My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  Despite the conversation, he kissed Renata. “You’d better put your shoes on or you’ll wreck your stockings.”

  “It’s charming of you to think I’m wearing them,” she said.

  David closed the door behind her, intending to call his friends at a Thai restaurant, but his business line was ringing again, a call from that same unfamiliar number.

  3

  “David?”

  The voice was tentative, but he recognized it immediately. He felt a strange grip of panic, assuming she could only be calling after all these years with bad news. He cleared his throat, and managed a raspy, “Julie!”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No, no,” he said, appalled at the idea. He’d been raised by a mother who believed that sleeping was suspect behavior, more shameful than alcoholism and compulsive gambling, two things about which the dear woman had known a lot. It was one of the few beliefs in her Italian and Catholic ideology that had left an imprint. “It’s only four in the afternoon,” he said.

  “Oh? Oh, right, the time difference.” She said it dismissively, as if it was an annoyance, and David felt an unexpected throb of affection. Julie had always been bad with time zones and directions and dates. He sympathized with her annoyance; he’d grown up in Rhode Island, and despite having lived in San Francisco for twenty years, he still considered East Coast time the real time and everything else irritating rebelliousness.

  “I know you don’t like to admit to sleeping,” she said.

  “I’m flattered you remember,” he said.

  “I remember a lot.”

  “In that case, I’m flattered you called.”

  “Don’t be—I’ve forgotten a lot, too.”

  He saw Julie as she was the last time he’d seen her, a slim young woman with a love of white shirts and gray men’s pants she ordered by the half-dozen from some utilitarian catalog and wore with enough conviction to make them unexpectedly sexy and chic. She’d kept her hair long in a casually nondescript way and spent money on presents for people she barely knew. She’d had muddled plans to become an illustrator or a graphic designer, plans that were constantly derailed by an inability to stick to one thing for long. She’d had the misfortune of being talented and capable in many areas without being expert in any of them. This, he’d noted, makes one interesting when young but usually, when middle-aged, disappointed. Or a teacher.

  Back then, she’d made resolutions and broke them within the hour, started projects and left them unfinished. Those were the traits that had endeared her to David and made him want to fix things for her. His desire to be helpful was one he’d naïvely mistaken for lust back when he was less resolved about his sexual leanings, just as, years later when he was more resolved, he’d mistaken lust for affection, admiration, and even love. He and Julie had lived together in New York on the Upper West Side for more than two years and had been married for less than one.

  “You must be shocked to hear from me,” she said.

  “I was at first, but I got over it quickly. Now I’m in the delighted phase.” This was true. Her voice brought him back to a time in his life when the real estate news he’d just received would have been an upsetting inconvenience rather than a crisis. “Why did we fall off?”

  “I think it had to do with the fact that one day we were supposedly in love and married and then, suddenly, we weren’t either.”

  “I guess that will do it. And then,” he added, a mild attempt at self-defense, “you remarried.”

  “Me and my marriages. Some people never learn.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, god, David. You don’t think I’d call after all this time just because something’s wrong, do you?”

  That seemed like the most logical explanation, but he said, “I was just making sure.”

  “Good.”

  Having cleared this up, she started to cry.

  David had reached the point in midlife at which he’d grown used to hearing friends burst into tears for reasons both personal and global or for no apparent reason at all. He made his way into the kitchen of the carriage house and started a pot of tea. It was unlikely this would be a short conversation.

  “Do you remember those singers you used to play all the time?” she asked. “The French ones with the delicate voices? Do you still listen to them?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Although I think you may have ended up with most of the records.”

  “My daughter found them recently and started playing them.”

  He was beginning to understand why she’d called. “The past came flooding back on a tide of Jacques Prévert?”

  “Something like that. They made me miss you. Not the marriage. I mean our friendship. I guess I’m in need of a friend.”

  He was taken aback by something in her voice as she said this, a sad, wistful quality that had always gotten to him in the past. Although his sexual preference had been for men for decades (his entire life if you included a few crucial years when he’d been in denial about the obvious), he’d always found it easier to feel protective of and affectionate toward women, possibly because underneath it all, he knew he was incapable of giving himself to them fully. The reason he’d been so open toward Soren for five years was because, underneath it all, he’d known that Soren was incapable of giving himself fully to anyone.

  “I miss you, too,” he said.

  “I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t say that unless you didn’t mean it.”

  “But in this case, I do mean it. I’m more earnest and less skinny these days, both signs of aging, I’ve been told. I often think about those walks we used to take along Riverside Drive.”

  “At a certain point, it was easier than being in the apartment together.”

  “Yes, but they were still wonderful. All that gray water and granite, the low skies.”

  “Another way of saying there was always a cloud hanging over our heads,” she said.

  “I suppose. But as I recall, neither one of us was big on the sun.”

  They lapsed into reminiscences of people they’d known all those years ago and Oliver, the neighbor’s sickly dog they’d adopted and had seen through to his death. He was the only dog David had ever lived with, and losing him had been part of the tumble of losses that had come at the end of their relationship. As the least personal, it was the easiest one to discuss now. Julie mentioned her teaching job and told David she was running an “informal B and B” out of her house. He thought it was best not to press for details on this. “Informal” probably meant “illegal.” After another fifteen minutes, the conversation began to feel like one in which they were talking around something.

  “I get the feeling,” he said, “that there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “That goes without saying, don’t you think?”

  “We have to get to it eventually.”

  “It’s a favor,” she said.

  “That goes without saying, too. And I love feeling useful.”

  She hesitated, and he sensed she was calculating how much to reveal. “My daughter’s a junior in high school,” she said. “She needs help with colleges.”

  He was thrilled. After all this time, he really could be useful to dear Julie. But after talking for a few more minutes, he realized he was hearing only part of the problem.

  4

  Mandy was sitting on her bed while her friend Lindsay sat on the floor with her face buried in her phone and her back propped up against the mattress.

  “So what’s he like?” Lindsay asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “You just told me you’ve been working together for two weeks.”

  “I told you I told that to my father. Which has nothing to do with reality.” She’d also explained to Lindsay about doing a search on David Hedges; that probably hadn’t registered either. “There’s a big difference between you and me,” Mandy said, although it was beginning to seem as if there were many differences. “Neith
er one of us listens to other people, but I fake it better. You should work on that, it comes in handy.”

  Lindsay went back to her phone, where, Mandy knew, she was watching videos from one of the vloggers she followed. No doubt someone talking about makeup or Starbucks. Either that or she was rereading messages from Brett, a senior boy whose distinctive traits were playing football and being a Christian. Meaning that everyone wanted him but no one got him. Especially not Lindsay. The mere fact that he was paying attention to Lindsay had boosted Lindsay’s status at school. Mandy had a sense that they wouldn’t be hanging out for much longer, and this made her want to push her friend away all the faster, just to get it over with.

  Lindsay and her family had lived next door to Mandy when they were growing up. Their friendship had always seemed like a matter of proximity and convenience, but then again, wasn’t that the basis for most sibling relationships, too? After Lindsay’s family moved to the other side of town, they still hung out, but less frequently and always with a feeling that they were killing time until a better offer came along.

  Ever since ten days ago when Craig Crespo had stopped Mandy on the street and asked her if she needed a ride home in his van, Lindsay’s relationship with Brett had seemed especially insignificant, and Mandy’s friendship with Lindsay had been even more frustrating. It would have been nice to talk with Lindsay about what had happened with Craig—as he’d told her to call him—about his vague mention of “coming to work for him,” but she knew that she shouldn’t. Lindsay wouldn’t approve (would be jealous, in other words) and would tell her incredibly bland and nosy mother. There would be phone calls and questions, and Mandy would end up humiliated, all before anything had actually happened. Lindsay considered herself a “romantic,” which meant she was a Disney princess who’d read her mother’s copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.

  “But why did you bring up your mother’s ex in the first place? They divorced so long ago.”

  “It’s obvious my mother needs help. Who else am I going to bring up? Craig Crespo?”

  At the mention of his name, Lindsay touched her neck. “But you don’t even like your mother.”

  There was something about this comment that made Mandy want to cry. Lindsay wasn’t stupid. Her grades were better than Mandy’s, and she was always getting prizes for writing boring essays on politically correct topics even though her parents had creepy political views. How could she not read between the lines of Mandy’s complaints about her mother and know that she was frustrated with her because she did love her and wanted her to get her life on track so that she could go off to college without worrying that her mother would fall apart completely?

  It was now weird to Mandy that she’d never been interested in her mother’s first marriage. But ever since she’d found the boxes in the basement and her mother had started talking about it, she’d been fascinated. Her mother and David had lived in a huge apartment on the upper floor of a building in New York they were subletting for practically nothing. Mandy loved the descriptions of it and felt as if she could see it all—the vast spaces, the crumbling ceilings, the little sinks in every bedroom, and, best of all, the tiny maid’s room behind the kitchen that no one ever went into. That would be the room she’d want. A perfect, private hiding place.

  When her mother talked about these details, she got a dreamy faraway look in her eyes, different from when she was stoned. She missed David Hedges. She’d even gotten teary when she talked about the dog they’d owned, and Mandy understood then why all three dogs they’d had since she was a baby had had names starting with O. As if they were descendants of that original mutt.

  And then there was the photograph that had fallen out of a book: her mother and a skinny guy that had to be David sitting on a park bench with their arms around each other’s shoulders and the dog her mother had described sitting between them like a small child. She’d seen pictures of her mother young before, but never from this period in her life and never looking so defiantly happy. She hadn’t shown it to her mother for fear it would induce a pot-fueled weeping fit. She’d been keeping it in a pocket in her overalls.

  Last weekend when she was staying at the horrible townhouse Carol and her father lived in—pale blue wall-to-wall carpeting—and overheard her father talking about selling the house to Amira’s husband, she knew she had to do something.

  “You know what, Lindsay?” she said now. “You need to get a clue.”

  “You can be a real bitch sometimes,” Lindsay said without glancing up from her phone.

  “Really? I was hoping it was all the time. But thanks.”

  Mandy picked up the book she was reading, one of the mildewed ones she’d found in the basement. It was a paperback about a village in England. The whole thing was like Beauport—a lot of petty people gossiping and fighting about who to invite to a tea party. It was probably meant to be funny, but it was funniest if you pretended it was supposed to be serious, the way everyone in Beauport was hilarious because they took themselves so seriously. She’d found a whole set of these books and was reading her way through them.

  As for David, she’d finally received an email from him this morning.

  Dear Mandy, Your mother and I spoke a few days ago. It sounds as if you and I are going to be working on college applications. I hope you’re as excited about this as I am. Your mother and I are old friends, so it will be a pleasure to get to know you. Send me a few good times to set up a first call. This is going to be fun!

  Best wishes, David

  The whole thing struck her as dishonest, which was a disappointment. She’d expected more of an ally, someone who’d treat her like an equal or at least like an adult. Was he really “excited” to be working with her for free? As for “old friends,” did he think her mother hadn’t told her they’d been married?

  She went back to the novel and read another few pages. What she loved about these books was that you knew the little crises that weren’t even problems would turn out fine before the end of a few chapters, unlike, say, her own life, which she felt instinctively was headed toward a cliff.

  She heard someone downstairs calling her mother. There were three guest rooms on the second floor and one closet-size room on the ground floor. Her mother had fixed this up “for an emergency, in case I overbook.” You could view this as sensible, but also as proof that her mother knew the probability of her screwing something up was high. She and her mother had moved up to the third floor once they started the Airbnb thing.

  Usually, the people staying in the house crept around, somewhere between family and thieves who’d just broken in. Even though they were paying to stay, they tended to be sheepish, as if her mother was doing them a huge favor by letting them pay a hundred bucks a night for a stale muffin and a bed with an old mattress.

  The woman called for Julie again.

  “Aren’t you going to see what she wants?” Lindsay asked.

  “It’s not my problem.”

  “Is she the one with the cute husband?”

  Mandy hated the word “cute” unless it was applied to puppies and infants. There was something sleazy about the woman’s husband—the slicked-back hair, the loafers without socks. He was handsome, but calling him “cute” was just a way to make him seem less dangerous and sexy. Why couldn’t Lindsay just say she was excited and terrified by him? If Mandy was going to talk about Craig Crespo honestly, that’s how she’d describe her feelings toward him.

  Mr. Crespo was probably in his late twenties. He ran one of those geek-in-a-van businesses and showed up at the high school once or twice a week when there was a computer glitch that needed to be fixed. About five seconds after he pulled into the school lot, word had spread through an invisible network of gossip and social media. It was like when there was a natural disaster or a mass shooting somewhere: people instantly knew. It didn’t take much to figure out that everyone was in love with him, whether they realized it or not. The boys either bragged about knowing him, like he was their amazingly coo
l older brother, or talked him down because their girlfriends had crushes on him. There was no shortage of rumors: he’d been in Afghanistan; he’d been in jail; he carried a gun; he was gay; he’d been seen making out with Mrs. Mullen, the married history teacher; he lived with his mother.

  Mandy hadn’t paid much attention to him, mostly because she figured she was the kind of person Mr. Crespo wouldn’t notice. But he wasn’t easy to ignore. When he stopped to ask her if she needed a ride home, she knew that wasn’t what he was really asking her. But what he was asking wasn’t clear, so her instinct had been to say no and keep walking. She’d sensed danger, the way she had when she’d spotted a coyote around one of the quarries in the woods above town and just knew it was rabid. But in the case of Craig, she’d also known she was being offered an opportunity, one that probably wouldn’t come again. And most of all, she’d been noticed by someone who mattered, a big fuck you to everyone who ignored her. She’d shrugged, surprised at her own ability to be nonchalant, and had gotten in. She’d been only two blocks from home, so it was a short ride, and aside from his random mention of a job, they’d said nothing.

  The woman downstairs called for Julie again. Mandy got up off the bed and opened her door. “My mother’s not home!” she shouted.

  “What’s that?”

  “My mother isn’t home.”

  “I think she forgot to leave us towels.”

  “If I’m gone more than five minutes,” Mandy told Lindsay, “come looking for me.”

  She’d bumped into this woman earlier in the day and she’d treated Mandy as if they were sisters, asking her where she’d bought her overalls. As if it was any of her business or, based on what she was wearing, she’d be caught dead in them. Did she really believe Mandy would fall for the fake friend routine?