by Laura Dave
“I’m going to be away a lot on retreats and at conferences,” Thomas says. “It’s better. It’s better that your mother isn’t always sitting around waiting here for when I come home, for when I am leaving again.”
“So don’t leave again,” Georgia says.
He wraps his arms around his daughter. “Your mom and I are both okay with what is happening. This is what we want for ourselves. Isn’t that the most important part?”
“No.” But she sighs as she says it—and offers a half smile— as if she has given up the fight. For now. Thomas looks at her gratefully—for this allowance—and turns toward Nate.
“You okay, guy?” Thomas asks him.
“No, he’s not okay,” Georgia says. “He just doesn’t know himself well enough to know he’s not okay.”
Nate smiles at his sister. “I’m fine, Dad. I just think Maggie and I should unpack,” he says.
Maggie looks at Nate. Where have you been?
“So unpack,” Thomas says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Maggie looks at him, and fights the urge to say it. If I’m startingto understand anything, it is that that may not be true. Then, as she stands up, she looks back at the Buddha one last time— wondering what he would say if he could talk. Maybe, Welcome to the family.
More likely, Get ready.
Gwyn
In Buddhism, there is a word that means loving-kindness. Maitri. It means always acting from a place where you try to be kind toward yourself, toward others. To meet whatever hand you are dealt, with an open curiosity, and not make it mean everything, not make anything mean more than it should.
Maitri—forgiveness.
What is the expression in Buddhism for ‘betrayal’?
How about for fucking liar?
Gwyn stares at herself in the bathroom mirror, her heart pounding out of her chest, beating through her ears. She takes another drag of her joint, breathing deep, trying to calm herself, trying to get centered.
It’s done. The hardest part is done. Protecting them, protecting her children. And she thinks she has, thinks they bought the gentler version of the story. She thinks they bought the whole thing. Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they assume that what was going on is what she told them is going on?
She assumed it. For a long time. Here, in this very bathroom, she bought it, herself: Gwyn standing by the sink, Thomas sitting on the edge of the bathtub, as he first told her how serious he was getting about Buddhism. His hands clasped around the pamphlet, like a paper witness. He was meeting her eyes in the mirror—they were meeting each other’s eyes there. Even then, she knew that was a first step toward not meeting them in real life.
“I’m losing him,” she told Jillian over the phone later that week. Her sister lived in Oregon with an underemployed journalist who grew pot in their backyard. And even on beautiful Sundays, the journalist slept until 2 P.M. and wanted to spend the rest of the day in bed. And to think! To think there was a time when Gwyn had felt bad for her.
“You are not losing him,” Jillian said. “It’s a phase.”
“A phase? I don’t think so. Deciding to go on safari in Africa is a phase. Or joining a book club! This is a religion. One that he says may take him away to retreats for weeks at a time. Months at a time.”
“You have had tough stretches before,” Jillian said.
And this was true. They had. Who hadn’t? When the kids were little and Thomas hadn’t known his place, exactly; when Thomas had taken that yearlong fellowship in Nevada and Gwyn had felt neglected. But still. This time felt different, right from the beginning. For the first time, it felt like they weren’t in it together. For the first time, it felt like Thomas was determined to make her feel like they weren’t in it together.
Gwyn takes another drag of the joint, feeling the world start to grow foggy, dulled out, in a good way. She never smoked before now, not in high school, only once in college. But when this whole Buddhism thing started, her sister Jillian sent her a small stash of marijuana in the mail, hidden in small sewing thimbles, buried under a plate of brownies. In case this phase doesn’t end by his birthday, she wrote in the note. In case, by his birthday, you need to be celebrating something else.
This had been Jillian’s promise. That it would end by his birthday. His sixty-third. Based on Jillian’s theory that Thomas was behaving the way a man sometimes does at sixty-three. (Peoplesay it happens at sixty-five, but it is sixty-three, she said. That is the birthday when they think they still have time to change everything.) He was panicking, searching, panicking more. And because Gwyn wanted to believe that was what was happening, she suggested that they go into therapy, couples counseling. So she could try to understand. But Thomas was against this. Therapy. Understanding.
This isn’t a simple infidelity. That was what he said. That was his answer to her request. This is who I am now. It is what I want my life to mean.
He wasn’t interested in helping Gwyn understand. It was a total lifestyle change and she could accept it or—if she thought he was turning into someone she didn’t recognize—she could choose something else for herself. But either way, this was the direction he was choosing.
No place to meet in the middle. An open and shut case. Either she was in or out.
With such a halfhearted invitation, he certainly didn’t count on her choosing in. He didn’t count on Gywn’s reaching deep into herself, the part that wasn’t sure how she felt about any religion, especially one that she knew so little about, and deciding that what she believed in was her husband. The one she married thirty-five years ago, in the very house they still shared. He didn’t count on her summoning up how she had felt then, and driving to Oyster Bay, to the Buddhist Center to join her husband for Thursday meditation class: Gwyn walking through the peaceful hallways in a red dress, black scarf wrapped around her neck. As if it were something she knew how to do. Pray, learn, change. As if it were something she could figure out how to do.
A woman in a long, dark robe introduced herself as one of the center’s master teachers, please call me Donna, and asked Gwyn how she could help her. “I am looking for tonight’s meditation class,” she said. “I am meeting my husband, Thomas Huntington.”
“The meditation class is in the third room on the right, but did you say your husband was Thomas? I’m sorry, but there is no one in the class by that name.”
“Are you certain? How many people are there? Maybe you missed him.”
“Five.”
Gwyn shook her head, blinking in confusion. “But he is in the middle of your sixteen-week meditation class.”
“Is it possible that he registered under a different name?”
Maybe. Maybe he thought they would know his financial situation if he used his real name. Maybe that would be looked down upon. So Gwyn walked the rest of the way down the hall anyway, to look inside the room herself. They were on the floor—the five. Three men and two women. Three brunettes, one blonde, one gray. All in brown robes, all silently kneeling over brown benches.
Thomas was nowhere. She went back out into her car, and stared at herself in her rearview mirror for an hour, maybe longer. As if her own face would show Thomas’s secret, or show her where to go next. It didn’t. She had no idea where to look. Not that night. But she knew the beginning of the truth. She knew what was really happening with her husband.
It was another woman.
With blue eyes and noble hips, a tattoo of the Chinese character for peace on the nape of her neck, the one for joy on one of those hips. Her thirtieth birthday still years away.
It is still the other woman. And because she has refused to tell Thomas that she knows this, Gwyn has been left in the tricky position of putting together the rest of it—painfully putting together what she has wanted to know least—why Thomas has lied to her, why he has lied so elaborately.
Because the truth was so simple. An affair with a younger woman? How absurd! How cliché! But how familiar, too. If Thomas confessed there was som
eone else—as opposed to making up the Buddhism story—Gwyn would have been furious, but so furious that she would have wanted out of the marriage? Hard to say. Many friends have dealt with infidelity and survived. She might have chosen to do what they chose to do: to stay and to fight. For their marriages. For their husbands. For the only life they knew.
But religious conversion? Newfound belief?
Thomas was banking on this making him seem like a stranger to Gwyn. And who wants to fight to stay with a stranger? Who wants to stay?
This is why he lied, Gwyn knows. She knows now. She knows all of it: Thomas didn’t want her to fight. He didn’t want her to blame him, or feel hurt. He didn’t want to be the bad guy. He just wanted to leave.
This isn’t a simple infidelity, he had said. How right he had been. And how wrong.
Gwyn takes a final drag and puts out the joint with her thumb and index finger. A quick tap of the base. And puts the rest back in the walnut box, slides it under the sink. Then she wets her fingers, runs them along the bridge of her nose. Steadies herself.
He still doesn’t know that she knows the truth. Because he underestimated Gwyn in the worst way. He underestimated the great lengths she would go to to try to understand him. To try to meet him wherever he needed to go.
He underestimated how much she loved him.
So now, on the eve of their thirty-fifth anniversary, he isn’t the only one with something he is trying to hide. And Gwyn won’t be the only one asking the question: Can you ever know anyone?
Maitri.
Forgiveness.
No.
Not tonight.
part two
unexpected guests
Maggie
They are having a divorce party.
They are having a divorce party. Maggie knew this coming in. She knew most of this coming in. And yet, to hear them talk about the actual event, to have the event be this close to them, makes it feel more immediate. And certainly more bizarre. Everything here feels bizarre. Beneath these hardwood floors, soft curtains. Beneath these enormous windows looking out over the ocean and the clouds and the rest of everything.
And still. A small, arguably reasonable voice enters into her head, asks a question she is not sure she wants to answer—Who are you to judge? Why would you even want to?
Maggie was nine years old when her mother left them. There was nothing like a party—nothing like an announcement, even. Maybe Maggie would have been better off with some kind of ceremony. But her mother simply walked out the door on an otherwise typical Tuesday night, and no one even told Maggie it happened. For the first couple of weeks, her father pretended Jen Lyons Mackenzie (age twenty-nine, landscape architect, Aries) had gone on a trip—an extended vacation back out to Eugene to visit her parents. Maybe Eli was hoping it would turn out to be true, or true enough. That, at the panic-inducing age of twenty-nine, Jen had been rash in her decision to depart, would come to her senses and come back to them. But what kind of judgment was Eli using, hiding the reality? Her father was trying to save Maggie, by choosing which pieces of the truth she got to see. Which was the surest way to never save anyone.
She hoists her bag higher on her shoulder, follows Nate up the stairs, toward his childhood bedroom, and tries not to focus on how today is starting to feel like that. A day of hidden truths: incredible finances, childhood friends, creepy two-hundred-person parties.
Instead, she focuses on the several black-and-white photographs lining the staircase. There are gorgeous photos of the family, and enormous landscape photographs, mostly of Montauk—though, not surprising, she is mostly drawn to the ones with Nate in them. But then her eyes catch on the one at the very top of the stairs, a large eight-by-ten: Gwyn and Thomas in the front seat of an old pickup truck, the highway behind them, Thomas’s arm straight out in a way that suggests to Maggie that he is the one shooting the photo. Gwyn, meanwhile, is kissing his neck. And he is laughing. He is really laughing.
Maggie stops in front of it, runs her finger along the black frame. It is a nice picture, but when she looks up to ask Nate about it, he is not there. He has gone on ahead, without her, which is her first real indication that he may actually be affected by what he’s heard in the living room.
He’s left his bedroom door open for her. It is a corner room, small, with wood planks lining the walls and a square window near the ceiling that is the only source of light. It looks like a boat cabin, in its way, covered with too much blue: blue comforter and carpet. Blue bike in the corner. She goes right to it—the bike—runs her hands along the seat.
“This was your room?” she says.
He nods. “This was my room.”
Nate is sitting on the edge of the bed, and she goes to sit down next to him. His T-shirt is hiked above his waist, and she can see the hair there leading downward from his belly button. She moves toward him, reaches out to touch him there.
Her eyes focus on the bulletin board above his desk: newspaper clippings and ribbons, lots of empty tacks where things used to be, things that are long gone now. She wants to tell him she likes his room, but he tenses, even at her touch, and she can feel that he is annoyed—or maybe embarrassed, or maybe both. It isn’t exactly about her, and yet she doesn’t say anything, takes her hand away.
“We don’t have to talk about it, Nate,” she says.
“You obviously want to.”
She takes a deep breath in. “I just want to make sure you’re doing okay,” she says.
Nate is quiet. “I’m fine,” he says.
“I can tell.”
“Mag, I can understand that you are freaked out. I get that. If this were your parents’ house, and I walked into all of this, I think I’d freak out a little too.”
When it was her dad’s house they were visiting, Maggie had been so worried that her father would drink too much, say something inappropriate. The worst thing he did was speak with a little too much detail about his most recent girlfriend, Melinda. And yet it had been tame in comparison to Maggie’s fears, hadn’t it? Maybe because Maggie had told Nate everything about her father a long time before they went to Asheville. He knew her whole story—everything that could potentially cause friction— and so, when it all went well enough, it created a sense of relief.
“If this were my parents’ house, you’d deal,” she says.
“So you’re dealing?” he said.
She shrugs. “You’re a better person than me.”
She is trying to make a joke—to bring him back to her—and it works for a second. He smiles. Then his smile disappears. “Please don’t feel weird. This is all fine. This is what they want. I accept that. Sometimes things just don’t work out. Sometimes, it’s easier to separate . . .”
She looks at him, worrying that he’s missing it—the bigger picture—and wondering if he is missing it for his parents’ sake, or if he would also be capable of missing it for them. “Something just feels off about it,” she says. “The divorce party. I think something else is going on.”
“What are you talking about?” he says.
“I’m not sure yet,” she says. “I’m not sure I can explain it. I just have a bad feeling.”
“A bad feeling?”
“Yes. I have a feeling that it is not as simple as them both wanting this.”
He looks down at her hand, turning it over. There is no engagement ring there. She hadn’t wanted one. Now she almost wishes she had one. She wishes she had something to look down at, as proof that they promised to be in this together. Because, right now, she is feeling outside of it, of them.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“For putting us here.”
Maggie shakes her head, trying to take this out of the realm of the two of them. This is Nate’s family’s weirdness, not his. Nate has always worked hard, so hard to be good to her, to be there for her. It is unfair to even worry in her own mind, now, about whether that will be the case. Because of his parents? Because of any
thing he says about why they’ve chosen to end things?
“I’m the one that should be sorry,” she says. “It’s your family.
You know them better than I do, and I shouldn’t be rushing to judgment.” She makes herself meet his eyes. “I just feel a little overwhelmed by everything . . .”
But suddenly she doesn’t want to say even to herself what the everything is. The part of him that she is seeing now too. It has taken Georgia to point out that Nate gets absent, doesn’t want to deal. How could Maggie not have picked up on that before now? Has she not noticed? Or has she been too scared to acknowledge that she has and what it may mean?
“You know,” he says, “let’s just lie down for a while . . . take our clothes off for a while.” He smiles at her. “If we get some sleep, this will all feel less weird. Plus when we wake up, we’ll be that much closer to out of here. Sound like a good plan?”
She nods. “Sounds good.”
But just as they are lying back, there is a knock on the door. “Nate!” It’s Georgia. She’s knocking more while she’s talking.
“Can you come downstairs with me for a minute? I need to talk to you. And don’t pretend you can’t hear me. I’ll bust this door down and make you hear me.”
“I need a minute, Georgia.”
“No.” She knocks again. “Now.”
Maggie touches his knee, shrugs. “Go. It’s fine. I’ll sleep for a little while. It will be good. You can talk to your family without worrying about me.”
He turns back toward Maggie, putting his forehead against hers—holding it there, closing his eyes.
“I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be here.”
He nods, pulling back, and kissing her on top of her head, which she imagines is supposed to bring her calm, but has the opposite effect. Because it feels nothing like him.
Maggie listens to the door click shut, and looks back over at the bulletin board, at the red ribbons in the middle, and the newspaper clippings again, and the empty tacks. There are no photos up there anymore. But she thinks of the last one on the staircase: the one of Gwyn and Thomas in the pickup truck. They look in love in that picture. They look very much in love. How do you get from there to here? Does it start with one lie, one small omission? One conversation that you need to have, and can’t seem to?
