My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  “Everything’s relevant,” she said. “I’m going up.”

  The staircase got hotter and stuffier as they ascended. At the sound of footsteps, Opal, who was locked in Julie’s bedroom, began to bark and scratch at the door. “Probably best not to open that door,” Julie said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “You don’t need to tell me! I’m not a dog person,” Sandra growled.

  She opened the door to Mandy’s bedroom and grunted with disapproval. “This the daughter’s room?” She made heavy slashes on her papers.

  “Are we done?” David asked.

  This was not, apparently, the right question. “Some of us are never done, David. Do you know who runs the majority of these businesses? Single women. Women who are single because they were left by their husbands, even though they tried to do everything they could to save the goddamn marriage. So to make ends meet, you let a parade of strangers traipse through the house, stealing your ashtrays and leaving everything else filthy. And god forbid you should be in the kitchen having a snack when one of them comes in and thinks it’s her duty to give you a lecture on carbohydrates. As if I care.

  “And then you have to tell your friends how much you love having people stay with you, how fascinating it is to meet these people from all over the world even though the people who rent from you instead of springing for a hotel room are pretty much carbon copies of each other, no matter what stamp they’ve got on their passports.”

  “We’re going downstairs now, Sandra,” David said. “I’ll follow you.”

  “What’s the matter? Can’t handle what I’m saying? Well, don’t forget, she’s the one who called me because she’s lost her husband and is about to lose her daughter and the house. And I don’t care if you like it or not, I’m going to send my report. I follow through on my promises. But let me give you a little preview, Julie.

  “This isn’t going to work for you. You’re not cut out for it. The place is a mess, you’re letting people stay here for free, there are about four toss pillows in the whole house, and if you think I didn’t see that joint in the ashtray on that shelf behind the sofa, you’re wrong. This kind of scene brings down the whole industry. So get rid of the dog and the freeloaders, and bail. You’re not cut out for this.”

  13

  It was turning out to be a much longer day than David had expected. It felt as if he’d left San Francisco weeks ago. After escorting Sandra to her car and making sure she didn’t plow through the hedge on her way out, he walked into the house and called, “That was memorable. I’m ready for a nap. Or some of whatever it was she had in that thermos.”

  But when he walked into the hallway, he saw that Julie was crouched against the wall by the staircase with her head buried in her knees. He was alarmed by the fact that she didn’t look up, and then he realized she was crying. The nap was off the table. He slid down onto the floor next to her and put his arm around her. “She was drunk,” he said. “And I can’t imagine she’d be a lot more credible if she was sober.”

  She shook her head and David felt her hair brush his face. There was, he saw, gray mixed in, something that had escaped his earlier scrutiny. Even more touching, it was obvious she colored it. She who’d always criticized her mother for coloring her hair, who’d always eschewed makeup and asserted she’d never do anything to hide her age. What an easy promise to make when age had seemed like someone else’s problem.

  He hugged her to his side, and was transported back to another, similar moment almost thirty years earlier when he’d returned home from a school trip to Washington, D.C., and had found her curled in a ball, sobbing. It was a moment that had haunted him for many years. He hadn’t been used to seeing such raw, undisguised pain, although in the years that followed, he’d see more of it from stricken young men and their mourning families and friends. He’d had a sense back then of what had happened as soon as he saw her, but it had taken almost an hour of coaxing before she said that she’d lost the baby, and in the moments that followed, all their assumptions about their future had begun to fray.

  “I can’t believe you’re taking this so seriously,” he said now. “I was hoping to start turning this into an amusing anecdote before dinner.”

  She waved this off, newly bereft. He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. He remembered it, all at once, as a gesture that had always calmed her down, as it often quiets infants and dogs. The sudden tenderness he felt toward her shook him because it brought back a time when this closeness would have led somewhere it clearly was not going to lead now.

  When Julie had composed herself, she sat up and shook back her hair. “The problem is,” she said, “she’s right. She’s awful, but she’s right. This is never going to work out. And even if it does, it’s never going to be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “There’s a lot I haven’t told you,” she said.

  “That’s a good thing,” he said. “Between that and what I haven’t told you, we won’t run out of things to say. I gather Mandy’s education is the tip of the iceberg?”

  “Considering the climate, that metaphor will be completely obsolete soon.”

  “That’s a yes?” he asked.

  “That’s a yes.”

  She took him out to a relatively private spot in the backyard where the decrepit Adirondack chairs were roosting between an old barn she was using for storage and the immense pine tree. The ground was fragrant with fallen pine needles.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. He watched as she went to the side of the house, rummaged around near the foundation, and returned with a stone. There was nothing promising in this.

  She sat in the chair next to him, slid aside the bottom of the rock, and pulled out a joint. “Don’t judge me,” she said. “I stopped smoking a while ago, but I keep a little around to prove to myself I don’t need it.” She flicked a small red lighter, and inhaled. “Anyway, it makes me more honest.”

  David thought of smoking pot as a habit people outgrew in their late twenties, possibly because that was when he’d stopped smoking it. It was an assumption that made no sense since he knew scores of gray-haired potheads in San Francisco, but he’d put it down to the place. Over the years, he’d noticed that while alcoholics were, on the whole, a lot less appealing than potheads, they rarely made claims that drinking gave them special powers; regular marijuana users alleged that everything from their lovemaking to their deductive reasoning was improved by being stoned. Maybe there was some truth in that.

  “Do you think it would make me a better listener?” he asked.

  She handed him the joint. “It’s worth a try.”

  He took a hit of pot and immediately felt himself slide into a remotely familiar pocket of warmth tinged with euphoria. The humid late-afternoon air was soothing, and he had a brief moment of believing this trip was the best move he’d made in ages, icebergs and all.

  Then Julie began talking. Mandy, the house, the money. Henry’s attempt to sell to the rich neighbor. Henry’s late-in-life change to the restaurant business. A rejected mortgage application and a plan to sell her dreadful mother’s allegedly valuable jewelry. His own situation, which had seemed so dire back in San Francisco, looked relatively simple from this new vantage point. Unless maybe that was the pot talking.

  “If I were you,” she said, “I’d get on my computer and book the next flight back to San Francisco. This whole vessel is sinking.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” he said. “And there isn’t much waiting for me back there. I’m familiar with sinking vessels myself.”

  She was going to have to come up with $250,000 by the middle of August, and Mandy had to have a credible plan for college. The Seven Steps to Julie Fiske’s Future was beginning to look like a much steeper climb than he’d anticipated. And that wasn’t even taking into consideration Amira’s theory of Mandy and the library.

  “You’ve got two months,” he said. “I’ll sit down tomorrow and make a plan, and we’ll work through as much of it
as we can while I’m here to get you started.”

  The pot and the heat had made him sleepy but certain he was in exactly the right place.

  14

  The next morning, he woke with a gasp, as if he was being suffocated. Over the course of the night, he’d managed to entangle himself in the sheets of the single bed so thoroughly he was practically mummified. Had he gotten up in the middle of the night and trekked to the bathroom? He couldn’t remember. Then it came to him—the weed. That seductive layer of fog between reality and consciousness of reality. He’d have to be sure to stay away from it. He’d have to try to get Julie to give it up. Or at least admit that she hadn’t already done so.

  The house was quiet, but somewhere in the distance, he heard a lawn mower chewing through grass. It triggered memories of his largely unhappy childhood in a gruff suburb outside of Providence where lawn mowing—along with, and somehow related to, car washing and alcoholism—had been a competitive sport. He saw his father, the tall, scowling owner of a hardware store, standing in the kitchen knocking back a glass of whiskey and rattling ice and announcing he was going out to “cut the fucking grass.” He hadn’t thought of him in ages. This was one of his few happy memories of him.

  The lawn mower roared until there was a loud clunk of blade against stone, a shouted curse, and then quiet. David opened his eyes and gazed around the room, not exactly a taxing experience. The one window was almost flush with the privet hedge and the overpowering scent of the flowers filled the air. Still, he hadn’t been lying to Julie when he said he loved the room; it felt like a small but significant corner of the house, just as he hoped to play a small but meaningful role in her life. How long she’d be able to keep the house was another matter.

  As he was contemplating staggering across the hall to the bathroom-with-privacy, he heard from above the sounds of creaking and muffled pants, followed by a few lazy grunts. He recalled Sandra’s warnings. Unfortunately, he had nothing to throw against the ceiling. It had to be the jumpsuited couple from yesterday consummating their relationship. Julie had told him they were religious fundamentalists and had bumper stickers on their car imprinted with the numbers of New Testament verses. Once decoded, these gaudy Public Displays of Religion usually translated to tiresome condemnations of some aspect of his life, which made it even less appealing to listen to them enjoying theirs. He wasn’t sure why, but he was mildly repulsed by the thought of religiously devout people of any faith, age, or gender combination copulating. He realized this was intolerant, but he took some comfort in reminding himself that they felt the same way about him, and at least he had no desire to restrict their civil rights.

  A few minutes later, when he’d come back from the bathroom, the noise had stopped. Above the sound of footsteps, he heard the man say in clear tones, “Well then you clean it up, goddammit.”

  This, he decided, was the mission statement for his visit. Even at this early hour and with a mild pot-over, he felt more energized than overwhelmed by the challenge. It was a chance to make up for his mistakes of decades ago. Antrim, the man who’d been the catalyst for the end of his and Julie’s marriage, had appeared in his stoned dreams last night, gawky and young. David hadn’t thought of him in years, and it had been disconcerting to have a visit of sorts from a man who’d disappeared from his life after turning it upside down.

  There was a small desk wedged against the foot of the bed, and he set up his laptop on the wobbly surface. This room, like much of the house, was cluttered, but given the minute size, it made even less sense here than elsewhere. What was the purpose of the tiny end tables in this room and the chair jammed into a dark corner or even the ornate frame for the single bed that took up too much space?

  His email inbox was as cluttered as the room, most alarmingly with coupons from a company that specialized in clothes for “men of substance.” Were these being sent to him because he’d complained about having gained weight in a few emails or because some fishing expedition had calculated the caloric content of the take-out orders he’d made over the past six months and drawn their own conclusions? Either way, the sight of them made him furious at Soren for having abandoned him, not exactly because living with him had been such a great pleasure but because living without him had been such a hunger-igniting trial.

  There were emails from several clients and one from Renata. Sooner or later, he was going to have to confront that reality.

  Dear David: When I told Soren you’d gone east for a while, he said it might be to visit your ex-wife. Excuse me? After all this time, you never had the decency to tell me you had been married? To a woman? And you dare to play the victim here? Contact me immediately! Porter and Soren want to close on the house as soon as possible. I know you don’t want to complicate things for your landlady who’s been so absurdly generous to you all these years.

  He deleted the message immediately. Let her stew.

  One of the client emails was from the son of a prominent artist in Sausalito. He was a dark, intense boy who was on Step Five of his path to the future—The Personal Essay. He was applying to Brown, Harvard, and Princeton. He’d told David that he planned to drop out after his first semester, but felt that dropping out of an Ivy League university would look more impressive. He had a point: in the world of outlier gaming and software that interested him, rejecting Harvard had more cachet than graduating from it.

  “Growing up,” his essay began, “my father encouraged my brothers and me to piss in the kitchen sink when my mother wasn’t home.”

  David was stopped cold. This was either the worst opening sentence he’d read or the most brilliant. About 90 percent of the essays his clients wrote began with mention of a grandparent or cancer. According to admission directors he’d dealt with, these rarely got read. They were all so similar it was impossible to plow through them without having the brain freeze. In this case, it was impossible to imagine the person who wouldn’t read on, even if it was because he was appalled.

  The rest of the essay was about the passionate hatred for each other his parents shared and how it defined their marriage, which had endured for twenty-three years and was still going strong. Ashton made only a few direct references to himself (holding his baby brother up at the kitchen sink, for example, so the infant could urinate into it), but by the end, David had such a rich sense of him, it was as if he was there in the tiny room, speaking with him.

  “This is genius,” David wrote to him. “No one is going to ignore it, but let me talk to a few people to get a sense of how many will be appalled. I think we should apply to a few other schools as well so you’ll have a wider range to reject out of hand.”

  He was about to close down his laptop when he thought again about Renata’s email. What was it she’d said? He went to his trash folder and reread it. “… Complicate things for your landlady.” He hit the Reply button and wrote: “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this message, dearest Renata. You’ll hear from me soon.”

  He checked the time. It was much too early to call his friend Michael in San Francisco, especially since he didn’t have anything salacious to report. Salacious reports formed the bulk of their conversations.

  He wrote him an email. “Listen, Michael, call me when you wake up. You know how you’ve always said you love my carriage house? Wouldn’t you love to vacation there for a little while?”

  He rummaged through the pockets of his corduroy pants and found the little notebook he’d been scribbling in yesterday.

  The Seven Steps to Julie Fiske’s Happy, Henry-Free Future, he typed into his laptop. Boy, was that optimistic.

  1)  Mandy—Common App, tests, essay prep, feelings about library(?)

  2)  Declutter house, repair and repaint living room ceiling, buy more toss pillows (optional), room rates increased (excepting mine)

  3)  Yard work and related outdoor decay and pandemonium

  4)  Pot Problem

  Mercifully, there was a soft knock on his door before he got to Fina
nces. He reached behind him to open it, and the door swung in and banged against the bed. Mandy (it was obviously she) stood there, arms folded against her chest, grinning in a way that was straddling sardonic and shy. She looked younger than some of the kids her age David had worked with, something about her round face and flushed cheeks (a contrast to Julie’s pale, narrow face) and the overalls she was wearing. Or maybe “coveralls” was a better way to describe them since she seemed intent on covering up her body. On closer inspection, there was something sorrowful in her face that made her appear more mature. David was drawn to sadness in teenagers, which he took to be a sign of intelligence. What teenager with half a brain looking at the condition of the planet they were set to inherit wouldn’t be bereft?

  He made the extremely short trip from chair to door and hugged her. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” he said. “I’m sorry I conked out so early yesterday. I took an overnight flight and was up most of the night before.”

  “That’s okay. It’s probably good to get as much sleep as possible.” He couldn’t tell if this was a general statement or a recommendation to rest up for what was ahead. “Can we get something out the way? I’m not sure what I should call you. Mr. Hedges? Uncle David?”

  He was impressed and unnerved by the blunt maturity of her desire to clear this up. She had dark hair, although its color looked a little too dark and uniform to be natural. It was cut into a short bob that—along with the overalls and a long-sleeved flannel shirt—gave her the look of Louise Brooks unconvincingly playing a farm girl. It seemed unlikely he’d be able to get away with false cheer or optimism.

  “I think ‘David’ is probably best, don’t you? ‘Mr. Hedges’ is too formal and ‘uncle’ might undercut your respect for me professionally.”

  She looked over his shoulder at the rickety desk and narrow bed and smiled. “This room already did that.”