her skin turn hot. She thought to say, “You weren't supposed to know.” Or: “You can't even imagine how much of a mistake this was.” Or even: “It was on his floor. It was awful.” But she saw that it was pointless. This revitalized fresh face of his—this was the face of someone who had already reckoned with the facts. The marriage was dead and she was the one who'd killed it. Her disappointment gave way to resentment. Wasn't this what her mother had been trying to tell her when she was young? Even Spencer, the good liberal Jewish boy from Chevy Chase, having read the right books, having marched against apartheid, having divested the family portfolio from fossil fuels, having genuinely wept over Djimon Hounsou in
Blood Diamond,
having never once made a creepy joke about
The Inseparables
—even Spencer believed that her body belonged to him. The issue was not one of forgiveness or sin or his attitude about the practicality of monogamy. The issue was property. This was the obvious truth. She saw it all over him.

“So this sounds to me distinctly like a punishment,” she said.

He squirmed. “Is there another, softer word for ‘punishment'?”

She sat back. Waiters circled. Bread in the kitchen burned in a toaster.

After they first met, at the party in Tribeca, she'd left without his number and was a block away, walking with friends north on Lafayette Street, when she realized. She turned back, alone, to return to the party, and found, before she even reached the building's stairwell, that he had done the same thing. These were the elemental things, these facts, their finding each other in the building's vestibule, by the elevator banks. This was the story they told at dinner parties. Every family has a creation myth and this was theirs. She had felt, running into him that night, as if it was the beginning of something. She even said it to him. “That sounds ridiculous, probably,” she acknowledged, even though she was telling the truth.

She looked around. They were in a half-empty coffee shop in suburban Massachusetts. Did this feel like an ending?

“Yesterday was a disaster,” she said. “I want you to know that I think it was a disaster.”

“You have to admit,” Spencer said, “it's a really good racket. Advising couples about how best to break up. Weakening the marriage. All the while preying on vulnerable women. In an immoral, psychopathic way, he's actually kind of brilliant.”

“It's not like you were completely innocent yesterday yourself,” she said. “Showing up there with our daughter! What were you thinking?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes, honestly.”

“I was on drugs,” he said. “So that's my excuse. I was on drugs in front of our kid. I'm basically the greatest father in the history of fatherhood. What's your excuse?”

“What do you want me to say? That I wanted to screw another person?”

“Do I want you to say that to my face? That you wanted to fuck our marriage counselor and eventually you did in fact fuck our marriage counselor? No. I don't think I need to hear that.”

Slumping back in her chair, no longer hiding how dejected this made her feel, Oona saw Spencer's expression change. He leaned forward. He reached out to touch the sleeve on her coat. She could see that his instinct was to help her. This had become his role in their marriage. He came when she called. Any bad experience, and he came running. This, she realized, was exactly why she had called him. Because their marriage had become a habit, a series of faithful patterns. She hadn't called because she wanted to come home, but because she needed him to make her feel better. He checked the time on his watch. She felt a new distance opening. What did she honestly expect him to say that she didn't know already? Yes, casual sex could be fantastically and distressingly weird. Even with a stranger, someone you met in a bar, someone who was not your therapist, it was almost always a bad experience. Yes, you could find yourself on your back on a cold kitchen floor, pulling out a man's chest hair with your fingers. Or hearing about that man's redheaded ex-wife having an epiphany in the Himalayas. It was not like in her mother's book, she knew. Dependency happens. Good sex was not enough. Guilt was inevitable and useless. Occasionally you needed someone to make you feel better. Across the table, Spencer wore a confused expression. Half pity, half anger. An expression that appeared to say,
I don't have anything good to tell you about this. In fact, I need someone to make
me
feel better about it.
She felt unreasonably close to weeping and hated herself for it. He was her person. What were you supposed to do when you lost that?

“This isn't how I thought this would go,” she said finally.

“How did you imagine it?”

“Amicable.”

“That I'd just welcome you back home?”

She shrugged. “More or less. I mean, that's what you asked for two days ago. And in the letters, right?”

“I thought you didn't read the letters.”

She smiled. “I think I read most of them. Or at least half. There were a lot of letters. Like, many, many letters. Thousands of words.”

“I had a lot of feelings, I guess,” he said.

He laughed and then she laughed, and for a minute they let this moment exist between them, and when it was over there was silence. The coffee left in their cups rippled in the mugs. Her smile lasted longer than his. She felt as if they had just watched a lunar module fall into the sea. A rare occasion tinged with the possibility of impending doom or sadness.

“I won't write anymore,” he said.

“You can write if you want,” she said.

“I've clearly embarrassed myself.”

“You're very good at it, though. It's one of your best skills.”

“Or call. I won't call.”

“You can call, too,” she said.

“I just don't think that this is the part of the process that's amicable,” he said.

“Then what part of the process are we in?”

“The part of the process where one of us starts sleeping with other people before the other one does.”

She shredded a napkin. “I thought we were about to transition into the part of the process where we get along.”

“Fine,” he said. “This is the part of the process filled with bitterness and jealousy and maybe one of us standing on a city block with binoculars.”

“So, madness, you mean.”

“Fine. Madness,” he agreed.

“When does the peaceful part of the process happen?”

He sighed. “After both of us find someone new.”

“What if we don't find someone new?”

“I didn't finish reading all the divorce books,” he said. “I don't know how it ends.”

“I don't know either.”

Outside, a hydroelectric waterfall sent mist into the air that froze into a slurry on the street. This was the ugly season, they had always called it. In Massachusetts they had football season, the color season, the drinking season, the Christmas season, and finally this. Mud everywhere, stubborn winter, forests of gray. Still, there were ducks. She watched them waddling from the river to the land and back to the river. Wood ducks, their green heads wet and shimmering, a magnificent line of them. This corner of wet earth, with its gentleman's farms, its resplendent waterfowl, its meticulous landscaping, the seat of the American Revolution with café parking lots full of luxury Bavarian engineering—maybe they should have never left New York. She said this to him.

“Don't you think the end would be the same, though?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“Geography doesn't affect fate.”

“That sounds like stoner teenage talk,” she said.

“Love is a teenage emotion,” he said.

“Your pessimism is inspiring.”

“All the songs on the radio, the love songs—they're for teenagers. They don't write love songs for actual adults. They would be too depressing.”

“Songs about divorce attorneys and couples counseling. That sounds like a lost Merle Haggard record.”

“If we had stayed,” he said, “we'd just be arguing in a coffee shop in Manhattan.”

“Maybe.”

“A more expensive coffee shop.”

“You were happier there, at least.”

“I was twenty years old. My brain hadn't fully formed yet. I was happy and stupid. I didn't know anything about anything.”

When they were finished, he walked with her out to her car, over the covered bridge that spanned the river, slick with ice, past the ducks, gulls from the sea overhead, and she remembered how, when they came to Aveline the first time, she had explained to Spencer that love was a chemical reaction, how a surfeit of hormones prompted a bond with another person, something as easy as a light switch flicking on and off. She had learned this in her endocrinology class. She remembered how angry this had made him. Such a cold, clinical explanation for something he considered vast and unknowable and beautiful.

At the end of the bridge she took his hand as they walked, and for a moment before they got to the cars he held on to her and squeezed very hard until her fingers went white, as if he was an injured man about to have a limb cut off without anesthesia, all the while saying nothing, looking out at the river, at the ducks and the ice. A part of her understood. She had felt this way about him when things were better, that she wanted to grab him so tight because she was afraid he would vanish. Before he unlocked his door and drove away, she said to him, “You know the picture of us at the party? The one where we met?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Do you still have it?”

He nodded.

“I think I lost mine,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Maybe when I was packing up.”

“Okay.”

“I was looking for it,” she said, not knowing whether this was something she could say anymore. “And I realized I must have misplaced it.”

“I can make you a copy,” he said. “If you want.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

She had watched too much television and she expected then that he would kiss her. A last moment. A parting thing. Fucking snow falling around them. Goddamned stupid waterfall nearby spraying up stupid sentimental mist. She waited for it, even. She would think of this later and cringe and make promises to herself not to expect unreasonable things from the people closest to her. Instead, they lingered in the parking lot in silence, not even really looking at each other, even though this was what she wanted to do. Another foolish impulse. To really look at his face. To remember it better.