Neil turns the key and the gate slides open.
“I will not rest until balance is restored. Understand?”
I don’t reply.
There is something in his voice, something familiar. “You’ll find the plane is well equipped.” Then from behind me, I hear him say, “Dr Pepper, Jake?”
In my mind, I complete the exchange, the way I always do: That sounds good.
And that’s when it hits me, why he seemed so familiar that day at the Woodside party. Back in college, I never knew his name; I always thought of him as “the jumper on Sproul.” JoAnne married the boy she talked down from the roof. She married the boy she saved. What would Freud say?
And why, then, did she tell me she had met Neil after a car accident? Why did she lie to me?
I walk steadily toward the Cessna, watching JoAnne’s plane as it taxis down the runway and rises into the air. It disappears into the shimmering desert heat.
77
The Cessna’s wheels shudder on the runway in Half Moon Bay. I grab the Ziploc bag, thank the pilot, and stumble down the stairs.
In the café, still groggy, completely starving, I sit down at a table in the corner. The waitress in the retro uniform slides a menu in front of me. “The usual?” she says in a friendly voice.
“Sure,” I reply, surprised that I’ve been here enough times to have a usual.
She returns with French toast and a side of bacon.
When the food is gone, I turn on my cellphone. It takes a while to kick in. When it does, I notice there’s a new icon on the main screen. It’s a small blue P. I try to delete it, but nothing happens. It disappears for a second, then returns. There are a handful of texts and several voicemails. I don’t look at any of them. Instead, I dial Alice.
“I’m home,” I tell her before she even has a chance to say hello.
“Are you okay?” I hear the sounds of her office in the background.
“I seem to be.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
Outside, I find a spot on the bench. The planes circle overhead. A black Chevy Suburban is parked at the corner of the lot.
I hear the distinctive rumble of Alice’s old Jaguar as it turns off of the highway. She pulls up beside me and leans over to open the passenger door. I grab my Ziploc bag and slide in beside her. She runs her hand over my bald head, gives me a sympathetic look, and then pulls out of the parking lot and back onto the highway.
The Chevy edges out of the parking lot and turns onto the highway behind us.
Alice is wearing her favorite wrap dress, the one that shows her small waist, her beautiful hips, and just a hint of cleavage. As we move into the tunnel, pointed toward Pacifica, I slide my hand under the hem and rest my palm on her bare thigh. She feels so warm. I remember precisely how I got to where I am. This wonderful marriage, this terrible nightmare, all began with that touch—the surprise of warmth, the smoothness of her skin.
I see the SUV in my side view mirror, and I hear Neil’s voice in my head: I will not rest until balance is restored.
Alice’s iPhone rests on the console between us. A small blue P in the top corner blinks off and on.
78
During the car ride home, Alice doesn’t ask questions, and I don’t offer up my story. I’m not quite ready to share what I’ve been through, and I sense she isn’t quite ready to hear it. Still, after she pulls into the driveway and leans over to give me a kiss on the cheek, I’m hurt when I realize she isn’t coming inside. I need so badly to be with her right now.
“So sorry,” she says. “Big court date tomorrow. I’ll be home late.”
After being apart for a while, it takes time for a couple to reconnect. I tell my patients this. In movies and literature, there’s such a fascination with couples who are meant to be together, the idea of Mr. or Mrs. Right. But, of course, none of that is true. For some people there are many Mr. Rights. For others, there are none. Like atoms, the fact of couples coming together is based more upon timing and circumstance than magic.
Of course, there is magic too. Like atoms, couples can only combine if there is attraction, some sort of logical connection, chemistry producing a reaction. When two people are apart, though, even the strongest bonds inevitably dissipate, so it is necessary to rediscover the connection, rebuild the bonds.
Several years ago, I did an internship with the Veterans Administration. One of my first patients was Kevin Walsh. He had joined the reserves as a way to pay for college but was surprised to get deployed to the Middle East. One tour led to two, two to three. When he returned to San Francisco, to his wife and two kids, Kevin said he felt like he was stepping into someone else’s life. The kids were well behaved and fun, the wife was pleasant and attractive, but he couldn’t escape the feeling this life wasn’t his, that it was a life chosen by a different man and he was an impostor trying to make it work.
I wander around our home, becoming reacquainted with our things, our life. The place is a mess. Clearly, Alice didn’t expect me home today. In the garage, her studio has been rearranged—two chairs, two amps, two guitar stands facing each other. A worn piece of sheet music lies on a table. I pick it up and scan the page futilely, as if the bars and notes might contain some secret code to Alice. But it is a bizarre, impenetrable language.
I’m worried. Less for myself than for Alice.
Back upstairs, I see the house with fresh eyes: two plates in the sink, two forks, two empty wineglasses on the floor beside the couch. I feel sick. I go to the window and scan the street for the black SUV, but it isn’t there. I peer up at the streetlight. It has always been there, rendered invisible by its mundane presence. But now I notice three small boxes on top. Were they there before?
What has happened inside the house while I’ve been gone? More important, has The Pact been watching? Of course they have. How can Alice be so reckless? If The Pact comes and takes her away again, it will change her forever. She might be more faithful, she might be more obedient, but that’s not what I want. I want Alice. Beyond that, I want Alice to be Alice, good and bad. Finally. Is this love?
I call the office to let them know I’m back. Huang is surprised. “Where have you been, Mr. Jake?”
“Here and there. I got a haircut.”
A notebook lies open on the couch. All of the guitars and speakers are scattered around the house. The Teac four-track is set up on the breakfast room table, another notebook beside it, song titles scribbled. On our bed, I find a wrapped present with my name on it. A compact disc.
I slide it into the player on the bedside table, turn the power on, pull the headphones over my ears, sit on the bed, and press play. It’s Alice singing, accompanied by guitars, keyboards, drums, and at one point even a set of children’s percussion instruments. There are several background voices, but those are also Alice. The songs are beautiful and moody.
Track five is a duet. Alice is joined by a man’s voice. It’s another relationship song, a relationship that sounds familiar, and I realize that it’s about Alice and me, though somehow foreign. It’s the story of us, as seen through Alice’s eyes. The male voice sings my lines, certainly better than I ever could. The intimacy between the two voices makes the song deeply disquieting. The intake of breath before each line, the sort of thing that gets removed in the final edit, makes me feel as though I am right there in the room. I try to distance myself, to hear it as it would sound to an outside party, to someone who is not in love with Alice, but it’s not possible.
I remember the day on the stairwell, when Eric knew I was there but Alice did not. I think of the look he gave me. There was a challenge in his eyes, though maybe I read it all wrong. Maybe what I was seeing, instead, was compassion for me, or pity—because he knew something that I did not.
I listen to the disc all the way through, and then I start over again. Like the room in the garage, it feels as though I am peering into a part of Alice that I have imagined but never actually seen.
The musica
l portrait she paints of me is nuanced, occasionally forgiving, and brutally honest.
For so long, I held on to Alice so firmly, keeping her directly in my sight, looking only at the parts I wanted to see. I encouraged those qualities I loved in her, coaxing them forward, subconsciously hoping that if I ignored the other parts, they would recede and fall away. Of course, in my absence those parts have been flourishing. Yes, Alice has been becoming Alice again, her full and maddeningly complex self. I close my eyes, listening to her voice.
At some point, I hear a noise in the kitchen. I slide the headphones off. Alice is home. I wander down the hallway and find her high heels kicked off on the living room floor. I smell chicken, garlic, a hint of chocolate. I take in the moment, which feels perfect and welcome, until a vague sense of dread edges in. I look out the window and check for any suspicious cars parked on the block.
Alice is standing at the stove in pajamas and a Lemonheads T-shirt, frying mushrooms in butter, a wooden spoon in one hand, a beer in the other. The pan sizzles, and a slight smokiness fills the air. I slide my arms around her waist.
“Well, look who’s returned from the dead,” she says.
I murmur into her ear, “I loved your songs.”
She turns to face me, and I take the glass and the spoon out of her hands and put them on the counter. I pull her away from the stove, into the center of the kitchen. We stand there, locked in a kind of slow dance. At first, she is stiff, her hands perched on my shoulders, back slightly arched, as if she’s unwilling to give in to this moment, and to me. Then her body relaxes. She leans her head on my shoulder, moves her hands down my back, and pulls me close. I can feel her breath through my shirt. “Sorry about some of the lyrics.”
I can tell she wants to say something else. I just hold her and wait. “And the rest of it,” she says, sighing. “I’m sorry for the rest of it.”
Which sounds like a confession, at once alarming and a relief. If this happened between clients, I’d congratulate them on the breakthrough. I’d tell them that honesty is good, honesty is the first step. Of course, I would also warn them that, now that the truth was out in the open, things might get worse before they got better.
“You be you,” I say, and I mean it, I think.
Alice jumps up and puts her legs around my waist, and I am holding her entirely. We haven’t done this in so long, and I’d forgotten how light she feels, wrapped around my body.
79
It’s surprising how quickly Alice and I return to our patterns. I catch up at work, and she returns to her new case. But she leaves for the office a little later each day and comes home a little earlier. And when she’s home, I rarely catch her with the briefcase open, reviewing legal things, doing research. Instead, before we retire to the couch and click on a new episode of Sloganeering, she spends an hour or so on her laptop, inside Pro Tools, headphones on, mixing, tweaking, reviewing the songs for her new album.
We don’t talk about the days I was gone, what happened at Fernley or what happened here in the house. It is as if we have reached some silent agreement. Although the judge sentenced me to mobile incarceration, there was no further explanation. I waited for the bracelet, but it never came. I can only assume that they’re watching me more closely than ever. Maybe the house is bugged. Maybe there is a device in my car. Or maybe it is all some cruel psychological game: the not knowing is its own kind of prison.
Slowly, my hair begins to grow back. The longer it grows, the more Fernley seems like a distant nightmare.
At work, I return to my regular patterns, my clients, the teenagers, the married couples. I slowly start to wrap things up with those who are ready. Therapy, like all long conversations, has a beginning, middle, and end.
At home, I treasure the happiness we’ve found these past few weeks, the stability, the security, the warmth. I can see it in Alice’s eyes: She is happier. I imagine she is surprised to have found a hidden path that has let her merge the different sides of her personality. It feels as though we are slowly building our relationship, unique and different from all others, a marriage not unlike the ideal described in The Pact.
And yet my mind, like a computer calculating pi forever in the background, is still desperately trying to find a way out of The Pact. I sense Alice is doing the same.
Last night, I saw a dark SUV up the corner. The day before, Alice spotted a Bentley across the street. We both know that change is coming, that something has to be done, but neither of us mentions it.
80
On Tuesday, Alice receives word that the keyboard player from her old band Ladder has been killed in a motorcycle accident on the Great Highway. He was in his early forties and had a wife and twin daughters in preschool. Alice once spent two years with him in a van, on the road touring, so the news hits her hard.
An impromptu benefit has been planned at Bottom of the Hill on Saturday night. I suggest maybe she should go alone, but she insists that I come with her. When I get home from running errands on Saturday, I catch a glimpse of her in front of the bedroom mirror, and I barely recognize her. Her hair is crazy, her makeup extreme, the black minidress, fishnets, and Doc Martens unlike anything she has worn in years. She looks great, but her ability to transform so swiftly back into the creature she once was makes me uneasy.
I struggle with my own clothes, finally settling on jeans and an old white button-down. We look entirely mismatched, like a couple heading out on an ill-conceived first date set up by friends who don’t know either of us well. Alice is nervous about being late. We finally squeeze into a parking spot six blocks away, and we run-walk all the way to the club. Inside, Alice is swallowed up immediately by a crowd of old friends, acquaintances, and fans. I stand back and watch.
The music starts. It’s a strange mishmash of musicians playing all of the old favorites. Green Day is there, the keyboardist from the Barbary Coasters, Chuck Prophet, Kenney Dale Johnson, others who look vaguely familiar. The crowd seems to be enjoying it. It’s a mix of sadness and joy, people celebrating their friend’s life, still stunned by his death. The music is good, and I can tell the musicians are putting their hearts into it. Still, it has been many years since I’ve been to a club like Bottom of the Hill, so it’s not long before my ears are ringing. I scan the crowd, but I don’t see Alice.
I grab a Calistoga at the bar and find a spot against the wall in the back, in the dark. As my eyes adjust, I realize that there are three other guys against the back wall, two of them also drinking Calistoga, all three wearing white button-downs and jeans, all three around my age. Probably A-and-R guys.
When did I get old?
It happens slowly, but rarely with ambiguity. In restaurants, the waiter places the check beside you. At work, in meetings, when a difficult decision arises, others look to you first for direction. A tint of gray at the temples, the obvious signs: a house, a car that’s paid for, a wife instead of a girlfriend.
A wife. I finally spot Alice, talking with people I don’t recognize, a crowd between us. Despite the complications, I’m so happy with my choice, and I hope she’s happy with hers.
Eventually, the noise becomes too much, so I get my hand stamped and step outside. The fog feels good on my face. I watch the cars moving up Seventeenth Street.
“So I hear you’re a therapist.”
I turn to see Eric Wilson standing beside me. I see now what I didn’t notice that day in our garage—probably because I was so focused on Alice. He no longer looks like the young, good-looking bass player from that photo out front of the Fillmore. His hair is a little greasy, and he has bad teeth.
“Yes,” I say. “And you are a bassist in a band.” It comes out more derisive than I mean for it to, or maybe not. The fact is, I have nothing against bassists in general. Just this bassist.
He pulls out a cigarette and lights up. “By night,” he acknowledges. “During the day, I’m a professor at Cal. Biology. Didn’t Alice mention that?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“It’s not unprecedented. The guy from Bad Religion teaches at UCLA.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, we’re co-authoring a paper on the green turtles of Ascension Island. Chelonia mydas. Ever heard of them?”
“No.”
Through the wall, I can feel the vibrations of the music inside. I want to go back in, but more than that I want to punch Eric Wilson in the face. It’s a fairly new sensation. What would happen, I wonder, if I were to simply put my more rational nature aside, just for once, and act on instinct?
Eric must have just come offstage, because he has sweat running down his neck. I’m reminded of a recent article from JAMA, a piece about how women are often attracted to their future mate by the smell of his sweat. The theory is that women look for a man with unique-smelling perspiration because it implies a difference in genes, a better prospect for immunity in their children, a better chance for the family line to endure. Immortality, all in the smell of sweat.
“These giant green sea turtles,” Eric says, “are born on Ascension Island. Then, they spend their lives far away, enjoying different waters, exploring, swimming off the coast of Brazil and things like that. But you know what?” Eric has turned to face me, so close I can feel his breath on my face.
“I imagine you’re going to tell me.”
“When it’s time to settle down, time to have a family, they return to who they are. Can you imagine that? When the time to get serious comes—and trust me, it always does—wherever they are, whoever they think they’ve become, they put it aside, and they swim, and they swim. Sometimes, thousands of miles. They shed their current life without a moment’s hesitation. They return to that beach on Ascension Island, give up all pretense, and become exactly who they are, exactly who they were.”
The Marriage Pact Page 32
