My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  Elaine nodded and smiled. “She’s a find. She came in one day and fell in love with our stock. She was looking for a gift for her mother’s birthday. She and her mother are very close.” There was an emphasis on this last bit of information that made David think it was a comment on Mandy’s relationship with Julie. “I actually had to talk her into working for me. I pleaded with her. I needed someone different from Mandy.”

  The name clearly left a bitter taste in her mouth.

  “I’m sorry that didn’t work out,” he said. “I’m helping her with her college applications, and it would be useful to understand why you let her go.”

  Further prompting was unnecessary. “If you take everything we said about little Trisha’s personality, enthusiasm, and retail instincts and imagine the polar opposites, you’ll have some idea of what Mandy was like as an employee. I think it’s safe to say she was a complete disaster.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. He didn’t doubt there had been problems, but considering how little was at stake here, “complete disaster” surely was inappropriate. “She spoke so highly of you and your merchandise.”

  “It would have been nice if she’d shared some of that supposed enthusiasm with the customers. Sales have shot up since I let her go.”

  “When was that, by the way?”

  She produced the date instantly, the way one would produce the date of a marriage, birth, or release from prison. It struck David as almost alarmingly long ago.

  “I suppose business must pick up at that time of year anyway, doesn’t it?”

  “When you have an employee with an attitude, it doesn’t much matter what the date is. I don’t blame her entirely. I didn’t realize at the time I hired her that her mother was involved with Airbnb.” If that was the tone she used to utter “Airbnb,” how did she articulate “White Supremacist Movement”?

  He decided it was best to turn officious. “Yes,” he said. “Short-term rentals are becoming an important part of the tourism industry worldwide.”

  She eyed David and sipped from a lipstick-stained coffee cup with a sailboat on it.

  “Oh, they certainly are. They bring in hordes of people who are used to shopping online for the lowest prices. At brick-and-mortar stores, they try to make deals, as if we’re all used-car salesmen. On top of that, the Airbnb hosts are undermining the established B and B’s who play by the rules, have standards, and are members of the Chamber of Commerce. And they make it ten times more difficult for legitimate, year-round, long-term tenants.” She put down the coffee cup and looked at him as if she’d scored an irrefutable point. “I’m surprised your friend Kenneth didn’t discuss this with you. He’s helped craft a petition to regulate them in Beauport, assuming we can’t ban them outright. I believe your friend Julie’s house was listed in his evidentiary findings.”

  This was infuriating news. Kenneth had driven him home after Mandy’s call, had come into the house and been helpful setting Mrs. Grayson up until the ambulance arrived. He’d poked around with what David had assumed was simple gay-male curiosity about the window treatments. Now he realized he was responsible for letting the enemy into their camp. No doubt, he’d been looking for code violations and more “evidentiary findings” (please!) for his report.

  He heard the door open in the shop and the bustle of a few people entering. “It’s nice and cool in here,” a woman said. “You’re lucky you get to work in air-conditioning all day.”

  “Aren’t I?” Trisha enthused. “And I get to work surrounded all day by these incredible treasures you can’t find anywhere else. If you want to know my personal favorite…”

  No, it was ridiculous for Mandy to have even tried working here.

  David stood, ready to make his escape. “Kenneth mentioned she’s probably at a different store out here. Do you happen to know which one?”

  “As far as I know, she hasn’t been out on the Neck since the day she left here with her tail between her legs. I’d have heard from the storeowner if they were considering hiring her.”

  David thanked Elaine and said, “By the way, Mandy’s SAT scores were extraordinary.”

  Elaine was already examining receipts. “I’m sure that will be of interest to someone,” she said.

  * * *

  As he was walking home, wondering where it was Mandy went when she claimed to be going to her job, Michael called him.

  “We’re at a dead end,” he said. “They’re not budging past the twenty-five thousand, and I’m afraid the whole deal is going to collapse. Renata pointed out a few problems with your lease that make it less airtight than I thought. I confess, I’m probably not as up on California statutes as I should be. To her credit, she’s begun looking again for something you can maybe afford. It turns out I had her wrong all these years. She invited me to a party her husband is throwing next week. Since you won’t be able to buy in Belle Reve or whatever that town is, let me know when I need to go back to my own apartment. Twenty-five thousand is better than nothing.”

  38

  As soon as Mandy went into the dining room to work with David that afternoon, she sensed that something was wrong. He was on his computer when she sat down opposite him at the table, and he said “hello” (hello?) without looking up. While she waited for him to finish whatever it was he was doing, she calculated all the possibilities. One was that she just had a guilty conscience and was imagining things. If there was one value to the work she’d been doing for the last few weeks, aside from the questionable one of the money, it was that she’d become more confident than ever that she had a real talent for reading people and understanding their feelings.

  The second possibility was that David was stressed because her father and Carol were coming for dinner tomorrow and he wanted to make sure everything went well.

  Either of those things was an option, but there was something in the anger he was trying not to show that was clearly aimed at her. What did he know and how had he found out?

  Worst of all, she hadn’t been able to do the work he’d asked her to do. She’d tried. She’d completed her essay about Clara Dunston, but she knew it was weak. She’d tried taking the personality tests he’d given her, but had lost heart halfway through. Right now, it was hard enough to remember she’d had birthday parties without trying to recall a favorite one. She’d tried to organize her list of college choices they could present to her father over dinner, but that hadn’t worked out either. All the online photos of the colleges showed a rainbow coalition of happy students working in labs and playing guitars and tossing around Frisbees. When they were shown gazing into computers, they were in libraries, not dank basements, and they were fully dressed. Everything made her feel depressed and angry. Deprangry. She couldn’t get past the feeling that even though she had been equally deprangry at the start of the summer, she’d been a different person then. An unhappy, upset, inexperienced, untalented, unpopular person, true, but not a person who’d let herself be used, not someone who’d become a weird variation on a virgin whore. She’d been a better depressed and angry person.

  Books about time travel annoyed her. If there was something about going backward or forward in time in the description of a novel, she put it down instantly. And yet, she’d become obsessed with the idea that she might go back and undo everything that had led her to this point.

  She realized that she’d chosen the wrong essay prompt anyway. She should write about going back to Square One, but that would mean revealing everything about herself she had to hide.

  When David finally looked up from his computer, he said, “Did you finish the essay?”

  Reluctantly, she took out the two pages she’d printed out. He put on his glasses and read them, occasionally biting his lower lip. When he finished, he took off his glasses.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Do you remember when I showed you the essay about the ski lift? Do you remember how you critiqued it? Why don’t you try doing that to your own.” He handed her the pages.
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  It made her a little sick to look at them, but what choice did she have? “I love the first sentence, about the glue gun. I think it’s fun.”

  “I agree, but there’s a problem.”

  “The problem is, I love it too much, and it shows. It looks like I’m writing about this topic because I wanted to use that phrase more than discuss the topic itself.”

  “Good. Go on.”

  “And why am I writing about Clara Dunston when she’s not the one applying? I meant to get around to making the essay about me, but I ran out of space.”

  He stuck his glasses on top of his head. “Oh, is that the reason you didn’t get to yourself?”

  “No, of course not. It’s because I couldn’t face writing about myself honestly, and I didn’t want to lie. So I guess I’m half a fraud.”

  “I don’t see it that way. But care to tell me why you can’t face writing about yourself honestly?”

  She tore the pages in half. Not dramatically, but slowly, because she knew they were useless. “Because I don’t like myself a whole lot right now.”

  “Then start by trying to like yourself a little more,” he said. “Cut yourself a little slack. I’d like another revision in two days. Do you have the rest of the work I gave you?”

  Taking a page from Craig’s Big Book of Behavior, she changed the subject. “Are you basically going to be moving in here?”

  He slammed down the cover of his laptop. There were some things you’d just rather not see, and his anger was one.

  “You were the one who contacted me and asked for my help. You were the one who suggested I visit. You know how much this dinner with your father means to Julie. You’re the one going to college. I don’t see why you’ve decided to let the ball drop at the worst possible second.”

  “Why are you screaming at me?” she shouted.

  “You can tell I’m not happy, but I didn’t raise my voice once. Accusing me of that is yet another way to change the subject.”

  She had a terrible feeling that she was going to start crying, something she was doing so often these days it was beginning to scare her. And, naturally, made her want to cry more. Somehow, it had all started out so innocently. She’d always had a fantasy that she had a boyfriend in another town, someone unconnected to her school, someone incredibly handsome and amazingly talented. She imagined herself showing up at a school event with him, proving to everyone who’d ignored or dismissed her that she was worth more than they’d supposed. She could see now how stupid it had been to think that Craig Crespo could ever be that person. She’d simply dug a deeper hole for herself.

  If she was going to write about Square One—or write honestly about anything—she’d have to start somewhere. “Can I tell you something?” she asked quietly.

  “You’ll have to speak up,” David said. “I can’t hear you.”

  “Remember when you asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I said ‘not really’?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I sort of do. I mean, he’s not a boyfriend, just someone I see. But he’s a disappointing person.”

  “Disappointing in what way?”

  “Maybe what I mean is I’m disappointed that I spend time with him. Maybe that’s why I don’t like myself so much. And I’m sorry I didn’t do what you asked me,” she said. “I promise I’ll try.”

  He surprised her by reaching out and touching her face tenderly, and looking at her almost as if she were someone else, like maybe a nice girl who worked behind the counter at Beachy Keen.

  “You asked about my plans,” he said. “Your mother and I were waiting for a good time to discuss them with you. She and I talked about me staying and eventually fixing up the barn to live in, assuming I could figure out the financial details. Well, the details are not looking too good right now, so a lot of things are up in the air. But whatever happens, Mandy, you’ll stay with your mother. Promise me that. At your age, your wishes have a lot of influence with judges.”

  Who knew what kind of deal her mother and David had going, but maybe the particulars didn’t matter so much as long as they both had someone. Except now it sounded as if that was falling apart, too. “I want to stay with her,” she said.

  “And, Mandy,” he said, “if you’re disappointed with yourself for spending time with this guy, you should stop seeing him.”

  She went out to the porch and sat in the rocking chair she’d come to think of as Mrs. Grayson’s. All the people who’d stopped at their house and spent a few nights were beginning to accumulate in her mind, like a needy mob demanding her attention and sympathy. The same was true for the foolish men she chatted with online, whose faces she never saw but whose personalities she knew so well. She’d always been a little frightened of mobs.

  David was right: she should just stop. Of course she should, but something that looked so obvious and easy was, underneath it all, complicated. And if she stopped now, she didn’t yet know where she’d be.

  39

  Over the course of cleaning out the house, David had come across photos of Henry at various stages of life and hair loss. He could imagine his mother saying of Henry that he had a “pleasant face,” which is to say a look you couldn’t find fault with. Although he wouldn’t have admitted it to Julie, he felt no particular animosity toward Henry. It was true that his treatment of Julie had been unfair, but David’s had hardly been exemplary. He’d had enough life experience to know that making assumptions about the relationships of others was like forming opinions of books you hadn’t read: tempting, but pointless. On top of that, it always backfired.

  Through little details Julie had tossed his way (“He’s not exactly enlightened on some subjects” and “He grew up in a fairly conservative family”), he inferred that Henry was blandly homophobic. He was familiar with this type of man, since many of the successful fathers who hired him fell into that category. It wasn’t that they believed he shouldn’t have the same civil rights as everyone else, it was just that their body language and mildly condescending gazes conveyed the impression that they considered themselves inherently superior. They didn’t want you to be unhappy, they were just convinced that in the grand scheme of things, your homosexual happiness counted for less than their heterosexual joy. David’s brother, Decker, was one of these: he was fine with the fact that David had the right to vote, he just thought David should have the decency not to exercise it.

  It was a question of masculinity, of course, but this made no sense to David since he’d come to believe that the libidinous excesses of gay men expressed male desire in its purest form. This made them more genuinely masculine than their heterosexual counterparts, even if they sometimes went overboard with eyebrow shaping and mid-century sofas. Children factored in, too. If you didn’t have them, you were still human, but you were living a lame-duck life that mattered less. Although Decker had never expressed it in so many words, it was clear to David that he felt the fact that David had almost been a parent was proof that, as the Bible had made clear, he was not meant to live a full life. Among the many hypocrisies of the “religious” was the fact that they viewed god as omnipotent, but treated him like a ventriloquist’s dummy by putting their words and crackpot beliefs, prejudices, and unfounded biases into His mouth whenever it suited their purposes.

  David had a mordant curiosity about Henry and a more eager one about Carol, whose photos were not to be found anywhere in the house. And yet, the day of the dinner, he’d woken up feeling as if a couple of social workers were coming to evaluate the household for an undisclosed purpose. His own purpose was to make enough of a case for the progress he and Mandy were making to take Henry aside and, man-to-man (or whatever), ask if he could hold off on the closing of the house for another few months. That might be enough time to go back to San Francisco and try some negotiations of his own with the landlady or seek some other options for Julie. He hadn’t broken the bad news to Julie, but he could tell she knew something had happened.

  Julie had told him that H
enry and Carol would arrive promptly, and at exactly seven-thirty, as David was sliding a casserole dish into the oven, he heard tires crunching on the stones of the driveway.

  “They’re here,” he called into the house.

  “I told you they’d be on time,” Julie called back. “They’re just impossible.”

  When David looked out the window again, Henry was surveying the yard and the house with what he hoped was approval. He was better-looking than his photos suggested, a point that gave him an advantage, but that was neutralized by the fact he was wearing short pants and no-show ankle socks that were showing. The latter accessory was associated in David’s mind with women who wear sun visors to play golf at restricted country clubs and men who depilate their legs for unknown reasons.

  Carol, even from a distance, exuded the nervous eagerness for approval Julie had mentioned. She stepped out of the car and adjusted her light hair, brushed down her pink, scoop-necked jersey, and gestured to Henry to move the car closer to Julie’s so it wouldn’t be taking up two spaces. Clearly, she ruled Henry’s life with her anxiety and punctuality. He was certain she had selected Henry’s socks, especially since she was wearing them, too.

  When Julie came into the kitchen, Carol was taking a large bouquet of flowers from the backseat with the care you might use to lift an invalid. “Oh, no,” Julie said. “Flowers. And so many of them. Be sure to make a fuss about them; she spends half her time planting and weeding. Gardeners always make me feel morally inferior.”

  David put his hands on her shoulders. “She’s not a better person because she grew some delphinium.” In truth, he saw his own impatience for gardening as a character flaw on a par with his inability to memorize the names of constellations and his complete lack of interest in observing wild animals in their natural habitats.

  “I hate that you tossed off ‘delphinium’ so easily,” Julie said.