My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  With the joyless resignation that defined so many of her actions these days, Mandy lumbered to the trunk and pulled out her duffel bag.

  “I thought you were going to have something done about those gutters,” Henry said.

  Julie looked back at the house. Henry had tossed out orders last time she’d talked with him. Naturally, she’d forgotten.

  “I’m working on it,” Julie said.

  Mandy clomped over to Julie and planted a kiss on her cheek. A crumb tossed in her direction, but such a welcome one. “Nice perfume, Mom,” she whispered.

  It was getting harder to tell herself that Mandy knew nothing about her pot habit since, in the past year, it seemed as if Mandy knew more about most things while caring less about everything. Another reason to be glad she’d stopped smoking.

  As soon as Mandy was inside, Julie tried to grab the advantage. She presented the oily bag to Henry. “A little something for Carol,” she said. “Carrot muffins. I know she’s big on vegetables.”

  He held up his hands as if she’d pointed a gun at him. “That’s one of the things we need to talk about,” he said. “No more gifts. It makes her feel terrible you’re being so nice to her.”

  “Would it help if I included a nasty note?”

  “You know what you’re doing, so let’s cut the comedy act.”

  Like a lot of people who have no sense of humor and take themselves entirely seriously, Henry assumed everyone else was playing it for laughs. Oddly, she’d been attracted to Henry’s earnestness when she first met him, probably a reaction to David, who’d been compulsively ironic. The second husband was often a reaction to the first, just as Obama had been a reaction to Bush or—more appropriately in this case—Reagan had been a reaction to Carter. Henry had had the looks of an ordinary man you’d see grilling hamburgers in an ordinary backyard, a man you could imagine expounding too long on a topic of interest to no one, a contrast to David’s lean angularity and floppy hair that had made him look, in certain lights, like a dashing minor character in a British miniseries about university life. Those less interesting qualities of Henry’s had made her feel secure and, no doubt, a little more interesting herself. Henry had found her offbeat because she’d never worn makeup. Now he had Carol, who, according to Mandy, had a makeup mirror with multiple settings including one called “Home Lighting Situations.” Julie had home-lighting situations, too, but they were blown bulbs, frayed cords, and trouble finding the circuit breakers.

  She tossed the bag with the muffins onto the porch. “Fine. Was there anything else?”

  He scanned the backyard in a way that made Julie nervous. She suddenly wished she hadn’t smoked the joint after all.

  “I had a call from Richard the other day,” he said.

  “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

  Henry pointed to the hedge surrounding the property and indicated the house on the other side with his chin. “Amira’s husband,” he said.

  “Oh, that Richard.” Like most wealthy men who were married to gorgeous, much younger women, Richard’s name was less relevant than his bank account. Julie and Amira were friends, at least to the extent that Amira was capable of having friendships with women. It helped that Julie provided less competition for male attention than Opal. She waited for Henry to say more, with a sick feeling growing in her stomach.

  “He’s interested in the house,” Henry said. There was disingenuous enthusiasm in his voice, as if he really thought she’d be happy to hear this. Good news! The tumor is malignant!

  “He has a house,” Julie said. “According to Amira, he has several. And this house isn’t for sale, so how is that relevant?”

  “What do you need this monstrosity for? It’s going to be a weight around your neck, trying to keep up with the bills and repairs. When Mandy goes off to college, you’ll be rattling around in an empty house with the roof falling in.”

  “The roof is sound.” That was true. The rest of what he’d said was up for grabs. It was important not to show that she was beginning to panic; Henry, like all cowards, had a knack for smelling blood in the water. “We have a deal, Henry. We’ve signed an agreement. I’ve submitted paperwork for the mortgage. Once we pass papers and finalize the divorce, you won’t have to worry about the weights I have around my neck. You’ll be free, and frankly, so will I. As for Richard, he can buy some other historic house to knock down.”

  Henry shook his head with a combination of pity and disapproval, a variation on his prevailing attitude toward her since the glow had worn off their relationship and all the things that had charmed him about her began to annoy him. He’d been losing his hair for years, and recently, Carol had persuaded him to shave his head, a move that gave him a more solid and confident appearance. Specifically, he seemed more confident that he’d been justified in leaving her.

  “I’m making sacrifices here, Julie. I need the money for the restaurant and Richard’s offering more than we discussed. A hundred thousand more. Cash, no contingencies, no inspection.”

  “We did more than discuss it, we made an agreement. We have legal papers.”

  She could see his eyes wandering. This was what she’d come to realize about Henry, that he didn’t listen when other people talked, just waited for them to stop talking so he could make his next point.

  “The papers can be changed. And don’t forget, the house is only one part of our agreement.”

  The summer was officially wearying on. The piano she’d heard earlier started up again, but this time it sounded jangly and jarring. Six months after she and Henry had moved into the house, she’d discovered she was pregnant. The place was bound up in her mind with Mandy and all the hopes they’d had for a happy life. She’d never known Mandy anywhere else, and if she lost the house, she’d be losing a connection to her daughter. She was stung by the realization that Henry had no nostalgic associations and saw the place primarily as a pawn.

  “I don’t like the direction Mandy’s headed,” he said. “She’s evasive, she’s cranky and surly. She comes over for the weekend and she doesn’t even want to watch TV with us.”

  She didn’t like the direction Mandy was headed in either, although it was hard to pinpoint a reason. She wasn’t depressed, but she rarely exhibited anything like happiness. Her grades were holding steady, but somewhere in the mediocre range. She’d occasionally fly into a rage and stomp around the house, not caring if the guests heard her. There was something heavy about Mandy, like the muffins Henry had just rejected.

  “So your concern is she’s not interested in House Hunters and cooking competitions? You should spend a little more time with her peers. They’re all like that. And you don’t think your moving out might have hurt her?”

  He pondered this briefly and then brought down the hammer. “Possibly, but she sees that I’m happy.”

  Julie had been happy for three days in April, when Raymond Cross had stayed at the house. But somehow, that brief respite had made her realize how numb she felt so much of the time. Maybe how numb she’d felt for years.

  “I’m worried about college,” he said. “I asked her what you and she were doing about it, and I got a vague response about a friend whose parents supposedly told her she doesn’t have to go if she doesn’t want.”

  “She’s going to college,” Julie said. “She took the SATs a couple of weeks ago. We’ll know her scores in July. In the meantime, I’ll get even more organized about it when my teaching’s done.”

  “Really? Not too busy renting rooms and ignoring the upkeep on this place and forgetting to pay the bills? Those half-assed college visits earlier this spring?”

  He moved his hands to his hips and glared at her for a moment across the twilit yard, once the scene of quiet evenings when she and Henry had sat side by side in Adirondack chairs and discussed their good fortune. She looked to the chairs, all too appropriately going to rot under the pine tree at the edge of the lawn. The contempt she could take, but when his face softened, something inside her dropped
. She could smell trouble of a more serious kind on the breeze.

  “Can we continue this inside?” he said.

  As they walked in, Julie toggled between hoping he wouldn’t notice all the dog shit on the lawn and wishing he’d step in it.

  She indicated the sofa thing.

  “Please,” she said. “Take a seat.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I figured I could since it’s still my house.”

  Henry plopped down wearily and she sat in a chair opposite him. “Have you noticed,” she said, “that I’ve done a lot of tidying up in here?” Sometimes, if you plant a suggestion in someone’s mind, they see what you want them to see.

  He looked around doubtfully. “Still going to flea markets, I gather.” He frowned and turned on a light. Or tried to. Home Lighting Situation #1.

  “First of all,” he said, “this isn’t a fight. We’re talking about what’s best for our daughter.”

  The reasonable tone was clearly meant to allay hysteria. She felt as if a clamp was tightening in her throat.

  “Please get to the point,” she squeaked.

  Again he cast a disapproving look with contempt in his eyes. “We have better schools where I’m living now.”

  She stood. “No!” Perhaps she said it too loudly; there was a creaking of floorboards from above, the room where the messologists were. “Absolutely not.”

  “Better schools, better counselors, more motivated students. A better place for her senior year.”

  “No. It’s not part of the discussion.”

  “If you really expect to get primary custody, if you expect me to take peanuts for the house, maybe it needs to be. Have you thought of that? She needs rigor in her life and it’s obvious she’s not getting it here, especially with a lot of strangers tromping in and out.”

  “She’s meeting people from all over the world,” she said. “It’s educational.” It wasn’t clear how changing sheets for a guest from Amsterdam was more educational than changing them for someone from New Hampshire, but there was no need to go into that. Newly bald Henry looked especially stern and steely in the dim light of the room. “I don’t suppose you’ve even discussed this with Carol.”

  “As a matter of fact, it was her suggestion. She wants to get Mandy on a study schedule and take her out jogging with her.”

  After all the effort Julie had put into her little gifts. After trying to be so damned understanding for the past year and a half. What can you expect from someone who eats figs.

  “If you had a shred of decency, Henry, you’d find Carol help for her fitness obsession instead of encouraging it and trying to drag your daughter into grade anxiety and body dysmorphia.”

  And then, in a depressingly reasonable tone, he said, “Come on, Julie. Admit it, you don’t have a plan for college here.”

  “Actually, Dad, we do.”

  Julie turned. Mandy was standing in the doorway from the hall. She was wearing the same overalls and long-sleeved jersey she’d been wearing earlier, but had put on a woolen watch cap. Because it was so cold? Opal was beside her, looking up at her with the eager adoration Julie was no longer permitted to express to her daughter.

  Henry’s mouth was pursed in doubt. “Oh, really? And were you planning to tell me?”

  “Mom contacted her first husband.”

  “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “He has a college-counseling business,” Mandy went on. “We’ve been working together for a couple of weeks, talking schools and essays.”

  Julie was appalled by the audacity of this lie but said nothing.

  A couple of months ago, Mandy had come across boxes of records and books of David’s that were moldering in the basement. Julie had had no idea they were down there or why she had ended up with them in the first place. The boxes were a time capsule of a previous life she thought she’d let go of decades earlier.

  “Who’s David Hedges?” Mandy had asked, reading the name from inside one of the books.

  When Mandy was ten, Julie had told her she’d been married before. Why not? But until that moment, Mandy had never seemed especially interested in the details, not that Julie had been eager to discuss them. As Mandy was flipping through the albums of Jane Birkin and Françoise Hardy and the other French singers David had introduced her to, Julie had felt an unexpected surge of nostalgia.

  “The man I was married to briefly a million years ago,” she’d said.

  “Oh, right. Why’d you divorce?”

  “That’s a long story. We decided we were better as friends than husband and wife.”

  Mandy had nodded, looked through the records and books, and then, in a nonchalant way, said, “Gay?”

  There was something galling about the fact that Mandy had apparently surmised in ten seconds what it had taken Julie years to figure out. She acknowledged that he was.

  “We lost touch after your father and I met. He lives in California. I was thinking of him the other day.” And then, as ghosts started to rise from the cartons, she said, “We had a little dog named Oliver with a tiny body and huge ears,” and launched into a description of their pet and their apartment. Mandy had listened with unusual interest.

  Mandy had taken the records and a few of the books up to her room along with the suitcase-like record player she’d found in some closet. She’d been listening to the records that weren’t too warped, the singers’ voices frail and melancholic, even when singing ostensibly happy songs. Julie had been out on the lawn one evening at dusk and Françoise Hardy’s voice had come pouring down from the third floor, singing a heartbreakingly innocent song about friendship she’d recorded at age eighteen. The music had filled Julie with yearnings, partly for David and the imperfect life they’d been living back then, but mostly for the life she’d believed she would have. For the faith she’d had in possibilities.

  Obviously, Mandy had done some investigating on her own.

  “I thought he was in San Francisco,” Henry said. “Appropriately enough.”

  Henry had enjoyed deriding David from the outset, reminding Julie that he was more of a man than David had been, whatever that meant. Men’s obsessions with their own masculinity were embarrassingly effeminate. His jealousy of David had been ridiculous, but it was true that she’d always felt closer to David in an inexplicable way than she’d ever felt to Henry. At one time, she and Henry had been ardent lovers, they’d been companions for more than twenty years, and they’d been loving, cooperative parents, but she couldn’t claim they’d been friends in the way she and David had been. It was a question of small matters: Henry never laughed about the same things she did; he’d never lain at the opposite end of the sofa and read whole novels to her; never sat up in bed and explained the virtues of Nicole Croisille’s breathy delivery and Mistinguett’s enduring appeal. He’d never opened up a world for her. He’d never even understood why she loved dogs.

  “We’re working on the phone and through email, Dad.”

  Mandy had moved closer to Julie’s chair, and Julie felt a conspiratorial closeness she hadn’t felt since Mandy was thirteen. She put her arm around Mandy’s waist. “He charges a fortune for his service,” Julie said. And then, to add something else that was not, technically, a lie: “We haven’t gone over the specifics, but I know he’ll agree to do it as a favor.”

  Henry stood up from the sofa thing and leaned back to relieve his spine. He and Carol loved showing off how much pain and irreparable joint damage their fitness cost them. “Is there some reason you didn’t mention this when I brought it up earlier?”

  “The thing is, Dad, we’re telling you now.”

  “Just for the record,” Henry said as Julie was walking him to his car, “I don’t entirely believe that, but it’ll be easy enough to check on whether you’re getting anywhere. I want her to complete the common app and have a plausible list of colleges she plans to apply to by the date of the closing. That’s August fourteenth.”

  It irritated her that the date had iconic sta
tus for him.

  “If she doesn’t, we’re going back to mediation. I refuse to sacrifice everything.”

  “Wow,” she said. “We’ve gotten to actual threats.”

  “Call me when you hear about the mortgage. If you get turned down, we need to start negotiating with Richard.”

  Julie was still buoyed by Mandy’s use of “we” even if it had been folded into a lie. As she walked up the staircase to the third floor, she heard music, one of those Juliette Gréco songs that made you think of foggy docks and dark nights. It was warmer up here under the roof, and it smelled of tar and sunbaked wood.

  When Mandy opened her bedroom door, the conspiratorial affection she’d shown earlier seemed to have evaporated. Probably it was too much to hope it would last.

  “That’s such a beautiful record,” Julie said. “It makes me happy you’re listening to this music.”

  “I’m not really. I like the way the scratches sound.”

  Surely there was something appealing in this, too?

  “As you can probably guess,” Julie said, “I have a lot of questions.”

  “I know, Mom, but you don’t have a lot of time.” She reached into the pocket of her overalls and handed Julie a scrap of notebook paper with a number on it. “You should call him tomorrow.”

  2

  “Lorraine told me you did a great job on her daughter’s college applications, David. She said you have a patented system.”

  “Patented in the loosest sense of the word.” A more accurate description might be “applied OCD.”

  “Well, if you can help her, I don’t think you’ll have any problems with Nancy. She’s been gifted since she was tiny.”