My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  David mentioned the store in Hammond, a pale imitation of Kenneth’s Kitchen.

  “They come into my shop, study my inventory, take photos, and then copy everything I do. I wish you wouldn’t shop there.”

  “I felt bad about that, but since I was bringing it tonight, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. I suppose you know they have lower prices.”

  “More evidence they don’t know what they’re doing. If you overprice something by a little, people feel ripped off. If you overprice it by a lot, customers assume it must be superior and buy it by the case. Part of what they pay for is bragging rights to the obscene price.”

  “I’ll remember that if I decide to go into retail. May I take a seat?”

  The cottage was even smaller inside than it appeared from the walkway. It was one open room carefully furnished in blues and whites so it resembled the interior of Kenneth’s store. The white cotton curtains were billowing in on a breeze in a way that was romantic but made the room seem smaller. The selling point of the place was its location: it backed up to a small pond with a cemetery on the opposite side. The view from the windows in that direction made the cottage feel completely private, almost as if it were a houseboat floating on the still surface of the water.

  David took a seat on a small chair with a white slipcover. It was so close to the ground, his knees came up and he had to lean forward to balance.

  “I have a suggestion,” he said. It was something he’d thought about on the walk over and had rehearsed his choice of words. “It seems as if we’ve adopted trading sarcastic comments as a form of communication. I propose we try something else.”

  Kenneth was in the adjacent kitchen alcove opening the wine. “I’m afraid I don’t have any board games, if that was what you had in mind.”

  “I was thinking more about swapping a few salient biographical details.”

  Kenneth handed him a glass and sat opposite. “The résumé approach to conversation? Where did I grow up, last book read, all that?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “I’m about halfway into Great Expectations, but don’t ask me when I started because junior high was a long time ago.”

  “Noted. Let’s move on. Politics?”

  “I don’t pay all that much attention, although I do vote. I’m heavily influenced by celebrity endorsements, assuming I like their music or movies.”

  “That seems reasonable, as long as Clint Eastwood isn’t one of the celebrities.”

  Kenneth gave him a puzzled look. “Who?”

  “Never mind. Maybe I should tell you what I do for work.”

  “You can if you want, but I already looked you up online. I’d send some of my nieces and nephews to you, but I’m guessing you don’t specialize in underachieving public school students from rural Kentucky with alcoholic and occasionally abusive parents.”

  “It sounds rough. I’m sorry for them,” David said, but what he really meant was that he was sorry for Kenneth and the struggles his comment necessarily implied. “Do you have a lot of nieces and nephews?”

  “I’ve lost count, which is some indication.”

  There was a smell of food drifting in from the kitchen, specifically, the clean, starchy smell of rice. Given the appearance of Kenneth’s person and his cottage, David was counting on an artfully presented dinner that was under-salted. And yet, the more they talked, the more clearly the conversation drifted into flirtation and significant glances. David had a sense that dinner would not be served anytime soon. When he asked Kenneth if he was a good cook, he shrugged in response and bounced his crossed leg. When he asked what he was serving, Kenneth looked at him over the rim of his wineglass and raised his eyebrows in response.

  David stood up from the low chair with difficulty and led Kenneth to the side of the room with a bed. There was the smell of mud from the pond and the deep croaking of bullfrogs. A copy of Architectural Digest was open on a chair by the bed, and David was moved by the thought of Kenneth spending his evenings here alone, exhausted from work and reading up on the extravagant décor of country estates and rock-star penthouses.

  He’d expected Kenneth to be a greedy and demanding lover, but, contrary to almost every other aspect of his personality, he turned clingy and affectionate as soon as they were sprawled out naked on the white sheets of the bed. At one point, he looked up at David and said, “Don’t hurt me, okay?” David had assumed that that wasn’t possible or, if possible, would have been welcomed. He assured him that he would go slowly. “No,” he said. “I mean don’t hurt me.”

  Most of David’s recent sexual escapades had been with people who texted him on an as-needed basis, stopped by his carriage house, and rarely said more than the mandatory, perfunctory complaints about traffic and internet billionaires before leaving. He’d accepted these encounters as a practical solution to his simple human needs. These had changed over time but had not, to his great surprise, abated. If these encounters weren’t as satisfying as he’d hoped, they at least weren’t as depressing as they sounded in theory. He missed the warmth of greater intimacy, but, like reducing your sugar intake, you got used to it.

  Kenneth’s display of vulnerability touched him so deeply, he cupped his head in his hands, kissed his mouth, and assured him he wouldn’t, all the while pushing aside the panic he felt at the implied responsibility he was accepting. Maybe he was growing up.

  * * *

  Over dinner, he learned that the cottage was rented and that the rent was modest. While everything Kenneth owned was carefully curated and spotlessly clean—the furniture, his clothes, the dishes, the bicycle leaning against a wall on the porch off the back—none of it was new and, on closer inspection, all of it showed signs of age. He’d noticed a small patch on the white bedsheet that Kenneth had sewn in expertly. He described himself as coming from “a long line of chain smokers and QVC shoppers.” David imagined this meant a scarring coming-out experience and a difficult passage through high school.

  On the subject of boyfriends, he was circumspect. “There are more people with drug problems around here than you’d guess,” he said. It didn’t take much reading between the lines of this and other comments to see that there had probably been heartache followed by a few arrangements with men already in relationships, the last refuge of those who were themselves unsuitable relationship material.

  The food was, as David had suspected, a triumph of presentation: a molded pyramid of rice, a scoop of steamed vegetables, a fillet of flounder rolled into a tube and dusted with paprika.

  As he was clearing the plates, Kenneth said, “I hear you’re organizing your ex-wife’s house.”

  “Really? Did Mandy come in and tell you that?”

  “No, just local gossip. As for Mandy, I haven’t seen her since she stopped working at that store.”

  David was distracted by the disappointment of the dessert that was set in front of him: a poached pear. It was something a caregiver would serve to an invalid wearing a bib. When he finally registered what Kenneth had told him, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. She still works there.”

  “She most definitely does not. Elaine came into my shop the day she fired her and complained for an hour about her attitude. She was overcompensating. She felt bad about turning her out. After all that, she tried to talk me into giving her a job.”

  “Mandy never said anything to us.”

  “She was probably embarrassed. High school kids usually don’t last more than a month at any store. They bounce from one to the next. Aren’t you going to eat the pear?”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know the date, but weeks ago.”

  It was hard to know what to make of this news, but he was unnerved by it. If Julie knew, she would have told him. Mandy was still going to work, so maybe she had replaced one retail job with another and, as Kenneth indicated, had been ashamed of having been fired. Probably it was best not to make a big deal of it. He could go to the store and ask a few
questions before confronting Mandy.

  His phone was vibrating in his pocket, but it seemed impolite to answer. Naturally, Kenneth, who seemed to notice everything, heard it. “You can get that if you want, as long as it’s not a boyfriend.”

  It was Mandy. “David,” she said. “Mom asked me to call you. Can you come back? Something’s happened here. We need you.”

  36

  Julie had held Mandy tighter, and smoothed down her hair as she cried quietly through the weather report. It was wrong or maybe morally impoverished to take advantage of your own daughter’s unhappiness, but she’d felt such a thrill in being allowed to hold her like this after more than a year of Mandy’s brushing off her affectionate advances, she’d had to revel in it just a bit, briefly ignoring the dark undercurrents.

  “What is it?” she’d asked, after she’d turned off the TV. “Is everything all right?”

  She’d felt Mandy shrug her shoulders against her and shake her head. She smelled of an unfamiliar soap, probably a product they used in the store. “Did something happen at work?”

  Mandy hadn’t said anything, just burrowed in closer to Julie. She knew she ought to be thinking more about what this meant, but she couldn’t help wondering instead why Mandy had denied her the pleasure of this closeness for so long.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Julie had said, “but I wish you would.”

  Mandy had looked up at her, and through her tears, she’d seemed to be searching Julie’s face, as if she was evaluating whether or not she could trust her. Julie had a million questions she wanted to ask, beginning with “You’re not pregnant, are you?” but she’d thought it was best to say nothing and follow Mandy’s lead. Besides, she’d never heard a word about any boys.

  “I wish I made better choices sometimes,” Mandy had said finally.

  This was so open-ended and contained so many awful possibilities, Julie could barely get out: “About what?”

  “My job.” It was hard to know if she’d said this as a statement of fact or as a question, but either way, if this was what they were talking about, it had been such a huge relief that Julie sighed as she stroked Mandy’s hair.

  “You can always find something else. School starts in a month. If you want to take off a few weeks, I’m fine with that.”

  They’d gone into the kitchen and made a dinner from leftovers.

  It wasn’t until they were cleaning up that they heard a loud noise from above and a scuffle of feet. Maybe, Julie thought, it had been a mistake to let strangers into the house. Mandy had never objected loudly, but it was possible that she’d had unfortunate encounters with guests who’d been rude to her. After taking some of Sandra’s suggestions and letting David play bad cop, it was turning out to be profitable, but if the whole venture made Mandy feel like a servant in her own house, she’d have to figure out something different.

  The people in the room above the kitchen were from Quebec; Hélène and Philippe, a quiet couple who spent most of their time reading French novels on the porch and, in disbelief, showing her photos they’d taken of the food they’d been served at various restaurants in Beauport. A mound of cottage cheese, a slab of steamed fish, a ball of mashed potatoes. “It’s all the same color,” Hélène had said incredulously several times. “No color at all. Do you think they do it on purpose? Maybe it’s an art project?” They didn’t seem the types to be moving furniture at this hour of the night.

  She heard panicked voices from above, and as she was about to investigate, Hélène appeared in the doorway, breathless.

  “You need to come up,” she said.

  “Is Philippe all right?” Julie asked.

  “Yes, he is fine. But the old woman, not really.”

  Mrs. Grayson was lying on her side on the floor of the hall. Her eyes were wide with fright, and she was clutching her cardigan to her chest. Not dead, Julie concluded with relief, but beyond that, hard to tell.

  “Should I call 911?” Mandy asked, taking out her phone.

  “Please,” Julie said. “Call from her room.” She sat down on the floor next to Mrs. Grayson and took her hand. “Don’t worry about anything,” she said. “Mandy’s calling an ambulance. Hopefully they’ll be here soon. Can you sit up?”

  She could not, a discouraging sign.

  “That’s all right, dear,” Julie said. “It’s more comfortable lying down anyway. Let’s see if we can put your head on my lap until someone comes.”

  Julie found the weight of her head against her thigh comforting. She saw from this angle that the dandelion-puff hairdo was designed to hide her shiny scalp. “Is your son’s phone number written down somewhere?”

  Mrs. Grayson looked pale and anxious, and she shook her head slowly. “I don’t want to bother them,” she croaked. Her speech was thick and slightly distorted, as if her tongue was in the way. “It was a dizzy spell.”

  “I’m sure they’d want to know,” Julie said.

  Mrs. Grayson gripped her arm. “No. Please.”

  Julie saw that Mrs. Grayson had wet herself. She reached down and discreetly arranged the loose material of her skirt until the stain was less obvious. Loss of dignity inevitably boiled down to being betrayed by the body in a way that recalls the helplessness of infancy. The carefully dry-cleaned beaded cardigans, the soft, white hair, the delicate tread on the steps, all had been undermined by a trickle of urine. Wasn’t this the very thing that everyone feared? To be sick, stricken, among strangers? When the ambulance did come, Julie would need to go through Mrs. Grayson’s purse looking for insurance cards; maybe she’d find the son’s number then. She hoped she wouldn’t find anything else—a flask or a stash of chocolate bars. Just thinking about it made Julie feel so lonely and sad, she was tempted to lie down next to Mrs. Grayson and put her arms around her.

  When Mandy came back with a pillow, Julie told her to call David. “It might take a while for the ambulance to get here, and he’d want us to tell him what’s going on.”

  Maybe that was true, but mostly, surrounded by the strangers who were staying in her house, she herself was beginning to feel stricken and abandoned and wanted him to be there with her.

  37

  The distraction of Mrs. Grayson’s stroke was beginning to wane, as, fairly or unfairly, almost everything in life does, replaced by the human demands for shopping, cooking, and updates on celebrity divorces. She was still in the hospital, poor thing. She’d had a mild stroke but would recover her mobility in time. Her son had insisted on having her moved to Mass General in Boston and, when she was released, to a fancy rehab facility about forty-five minutes away. It was an irony that David had noted before: wealthy offspring who’d paid minimal attention to a parent when she was healthy spent vast sums on the best medical care when she got sick, especially if it guaranteed keeping them at a distance. Money is easier to dispense than affection, even for the most miserly.

  Naturally, in his mind, David’s imaginary daughter would have been attentive to him throughout her life, freely dispensing as much affection as he’d earned. In gratitude for her kindness, he’d off himself at the first signs of irremediable trouble and spare her the expense and boredom of overseeing the slow decline. Abrupt endings were problematic in movies but rarely—after the initial shock—in life. He thought about death as often as he thought about the period of his life before he’d been born, which is to say, close to never. His view of the subject was an Epicurean one: it was not an event he would experience, so why worry? It would be like spending hours trying to figure out what to wear for his date with Zac Efron.

  Beachy Keen was housed in a shingled building that, like the majority of the buildings on the Neck, appeared to be tilting in response to the prevailing winds. The girl at the register was young, probably not more than fifteen, and decked out in heart-shaped sunglasses and a beach costume that seemed like an unintentional but nonetheless unwholesome reference to Lolita. She greeted David with cheerfulness that struck him as both rehearsed and
genuine. Seeing this sunny girl with her broad grin, David found it impossible to imagine Mandy standing in her place, playing the same role. No wonder it hadn’t worked out.

  “If I can help you with anything,” the girl chirped, “just let me know. My personal favorite item in the store is the Beach Tree. It’s such a fun gift, they’re flying off the shelves. They’re our Signature Item!” She made this announcement with the reverence one might use to say “recipient of the Nobel Prize!” “And you’re in luck because they’re 70 percent off. Today only. Pretty great, right?”

  David had a strong suspicion that “today only” was a variation on a lie, but he hoped he’d never return and have reason to find out the accuracy of his suspicion.

  “I’ll check them out later,” he said. “I was hoping I might have a word with the owner, if she’s in.”

  She cheerfully told him she’d check and stepped into an office in the back of the store. The owner strolled out, dressed for a Caribbean cruise, and shook his hand. She told him that she was delighted he’d come in, but that she had finished buying merchandise for the season.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” he said, insulted that she thought he was a salesman hawking the kinds of trinkets the store stocked. Even worse was coming.

  “Well, I’m not hiring now, either, so if that’s…”

  “It certainly is not. I’m a friend of Julie Fiske, Mandy’s mother. I was hoping you could tell me a little about your experience with having Mandy work here.”

  The owner looked at the girl behind the counter and indicated with a gesture of her manicured hand that he should precede her into her office. There was no window in this dark alleyway of a room, but an air conditioner was turned on, blowing in chilled, unbeachy air.

  “I don’t like to talk about former employees in front of Trisha. She’s very bright for her age, as you could probably see.”

  “She is extremely enthusiastic,” David said, a fact he’d taken, in this context, as evidence of a lack of intelligence.