She loved that he felt this way. Increasingly, she found it hard to trust or respect anyone who thought the world was heading in a positive direction. He was undoubtedly a gentle, accepting father. Unlike Henry, who’d always worried that showering Mandy with too much approval would make her spoiled and unproductive.
“Doesn’t she have her own band?”
“She travels with a quartet. They pick up the other musicians in whatever city they’re playing. It’s a lot cheaper than having a whole entourage traveling with you. The money all goes into the lighting and promotion.”
It was such a small and irrelevant piece of information, but she loved hearing it. It was one of the things she’d always liked most about being in a relationship, all that new knowledge you gleaned from the other person.
“Lighting does matter,” she said. He had, thoughtfully, closed the drapes and left on only one light in a corner of the room.
She took one of his hands in hers, both because it made her feel closer to him and because it was starting to stray from her ribs to the flesh on her stomach.
She wasn’t sure how she wanted to bring it up. She’d been thinking about it all day, trying to come up with something that didn’t sound clingy or accusatory. She decided to just come out with it.
“I assume,” she said, and managed to keep her tone as neutral as the carpeting. “I assume you’re married.”
He must have known this moment would come eventually, but he lay still and silent for a moment and then kissed the back of her neck. “Why do you assume that?”
“Because why wouldn’t you be?”
“There are probably a million and one reasons why I wouldn’t be. Musicians are notoriously self-absorbed. Also perennially broke. We’re temperamental and moody. Prone to heavy drinking and drug abuse.”
“You don’t seem to be any of those things.”
“I’m not. Which maybe explains why I’m married.”
Of course she’d known this was the answer she’d hear, but having heard it, she felt as if she’d just lost something, even if it was something she’d known all along was a fantasy. Expect to feel upset.
“Tell me something about her,” Julie said.
He rotated her body so she was facing him. He had a kind and sad look in his eyes. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I talk about you?”
“God no. I know all about me and there’s nothing of interest to say.”
His face changed, as if a cloud had passed overhead and thrown him into shadow; he darkened. But it was too late to turn back now.
“We’ve known each other since high school,” he said. “As corny and unbelievable as that seems.”
“I don’t think it’s either. I think it’s wonderful.” She hadn’t kept in touch with anyone she’d known in high school. The less said about that humiliating period, the better. This information about his marriage was consistent with what she took to be his steady, reliable, loyal personality. Inconveniently, it made her like him more.
“And you still love her.” She made it a statement so he wouldn’t think she was asking him to deny it.
“Very much.”
She wanted to wriggle out of his arms, but she knew it would make her feel even worse to flee, to be seen as needing to flee.
“Is the length of time you’ve been together a factor?” she asked.
“In my being here with you?”
“In infidelity in general.”
He laughed softly. “There is no infidelity in general. You’re the only other woman I’ve been with in many years. Not since we separated for a while back in the nineties.”
She loved and hated hearing this; it made her feel both more special and more guilty.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” he said.
“I don’t have any reason not to. Except that I’m not the kind of woman a faithful man would cheat on his wife with.”
“Oh? Who is?”
“I can’t offhand think of any twenty-four-year-old Pilates instructors by name, but you see what I mean.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, and she propped herself up on her elbows. She watched his long, sinewy back as he scratched at his scalp and then redid the elastic band around his ponytail. “In addition to being beautiful—and please don’t attempt to wedge in self-assault—there’s something incredibly endearing about you.”
“Endearing” was such a soft word, but at least easier to accept than “sexy” would have been.
“I think one of the things that made you so attractive to me as soon as I saw you is that you looked lonely. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I prey on lonely women, it’s just that I’ve been lonely myself for the past nine years. It made me feel as if we were kindred spirits.”
As soon as he said it, she realized that this was one of the things that had attracted her to him. He was the one outsider member of his jazz group, he didn’t stay with the others, he didn’t even care for the music they played. But there was more—a neediness in his eyes, not for sex so much as companionship. For talk, a proffered turkey sandwich. She supposed he was talking about the loneliness of travel, but the way he’d turned serious, the fact that he was still facing away from her, made her think it was something else. She reached out and touched his back. “What is it, Raymond?”
“She’s sick.” He said it in the matter-of-fact way of someone who’d been dealing with a problem for nine years.
“I’m…”
“She has MS.”
Julie had grown used to hearing people announce they had cancer and then, after a long, painful tunnel of horrors, very often announce that they had come out the other side. But this? The specificity and special darkness of the disease overwhelmed her. There was no “other side.” She felt weak.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Thank you. I am, too. It’s just how it is, and you get used to everything, but it’s incredibly lonely. More so for her, of course. You drop into a different world where people only see you as that. When I play, I go so deeply into the music, even if it’s a pop song I hate, I’m outside of myself. I forget. That’s how I felt when I walked into your house. It was immediate.”
She now saw some of the texts he’d sent her or some of his responses to hers in a completely different context. Talk later, dealing with minor crisis. Or: Some people here at the moment. Or: At appointment, will call later. He told her more about the onset and course of the disease—more than she wanted to know, but considering all his family had been through, listening was the least she could do. There was the reaction of their three kids, the youngest in her midtwenties, the cast of home health-care workers that came and went, the doctors. Finally, there was this, said without tears or bitterness, just a terrible sincerity: “If I could be the one sick, not her, I would be. Without giving it a thought.”
She inched closer to him and took his hand again and thanked him for telling her. The room was even colder and although she’d been grateful that the drapes were drawn and the lights off, she wished now that it wasn’t quite so chilly and dark. She wound her fingers through his and squeezed, but as she did so, she recognized that there was something different about the way they were touching. Having this new information—which might have made her question his decency for being here—made her more certain of the fact that he was a good man. A good man she could never see again.
He turned so he was looking into her eyes with the kindness she’d come to appreciate.
“I want you to know something, Julie,” he said. “This meant a lot to me. We’ve only spent a total of a few hours together, but in my mind, I’ve been with you much more often than that.”
They both knew he was saying goodbye.
At the door to the room as she was leaving, he pulled her into his arms and hugged her tightly. It was a loving embrace, but there wasn’t anything sexual in it. He kissed her anyway and then said, “One other thing. You don’t seem as lonely as you did. I felt that as soon as I saw you in the lobby.
”
“I’ve been getting more sun,” she said.
“No, something else.”
She realized that he was right; she didn’t feel as alone. She would have said it was because of him, because he’d made her feel seen for the first time in years, relevant, hopeful in an inchoate way. But now that this was over, now that he had moved to a remote part of her life even though he was standing in front of her, she didn’t feel defeated or alone.
“I have someone helping me out,” she said. “My first husband, actually.”
She saw something in his eyes that she wanted to believe was hurt. “Love of your life?”
“No, it isn’t like that. Just a very good friend. Unfortunately, he’ll be leaving soon.”
* * *
Raymond’s room had a view, meaning that instead of facing the highway, it looked out to the back where there was a parking lot and, beyond it, a tidal marsh thick with tall grasses, beginning to look overgrown now that they were past the middle of July. When she stepped outside, the air was cooler and the sun was low, slanting into the marsh. It felt suddenly as if they were on the waning side of summer. He’d tried to walk her down, but she’d asked him not to. It was better to say goodbye in the darkness of his room. When she got to her car, she looked up and thought she saw a ghostly silhouette of him in his window, although the glass was reflecting back the late afternoon sunlight.
She got into the car and hit her steering wheel repeatedly. Shit. Shit shit shit shit.
She unlocked the glove compartment, where she’d hidden a joint far in the back, behind the registration papers and insurance. A form of insurance unto itself. Surely she’d earned it this once. She pushed in the lighter on the dash and looked up again at the window. If he’d been there a moment ago, he’d withdrawn. So that was that.
The lighter popped out and she grabbed it, but before she touched it to the end of the joint, she fell back into her seat. How dare she? How fucking dare she? This wasn’t her tragedy. Not even close. She could drive away, back to her house where she had someone waiting for her, not a husband, not a lover, but a friend, even if the friend was yet another person who’d soon be leaving her.
She tossed the joint out the window and started the car.
Halfway home, Pamela called her about the jewelry.
30
David was in the living room reading a massively long novel he’d rescued from the far reaches of a bookcase. The record player was on a table near him, and he was listening on repeat to a 45 of Jane Birkin singing “Fuir le Bonheur.” As he saw it, it was a song about fleeing happiness for fear that it won’t last forever and therefore getting a jump on the disappointment. To move on to other things preemptively. Yes, he’d done that throughout his life, either physically or emotionally, and this time he was determined not to make the same mistake.
He checked his watch again. Apparently, Julie’s visit with the musician was going well. She’d been gone almost four hours. What stamina!
As for the novel, it had been famous in the 1950s and concerned a doctor’s surfeit of ambition and lack of money. David remembered reading a Reader’s Digest abridgment of it as a child that had boiled it down from 800 pages to 150, including illustrations. Reading this baggier version filled him with nostalgia of the safest kind, that is, a longing to reminisce about a period of his life he had no desire to return to.
He heard the screen door slam, and Julie came into the living room looking more tired and agitated than pleased about her meeting. She flung herself on the sofa opposite him without acknowledging or seeming to have noticed the changes he’d made in the room. How was that possible? At least 40 percent of the furniture had been removed, the sofas had been rearranged, and all the new light had created a warm glow. He thought it best not to mention her meeting with the musician until she brought it up. Instead, he showed her the novel and asked her if she’d read it.
“Did you find it in the house?” she asked. “If so, the answer is probably no.”
“It sold millions of copies in the 1950s and was made into a famous movie,” he said. “But today the author is known primarily for his elaborate recipe for roasting a turkey.”
“I’ll keep that in mind come November.”
“My point being,” he said, “it’s not always your greatest accomplishments that are most remembered, although at eight hundred pages, this accomplishment might have been too great.”
Judging that sufficient time had passed, he asked her if she noticed anything different about the room. She stood and made a tour, running her hand along the backs of chairs and the edges of tables. She wandered into the front parlor and the dining room, and returned looking more upset than before. In a tone so harsh it caused Opal to leap to the floor and head to another room, she said, “Put it all back.”
“You don’t like the way it looks?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Everything, I’d think.”
“Not everything, David. For the time being, it’s still my house, remember? It might not be for much longer, but at the moment, it’s my home. You can’t come in and tear everything apart like this.”
“We talked about it,” he said. “You agreed to let me make some changes. I just moved it out to the barn. It’s not like I tore anything apart or sold it off.”
“No. What would be the point of selling it?” she asked. “I’m sure it’s all worth nothing. And please turn off the record. I can’t stand to hear that song one more time.”
“You used to like it,” he said.
“I used to like Mel Gibson, too.”
He got up and lifted the needle off the record and the room became eerily silent, without the sound of a passing car or a creak of floor from above.
“Pamela called me as I was driving home from my afternoon at the Marriott Courtyard,” she said. “She wondered why I hadn’t contacted her with a decision about whether or not I still wanted to sell, given the estimates. In addition to feeling humiliated by the actual value, I felt like a child who’s so fragile she has to be protected from bad news. I’m guessing that’s why you didn’t say anything. But I’m not a child, and you should have let me know. It was cruel not to.”
He’d been hoping to delay the bad news about the jewelry until he had a definite response from Michael about the buyout. Now he saw that he’d delayed too long and had compounded the problem. He thought he’d learned his lesson about secrets long ago—as tempting as they were, they never remained secret forever, and they never made life easier in the long run.
“Did you bury it in the backyard?” she asked.
“Under my bed. I was going to tell you.”
“When? As the moving van was arriving?”
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk with you about something.”
“I’m tired of people telling me to sit down. I’m just fine standing, thank you.”
Having said that, she sat on the sofa opposite him, arms folded, waiting.
“A friend of mine in San Francisco, a lawyer—a retired lawyer, to be exact—has been trying to get my landlady to buy me out of my lease so she can sell the place I’ve been renting for the past twenty years without the encumbrance of me in it. Since my ex is moving in, it’s especially important to get me out. The property is selling for millions, so if it works out, which he’s confident it will, it will be a substantial amount of money. More than enough to help you out.”
While he hadn’t expected her to fall to her knees in relief and gratitude, he hadn’t expected her looks of puzzled annoyance, as if he’d said something completely insane.
“You don’t think I’d take money from you, do you?”
“It’s not as if I earned it,” he said, “or even, to be perfectly honest, deserve it. It’s a completely unexpected windfall I can live happily without. On top of that, I have selfish motives.”
“If this has something to do with tax deductions, don’t bother explaining the specifics.”
“I want to propose something, but you have to promise me you’ll say no if the idea doesn’t appeal to you.”
“I’m not promising anything until I’ve read the contract.”
“That’s so unlike you.”
He began, growing in conviction as he spoke, describing the plans he’d been toying with for weeks now. Maybe since he’d first canceled his return flight to San Francisco or maybe, without knowing it, when he’d boarded the plane to Boston.
“It’s time for me to relocate,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t like San Francisco. Everyone likes San Francisco. It’s just that, for whatever reasons, I’ve never felt at home there, less and less so as it’s become the real estate capital of the planet. All those tech-savvy billionaire children in shiny cars. On top of that, most recently, it’s associated in my mind with a series of mistakes and bad judgment calls on my part.”
“And I’m not?”
“I’d like to think that the fact we’ve been getting along so well means we’ve moved past all that.”
“So your relocation plan is to live in the Cabinet Room for the next thirty years?”
“I have some dignity,” he said. “I’ve been spending a lot of time going in and out of the barn. It’s in decent shape, as far as I can tell. The roof looks good, and it has plumbing. It would be a big project to turn it into a little house, but if my friend is right, there will be more than enough left over from the purchase to make changes. We could legally convert it into a condo and figure out a way to make it work financially once we get there. It would solve a lot of problems for both of us.”
She still seemed doubtful, although not for herself.
“Beauport is the kind of place people move to when they’re folding their tents,” she said.
My Ex-Life: A Novel Page 21
