My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  “I have. It’s why I’m calling. She sent me an email. Short, but nice. She mentioned it might be easier to do the work if I was there. It got me thinking. It’s been so long, and I have a couple of weeks, open—well, relatively open—and there are cheap flights now. Cheap as long as you don’t eat, drink, have luggage, use the bathroom, or need a place to sit. What if I came? Just for a little visit. Help her. Finally see you after all these years. A week or ten days.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right, David? You sound wound up.” It gave her a sudden feeling of tenderness to be able to recognize his mood.

  “I’m at a cocktail party and I had a drink. It went to my head, which I guess is the whole point. It looks as if there are dozens of inns in that town, so maybe if you could recommend one.”

  Amira was on the sofa, texting with someone. It was impossible to imagine it was her husband, and since she didn’t seem to care much for women in general, it was safe to assume it was one of her alleged lovers. It was convenient to think of Amira as a friend, but she couldn’t be counted on. Not that David had been so reliable, but she’d never doubted his intentions. “I wouldn’t let you stay in one of those places,” she said. “That’s out of the question. When were you thinking about coming?”

  This question was enough to make Amira put down her phone and peer at Julie in the flickering light.

  “I was thinking maybe as soon as I could get a flight,” David said. “Sometime in the next few days?”

  “Let me know when you make your reservations.” Suddenly, this struck her as an answer to a prayer she hadn’t uttered because, after all, she didn’t pray. There always had been a calm, gentle quality to David that she’d found endearing and comforting. It had been a buffer against the chaos of the city they’d lived in together and her own tendency to overreact to world events and letters from her mother. He’d been thin to the point of appearing frail in certain lights, but he’d stood up for her with a ferocity that had consistently taken her by surprise. There were things she’d have to tell him, of course. Or more specifically, one thing, but she didn’t need to worry about that now. “David,” she said. “We might not like each other as much as we used to.”

  “I doubt that’s true, dear,” he said. “But we’re certain to like each other more than we did at the end. Are you having storms?”

  “We were. They seem to be passing out to sea.”

  When she’d hung up, Amira asked if this was the clarinet-playing lover.

  “Saxophone,” Julie said. “And no, it’s my ex-husband.”

  “From when?”

  “We were married almost thirty years ago. But not for long.”

  “I’m so jealous of all your exes,” Amira said. “It’s embarrassing having a stable marriage, even if I did marry for money. Are you still in love with him?”

  “I scarcely know him anymore. He’s gay.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful. The gay ones all love me. I have no idea why. I’ll have a party for you both. He can help you buy the house and fix Mandy. He’ll be your savior.”

  With eerie synchronicity, the lights flickered on just as Amira uttered the last word. Julie wanted to protest that she didn’t need a savior, but she knew that wasn’t true.

  8

  Somewhere over the Sierras, David felt California beginning to fade. He was heading away from his troubles and toward Julie’s relatively well-ordered life. In a house she owned, not a rented space. It was clear she was dealing with her own complications, but perhaps they could help each other out in ways they hadn’t been able to all those years ago.

  He’d taken a red-eye, and already, less than an hour into the flight, the lights were off and passengers were huddled under blankets, attempting to sleep or, if medicated, sleeping. It had taken him a few days to get reservations and get organized. He’d left keys to his apartment with his friend Michael and had asked him to check in once or twice while he was gone.

  As for Renata, she’d called at least a dozen times since the party, and he’d refused to pick up or listen to her messages. He’d sent her an email saying he was going to visit a friend on the East Coast and would let her know when he got back.

  It had been too long since his last trip east. Six years earlier, he’d returned for his mother’s funeral. He hadn’t seen her much after he’d moved west—he lived too far for frequent visits, and she was always tremendously busy—but they’d spoken on the phone almost daily. She had a sweet attachment to him that stopped just short of wanting to know much of what he was actually doing. “I know you don’t want to tell me anything about your life,” she’d say hopefully, “but I’m glad you’re finally happy.” She’d made frequent trips to casinos in Connecticut where she ate a lot of shrimp and lost small sums of money that eventually added up to her net worth. His father had died when his mother was in her early sixties, and she’d experienced one of those second acts common to widows of her generation. She’d had freedom for the first time in her life and reveled in travel, drinking, and gambling with other newly liberated widows. These friendships were far more agreeable and intimate than most of their marriages had been.

  After she died, David had keenly felt the loss of her and of family in general. He had one brother, a computer programmer who lived in North Carolina. He’d never forgiven David for divorcing Julie, even after David had assured him it had been a mutual decision. “You should have done the right thing and stayed with her,” he’d said, a theory that alternated with a contradictory theory that he should have “done the right thing” by never marrying her in the first place, given what should have been obvious to him about his sexual interests. Religion came into his opinions. He was married to a pretty woman who used the expression “the Lord” in a disturbing number of sentences, and was homeschooling their three kids, always a red flag. He didn’t envision having a rapprochement with Decker too much in advance of one or the other’s deathbed. He was, essentially, without a family.

  At some point in the flight, he fell asleep. When he woke up, it was early morning. The cabin smelled of coffee. Sunlight seemed to loosen the tongue of the young woman in yoga pants sitting next to him, who, earlier in the flight, had been watching cooking shows on her screen with don’t-talk-to-me intensity. When David asked her now why she was going to Boston, she announced that she was visiting her fiancé. The word “fiancé” was emphasized in a pointed way, as if she was trying to let him know that any dirty-old-man attempts at hitting on her were doomed to fail. He’d noticed that since acquiring gray hairs and gaining weight, he was more often assumed to be heterosexual, specifically a straight man with a predatory job like selling life insurance policies. To heighten the confusion, he told her he was traveling to see his ex-wife. “We haven’t see each other in more than twenty-five years,” he said.

  Naturally, this was of absolutely no interest to her.

  “And,” she followed up, “today is my twenty-ninth birthday.”

  “The summer solstice,” he said. It was June 21 or 22, wasn’t it? Hard to believe Julie’s first call had been only two and a half weeks ago. “Happy birthday.”

  When the flight attendant asked her if she’d like a coffee, she proudly told him she was pregnant and trying to cut down. “Heartburn,” she said.

  “Congratulations on the baby,” David said. “By the way, that’s the reason my ex and I got married, too.”

  “That’s not why we’re getting married. It’s because we’re getting married.”

  He saw his mistake immediately, apologized, and agreed that that was different.

  “Why did you get divorced?” she asked. The hostile tone suggested the question was punishment for his earlier assumption.

  “It’s a long story.” He was about to get into the tangled weeds of sexuality and who knew what when—that would also reassure her that he wasn’t about to start pressing his knee against hers—but he wasn’t sufficiently alert to make a coherent narrative out of a chronology that involved so much denial and
so many deceptions.

  “And she got custody of the baby?”

  “Sadly,” he said, “she had a miscarriage.” When he realized this wasn’t something a pregnant woman would want to hear, he added, “As I said, that was almost thirty years ago. That kind of thing happened more often then,” as if he was discussing the 1840s. Sometimes, it felt as if it was that long ago. Two months earlier, David had had his license renewed, and when he filled in the year of his birth on the form, it had had an antique look to him, the way the dates of the First World War had looked to him when he was a child.

  Both he and Julie had been surprised by the pregnancy, which had come after they’d been living together for two years without making any commitments to each other. It had felt like fate was intervening, and they’d decided to go in the direction they were being led. They married. A few months later, Julie lost the baby.

  David rarely focused on his thwarted desires to be a father, but it was true that he’d chosen careers that put him in a mentor role with young people. Sometimes, when he thought about what might have been or imagined the adult their child would now be, he had pangs of disappointment. His neighbor in yoga pants was roughly the age their child would have been. This thought filled him with tenderness toward her, and he turned and smiled warmly. The look was misinterpreted, and the young woman immediately plugged in earphones and went back to her private little screen.

  The drive to Beauport, according to the GPS in his rented car, would take an hour. The morning air was warm and humid. There was already a torpid heaviness that reminded him of his sunburned childhood summers on the beaches of Rhode Island and the seductive, medicinal smell of Sea & Ski suntan lotion. He was driving against the rush-hour traffic headed to Boston, and going against the grain gave him a feeling of freedom. It had been such a good idea to come.

  Eventually, the urban sprawl thinned out and gave way to open fields and patches of pine trees and woods beside the highway. You had to cross a bridge to get to Beauport. A tidal river flowed far below the road, the water running swiftly as the tide either came or went. Everything below was sodden green, the trees, the marsh grasses, even the water itself. Once over the bridge, he passed along a road overhung with oaks and scruffy maples. A cool breeze that smelled of briny rot blew in. Suddenly, he was in the center of the village, all shingled buildings painted the washed-out colors of laundry left on the line for too many days. The ocean was at the end of the street, a vast field of blue dotted with bright lobster boats that looked so authentic and appealing, they might have been placed there by the tourist board.

  As directed by the GPS, he turned up a hill that rose steeply above the town. In the rearview mirror he saw the village below, miniaturized and charming, like the invented setting of a children’s game or one of those paintings that seduce with vain, cheesy nostalgia.

  He pulled into the driveway of a large yellow clapboard house he recognized from Julie’s online listing. Although barely recognized. It loomed above the houses around it with turrets and porches and ornamentation that bridged the architectural gap between Queen Anne and Carpenter Gothic. It was a hodgepodge on which nothing looked precisely right, but which, taken as a whole, exuded the chaotic appeal of a cheerful drunk welcoming you, martini in hand. Come on in! Have a cocktail. Don’t mind the mess.

  The website had undersold the size of the house and, to a much greater extent, its weatherworn condition. There were shingles missing along one side and a piece of gutter hanging from an upper floor. The porch railings looked as if they were having trouble supporting their own weight, never mind that of someone who might lean against them.

  Oh, Julie.

  The fat tires of the rented car crunched on the gravel as he drove it. The whole property was surrounded by a high, untended privet hedge, and as he stepped out he was overwhelmed by the cloying, slightly repulsive smell of the flowers, reminiscent of wax, vanilla, and semen.

  He was stretching and trying to get his bearings when a woman of indeterminate age (sixty-three, he determined) stepped onto one of the small decks on the second floor. She was wearing a beige pantsuit, which, in the harsh morning light, made her look like a nude mannequin.

  “No one’s come with the extension cord for the air conditioner,” she called down.

  “I’m sorry?” David said.

  “The extension cord. We’ve been waiting for half an hour and still nothing.”

  “I’ll check on it,” he said.

  “Half an hour. Yesterday it was the same thing with the pillows.”

  The door behind her opened and a man came onto the deck and grasped at the unsteady railing. He was almost identical in height and size and was wearing a darker version of the same outfit. He had on big eyeglasses, unflattering but helpful in making a distinction. “You’re going to ‘check on it’?” he asked.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “I’d think you could do more than ‘check on it.’ It’s stifling, and we’ve been waiting over an hour.”

  “I thought it was half an hour.”

  “One is as bad as the other,” the man growled.

  “Not really,” David said. “One’s twice as bad as the other. Isn’t that why you doubled the wait time? And please don’t lean on that railing. It’s primarily ornamental.”

  “That seems to be true of a lot in this house—the lamps, the bathroom fan.”

  David gazed around the backyard. There was an atmosphere of decline, characterized by a pair of peeling Adirondack chairs leaning haplessly against each other near a pine tree. He felt as if he’d stepped onto a stage in the middle of an underfunded play and, for reasons he couldn’t figure out, was finding it relatively easy to ad-lib the lines.

  The Seven Steps to Julie’s Future would clearly involve a lot of carpentry. He wondered how much he could get done in ten days.

  “You’re not being hospitable,” the faux-nude woman called down.

  “I respond well to reasonable requests,” David said.

  A dog that had been barking inside the house pushed open a screen door and sprang out. It was a small thing, black and tan, a shrunken variation on a terrier with the tall ears of a German shepherd. It made its way down the back steps in a series of lopsided hops. A tripod missing a back leg, but dealing with the challenge with more stoic determination than David could typically summon to deal with a hangover. It bounded over to him and leaped up giddily.

  “Sit,” he told her calmly, and apparently relieved at being given an order, she settled onto the lawn with a lolling tongue.

  “Opal!” It was Julie’s voice coming from inside the house. “I hope you didn’t go out.”

  “She can’t control the dog,” the woman on the balcony called down.

  Some combination of the chaos and the worrying condition of the house began to grate on David. “She’s perfectly tame,” he snapped. “I wish everyone was as well-mannered as she is.”

  “I can’t wait to write my review of this place,” the man said.

  Right-wingers, David thought.

  Julie stepped onto the porch off the back of the house. She gave a cry of surprise and checked her watch. “I thought you were getting here at eleven tonight,” she said.

  Upon seeing her, David had the strange sensation of being in his former life, but with the players distorted by funhouse mirrors.

  “No. Eleven a.m. I took a red-eye. As you’ll notice once I get closer.”

  While it was sometimes shocking to see the physical ravages of time, David was just as often amazed by how unchanged people were, in an essential way. Not from decade to decade, but from birth to death. Julie’s face, in the morning light, had the yesterday’s-dessert look he’d grown accustomed to seeing in his peers and his mirror—everything a little melted, fallen, and shiny—but she had the same long, straight hair and the same demeanor of addled sweetness, most apparent in her bemused and slightly wary smile. She had on work pants and a white shirt, an outfit she’d adapted from the androgyn
ous gamine singers they’d listened to together and had, apparently, been wearing for all these decades. The clothes emphasized her height and unchanged slenderness, and for a moment David had the feeling he was seeing her emerge from a store she’d stepped into to buy a pack of gum while he waited on the sidewalk. He found his bags in the vast trunk of the car and set them on the gravel.

  “Let me help you with your stuff,” Julie said and came down the steps.

  “How about helping us?” the woman above shouted.

  Julie had her back to the upstairs deck. She rolled her eyes and gave a concealed wave of her hand, dismissing them.

  “We’ve been waiting almost two hours,” the man said.

  “This is my ex-husband,” Julie said. With, David thought, a little pride. “I told you he was coming today.”

  “Yes, but you told us he’d be helping out, and we haven’t seen any evidence of that.”

  David went to Julie and hugged her. Her back felt bonier than he remembered.

  “They’re in the room I was going to give you,” she said.

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “You might once you see where you’re going.”

  Opal began circling their feet, a distant herding instinct kicking in. The couple once again made a disparaging comment about the dog. David assured them everything was fine. “Let me worry about the dog,” he said. “I’ll bring your cord up in a few minutes.”

  When the couple had retreated, David draped his arm around Julie’s shoulder. He pulled the suitcase behind him as they made their way to the house, and Julie rested her head against him.

  “You smell good,” she said.

  “It’s the upholstery in the rental car. They spray it with something to make it smell new.”

  “If only it were that easy,” Julie said.

  9

  How had she screwed up the time of his arrival? The answer was obvious and was yet another example of why it was important to have given up pot, even if she had had a little parenthetical slip over the past day or two to stave off anxiety. She’d made an appointment to have Sandra, the Airbnb consultant, come this afternoon before David landed. So she thought. She’d timed it specifically so that in his eyes, she wouldn’t seem desperate and on the verge of losing everything. First impressions matter.