by Tom Perrotta
“Let’s get you home,” she told him.
Part Three
Lovebirds
Truants
THE BAR EXAM WAS A TWO-DAY MARATHON, AS MUCH A TEST OF physical endurance as legal knowledge. Day One was the MBE, two hundred nitpicking, densely worded multiple choice questions, a mental root canal that made the SAT seem like a routine cleaning by comparison. Once they had you thoroughly battered and demoralized, they made you trudge back on Day Two for the essay section, which for Todd, at least, was even worse: an eight-hour confrontation with the blankness of his own mind, the white noise of his inability to think made even louder by the furious scratching of his fellow test-takers’ pens and pencils. It was as if he’d never gone to law school at all, as if he were living through an endless, real-time version of the nightmare in which you find yourself naked in an unfamiliar classroom, taking a final in Swahili or electrical engineering, some subject about which you know exactly nothing, except that you’d enrolled and somehow not managed to attend any classes.
“Eat your breakfast,” Kathy told him on the morning of Day One. “You don’t want to fade in the home stretch.”
Todd took an obedient bite of toast. Despite her frequently—and, at times, angrily—expressed worries about his preparation and motivation in recent weeks, Kathy had slipped back into the role of supportive spouse as the actual exam date approached. She smiled at him as though he were a child returning to school after a brief illness.
“I have a good feeling,” she said. “They say the third time’s a charm.”
They also say, “Three strikes and you’re out,” Todd thought, but he didn’t say it out loud. There was no reason to make this any worse than it already was.
“I’m going to buy a bottle of champagne,” she continued. “We’ll put it in the fridge and open it as soon as you get the good news.”
As far as Todd was concerned, there was only one upside to this whole ordeal: The results of the bar exam wouldn’t be announced for several months, so Kathy wouldn’t know until late November or early December that he’d failed for a third time. Maybe by then it wouldn’t matter so much.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he warned her. “We’ve been down this road before.”
“This time it’ll be different,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
She sustained this stubbornly optimistic mood all through breakfast and the short drive to the commuter rail station, and Todd did his best to play along. It was a relief to kiss her and Aaron good-bye and step out of the car, a relief to finally stop pretending. He stood in the parking lot, briefcase in hand, waving as they drove away.
A flight of metal stairs led up to the platform, but Todd remained below, pacing in front of the pay phone, forcing himself not to keep checking his watch every fifteen seconds. Sarah pulled up at 7:45 on the dot, just as the train rumbled into the station, its horn blaring a wake-up call to a herd of lethargic commuters. He climbed into the Volvo and kissed her hello.
“Right on time,” he said.
She studied him for a moment, trying to detect a trace of ambivalence beneath his cheerful demeanor.
“You sure about this?” she asked.
Instead of answering, he flipped open his briefcase, spinning it a quarter turn on his lap to reveal the contents: a bathing suit, a container of heavy-duty sunscreen, and a bottle of chilled white wine, still sweaty from the refrigerator.
“Quite the Boy Scout,” she told him.
It was a gorgeous summer morning, hot but not yet muggy, with a gentle intermittent breeze stirring the air, the kind of weather that made you wish you had a sunroof or convertible. They lit out for the North Shore, moving freely against rush-hour traffic, the radio turned way up to compete with the rush of wind and road noise through the open windows. Sarah reached across the gearshift console and squeezed Todd’s hand. She looked prettier than he’d ever seen her, her eyes bright with adventure, stray ringlets and unruly corkscrews of hair blowing across her face.
“I never did this in high school,” she confessed. “Not even when I was a senior.”
“I’m corrupting you.”
She laughed. “Better late than never.”
The idea had come to them just two days ago, and had blossomed into a plan with only the slightest coaxing. Todd had been agonizing about the test to the point where he’d become tedious even to himself. He knew he was going to fail, so why go through the motions? Why waste two whole days of his life on a hopeless and unpleasant quest? Why not spend them on the beach? Why not spend them on the beach with Sarah?
From there it was only a short journey to here. Kathy was taking both days off to watch Aaron, so Todd was clear on that front. And wasn’t Jean always volunteering to baby-sit Lucy? All Sarah had to do was concoct a little story about an old friend from college, an unexpected layover in Providence, a welcome chance to catch up.
“How was Lucy?” he asked. “She cry or anything?”
“Are you kidding? She just about shoved me out the door. How was it at your place?”
“The usual,” he said. “Everybody happy but me.”
They were on the beach by nine, their blanket spread on the cool sand, anchored at the corners by Todd’s shoes and briefcase, and a small cooler Sarah had filled with fruit and sandwiches and a six-pack of bottled water. Todd lay back, cradling his head in his hands, and smiled up at the perfect morning sky. Whatever guilt he was feeling was muffled by an immense feeling of relief: The sun was shining, the surf crashing, the gulls banking and crying out overhead, and he wasn’t sitting in the sickly light of a cavernous conference center surrounded by five hundred other would-be lawyers, sharing a table with some Ivy League whiz kid who was going to ace the test on his first try and be ruling the world by the time he was thirty.
“Can you believe it?” Sarah’s hand moved lightly over his thigh. “It’s our first real date. Without the kids, I mean.”
Todd raised himself on his elbows and looked around. It was still early, the beach mostly empty. The only other people out were solitary joggers and dogwalkers and a few families with small children.
“Think we should’ve brought ’em?”
She leaned forward like a penitent, her face momentarily eclipsing the sun, and kissed him on the shoulder.
“Not today. Today’s just for us.”
They rode the waves, then walked the length of the shore holding hands, stopping to examine the occasional shell or stone, marveling at the speckled beauty of a crab claw, shaking their heads at the sight of a washed-up tampon applicator tangled in seaweed, a pair of safety goggles with a broken strap. A tanned retiree jogged past, his potbelly wobbling over a pair of inadvisably skimpy Speedo trunks.
“Richard took me to a nude beach once,” she said. “Back when we were dating.”
“Around here?”
“In New Jersey. At one of the state parks. He found it in a guidebook.”
Todd wasn’t surprised. Sarah had recently told him about her husband’s sexual proclivities—the panties, the way he’d try to pressure her into attending a “swingers’ party” back when she was still breast-feeding.
“Did you take off your clothes?”
“Just my top.”
“Very European of you.”
She smiled. “I like to think so.”
“What about Richard? Did he go for the full-body tan?”
“Are you kidding? He was naked in the car on the drive down. Just a towel draped over his lap. Got some pretty funny looks from the toll collectors.”
They fell silent for a moment, smiling their greetings to a frustrated father about their own age, a big sunburned guy who’d been trying for a least a half hour to get an unwieldy box kite airborne, while his beautiful twin daughters—they were five, maybe six—looked on with expressions of withering contempt. He’d just finished a thirty-yard sprint, trying to create an updraft, the kite dragging along behind him, plowing the sand.
“No breeze,” he panted
defensively, as if he suspected the strangers of laughing at him. “Yesterday it worked fine.”
Todd and Sarah made sympathetic faces and continued down the beach.
“So tell me,” he said. “Did it turn you on?”
“The nude beach?” Perhaps unconsciously, she reached down and pinched the sweet roll of fat perched above the waistband of her bikini bottoms. “God, no. You want to feel young and thin and attractive, go spend a day with some nudists.”
After lunch they checked into the Sea Breeze, a justly inexpensive motel tucked between a propane supply store and a seafood shack on a soulless commercial strip half a mile west of the beach. It was the real deal, an old-fashioned, independently owned and operated fleabag, fully equipped with moldy wall-to-wall carpeting, a hideous synthetic bedspread that felt oily to the touch, and an unambiguously phallic painting of a lighthouse hung over the bed as if for inspiration. They toasted each other with Todd’s wine, poured into plastic cups liberated from sanitary plastic wrappers, and made love without showering, their bodies sticky and gritty with the obligatory day-at-the-beach coating of sand and salt and sunscreen residue.
“We’re like two pieces of Shake ’n Bake chicken,” he told her.
Todd was pleased by the metaphor, but Sarah shook her head, as if he’d said something offensive.
“No jokes,” she said. She was lying on her side, her legs scissored across the highly flammable sheets. “Not today. I want to concentrate.”
“On what?”
“On you. I want to feel you inside me.”
She closed her eyes, her face tightening into a grimace that suggested effort more than pleasure. All morning long he’d been fantasizing about being alone with her in a private place, no kids to worry about waking, a chance to finally cut loose. He imagined her shouting his name with the breathy gusto of a porn queen, startling the clerks at the propane outlet, making the waitresses blush at Ricky’s Chowda Pot. But instead she seemed oddly subdued, even quieter than usual. When he moved into her, she released a soft sigh. His retreats elicited an even softer whimper.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded, harder than necessary, as if she’d lost the power of speech and needed to be extra emphatic.
“I want to help you,” she said.
“How?”
“You’re sad.” She torqued her neck to look him in the eyes, daring him to disagree. “I want to make you happy.”
“You do.” He gave her more accessible breast a friendly squeeze. “This is about as happy as I get.”
“She puts too much pressure on you. I wouldn’t do that.”
“It’s not her fault.”
“Give me a chance,” she pleaded. “I know I’m not as pretty as she is.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Liar.”
“You have a hot ass.”
She smiled naughtily, bucking her hips to meet his thrust.
“You think so?”
“Oh, God. I’m gonna come.”
“I want to feel it.”
A wave of energy surged up from his toes.
“Now,” she commanded.
His body lurched, arching at the waist. A big shudder buckled his arms, followed by a smaller one. She gave a yelp, as if she’d been scalded. For an immeasurable amount of time, he was nothing but suspense and release, clenching and unclenching, until one last fluttery spasm turned his arms to jelly, and he collapsed on top of her, crushing her beneath his bulk. She gave a throaty chuckle and wriggled herself free.
Todd woke with a start, head foggy, body infused with dread. For a moment or two, nothing made sense—the dingy room, the labored wheeze of the air conditioner, the stark afternoon light pouring in around the edges of the curtains, the unfamiliar dead weight of the arm across his chest.
“Whuh?” Sarah’s face was bleary, vaguely alarmed. “Something wrong?”
Todd’s eyes shot to the digital clock/radio on the bedside table. It was only two-fifteen. They still had plenty of time. He let his head drop back onto the pillow.
“Just a bad dream.”
“What about?”
“I don’t know. It’s already gone.”
All that remained was an image of a conveyor belt, an endless procession of identical yellow flashlights, but how could that account for the odd thumping in his chest, the panicky shortness of his breath?
“Was it about the test?” she wondered. “Maybe you’re feeling bad about that.”
He wished she would shut up about the goddam test. Of course he felt bad about it. He had paid four hundred dollars just to sign up, four hundred dollars that were gone forever, and had wasted countless spring and summer evenings pretending to study for it. He had convinced his hardworking, ever-hopeful wife that he was making a good faith effort to pass it at this very moment, when, in reality, he was in bed with a woman he’d just fucked in a cheap motel, speculating about a dream.
“It wasn’t the test,” he explained. “I think I was supposed to be doing some kind of quality control, but I didn’t know how to tell the good flashlights from the bad ones.”
She sat up and nodded, as if this made perfect sense. She looked sweet, he thought, totally absorbed in the conversation, unconscious of her own nakedness. Her nipples were hard from the AC, just begging to be sucked. Without trying, he pictured her on the nude beach in New Jersey, unwilling to remove her shorts, her husband-to-be browbeating her for being a prude.
“What happened?” she said. “Did you ever even want to be a lawyer?”
“It was kind of an accident,” he admitted. “This guy in my frat, Paul Berry—he was the one who wanted to be a lawyer. He had this idea that it was an exciting, glamorous career, like on LA Law. He registered to take the LSAT, but he didn’t want to do it alone. We got drunk on tequila one night, and he convinced me to sign up, too, just to keep him company. We went to Stanley Kaplan, studied together for a few weeks, and sat next to each other at the test. When the results came back, it turned out I did way better than him. With the scores I got, it was stupid not to go to law school.”
“Not if you didn’t want to be a lawyer.”
“I didn’t know what I wanted. I put it off for a couple of years after college, worked a couple of different jobs, nothing too interesting, then finally put in the applications.”
“Law school must have been pretty tough.”
“It was okay. Just school, you know? You do the homework, you take the test.”
“So what went wrong with the bar exam?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could always take it again in the winter,” she told him. “I could help you study. I could grade your practice tests, and you could explain the answers to me. Sometimes it helps to talk things through.”
He was touched by the offer, impractical as it was, but he knew he was finished with the bar exam. He was never going to be a lawyer. He’d told Sarah he didn’t know what had gone wrong, but that wasn’t precisely true. He knew, he’d just never been able to put it into words. Something had happened to him over the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid’s day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can’t catch up with it, not even if you try.
“Mind if I suck your breast?” he asked.
In every way Todd could think of, the day had been a success, one of those rare occasions when your elaborate plan comes off without a hitch. He’d avoided the drudgery and humiliation of the bar exam and replaced it with a relaxing morning at the beach and an afternoon of uninhibited grown-up sex, a new milestone in his relationship with Sarah.
And yet the ride home was a somber journey, as if something had gone badly awry. But what? As far as Todd could determine, the only shadow on the whole experience had been cast by his cryptic half-remembered dream about the flashlights
. Rather than offering some specific commentary about his romantic and professional dilemmas, the dream seemed to issue a more general—and somehow more disturbing—warning about the unpredictability of life, the impossibility of knowing or controlling your own feelings. You go to sleep happy, you wake up sad. You have no idea why, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Unlike Kathy, who no longer took much of an interest in the nuances of Todd’s emotions, Sarah seemed all too keenly aware of the shift in his mood. As she had in the morning, she reached across the console and took his hand; but this time the gesture felt more supportive than conspiratorial, as if he were a patient in a hospital, someone in need of cheering up.
“Remember that guy you were talking about? Your best friend from college?”
“Paul Berry.”
“Are you still friends?”
“We kind of drifted apart senior year. I started seeing Kathy, and the two of them didn’t really get along.”
“Did he ever become a lawyer?”
“Didn’t have the grades. He got into real estate in Westchester County just in time for the boom. Last I heard, he was driving a BMW and dating a TV reporter.”
Sarah checked her mirrors and changed lanes. She struck Todd as a trustworthy driver, neither too cautious nor too emotional. Kathy drove slowly, almost like an elderly person, but her whole personality changed the moment she felt that another driver was trying to take advantage of her, cutting her off at a tollbooth, or deliberately not allowing her to merge. In a split second, she transformed herself into a tailgating, bird-flipping demon, fully capable of pulling up beside the offender and loudly berating him or her through an open window, despite Todd’s frequent reminders that people had gotten themselves and their families killed for less.
“You don’t talk much about your friends,” Sarah observed.
“I don’t have many. There were a couple of guys from law school I was friendly with, but they’ve scattered. We exchange e-mails every once in a while, but that’s it. I think they’re embarrassed for me. They’re all working now, making real money, and I’m—”
