Had my father cut in on my father-in-law? Had Malabar put my father up to it? Or had it simply happened naturally, like the shifting of a murmuring of starlings?
To my relief, Lily handled the situation with grace. She did not object or make a scene or shoot Ben a reprimanding look. Rather, she focused on my father, engaging him in small talk as they danced, her eyes magnified behind pink-framed glasses.
As for me, I couldn’t stop staring at my mother and Ben. Their cheeks were pressed together, words passing in warm whispers from one’s mouth to the other’s ear, faces aglow in happiness as they enjoyed a fleeting foxtrot against the backdrop of eternity.
Part III
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—ANAïS NIN
Twenty-one
For our honeymoon, Jack and I traveled to Nova Scotia, an oblong spit of land located on the Eastern Seaboard and almost entirely surrounded by water: the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Atlantic Ocean. We stayed in Cape Breton in a majestic hotel that sat on a bluff with panoramic views of Cape Smokey and the shores of Ingonish Beach. Jack had researched the trip meticulously, planning daily adventures that included hiking the Cabot Trail, visiting historic sights, and exploring the province’s finest restaurants. He made sure we had downtime too, quiet moments to read and lounge in our room, get massages, and enjoy cocktails on the patio where each evening at sunset a plaid-kilted figure marched up the green hillside to blow into his bagpipes, emitting sounds as melancholy and eerie as whale songs.
And it was here, during this idyllic vacation in Canada—where days were not to be hurried through but savored—that a listlessness set in. The most banal of choices left me stymied. Did I want meat or fish for dinner? I couldn’t decide. Hair up or down? Either. Would I prefer to walk or bike? Neither. I wanted to sleep. It felt as if in making any inconsequential decision, I might choose wrongly and forever close a door; there would go my other life. More than anything, I felt sapped of energy, the symptom that Jack and I seized upon, the least emotionally fraught issue to discuss on our honeymoon.
“Of course you’re exhausted,” Jack told me. “Why wouldn’t you be? I’m tired too. We just threw a week-long party for all of our friends that culminated in a wedding for two hundred people.”
I inhaled his explanations as he exhaled them, a form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, an intimate rescue. What Jack said made sense: I was going through a postwedding letdown following so much frenetic expending of energy.
But in my journal, I grappled with how to describe the dimming of my emotions, the way food tasted bland, colors looked dull, and my thoughts were unclear. I wrote that it was like having a small cloud hovering above, impeding the sun’s light and warmth. I tried to understand this strange sense of gloom, a steady but seemingly benign presence, more annoying than menacing. Yet whenever I tried to examine it, I found I couldn’t quite face it directly. Like the side of my nose, my growing sadness was both constant and peripheral.
On the last night of our honeymoon, I had a nightmare. In it, my brother Christopher had grown into a young man and was waiting for me by the stream behind my father’s cottage in Newtown. He beckoned me from the very spot where I knew my parents had sprinkled his ashes. My brother had something urgent to impart to me, but in my excitement to meet him, I embraced him, unaware that doing so was forbidden. All at once, Christopher’s body turned liquid and poured back into the creek, now dark and roiling. In the distance, my mother leaned against a tree, hands covering her eyes. She wouldn’t look at me. I awoke heavy with guilt, aware only that I had failed her.
As Jack and I packed to go home, I kept returning to the morning after my wedding. My mother had pulled me aside, brimming with excitement about her dance with Ben, eager to fill me in on what he’d whispered to her.
“Mom, please. You have to stop telling me this stuff,” I said.
My mother looked crushed. “Why? I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“I can’t be your confidante anymore, Mom,” I said. “I’m married to Ben’s son. Don’t you get that?” I told her she needed to turn to Brenda or someone else with less at stake personally. “Really, Mom. I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore.”
At my mother’s look of shock and abandonment, I softened my tone and explained I was exhausted from guilt and needed to start my life with Jack on fresh footing. It was one thing to have lied to him in the past; it would be more unforgivable going forward. I was no longer a child. “Mom, I’m married to Jack. Lily is my mother-in-law,” I said, enunciating each syllable.
“I’m not an idiot, Rennie. I know exactly who you’re married to,” my mother said, going on the offensive. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to murder someone. I was trying to tell you something sweet. Never mind.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said again, pleading. I didn’t want to leave for my honeymoon on bad terms with her. “Please, just promise me that you won’t tell me if you two start up again. I don’t want to know. I really, truly don’t. I can’t.”
Initially, I felt freed from a burden I’d been carrying since I was fourteen. At long last, my part in the emotional high-wire act of my mother’s affair with Ben had ended. I’d been spinning plates for so long that now that all the china finally lay shattered on the floor, I mostly felt relief. Still, I had to be vigilant. I couldn’t fall back into my old patterns. Malabar was my Siren and could bewitch me again and again. Deep down, of course, I was dying to know what Ben had whispered to my mother during their forbidden dance on my wedding night. Had he suggested they meet? Had he begged her to wait for him? Already, I missed Malabar and our confidences terribly. I’d been following in her footsteps for so long, I didn’t know if I could find my way forward without them.
After our honeymoon, I ferried the cloud back to San Diego, where it expanded inside me over the course of several months, settling in like a moody weather system. I didn’t feel sad so much as deprived of my normal range of emotions. Every sensation felt tamped down—victories at work, pleasure from food, distress for friends who were in pain. I couldn’t muster outrage when our country initiated the First Gulf War or feel adequate compassion for a colleague whose husband developed a drug problem. In the graph of my feelings, joy and sorrow had inched closer to the median. I had difficulty concentrating at my job and little interest in writing in my journals, something I’d been doing since I was thirteen.
On the surface, life appeared normal. Jack and I had a wide circle of friends and a routine of work and play that included hosting large dinner parties and caravanning across the border to a town south of Tijuana where there was a charming hotel nestled into the side of a cliff overlooking the Pacific. We’d reserve a large table in the hotel’s restaurant, drink pitchers of fresh margaritas, and wolf down homemade tortilla chips served alongside bowls of jalapeño-laden salsa and bright guacamole speckled with cilantro. A mariachi band crooned sped-up songs in minor keys, making sad tones sound happy, and our boisterous group sang along to “Bésame Mucho” and “Cuando Calienta El Sol,” talking over one another—mostly about nothing, local gossip and sports—until we surrendered to the hypnotic thrum of the waves below, our bellies full of carne asada, our minds blank with tequila. But it was here, surrounded by all these friends, vibrant flavors, and lively music, that I was at my loneliest. I felt as if I were watching myself from above, unable to comprehend the happiness of the people around me.
For Jack’s part, getting married had settled something in him, seemingly paving the long stretch of highway ahead upon which we could cruise for the rest of our lives. When Jack looked into the distance, the sight of all those mile markers—our thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond—put his mind at ease. A planner above all else, my new husband had already envisioned and could articulate a clear path to retirement. I was twenty-four; security in my dotage was the last thing on my mind. I wanted off the highway and onto coun
try roads where we could explore, find secret meadows, have sex under the stars. If I saw a pendant at a museum, I’d imagine the love story behind it. If I passed a stooped-over old woman on the street, I’d wonder what her burdens had been. I wept at passages in novels, memorized poems. Jack was rational and practical and coveted stability. He was the most dependable man I’d ever known, but was I looking for dependability?
Margot and I grew closer. She continued to oversee my development as a serious reader, and our conversations about literature became my lifeline. As books emerged as an essential part of my everyday life, beneath the bustle and noise of it all, I was able to listen more deeply. Margot married my father that spring on his sixtieth birthday, becoming my stepmother and a permanent force for good in my life. She was the first person to intuit that I was in real trouble. We didn’t discuss my rising desperation directly at first. Instead, we would meet at the café adjacent to her bookstore, where she’d offer literary fiction as antidepressant. She gave me novel after novel: Love in the Time of Cholera, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Lover, Vanity Fair. Each told stories of how characters coped with adversity, bad choices, life’s onslaughts.
“Books come into your life for a reason,” Margot said as she handed me another stack.
At the time, I didn’t quite grasp what she meant, but I craved the escape of plunging into these characters’ lives and figuring out their motivations and reactions. The novels wrenched me with their confrontations, pronouncements, and reversals, but they also brought into focus some of my hazy thoughts, providing moments of clarification. Like a woman possessed, I bought packs of three-by-five notecards and started compulsively jotting down my impressions of every book I read. On the front of each card, I detailed my overall response to the book, transcribed lines I loved, and highlighted essential themes, noting when those themes intersected with my own story. On the back, I wrote down words I hadn’t known and their definitions.
At Margot’s encouragement, I also signed up for a creative-writing workshop taught at UCSD, where, in my juvenile attempts to write fiction, my subconscious revealed its ongoing devotion to Malabar. In an early story called “The Pigeon Slayer,” I even managed to create the happy ending I felt my mother deserved. The piece was about an unhappily married hunter who smothers his terminally ill wife with a pillow and thus liberates himself to pursue his great love.
By day, my psyche busied itself with grotesque solutions to my mother’s ongoing drama, but by night, it turned its substantial wrath on me. Fraud. Liar. Fool. The voices in my head were relentless. Over the next two years, they grew louder and louder until they became unstoppable revenants that intruded daily, most aggressively in the predawn hours, when my defenses were at their weakest. I resorted to drinking goblets of red wine to help me fall asleep. But I couldn’t suppress the voices. Each night I would awaken with a start at exactly two o’clock. For an hour, sometimes more, I would lie expectantly, waiting for the endless loop of berating thoughts to end; they didn’t stop until dawn inched around the sides of the bedroom shades.
This scene played out night after night with Jack just one foot away from me, sleeping with the peace of the dead. Sometimes I considered waking him up, thinking he might understand and would be able to talk me out of my torment, but he was already confounded and exhausted by my unhappiness. He’d been watching me unravel for months now and was doing his best to support me. He took me for runs on the beach and tirelessly researched articles about exercise as a cure for depression. One of us needed to sleep. I let Jack be.
Everyone close to me knew I was suffering.
“Just tell me what to do,” Jack said. “Whatever you need, I’ll do it.”
“I’ve been there, darling,” my father said. “You’re resilient. You’ll get through this.”
“Let’s call my therapist,” Margot said. “She’ll help.”
“Don’t listen to the voices at night,” Kyra told me over the phone. “They act like they have answers but they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Drugs,” Malabar said. “Powerful ones. We need to treat this thing with a sledgehammer.”
But I also found my depression tedious—tedious to live through, tedious to explain, tedious to be around. I was bored by my own relentless loop and felt sure I was boring everyone around me. I had brought this on myself, after all, having made a series of decisions that landed me where I was: in the wrong city, pursuing the wrong career, and, quite possibly—the hardest thing of all to contemplate—married to the wrong man. What had Jack done to deserve being saddled with this depleted version of me?
I began to loathe living in San Diego with its nonstop sunny days and perfectly fit inhabitants. I missed the messy velocity of New York City and had started to imagine pursuing a career in the literary world. On my bedside table, old political journals had been replaced by current issues of the Paris Review and Granta. Would Jack possibly consider a life together back east? My husband was happy in San Diego; he loved his job, our home, and his routine. Reluctantly, Jack told me he’d be willing to move, but we both knew that no part of him wanted to leave. Besides, neither of us could say with any optimism that this was where his sacrifice would end.
“I couldn’t bear to leave everything I love and then end up without you too,” he said.
* * *
In late November of 1992, just over two years into my marriage to Jack, Lily’s heart gave out. She had a heart attack at a restaurant and died on the way to the hospital. Ben delivered the news to Jack matter-of-factly, who told me in a similar manner. I couldn’t fathom the concept of being without a mother. It was as unimaginable to me as waking up without the sun. But Jack did not fall apart. He did not cry at the news. Instead, he got through the evening in a high-functioning daze, purchasing airline tickets to Boston through United miles, making an extensive packing list, and calling other family members, delivering the news, and attending to their feelings.
Before the sun set over the Pacific, Malabar telephoned. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was my job to tell her about Lily’s death. Then the words spilled out.
“I already know, Rennie,” she said. “Ben called me first.”
I wondered if it was true that Ben had called my mother before he’d contacted either Jack or his sister. Perhaps Malabar simply needed to believe this. She went on to tell me that she’d decided against attending Lily’s funeral. Had she actually contemplated going?
In the next room, I watched Jack pace in quiet grief. On the phone, my mother’s voice was measured, but beneath the placidity, I could detect the vibrating hum of hope. Malabar would be seeing Ben soon. This love affair, born from a kiss a dozen years earlier, was potentially about to bear fruit. She might finally be getting the life she’d always dreamed of.
I thought of Vanity Fair’s protagonist, Becky Sharp, easy to revile for her raw ambition. On the index card I’d made for this novel, I’d transcribed the following quote: “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire?” Beside it, I’d written Malabar. For all of her faults, my mother was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted, something that could never have been said of me. The next quote I wrote was this: “Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?” Beside it, I’d written The kiss.
* * *
Jack and I arrived in Plymouth the next day, a typical New England late-autumn afternoon, cold and damp, the trees naked, the landscape various shades of gray. There were cars in the driveway, and when we pushed open the door, the house smelled of wet coats and stew. A pair of rust-colored mittens stuck out from the pegs that lined the entryway, and Jack hung our parkas over them. Under each peg were the initials of a Souther family member, written in the uneven lettering of a child. Even as a little boy, my husband had craved order.
A steady stream of neighbors and friends, as well as several widows from around town, came and went. They held Ben tight
ly by the arms or shoulders and shook their heads, uttering words of comfort. There were casseroles and pies on countertops, cards in a basket, vases full of cut flowers that brightened corners. The bounty of condolences demonstrated the community’s affection for Lily and the collective assumption that Ben would be lost without his wife of almost fifty years.
When the last of the visitors left in the early evening, Ben turned his attention to us, his family.
“How about a drink?” he said.
There was no argument. This was simply how days ended. It was just the four of us now—Ben, me, Jack, and Jack’s sister, Hannah—with some intermittent and welcome interruptions from Ben’s siblings and their spouses, who were handling various aspects of the funeral arrangements. Ben made our cocktails, and once everyone had a drink in hand, he raised his glass to toast his late wife. I no longer remember his words, only that they were kind and practical, not in the least romantic or nostalgic.
“Skoal!” we said in unison, Lily’s favorite salute. We clinked glasses.
Ben grimaced at his gin and tonic. “This is God-awful,” he said and then continued sipping.
Jack and Hannah recounted some family expeditions: backpacking trips to Wyoming and Montana, river rafting and other adventures that highlighted how game their mother had always been with regard to Ben’s need to hunt and fish.
When we’d drained our drinks, Jack got up to make a second round and discovered the reason behind Ben’s foul-tasting cocktail. Previously overlooked, a strip of masking tape ran along the bottom of the Schweppes tonic bottle, labeling its contents with a skull and crossbones and the words Plant Food—written in Lily’s block letters.
Jack and I stayed in Plymouth for a few days after Lily’s funeral to help Ben organize Lily’s things and to go through her treasures and find a keepsake or two. On the morning we intended to return to San Diego, I rose before dawn and slipped into the bathroom. From the second-story window, I noticed a figure on the lawn. It was Ben in a green parka hunched over a dark object, alone. At first, I couldn’t make out what he was doing, but I imagined that he was doubled over in grief, crippled by the reality that his wife was gone, ending five decades of life with her. My heart ached for him.
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