My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  Henry looked around the room and then back at David. “Define ‘a little,’ please.”

  “I’m not sure exactly. A few more months. Not much beyond that.”

  “I appreciate the work you’ve been doing around here, David. Now it’s obvious why you’ve bothered, but I’m still grateful. It will help bring a better price. If Amira’s husband backs out, we can put it on the market next week. Julie has wasted enough of my time. I originally wanted to sell a year ago. As for you, I don’t get what your game is here, but maybe it’s not my business.”

  “Game,” David said. “I’m not sure how any of this qualifies as a game. It’s a friendship and a living arrangement. I don’t imagine it’s perfect, and I doubt Julie does either. Then again, I don’t believe much in perfection when it comes to relationships and human behavior.”

  Henry took this in without expression and then said, “You’re not Mandy’s stepfather, and I hope you don’t forget that, but she seems to like you, and if you help her find a direction, even if it’s one I don’t necessarily agree with, I can’t complain. If it fits her, it fits her.” He opened and closed a few cabinets, looking for a place to put the vinegar and oil. “You’ve changed everything.”

  David pointed to a shelf on the opposite side of the sink. “A little reorganizing. I think it’s more efficient this way.”

  Henry put the bottles on the counter, apparently resisting the new order, efficient or not. “On top of everything,” he said, “I’ve always felt bad about what happened with you and Julie. I mean that sincerely, but it’s not enough to make me put my life on hold any longer.”

  “It was a long time ago,” David said. “As you know, I’m sure, a lot of it related to my own issues and behavior. I don’t spend time dwelling on the past, but it’s been nice reconnecting with Julie on different terms.” And then, as if he was talking with the father of his beloved, he added, “She’s dear to me.”

  “I meant about the baby,” Henry said.

  David looked at him more closely in the atmospheric lighting of the kitchen. There was sweat on his forehead, and although he’d said the words with a tinge of tenderness, his eyes were hard. It was a shock to hear this mentioned, since it was, in David’s view, one of those topics that was off-limits by unspoken consensus. It was hard to know if Henry was expressing genuine empathy or was trying to open old wounds.

  “Julie’s always felt bad about it,” he went on. “In an essential way, I think it was the cause of a lot of floundering and mistakes in the years that followed. Guilt, whatever that concept means.”

  “Different things to different people,” David said. “I’ve always felt somehow responsible myself.”

  There was a crash from upstairs and the scratching and scrambling of paws on wood. Opal had obviously woken up and freed herself from Mandy’s bedroom. He hoped she wouldn’t cause any trouble with the guests.

  “Yes,” Henry said, “but she’s the one who made the decision, not you. She’s the one who’s had to carry that around all these years.”

  David turned off the water he’d been running in the sink and gripped the counter. He felt a strange chill enter his body as he replayed and absorbed Henry’s words. Then, immediately, the assumptions he’d made about a few of the most significant events of his life began to rearrange themselves in his head. It took a moment or two for them to form a coherent narrative. He gazed at Henry, trying to figure out if he assumed that David already knew this or had said it out of spite, revenge for his relationship with Julie, with Mandy, and even with the house itself. It was easier to think about this than the information he’d imparted.

  Opal clattered down the back staircase and began pawing at the door to the kitchen and whimpering. David walked across the room and let her in, and with a burst of pent-up energy, she slid across the floor with her tongue hanging out and her one hind leg splayed behind her. Mandy had probably forgotten to leave out water, David thought, concentrating on something it was easy to focus on. Opal went to David and sniffed, then hobbled to Henry. He reached down to pat her head, and she sank her teeth into his hand.

  40

  Something was wrong. Probably more than one thing, if she had to guess. For two days after the dinner, Julie saw David infrequently. Twice she’d made him his morning tea and twice the big white mug had sat on the table in the kitchen until it turned cold and she had to dump it down the sink. He hadn’t cooked dinner or eaten with them, and there had been no reading, no walks, and no explanations. When she passed him in the hall, he smiled in a benign way that was warm enough to lack hostility but remote enough to be confusing. It was as if he was one of the paying guests and was trying to be as politely unobtrusive as possible. The dinner with Henry had not been a massive success, but aside from the incident with Opal, it hadn’t been a disaster. Mandy hadn’t done all that Henry wanted, but Julie could tell that he’d been mollified, at least for the moment. There had been no mention of Mandy’s living anywhere but there.

  The “there,” however, was beginning to look unlikely.

  The closing was next week, and although the benefits office at Crawford was ready to send her a portion of the funds she needed from her retirement account, the approaching event had begun to take on the surreal atmosphere of a recurring nightmare in which she was about to step onstage to give a lecture without notes or any knowledge of the subject. David was not going to come through. She knew, on some level, that she was headed toward disaster, but she was moving toward it inexorably. No one had made the announcement that the plane was crashing, the flight attendants weren’t screaming, and so she didn’t see any alternatives except to fasten her seat belt and stay the course. Maybe by some miracle, they’d pull out of the nosedive at the last moment.

  This morning, she’d asked David, as he passed in the kitchen, if he’d been seeing more of Kenneth, one other possible explanation for his absence.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing any more of him. He isn’t quite who I thought he was.”

  Again, the mysteriously remote smile, and then an escape to his room. The whole mood of the house filled her with melancholy regret. They were having one of those spells of deceptively autumnal weather that frequently occurs in mid-August. The mornings were chilly and crisp with what felt like heartbreaking clarity in the light. Somehow, this contributed to unease. Ask him, she kept telling herself, but some unnamed instinct prevented her from doing so.

  Around noon, Henry called as she was changing the sheets for a tenant who was coming into the Window Seat Room later that afternoon.

  “I’ve just come back from the doctor,” Henry said.

  Julie sat down on the feature for which the room was named, pulled her knees to her chest, and tried to focus on the view of the pine tree and the barn.

  “Oh? Anything wrong?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. I was bitten by a dog recently.”

  Opal, who seemed to know that she’d done something bad, had been unusually passive since the incident. That was for the good, but it still troubled Julie that if she’d done it once, there was no guarantee she wouldn’t do it again. She was lying on the floor beside the bed Julie had been making, a three-legged angel of a dog. When she’d asked David if Henry had provoked Opal in any way, he’d said no, but then mysteriously added, “I suppose I was the one he was trying to provoke.”

  “Obviously,” she said now, “you didn’t need stitches.” It was a safe assumption. Henry had tricky gums and she’d seen him bleed more when he’d brushed his teeth too vigorously than he had after Opal had nipped him.

  “I did not,” he said. “What I need is the paperwork showing the dog is up-to-date on shots. Just fax them over to me. She has had her shots, hasn’t she?”

  “Of course she has. I’ll send the papers over later today.”

  Although she’d been expecting him to demand them right away, he said, “That’s fine. It’s standard procedure. I’m not asking for them to harass you. If it had
been up to me, I wouldn’t have bothered going to the doctor. It’s healing anyway.”

  She suspected he took pleasure in this demand, even if it had been mandated by someone else. “Is that all?” she asked.

  “Don’t be so cold, Julie. We don’t have to hate each other.”

  She couldn’t respond to this. When she thought back to how she’d felt about him when they first met, about the hopes she’d had for their future together, about how thrilled they’d both been about the house, about the contentment and joy in the first few years after Mandy was born, the comment was like a slap across the face. After all the proclamations of love they’d made to each other decades earlier, this was where they’d ended up. Not hating each other.

  “No,” she said. “We don’t.”

  “Carol cleaned and bandaged my hand again as soon as we got home that night. She has a medical kit in the bathroom. I’m guessing that fact doesn’t come as a surprise to you. She made the appointment. When I went to the clinic today, they took one look at it and were convinced I’d gone to the ER when it happened. It was that professionally done.”

  Pretty and toned and—yes, all right—youngish as she was, it was hard to imagine someone as carefully controlled and meticulous as Carol in the throes of passion. The way Julie had been with Raymond, even if briefly. Raymond, who still appeared in her dreams more often than she liked, but less frequently than he had a few weeks ago. With Carol, there would probably be a long shower afterward and sanitizer, possibly from the medical kit.

  “You need someone like that,” Julie said quietly. “I’m sure she makes your life easier.”

  “Yes, she does. But when I was in the house with you and David, I realized she makes my life a little less interesting, too.”

  It was late in the game for him to tell her this. No doubt there was some calculation behind it.

  “Life is full of trade-offs,” she said.

  “If you want to know the truth, I was jealous that he was living in my house with my wife and my daughter and that you all seemed to get along so well together. Call me petty. I love the stability of what I have now. I’m too old for anything else. But it made me realize, there were a lot of ways in which the things that drove me crazy about our relationship made me happy, too.”

  Give me information I can use was what she wanted to say, but she was curious about where this was coming from and where it was headed. “Why tell me this now, Henry? What’s the point?”

  “I just thought you should know. I thought you’d want to know. I figured you’d enjoy hearing that I have a few faint regrets about the divorce.”

  “I’m not that small-minded,” she said. And then, after a moment, “On second thought, maybe I am. Thank you.”

  “There’s something else,” he said. “Some of those feelings might have led me to say things to David I shouldn’t have said. I apologize.”

  Maybe that answered some of her concerns about David’s behavior. “To me?” she said. “Why not apologize to him?”

  He said nothing, and she told him she’d get him the papers as soon as possible.

  There was a pause and then he said, “Are you two sleeping together?”

  She almost put down the phone. “How could that possibly be relevant to you?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “You haven’t earned an answer from me, Henry. I’m sorry. I’m sure you can figure it out on your own if you take all the facts into consideration.”

  “I’ll see you next week at the closing?” It shouldn’t have been a question.

  He knew, she could tell, that it wasn’t going to happen, but he was playing along. Either to appease her or to make his final triumph all that much more triumphant.

  “We’ll talk,” she said.

  * * *

  Later in the afternoon, she started looking for Opal’s papers in all the usual places but couldn’t come up with anything. She’d have to call the vet, but it felt like one extra step she didn’t want to take. She was in the hall, going through the drawers of a bureau that was the refuge of last resort for things like warranties on air conditioners and instruction booklets on the washing machine, when David came into the house. She wanted to ask where he’d been, but what right did she have, and on top of that, he looked uncharacteristically grave.

  “Looking for something?” he asked.

  “Opal’s papers,” she said. “I need to send them to Henry. The doctor has to have them. By law, I gather. You didn’t see anything like that in your cleaning, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m sure they’ll turn up. Things like that usually do.”

  His voice wasn’t cold, but it sounded like he was talking to a stranger. Did she want to hear what was wrong or did she already know?

  She put her hand on his arm as he was turning to go. “David, what is it? I’ve only seen you in passing for the last couple of days. We’ve barely spoken. I haven’t even had a chance to thank you for the dinner and the work with Mandy.”

  “You don’t need to thank me. It’s what I came for.”

  “You’re angry with me but you’re not saying why. I don’t think I can stand it much longer. We have plans, but if the money isn’t going to come through, we can figure out something else.”

  He took a seat on the staircase. At least he wasn’t running away. She sat on the step below him, looking up. He put his hand on her hair gently. It was such a relief to be touched after all the silence, she started to cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not getting the money I thought I would. It was probably too much to hope for, a nice fantasy while it lasted. I thought I could make up for the ways I failed you in the past, but I’m afraid it’s turning out to be another disappointment. You’ll end up with enough from the sale to get something for you and Mandy. Something nice.”

  She rested her head against his leg. It wasn’t right to make him do all the work. “I know the money is only part of it,” she said. “It’s about the baby.” She’d said the last words so quietly, she wasn’t sure he’d heard her.

  “You should have told me,” he said, still stroking her hair. “It’s not as if I wouldn’t have understood. It’s not as if I would have stopped you, if it was something you were sure about.”

  “I wasn’t sure.” One of the guests was taking a shower in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, but the sounds of water running through the pipes seemed to be coming from miles away, from someone else’s house. “I was panicked.”

  “I know, and I know why. I’ve tried to imagine what I would have done if I’d been in your place, and probably I would have done the same thing. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t wrong. If we’re halfway decent people, we do the best we can with what we’ve got at the time. And you’re more than decent, Julie.” The shower was turned off; she heard footsteps. “But you should have told me, if not then, then now. It would have been good for both of us.”

  He made it sound so simple and clear, so easy, especially at this distance. Maybe this moment would fall into perspective, too, at some later date.

  “You can forgive me after all this time, can’t you? I don’t want you to leave.”

  He kissed the top of her head, as he had the day he’d first arrived.

  “I don’t have anything to forgive you for. I’ve been happier here these past weeks than I’ve been in a long time. I just made some miscalculations about belonging here. I’m going back to San Francisco in four days. I made the reservation this morning.”

  41

  In her senior year of college, Julie had started dating a boy name Dennis Schaeffer. She remembered him now as leggy and long-faced, but in her memory, all the boys she dated back then, all the boys she knew, were leggy and long-faced.

  Julie was in over her head at Sarah Lawrence, and Dennis was in his element at Columbia, studying political science. He was a passionate, intellectually intense student with plans to go to law school and then run for office. He was, like a lot of ambitious people, manic depressive, although Juli
e hadn’t known that for the first six months they were going out. She thought he was just energetic. Intellectually, they were in different leagues. Her own mother—always ready with a harsh opinion—had confirmed this after her parents had taken them out to dinner in the city. “He’ll do great things,” her mother had said, “assuming he doesn’t become a drug addict and/or commit suicide. It won’t last, darling, but maybe it will be educational for you.”

  When, after a year and a half of dating, they broke up and Julie got enough distance to look at the realities of the relationship, she was struck primarily by how little fun they’d had. Everything had been a battle of wills, an opportunity for him to lecture her, another reason for him to correct her faulty logic or lack of information. Ah yes, reenacting the family dynamics. No wonder her mother had approved.

  In retrospect, she was plagued by two questions: Why had he been interested in her and, perhaps more important, Why had she put up with him? “The answer to both questions is the same,” her mother had said when she’d made the mistake of discussing her feelings over Thanksgiving dinner. “Low self-esteem.”

  It was a brilliant response. It was accurate and explained, by its wounding nature, everything Julie needed to know about her insecurities and their source.

  Sexually, Dennis had been insatiable, a fact that Julie took to be evidence of his attraction to her but was probably just another manifestation of his mental illness. Whatever it was, that hadn’t been fun, either. Dennis had been so completely focused on the demands and sensations of his own body, sex with him had been like sitting in a busy restaurant and being ignored by the waiter. Hello? I’d like to place my order? Julie often ended up wondering what had just happened and if she’d actually been in the room when it did.

  She sometimes pondered how she would have felt about David Hedges if they hadn’t met when Dennis Schaeffer was still a shape on the horizon in her rearview mirror. Would she have been so overjoyed that he supported all her creative aspirations and never criticized her addled tendency to leap from one project to the next? Would she have been so taken with his calm, steady demeanor? Would their playful, tender sex life have seemed so completely satisfying to her even when she was aware that David seemed more attentive to her needs than to his own? Would she have wondered more about what his needs were?