I’d have filed that event under Dumb Shit Teenagers Do if not for the thing Bobby’s dad said after graduation. He came up to me and Raymond so he could brag about Bobby heading to Yale. Then he offered it up without any segue: said he’d paid someone to write Bobby’s college application essay. I swear he got off on how disappointed we were, like it had been his intention to tarnish his son’s character. It worked, too—if only a little bit, but only because Bobby never told us himself. A while back, I brought it up to Raymond, but he’d revamped the memory entirely, claiming he always figured Mr. Hart was kidding. I saw the look on Raymond’s face that day, though. There’d been no humor there. He’d been heartbroken to learn Bobby didn’t trust himself enough to apply with his own work. Bobby was smart enough to get accepted on his own, but he went out of his way to ensure he’d always doubt his place there. He let his dad pay someone to invalidate his seat for the next four years—to delegitimize his relationship with an institution that would become his identity. What the fuck?
And still, in spite of the drama, we love our Mowgli. On paper, he’s a pain in the ass, but in real life, he’s our brother. We have history, and we have fun, and if anyone needs proof of his character, they got it the day Vanessa chose him. She’s as good as it gets. I’m sure Elizabeth is lovely. All I know is when Vanessa was by his side, Bobby stopped leaning on Ray to define him. Robert loved bitching and moaning about his stressful residency, never considering the rigors of Raymond’s training—his four-year apprenticeship; his bruised body, shredded muscles, jacked joints; his stress. We really don’t care if Bobby thinks he’s a higher species because of the MD after his name. It’s better he doesn’t know what it took for Ray to earn journeyman after his, or how much money Ray makes, or how much we’ve put away while Bobby strains to hatch his own nest egg. His is on display. Ours is in the bank. Raymond doesn’t brag because he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t complain about his hard work because that’s what he signed up to do. As entertaining as it would be to watch Bobby strap on gaffs and scale a seventy-five-foot pole while holding back puke and vertigo, it’s a good thing he lives in a separate world, tucked away in that old whaling port that doesn’t look all so different from home. This way, things don’t get competitive. And hell, if Bobby’s most lovable quality is the fact that he’s loved by Raymond, I’ll keep loving the guy like a brother-in-law.
Ray cups his hands around his mouth and howls again, screaming our daughter’s name as she finally leaves the bench and runs onto the field. I yell too, though not as loud as my husband. When the ball is in play, I say to Raymond, “Please don’t get sucked into Bobby’s problems.”
He shrugs and says, “You know I can’t help it.”
Isn’t that the truth. “You’ve got your own shit to deal with. You don’t need his.”
Ray puffs out his chest. “What shit do I have?”
“Well, for one thing: her tuition,” I say, nodding toward Bianca, who is ducking from the ball instead of hitting it. “Something tells me a field hockey scholarship isn’t in the cards.”
Ray winces—out of empathy, not disapproval, since we honestly don’t care what she does or how good she is, as long as she’s getting something out of it. Ray folds his arms and says, “Don’t you worry about that. There’s a storm system rolling in.”
“You better pray it’s a hurricane.”
“Hey, now. Let’s not spoil the children.” He smirks like the adorable, cocky bastard he is.
“Are you kidding? Let’s spoil them rotten.”
Bianca intercepts a pass and the crowd goes wild—me and Ray in hysterics, obviously, but everyone else, too, even the tight-ass in front of us, who pumps her fists in the air—and Bianca is so surprised that she freezes, then looks up at us, not smiling exactly, but checking to make sure we’re watching, which is just enough of a distraction for the other team to steal the ball away again, and everyone in the bleachers moans and sits back down—everyone except for Raymond, who keeps whooping at full voice, and maybe I’m imagining things, but it sure looks like Bianca’s smiling now.
“Yeah!” Raymond screams one last time. He sits down and squeezes my knee. “Well, how about that?” Takes a minute for his energy to settle, but once it does, he says, “Don’t worry. Bobby will be fine.”
“I guess,” I say, thinking to myself how it’s not Bobby I’m worried about.
9.
Here’s what’s going to happen: I’ll pull Nick aside tonight and tell him to pack it up and move on out. Whether or not I’m reading him or the situation correctly is irrelevant, because for all of Raymond’s shortcomings—and he has plenty—the man made an excellent point: There’s no sense in waiting for disaster. Run defense before the damage is done.
The drive home from Bar None serves up more traffic than I expected, but it gives me time to think about instincts and why I have them, and why it’s foolish to ignore them. Ray’s gut reaction confirmed my own. When I walk through the door four hours late, Elizabeth simply says, “Dinner’s in ten,” with a smile, and she accepts my wilted herbs, unexplained delay, and faint whiff of Bar None without comment. So I kiss her on the cheek, tell her how nice dinner looks, ask where the boys are, and try to act indifferent when she replies, “Out.”
We eat, just the two of us, like normal, asking questions about work and what we’ve heard about the house next door that’s up for sale, and what we’ve heard about our former neighbors. I clean my plate, clear the table, offer to do the dishes and do them. “When are they coming back?”
“Who, the boys? Beats me.” Elizabeth falls into the couch and a book, so I settle into my leather chair to read the latest Smithsonian magazine, and everything’s normal for a while. Normal and sterile and terribly quiet.
• • •
Eight thirty in the morning, I bang on the guesthouse door and Nick answers, rubbing his eyes, so I ask if I woke him, and he answers, “That’s okay.” When I insist on giving him a ride to a nice stretch of beach he hasn’t seen, he resists until he doesn’t. Takes him ten minutes to brush his teeth and put on flip-flops.
We hit green lights all the way. I ask, “So what’s your deal, Nick Carpenter?”
“My deal?” He closes an air vent.
“You like jogging and pizza. You like fishing but don’t fish. What else?”
He laughs. “What do you want to know?”
“Got big plans for the future?”
“Not really,” he says. “I’m better at living life than planning it, you know what I mean?”
“No. What do you mean?”
He pauses, then answers, “I guess it feels important to do whatever is in front of me at any given time, to do it well and see where life goes. Sounds corny, probably.”
I can’t argue with that. “A little reckless, too.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he says, “but I don’t want to wait until I’m old to do the shit I want to do. Like, maybe I won’t get old. Or maybe it won’t be fun anymore. I don’t want to miss the fun.”
“Interesting.”
“Oh. There is one thing. I have an aunt, lived with her through high school. She’s all the family I have left. I have this dream of helping her fix up the house. Maybe build her a screened-in porch. She worked hard to make that place my home. I’d love to do something for her in return. That’s the extent of my future planning, though.” He laughs.
I do not laugh. Nick Carpenter, the carpenter, waiting for his calling, dreaming of altruism, might enjoy one of those construction-for-charity gigs. Maybe I could hook him up, turn his departure into my own act of charity. Better yet, I could send him to another one of his beloved wilderness camps for fucked-up men, where he’ll spend the rest of the summer digging latrines or spotting belays—I don’t give a shit what he does—and Elizabeth and Jonah will believe he wants to go, because once he’s gone, I’ll say, Nick was too embarrassed to let it show, but seeing us as a happy family was too much for him He begged me not to tell you, but you have a right to u
nderstand. Please, keep it between us. He’d never trust again, poor thing.
Then I’ll be the good guy again. I’ll be at home in my home again, thank God.
But if Nick doesn’t take the hint, or if he gives me shit, I’ll call him out and say, Did you think you could play me for a fool?
And he’ll say, I underestimated you.
And I’ll say, This is your only warning, and he’ll be gone.
Just imagining this scene opens a valve in me, relieving pressure I hadn’t felt building until it’s gone. This allows me to be courteous, even though I’d like to break his nose; and he is gracious, even though he wants to fuck my wife. Perhaps he’s gracious not in spite of but because of his position—what he’s been given: the opportunity to take what’s mine.
I drive him to the farthest point on the beach and ditch him there. Leave the verbal threats and busted headlights to other men with other problems. I’ll eliminate the symptom in good time.
Elizabeth’s office door is closed when I get home from work, which means she’s not to be disturbed: her top condition for working from home. Her handbag is draped open on the granite countertop. Through a gap between leather seams, the glass screen of her cell phone reflects overhead lights. If I were one of those desperate, insecure men, I’d probably sneak a look. Fortunately, I’m not one of those men, and my trance is disrupted by the click and creak of Elizabeth’s office door opening, anyway. Next comes the high-pitched arc of her grand sigh, a ceremonial victory song marking the end of her day. I step away from temptation and fling open the refrigerator door so that I’m focused on condiments, not the contents of Lizzie’s bag, when she enters the room.
“I know,” she says. “We’re out of limes. They are at the top of my list.”
“You read my mind.” I grab a plain Perrier, move to the table, take a seat, flip through today’s stack of mail: business envelopes, pointless catalogs, fundraising materials that cost more to print and post than most donors are willing to give. Between bills, there’s a pale blue envelope addressed to Elizabeth, torn open down one side. I flip it over to read the embossed return address.
“What did you get from the Parkses?” I ask.
“Oh, Luna sent us her copy of the paper, the one with our picture.”
I open a piece of newsprint that’s been folded carefully so as to avoid creasing our faces. In the margin, in broad, loopy letters, Luna has written, Brava! Come see us soon, would you? Painfully predictable.
Elizabeth rests a hand on my shoulder. “I should get in touch with that photographer to get those other pictures.”
“Sure.” Elizabeth traces a line from the nook of my neck down to the C7 vertebrae. My skin tingles. Without planning to, I say, “I’ve been a stress case lately. I shouldn’t let it get to me. I should never take it out on you.”
She draws maps on my shoulders for a few lazy moments before accepting my apology. “Already forgotten.” Then she kisses the top of my head, and off she goes to the bar, commencing our evening ritual of cocktails and small talk before dinner and bed. Our routine wasn’t always so steady. We used to go for long lazy walks, sometimes drives. We’d go out: cocktail parties, dinners, jaunts to the city for gallery openings or the odd performance. Pina Bausch for Elizabeth, Mamet plays for me. I’ve enabled predictability, equal parts boring and reliable: fertile ground for sneaking around.
So I say, “Want to take a walk? It’s such a nice night.”
She glances over her shoulder. “Now?”
“Why not?”
She examines the glass in which she’s already poured two fingers of Scotch and drinks it down without ice or water, screws the cap back onto the bottle, and leaves her empty glass on the bar. “Let’s go.”
We follow the sidewalk through familiar territory, reporting gossip under our breath—Did you hear Mary Ellen is thinking of selling the house? And, Martin’s battling the HOA over that spruce, which reminds me to schedule a tree-trim for the elm going rogue over our front yard. Gabriel would have complained, but his house has been on the market for six months while he sweats it out in his East Hampton upgrade, so he’s not there to nitpick, and I kind of like a rogue elm. We cross over to the unfamiliar (Who on earth drives a truck like that?) and stumble upon a playground that never merited a second glance until now. Tonight, an empty swing set looks like a buffer. Juvenile, sure, but who can throw suspicious looks while facing forward? Who can get gridlocked while in motion, or be bitter adults when behaving like children? Elizabeth follows me across the grass, past a well-groomed sandbox, and watches me claim the highest-strung swing. Here’s something I haven’t done in at least fifteen years. Not since Jonah was a boy. Not since that nightmare jungle gym from Home Depot I assembled in our backyard.
Elizabeth laughs. “You sure are feeling at ease tonight, aren’t you?”
I tuck my toes on the downswing. “Yes. Finally.”
She wraps her hands around the chains, backs up until she’s on her toes, and drops into the cracked rubber seat. “It’s nice to see.”
“How would you feel about getting out of town one of these weekends? Heading somewhere for a night?”
“Like where?”
“We could drive upstate or go to Nantucket. Or head into the city to see a show. Spa, room service. I don’t know.”
She floats with legs extended. For one weightless arc, we are synced. “Sure,” she says, and we fall out of rhythm again. “That sounds nice.”
She drags her toes in the dirt and comes to a stop, so I drag mine, too: a pair of adults dangling out of our element, unmoored and opened. In Elizabeth’s pause, I feel her not saying something, and I know that the unsaid thing is what’s driving distance between us, so I make a guess. “Do you miss the city?”
“No.” With her heel, she draws spirals in the dirt. “Sometimes.”
“All you have to do is speak up. We can go in more if you want.”
“It’s not the city, exactly,” she says. “I mean, it’s not anything, really. I’m fine. I couldn’t live there again, I don’t think, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t even know what I’m saying. Maybe I could. You asked, so I’m answering. I’m just saying, sometimes I miss the opportunities I passed up—not that they were mine for the taking. I miss the sense of opportunity.”
“The sense of opportunity you felt in your twenties,” I prompt.
“Sure.”
“That might not be geography so much as time.”
“Maybe.” Elizabeth stands and releases the shiny chains. “Maybe this is just what getting older feels like.”
I brush dust from the back of her jeans. “Well, if this is what getting old looks like, we’re in good shape.”
“I said ‘older,’ Robert.” She puts her hands in her back pockets and returns to the street. This time she leads the way.
So she’s restless. Not terribly surprising, and it wouldn’t be the first time. Romanticizing her former life, though? Yes, this surprises me. I pulled her out of a quagmire she couldn’t escape on her own, and she thanked me. She was miserable when we met, drowning in debt, unemployable, unemployed. What on earth had she planned to do with a PhD in Comparative Literature anyway? What did she expect her life to look like when she married a poet—a rookie professor of poetry, no less, as if being a poet wasn’t bad enough?
He was faculty at Columbia at the time. She was a doctoral candidate in the same department. Realistically, she’d never have gotten a job in New York straight out of school, not at Columbia or anywhere, anyway. She’d have had to move someplace awful to find a vacancy, someplace dreary and Midwestern, and how would her marriage have fared then? Stuart wasn’t going to leave his adjunct professorship, unstable and insignificant as it was. The Ivy League credential mattered to him, just as the Ivy League education mattered to her. Some people are like that, fine. But she was the one who attended a conference at the medical school just to escape the confines of her department, just to hear someone talk about facts and
science for a change, and she was the one who approached me after my panel to say how much she appreciated my insight into the future of health care in America. She was the one who left her wedding ring at home that morning. Her eyes had been bloodshot and weary—the result of sleepless nights tackling her dissertation topic: Postmodern Applications of Classical Theory on the Feminine Sublime, or something, I soon learned—and her voice had been raspy and soft. I now know she’d only gone hoarse on account of fatigue and cigarettes, that she wouldn’t always sound like Kathleen Turner, but something about her timbre threw me. She shook my hand and looked at me like a little girl trying to buy a ticket to my ferry heading far away from her island. Anywhere but here, her eyes seemed to say.
Falling in love, and so deeply this time—so violently, actually, and disruptive and consuming—wasn’t part of my plan. Once it happened, though, against my wishes, against my will, the cravings kicked in something awful. I tried forcing Elizabeth out of my system by overindulging, hoping to get sick of her so I could spare Vanessa all that pain, but indulgence only got me hooked.
Stuart kicked Elizabeth out as soon as he discovered that she’d been spending afternoons with me and not at the library, that she’d been napping in hotel rooms on my dime. She could have completed her program but couldn’t bear the humiliation of facing her colleagues, who sided with Stuart. Besides, she’d have needed at least another year to finish writing her dissertation. In her revisionist memory, Elizabeth now measures that year as “so close,” but I saw how desperate she was. Maybe she could’ve toughed it out if she’d had no choice, but she had me, and we were madly in love.
He obviously never got over her. A few years after Elizabeth chose me, Stuart started sending her birthday cards. He wrote a hokey message about forgiveness, and how he finally wished her “nothing but the best.” Now he just signs his name, but he still sends them. His strategy for being remembered is so transparent, but I guess it works, insofar as making Elizabeth pity him enough to send birthday cards, too.
Man of the Year Page 9
