“Kate?”
“Rebecca! You sound awful.”
“Sorry to call you at work.” Sorry, sorry, sorry: all apologies.
“No no no! Don’t be. What’s up?”
“It’s…I.”
“…Becca! What’s going on?”
“I mean…I guess Philip and I broke up. Or that’s not the right word. Because we’re married. But I don’t know. I came home early and I walked in on him.”
“Becca. Start over, okay? What do you mean you walked in on him? Doing what?”
“I went shopping yesterday. And I came home before I was supposed to. And he wasn’t supposed to be there and he was there, and there was another woman there. It was that post-doc. It was Alicia. And I walked into the bedroom and.”
“Oh my. Oh m—ohhh Rebecca.”
“And they were.”
“Rebecca.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want to be alone right now.”
“I’ll come right over. I just need to take care of one thing and I’ll be right there.”
“Kate?”
“What?”
“I really need a drink right now.”
Please don’t say what I want you to say.
“Definitely,” said Kate. “The bars open at eleven thirty. And it’s five o’clock somewhere.”
They met just before noon in a bar attached to a hotel in the heart of downtown Stratton, sure that there they’d have some peace and quiet. They sat across from each other in a darkened booth, the only two people in the place except for the bartender. Kate bought the first round, an ultra-hoppy craft beer served in a brandy snifter.
When Rebecca took the first sip, after two years without a drink, she expected it to taste bitter, flavored with failure, and giving up, and the admission of her own weakness in the face of adversity. But—and for a short moment between the first and the second drink, she thought this was even worse—it tasted good. That first swig after a couple of years away from the bottle: there’s nothing like it, the way it tingles on your tongue, the way it promises a loosening of your limbs and a lifting of your cares. Between the second sip and the third—that third was more of a gulp, really—she knew that calling Kate instead of, say, her father, had been the right decision. Her father would have dropped what he was doing just like Kate, and given that he’d had his reservations about Philip that it had taken him years to stifle, he would have been more than empathetic. But all of his consolations would have been laced with his peculiar, skeptical, cynical brand of Christianity, his reminders that we see the world as through a glass, darkly, that our journey through this world takes us through a vale of tears, full of sorrow and doubt and confusion. Sometimes you didn’t want to hear all that shit.
And he wouldn’t have offered her a drink. Though her parents had never openly mentioned the fact that Rebecca had quit drinking, and she’d never discussed it with anyone else but Philip, and then only briefly and painfully, Woody couldn’t have failed to notice. In the past couple of years he’d seen her push away the wine list at a restaurant too many times to think it was just a whim. So if she called him up at ten thirty in the morning, saying that she’d found out in the worst way that her husband was cheating on her and she could really go for a daddy-daughter libation, he would have picked her up and brought her home and poured them both a glass of orange juice, and kept an eye on her until the urge for a drink had passed. She didn’t really want to deal with that do-gooder good-for-you stuff right this second, either.
No circle of friends was complete without a guiltless enabler, and Kate, dear Kate, had always been that for Rebecca. If you wanted to cut loose, or if you wanted a shoulder to cry on, or both at the same time, she’d be there for you. Maybe she had her flaws, but her heart was in the right place, and you always knew that if you really wanted to get away from yourself, if you really wanted to throw down, then Kate would grant you permission. She’d do it without judging you, and she’d keep you company for as long as you needed. That kind of friendship was rare, and priceless.
Kate brought the second round before Rebecca finished her first glass. “I took the rest of the day off,” she said. “You and I are going to get trashed. And don’t even think about opening your wallet today. Don’t even touch it. I wish this had been on a better occasion, but it’s been too long since we got ripped together. Years. Years! Drink up, buttercup. Drink and we’ll talk it out.”
Kate and Rebecca hung out in secluded corners of Stratton bars for the rest of the day, maintaining a decent buzz, in undeclared communion with all those whose lives had made it possible, through good fortune or ill, to have the time and the desire for a beer or two in a bar on a weekday afternoon. Rebecca did most of the talking, and Kate listened. That was another good thing about Kate: she was a good listener. She kept the drinks flowing at good intervals, making sure the two of them stayed tipsy but not quite smashed.
In the late afternoon, when they were both on their fifth beer, Rebecca said, “The hell of the thing is, the worst thing is, what he said was, ‘Oh, yeah, I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you wanted to know.’ I mean what is that. Because when you think about it, it’s obvious, it’s obvious, that everybody knew, and nobody said a goddamn thing. When the four of us were having dinner, you and me and Philip and Carson, Carson knew. And he didn’t say a thing. When that whole bunch of physicists came over to watch that thing on TV, including Alicia, all of them knew. Every single one. And none of them said a word: they just kept their mouths shut and let me serve them tortilla chips and beer. I’m so embarrassed.”
“Well, you can’t blame them for not speaking up,” Kate said. “It’s not like they were, you know, colluding. Not like they’d gotten together to decide to keep you in the dark. Each of them probably just decided it wasn’t their business—”
“Bunch of fucking bystanders—”
“—and Philip was their boss? You’re not going to just stroll up to the boss’s wife and tell her that—”
“Did you know?”
Kate paused. “Did I what?”
“Did you know. Because you were seeing Carson while this was going on. And he knew. He had to know, it was obvious to everyone, if you didn’t have blinders on like I did, it was plain as the nose on your face. Did he tell you? After a couple of drinks or something? Pillow talk? Did he tell you and did you not tell me, Kate? Because—”
“Rebecca! I—”
“Because it was something you didn’t think I wanted to know? Because—”
“Rebecca. Rebecca.” Kate gently took Rebecca’s hand off the glass of Brooklyn Lager she was holding and clasped it in her own. “We’re best friends, since like forever. You know I wouldn’t do that to you. If I’d heard anything like that was going on, I would have been on the phone to you like that. You have to believe that.”
Not meeting Kate’s gaze, Rebecca nodded. She tried to pull her hand away, but Kate tightened her hold and wouldn’t let go. “Becca. Look at me.”
Rebecca looked up at Kate, tears brimming on the edges of her eyelids.
“Do you believe me?” Kate said.
Rebecca tried to pull her hand back again. Kate gripped it harder still.
“You really believe me, right?” Kate said.
“I believe you,” said Rebecca.
“Okay,” said Kate, letting her go.
Around dinnertime Kate and Rebecca climbed into Kate’s self-driving car, and Kate commanded with mock hauteur, “Jeeves! Take us somewhere extra fancy!” The car obediently conveyed them to a steakhouse in Cranbury that had once been the main-street residence of a twentieth-century local bigwig, and the two women ordered up a pair of rib eyes drenched in peppercorn sauce, along with a couple of Grimbergen Blondes. Rebecca, who hadn’t exactly been eating right today, only got halfway through hers; Kate polished hers off easily and used the fries on the side to sop up the rest of the sauce.
&nbs
p; Kate did all the talking during dinner, and this was another good thing about her: she knew that shriving and catharsis involved letting you be silent for a while, and not just spilling your guts without end. She was circumspect, too, even as she became more garrulous and the mischievous college girl who still lived inside her after close to twenty years came to the surface. Usually when Kate got like this she wanted to talk, ad nauseam, about “boys,” said “boys” being more likely to have bum knees or developing bald spots than they used to. (And Rebecca was sure she was seeing a new guy, post-Carson: given her skills with online dating, and the fact that she was rarely without a boyfriend, it would have been weird if she wasn’t.) But in these circumstances, chatter about the petty dramas of budding romances would have been highly inappropriate. And so Kate filled the air with discussions about the comical things that had happened at her job, and movies she’d seen, and anecdotes about her teenage years. When the check came, Kate smacked Rebecca’s hand away from it and slipped her credit card inside the folder. “Whaddaya wanna do next?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca said, trying to respond in kind, letting herself be taken along for the ride, not yet really wanting to go back to her house. “What do you want to do?”
“I have an awesome idea. I know an awesome place we can go. Because it’s night, and the stars are out. Let’s go look at the stars.”
They picked up a couple of bottles of cheap wine from a liquor store on Route 1. Then, as they both sat in the backseat, Kate’s car drove them to a golf course in Princeton Junction, which they snuck onto: granted there was not much sneaking required, since it was well past ten o’clock at this point and the place was deserted, but there was a sign forbidding entry after dusk that the two of them walked past, and that made them feel naughty enough.
They plopped down on the closely shorn green of the fourth hole, screwed off the caps of their wine bottles, and took long pulls straight from the neck. (“This is so ghetto,” Kate said.) This far out from nearby towns, the view of the sky was relatively free of light pollution, and the stars above seemed as if they’d been strewn recklessly across the sky in handfuls, solely so that they could shine down on the gently sloping hills and valleys of this perfectly manicured, mathematically dictated landscape.
“I don’t want to leave here,” Rebecca said, after they had each drunk about a third of their bottles in companionable quiet. “I don’t want to have to go back to the house, and figure out what to do next. I just want to stop time and stay here, right now, looking at the stars and drinking with a good friend. You know?”
“Yeah. Except for the whole thing with your husband cheating on you, this moment right now is pretty much perfect.”
“Yeah,” Rebecca said quietly.
They watched the blinking red light of a night flight out of the Newark airport as it cut across the sky.
“You know this isn’t really about him and whatsername, don’t you?” said Kate.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that when he was making his excuses to you, sure, he was being an asshole, but he wasn’t wrong. And sure, it’s more than luck that he didn’t happen to have this fantastically profound intellectual connection with some hairy beary dude too fat to see his own dick when he looks down. But it’s not about her with him. It’s about the machine. Not to be crass, you know that crassness is unlike me, but if he could have fucked it instead, he would have. Now laugh.”
Rebecca obeyed, with not as much guilt as she would have liked to feel.
“But I’m serious. What he was saying sounded cruel to you, but in his own head he was just telling the truth. That’s why he didn’t ask for forgiveness or anything like that. I’m not saying it isn’t messed up; I’m just saying he was just telling you how it is.”
“It doesn’t make me feel much better to think he was cheating on me with a woman as a proxy for cheating on me with…” She trailed off into silence.
“With a fucking broken time machine,” Kate shouted, her voice carrying across the darkened fairway. “Come on, we’re drunk, he’s not around, we can call it a ridiculous busted not-working time machine instead of a causality whosywhatsitz, and he’ll never know. I’m not saying I told you so, I’m honestly really not, but fact is, he’s been thinking about this thing day in, day out for how long, years now, and he’s too full of himself to know when he’s failed, so every time someone tries to tell him he has it just makes him double down. And it’s obsessed him and it’s totally taken over his life.”
“Kate, what are you getting at?”
“I’m saying that what you need is closure. You’re not going to be comfortable going back to your house, and maybe changing the locks and lawyering up, until you get a little bit of closure. And he hasn’t called you—has he?”
Rebecca checked her phone. “No.”
“So unless you want to call him, which I say hell no to that, you can’t get closure from him. But it doesn’t matter. And you can’t get closure from that other chick: I guess you could get yourself a crossbow and hunt her down, but that’d just be stupid. But that doesn’t matter, either.
“Because in order to be satisfied and put a final period on this whole thing, you don’t need to face him down, and you don’t need to face her down. You need to face down the machine.”
“Look,” said Kate, “here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter if that thing is the love of his life. It’s a failure. And you’re not a failure. You’re a survivor. I mean, that car accident you were in? Something that would’ve made hash out of a lot of people just made you stronger. You’re stronger than that thing. It doesn’t matter what he thinks: that thing is a bunch of junk. And you’re not going to be able to shake this—you won’t stop asking yourself if this whole thing is somehow your fault, because you didn’t measure up—until you really realize that, in your bones. That this didn’t happen because you were imperfect enough to drive him to find someone better, but because he threw his life away on a mistake.
“So here’s what we’re going to do, right now. We’re going to hang out here and drink a little more of this wine. Then Jeeves is going to take us over to that lab. You’re going to go in, and you’re going to size up that machine and look it right in the eye. Then you’ll have your closure. Because you’ll know, you’ll remember, that you’re stronger than it.”
“Kate, that’s crazy!”
“If by crazy you mean awesome, then yes. Listen. That one time I went to the lab, I saw it. I saw this pile of wires and metal that doesn’t even do anything, and Philip had run such a game on these guys working on it that they were treating this piece of junk like it was a holy relic, and acting like they were the priests in charge of it. Oooh, it’s such a big deal: building a time machine is so hard, you wouldn’t understand. You know what whatsername said when I took even one step toward it? ‘Physicists touch. Tourists look.’ Well, la-de-fucking-da.
“Listen. How great would it be if Philip comes back to the lab, and he goes into his time machine chamber, and he sees scrawled on the inside, ‘REBECCA WAS HERE.’ I’m telling you, he’d feel just like you did when you found him in bed with whositz. He’d feel even worse.”
“That sounds like the kind of behavior that would land me in a lot of trouble down the line, and I’m not really seeing what this gets me—”
“Come on come on come on. Look: it’ll be easy. You’ve got a card that’ll let you in the lab, right? That’s what Carson told me: spouses of people in the lab get cards. So we don’t have to pull any secret agent stuff.”
“I have one in my wallet somewhere, I guess, but I’ve used it like twice.”
“Well, now will be the third time. Here’s how we’ll play it. You and I will go in together, and I’ll create a diversion. I’ll just hang out by the security desk while you go in. There’s a guard there who was totally looking me up and down the last time I went in there: if we’re lucky he’ll be on shift again.”
“And what am I supposed to
do in the meantime? Sabotage?”
“No no no! You let yourself in the lab—you’re going to get something, or something like that; we’ll figure it out on the way—and you go up to the machine, and you see that it’s not such a big deal, that you’re bigger than it is. You don’t even have to leave evidence or anything: let’s forget about the whole graffiti thing. You just have to give it the finger and I guarantee you, you will feel so much better. So much better.”
“There might be other people there,” Rebecca said, feeling her hold on this situation slip away. “Philip might be there. Alicia might be there.”
“It’s after midnight. There’s not going to be anybody there! Come on.”
“Physicists work weird hours, you know.”
“Well we’ll just swing by the place and if we see too many cars in the parking lot then we’ll call it off. Easy. Come on. I’m ready. Take another swig of liquid courage and let’s go. Let’s go!”
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