My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  “If you’d picked up one of them, it would have spread a lot faster. They’d have made sure of it.”

  What she meant, but didn’t want to say directly, was that there was a fair amount of status involved in being picked up by him, and since Michelle and Wallis looked down on her, they weren’t about to do her the favor of making sure their classmates knew.

  “Those girls look like the types who’d faint if you farted in front of them,” he said.

  “I won’t faint if you do, but I’d still rather you didn’t.”

  Craig was wearing an olive-green T-shirt and it made his eyes look incredibly beautiful. She hadn’t noticed before what a clear, light green they were and how they made sense of all the other heavy features of his face. The T-shirt wasn’t exactly clean, and she could see sweat stains under the arms. Maybe he’d worn it to bring out his eyes. She hated vanity, but she was willing to overlook it in his case because his looks were so clearly one of the main things he had going for him. She could see in the slant of the early evening light coming in the windshield that he had a small scar on the right side of his jaw. She had an urge to reach out and touch it, but of course she didn’t. It was odd to her that there were things about his face she hadn’t noticed before. What else was she missing?

  “So I just got fired from my job,” she said.

  He carefully negotiated a corner, while peering into the side mirror of the van, and turned onto the road to Hammond. The flashing red-and-blue warning lights went off in her head, but she ignored them. He said, “No big surprise there. You probably had a shitty attitude.”

  He’d made it sound like a compliment, so for the first time today, she was almost proud of having failed. “How’d you guess?”

  “Why wouldn’t you? You hated the idea of working there from the start.”

  She was sure she’d never told him this and the fact that he’d guessed it so accurately made her feel for a moment as if he knew her better than she knew herself. It was a strange feeling, because usually she thought she knew others better than they knew themselves.

  “So now you’ll have a lot more free time on your hands,” he said. “Which is a good thing for me. Now you have no excuse for not working for me.”

  She had known this was coming, and even though there was something sketchy in the idea, right now it was nice to know somebody wanted her.

  “I’m not exactly a computer wizard.”

  “I’m betting you’re a fast learner.”

  They were heading along the ocean, and overhead, it looked as if there was going to be a rain shower. “I hate to be nosy,” she said, “but are we headed someplace?”

  “I’m taking you to my house to lock you up in the basement,” he said.

  If someone was actually going to do this, they probably wouldn’t tell you first. And anyway, he’d kissed her, which meant they weren’t complete strangers. “Coming from someone else,” she said, “that might be a lot funnier.”

  “Here’s what you don’t realize: I’m the least scary person you know, Amanda.”

  She didn’t think this was true, but he was, without question, the most interesting and exciting person she knew, and if there was something scary about him as well, it seemed like a fair trade-off. “Here’s what you don’t realize,” she said. “My name’s not ‘Amanda.’ Just ‘Mandy.’”

  She never talked about her name with anyone, except when she lost her temper and screamed at her mother about it, even though it wasn’t entirely her mother’s fault. But she felt like opening up to Craig because she knew somehow he’d get it and wouldn’t hold it against her.

  “I was named after a song by Barry Manilow. Ever hear of him?”

  “Oh, yeah. My mother was a big fan. Used to go to his concerts at casinos with a bunch of other old ladies.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Kind of like Liberace but without the jewelry and the boys.”

  “I think there were probably a lot of boys. Anyway, one of his big hit songs was this incredibly lame ballad called ‘Mandy,’ and my father loved it and wanted to name me after it.”

  “At least it was a hit. Sing it for me.”

  “You don’t think I memorized it, do you?”

  He turned away from the road for a second, looked through her with his pretty eyes, and said, “Yeah, I do. I think your father used to sing it to you every night when he put you in bed and wanted you to go to sleep and you used to think it was the sweetest thing in the world and you’d cry and have a fit if he didn’t sing it to his little girl because you loved the sound of his voice so much you couldn’t go to sleep without it. Then he moved out and left you and your mom and it got all mixed up with how angry you felt toward him and now you bury your head under the pillow anytime he tries to serenade you.”

  This was such an eerily accurate description of her life and her childhood and her current feelings about her father, her head started to spin. She was literally dizzy.

  “How did you know he left my mother?”

  “It’s written all over your face,” he said. “Plus, don’t forget, I have access to all the computers at your school.”

  “So you looked me up?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just really good at guessing.”

  She knew, through gossip and by searching for his name online, that his father, a fisherman, had died about ten years earlier and that his mother, who’d worked for the food service at Hammond Junior High, had died more recently, both from lung cancer, according to the obituaries she’d read. There was something in Craig’s snarky personality that made it impossible to imagine him having had a good relationship with his father. Probably the father had been jealous of his looks and had been a drunk. Drinking was a common enough problem in Hammond, and now heroin was becoming more of one. Probably Craig had been beaten. Maybe that was where he’d gotten the scar on his face. This thought made her want to reach across the seat and touch him, even though she had a low opinion of girls with rescue fantasies who were attracted to boys primarily because they wanted to save them from themselves.

  They were driving past the tidal marshes behind Safe Haven Beach, and the air smelled salty. The sky was darker than before. As they crossed into Hammond, a fierce downpour started, as if a tap had been opened full. Craig swore and turned on his wipers. They slapped noisily from side to side without doing a whole lot besides making the windows even more streaked.

  The downtown of Hammond had once been a thriving center for shopping with an emphasis on the practical. Not that Mandy had any actual memories of that, but she’d been told so many times by her mother and father as they drove through town about the great shoe store that had been right there and the old-fashioned hardware store that had sold everything (whatever that meant) that she felt as if she’d seen them. What she had seen growing up was the steep decline of the town, with half the stores empty and shuttered. Things had turned around again, but it was the opposite of what it had been, with the most impractical stores imaginable—florists whose most expensive arrangements were the ones with the fewest flowers; bakeries that made fifteen loaves of bread so they’d sell out daily—plus yoga studios and some expensive restaurants with pretentious names like “Twice” and “Parsnips” and “Flaubert’s.” Craig drove through downtown quickly, the windshield wipers snapping.

  Just beyond the downtown was a gritty little neighborhood that stuck out into the harbor like a thumb, a thumb with dirt under its nail. It could have been one of the nicer parts of town and no doubt probably would be again one day, but there had been a fishery out there that had dominated the neighborhood. It had closed years ago, but the whole area still smelled of fish, especially on humid days, when all those murdered cod took their revenge and their smell rose out of the pavement like zombies.

  They pulled into the driveway of a small turquoise house that, like all of its neighbors, was surrounded by a chain link fence and, like most of them, was sided in aluminum that had probably been put on so long ago,
it qualified as hip. Also in keeping with its neighborhood, the house had a few religious statues in the front yard. Since Mandy couldn’t imagine Craig going out to hunt down a bathtub Mary, she assumed they were holdovers from his parents.

  “Do you live here alone?” she asked.

  He turned off the engine and the windshield wipers stopped and the rain quickly made it impossible to look out.

  “Since my mother died. I had to buy my sister out. Believe me, she and her husband didn’t need the money, and they certainly didn’t need the market value of the house. That’s why it’s always good to know people’s secrets, Mandy.”

  She gathered from this that he’d held some threat over his sister’s head to get her to agree to give him a good deal on the house. It should have made him seem like a thug, but Mandy took an instant dislike to his sister, based on nothing except the fact that Craig clearly didn’t like her.

  “I’m going to dash in and open the door. When I’m inside, you run in. I don’t want you standing out there while I’m trying to get the door unlocked.”

  “I don’t mind the rain,” she said. “Anyway, it was just a downpour. It’s letting up already.”

  “I don’t like people knowing my business. Wait till I get in.”

  He dashed out into the rain and spent a minute negotiating the lock and then pushed the door open with his shoulder. He fell into the house, her cue.

  The back door led into the kitchen, which is to say straight into the 1960s or some other decade well before she was born. It was all yellow-and-black tile, yellow floral wallpaper, and big yellow appliances. It was probably supposed to look cheerful, like one of those sitcom kitchens in shows that turn up on TV Land, but it looked sad. Retro was okay as an expensive design choice, but the real thing just looked old. And, case in point, too real. There were food smells, greasy, bacony smells that undoubtedly had been cooked into the tiles when Craig was a kid.

  Craig was making feeble attempts at cleaning up the kitchen, tossing a few dirty dishes into the sink and closing some cabinets. She was touched by the fact that he wanted to make a good impression on her, even if the effort was a failure. His green T-shirt was stained darker in places by the rain, and his hair was flattened against his head in front.

  He went to the yellow refrigerator and took out a beer, and she sat down at the Formica kitchen table. There was a burn mark in the middle that had to have been there for decades. He hoisted himself up onto the counter near the sink and sat facing her, drinking the beer.

  “Do you drink beer all the time or only when you’re around me?” she asked.

  “So Mandy got fired,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  They were back to him not answering her questions.

  “It’s my major accomplishment for the week,” she said. In that moment, for the first time, it somehow felt as if it was.

  “How much were they paying you?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not planning on buying any real estate.”

  He took another swallow from the bottle and wiped off his mouth with his hand. “I can’t tell if you know how cute you are or if you don’t and that’s what makes you so cute.”

  Hearing this made her unaccountably happy, as if she was being told the thing she’d been waiting her whole life to hear, despite her wariness about that word. Weirder still, having heard it applied to her, she desperately wanted to hear it again.

  He came over to where she was sitting and kissed her on the mouth—that cool, beery taste again. Looking at him as he stood near her, she saw that he was shorter than she’d realized. “You know you’ve got something all those little girls you hang out with haven’t got and you know they’re all too stuck up and busy posting their pictures of themselves and their little faces on their Instagram accounts to realize it.”

  She almost felt as if she was going to start crying because once again, he’d guessed exactly what she thought to be true. Or hoped to be true.

  He pulled her chair out from the table more and straddled her and actually sat on her lap, looking into her eyes. He was lighter than she thought he’d be, and she hoped he couldn’t tell her legs were shaking.

  “You know you’re special, but you don’t really know how. You’ve got a talent, but you’ve never known what it was. But guess what, Mandy? I do.”

  It didn’t seem likely to her that this was true, but what if it was?

  “And you know what else? I’m going to show you. And you’re going to be making so much more money than you would have made all summer at that store, you won’t believe it.”

  It seemed odd that making money had come into the equation so suddenly. It was pretty much the last thing she was interested in right now.

  “And in case you were wondering,” he said, “I’m not even going to touch you.”

  A funny thing to say since he was straddling her legs. This close to him, his eyes looked a little crazy, and she saw that he had long, almost feminine eyelashes. Probably his father had accused him of being “pretty.”

  He put his forearms on her shoulders and leaned in so their foreheads were touching and he started to sing “Mandy” to her. He knew all the words and even though he had the tune a little off, he had a decent voice. “You came and you gave without taking … Oh Mandy.” Against all odds, it made her feel so calm, it was almost as if she was being lulled to sleep.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  “So you really are going to chain me up in the basement?”

  He pulled her up out of the chair. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

  Whenever she saw a movie in which a character was doing stupid or crazy things because they wanted to experience everything to find out about life, she was filled with wary admiration, mostly because they were brave enough to be irresponsible. For herself, she always thought there was a better approach to figuring out about life—like maybe using your imagination? Or, for that matter, Google. Usually, she backed away from the edge of dangerous experience and steep cliffs and took the cautious route home. Then she got angry at her parents for raising her to be a coward. As she stood in the greasy kitchen, she felt she had an opportunity to make up for all that.

  He opened the door to the basement and flicked on the light. “You coming along?” he asked. It was fate that Craig had driven through town shortly after she got fired. Why else had she gotten in with him and let him drive her this far if not for the opportunity to be, for once, the fearless, irresponsible heroine of the story of her own life?

  27

  When Julie looked across Amira’s living room and saw David and Kenneth descend the staircase, both wet and grinning, she felt a stab of jealousy. She wasn’t sure why. If decades of separation hadn’t killed their friendship, it was unlikely a date or a hookup with this man would. And yet, despite what she’d said to David earlier about couples, it was true that there were evenings when they were lying on the sofa and he was reading to her that she had a longing to curl up with him. Not to have sex—that was happily off the table—but to share a deeper physical intimacy.

  When Kenneth had attached himself to a group of admiring women—customers no doubt—David wandered over to her.

  “You look happy,” Julie said.

  “Pleasantly distracted but wet. I should head home and dry off. Ready to leave?”

  “Very.”

  As they were headed to the door, Amira’s husband intercepted them. “Not going so soon, are you?”

  He was wearing light, fitted clothes and what appeared to be expensive leather sneakers. He kissed Julie on both cheeks, an affectation he’d picked up from Amira or perhaps his mysterious business excursions.

  “I’m afraid David got caught in the rain,” she said.

  “But not you,” he said. “You look more lovely than ever.” He shook David’s hand and said, “If I were a younger man, I couldn’t be trusted living next door.”

  It was the privilege of wealthy me
n married to beautiful, younger women to flirt outrageously with women like her, women he would not, under any circumstances, touch. It was as close to insult as it was to compliment, but she appreciated it anyway.

  Richard was a tall, imposing man. His long face was not unlined, but there was a taut perfection to his jawline that struck her as implausible on a man his age. Prior to learning about his interest in her house, Julie had developed a crush on him, probably because he appeared solid and unflappable. He made her feel he was on her side in his ruthless, right-wing way. It was, therefore, especially chilling to think of him as working against her behind her back, with Henry’s assistance. It was impossible to imagine that he hadn’t chosen to marry Amira as a decorative object, but Julie had noted an indulgent protectiveness he had toward her that she was convinced was born of love and made him a more sympathetic and interesting man.

  She introduced David and added that he was her ex-husband.

  “How could you possibly let a woman like Julie get away?” he asked.

  The facile comment was to be expected, but Julie was pleased that he remembered her name. He was that imposing.

  Richard asked David if he, like Julie, was “in the arts.” He was a politician at heart. He remembered a few facts about people—possibly with the guide of sophisticated mnemonic devices he’d learned at mind-control seminars—and then hauled them out, not out of interest but to show off that he knew something about you.

  Richard listened, or appeared to listen, as David explained his work. “I have two teenaged daughters,” he said. “One’s about to start applying to college. I’d love to put you in contact with her. She lives in Iowa with her mother, but she’s coming here in late August for a week. Will you be around?”

  “That’s not clear,” David said. “I’m helping Mandy with school, and helping Julie with the paperwork to buy the house from Henry.”

  Richard had no reaction to this comment but said in an unreadable way, “Henry is a good man. He just doesn’t know how to take ‘maybe’ for an answer.”