My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  Very possibly, yes, but she would never know now.

  They were happy together, laughed a lot, had their books and the music he loved introducing her to. In the midst of their lighthearted domesticity, it had been easy for Julie to overlook a few qualities that she should have questioned. It had never occurred to her to wonder why they never discussed the future.

  When they’d been living together for a year and a half, when David was talking vaguely about a move to Boston for a doctoral program in education, a move that might or might not involve her (it had never been clear), she discovered she was pregnant. She’d cried and apologized when she’d told him. There was a prescription she hadn’t gotten around to filling for longer than she cared to admit.

  “It’s not as if I’m not equally responsible,” David had said.

  None of the options was especially appealing, but in the end, they made one of their giddy, impetuous decisions to marry quietly and make announcements after the fact.

  Her mother, in particular, was not amused. “I can’t believe you think he’s the marrying kind,” she’d said.

  Antrim, a history teacher at the school where David was on the faculty, was introduced into their lives as a minor offstage character a couple of months before the pregnancy. He’d come to the school in the middle of the year. He and his wife lived in what was then an unfashionable neighborhood in Brooklyn. Based on David’s descriptions of their conversations, Julie had developed a crush, which, at some point, she realized she’d contracted from David. It was she who insisted they invite Antrim and his wife for dinner, and they arrived one early-spring night bearing flowers and wine. The four of them had an instant rapport, and Julie had fallen in love with both of them while, at the same time, feeling even closer to David in their presence. When they were trying to decide what to do about her pregnancy, Julie had mentioned how happy Antrim and his wife, about the same age as they were, always seemed.

  And then, one night, after they had married, Julie had walked into the kitchen and seen David and Antrim laughing together about something that had happened at school, and all the suppressed suspicions she’d had, all the fleeting doubts, all the unspoken concern about the amount of time he spent with Antrim gelled into conviction. She felt she had a right, even an obligation, to leaf through books and rummage through desk drawers. Within a few hours, she’d found a note from Antrim to David tucked into a folder, the very thing she’d been looking for and simultaneously hoping she wouldn’t find.

  Panicked, she’d called the one person she knew who had never given her sympathy, comfort, or solace, but who was unyielding and often right in her convictions and opinions. Her mother came to the city and took Julie out for dinner.

  “It was ridiculous to get married,” she said. “If you’d told me what you were planning, I would have talked you out of it. There was a much simpler solution. I knew this as soon as I met him. You think David will change, but he won’t. A baby will be a brief distraction, at most. This is about who he is, not what he’s doing. If you’re upset about it now, you’ll feel worse in a year, except then you’ll have a baby. You’re not capable of raising a child on your own, Julie. I’m not saying it to be unkind; it’s the unfortunate truth. Period. You’re too young, too unfocused, and too poor. Life has to be lived one step at a time, and this is not the step you need to take now. I’ll make the arrangements for you. You’re lucky you found out while there’s still time to change course.”

  Julie had chosen a week when David and Antrim had gone off to Washington, D.C., as chaperones for a school trip. When he returned, she couldn’t stop crying. She said she was no longer pregnant, they’d lost the baby. Lost.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked. “I would have come back.”

  “It wouldn’t have changed anything,” she said.

  A few days later, she said, “You do see, don’t you, that I wouldn’t be capable of being a single mother? You do see that, don’t you?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” he asked. “You’re not single.”

  “Oh, David,” she said. “We both know I am.”

  He had no answer to that, which told her, with some relief, that she hadn’t made a mistake. The rest of his story came out in fragments, and six months later, they went their separate ways.

  42

  For days following the dinner with Henry, David had spent most of his time walking around Beauport, trying to piece together his thoughts and organize his feelings. How could he criticize Julie for having kept a secret from him when the whole basis for it had been his own secrecy? Maybe, even after all these years, she was in denial about the facts of what she’d done as he had been in denial about himself then.

  Had Julie acted out of despair or anger toward him or simple practicality? Undoubtedly a combination of all three. Maybe, in the end, it didn’t matter. He had lived his life as he needed to, she had gone on and lived hers and remarried. For a while, she’d been happy. She had Mandy. If he could go back, would he change anything, ask her to do anything differently? It was impossible to know. He’d spent a lifetime training himself to short-circuit regret, and there was no point in trying to undo all that work now. As for blame, that was as unproductive as regret.

  All of it coming to light—and thanks to Henry, too—had pointed out the flimsiness of the foundation on which he’d built this feeling of home. It was time to go back to his interrupted life in San Francisco and try to restart that stalled engine.

  There were questions about Mandy’s job and her boyfriend, but that was a problem he would have to leave to her parents. He saw that Henry had been right—he was not a stepparent, and perhaps his interference was more of a problem than a solution to one.

  After his talk on the stairs with Julie he left the house and called Renata. He was shocked that she actually took his call.

  “Is this you or your lawyer?” she asked.

  “For better or worse,” he said, “it’s me.”

  “How sweet of you to return my call after, how many weeks? Seven? Eight? What can I do for you?”

  It was important to swallow his pride and get the job done. “My plans have finally come together. I’m heading back to San Francisco. Michael said you’d begun looking for something for me, and I was wondering if you have any leads in my range.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do have a place, but we’re up against a deadline. If you want it, you’ll have to take the twenty-five thousand and move out of the carriage house by September first.”

  “I’m ready to do that,” David said. “And since I didn’t want the money for myself anyway, I’m ready to forgo the buyout.”

  “Noble on top of everything else.”

  She described a small, sunny apartment on the top floor of a house in Noe Valley, a neighborhood David had always loved. There was a small master bedroom and a tiny second room that could be used as an office. “The kitchen is completely outdated and the bathroom is absurd, but someone like you might be able to talk himself into believing they have charm.” She named a rent that was shockingly low by the standards of San Francisco real estate.

  “There must be a catch,” David said.

  “Of course there is. This is life, David. There are several catches. The bathroom is one, the kitchen another. The owners on the floor beneath you are a couple of older gay men. Lovely, in their eccentric ways, those eccentricities being catches three, four, and five.”

  He asked for clarification, knowing ahead of time that, whatever they were, he’d have to accept them. He wasn’t in a position to be choosy.

  “They had a young couple renting from them for a fortune for a year or two. They had parties, loud friends, and worst of all, were noisily fucking all the time.”

  “Heterosexuals?”

  “Apparently. They ended up having a baby.”

  “That’ll teach them.”

  “The boys didn’t renew the lease and now they want a new tenant, but they’re willing to take a fraction of
what they could get on the open market provided I find them someone who’s clean and ‘quiet,’ if you see what I mean. Their ideal renter is a sixty-five-year-old woman with a cat, but there are the stairs to consider. You’d offer the same benefits, and they wouldn’t have to worry about a litter box.”

  “Can you explain ‘quiet’?” He had an idea where this was headed, but he wanted confirmation.

  “No renovations, for one thing. Everything has to remain as it is. Intolerable for me, but probably less problematic for you. They also don’t want to have to deal with the particular noise problem they had with the couple.”

  There was an echo of Sandra’s rant in this from her drunken consultation the day of his arrival. It saddened him to think about it.

  “Am I expected to sign a celibacy agreement?”

  “I doubt that would be legal. Or necessary.”

  He wasn’t clear if she was reassuring him or making an assumption about the prospects for his sex life.

  “Believe me, David, you’re not going to land a fluky deal like this anytime soon. You do seem to have decent real estate karma, but even that must have its limits. I told a sad little academic I met—with braids, if you can picture it—she could look at it next week, but if you get here right away, and the boys approve of you, we can sign the lease immediately.”

  “Can you hold it until Friday?”

  “Believe me,” she said, “you won’t regret it. I know you think I’m a heartless bitch, which I do not necessarily consider an insult, but this still pleases me. I could have been a better friend and now the slate is wiped clean. Send me your flight information. I’ll pick you up at the airport and we can head straight to Noe Valley. If you have sneakers, wear them. Or better yet, I’ll bring slippers for you. Did I mention they prefer you not wear shoes upstairs?”

  “Do they have a preference as to boxers or briefs?”

  “No, but I do. We can discuss that driving from the airport. Thank god you decided to grow up.”

  43

  Amira appeared stunned when Julie told her that David was leaving for good the following day. Julie had come to think of her as being above genuine emotion or at least above the expression of genuine emotion. But sitting in a molded plastic chaise longue on the roof deck of Amira’s house, Julie watched as her neighbor gasped and brought her hand to her pretty bow of a mouth.

  “But this is terrible news,” she said. “You’re being abandoned again.”

  The words, which should have stung, passed over her.

  It was a sunny day and the water was sparkling in the harbor below. About ten minutes earlier, Amira had lit up a joint. “I won’t ask if you want any,” Amira had said, “because I know you are now one of the eighteen people in the country who don’t smoke.”

  “Try me,” Julie had said, and when Amira had passed her the joint, she’d inhaled eagerly. Hello, old friend, she’d thought as a wave of forgetfulness rolled in. Where have you been hiding?

  There was too much to take in, too much disappointment and sadness and deep regret about things she couldn’t change. She supposed that one day she’d be angry at Henry about this, but for the moment she was almost relieved. He had told David the one thing that she had been trying to tell him for years but had lacked the courage to mention. Now she was back to a welcome state of bleary, false, fleeting peace. Someone in the neighborhood was practicing the piano again, and from up here, the soft music was blending with the reassuring sounds of children playing on the baseball field many blocks away. It was nice, in her current frame of mind, to be able to pretend it was a perfect late-summer afternoon.

  “I’d rather not think of it as abandonment,” Julie said. “I’d rather think of it as the inevitable end of David’s summer vacation.”

  “But now you can’t buy the house,” Amira said.

  “No,” Julie said. It was so much easier to say now that she was stoned. “I can’t. You’d better let Richard contact the pool people so they can start digging.”

  Amira pondered this for a moment as she tapped ash off the end of the joint. “I’m not going to let you smoke any more pot,” she said. “I don’t want to be a bad influence, and you were more alert when you were sober. I’m going to try to give it up, too. I can join a twelve-step group and tell my life story and find damaged boyfriends.” She flicked the joint off the edge of the roof with surprising vigor. “I’m also not going to let Richard buy the house unless he lets you stay there. He will do whatever I say.”

  Julie was touched by this, the most considerate thing Amira had ever said. But the truth was, she had infinitely less control over Richard than she had over her various lovers. Julie suspected that Amira, who knew she needed order in her life, had married him for this very reason: he couldn’t be bullied or manipulated.

  “Even if you could make him, I wouldn’t want that. I’ll be renting something for a year so Mandy can finish school here, and then I’ll buy a place in another town, one closer to work. I don’t want to have my old house looming above me every time I walk out the door. Or, even worse, watch it being knocked down.”

  “But David was supposed to rescue Mandy,” Amira said. “Now he can’t.”

  Amira’s English was flawless but occasionally fanciful. “Rescue” was a dramatic word, and in this case, Julie didn’t see the relevance.

  “He was supposed to help with her college applications, and he did. He’s promised he’ll do more of it from San Francisco. I can’t complain.”

  Amira lifted her round sunglasses from her lovely eyes, surveyed the horizon, and then put them back on. “If I see her on the steps of the library, I will let you know.”

  Mandy preferred to read her way through the books tucked into boxes and shelves around the house. As far as Julie knew, she hadn’t used her library card in ages. She mentioned this to Amira, but she ignored Julie’s comment. “And what about the clarinetist?” Amira asked. “Is he coming back anytime soon?”

  Julie had not explained the whole story of Raymond Cross’s wife to Amira, mostly because she feared that anything Amira would say about the situation would only make Julie feel worse—that she would be doing Raymond’s wife a favor by having sex with her husband or that once she was out of the picture, she could move in on Raymond. Julie had simply told Amira that it was over and had even stopped correcting her about the clarinet. At this point, it didn’t matter.

  “No,” Julie said. “My clarinetist is not coming back. We’re all just moving on.”

  Last week, he’d sent her an email with a file attached, which, when she downloaded it, turned out to be a piece of orchestral music she had never heard before—a little jazzy, a little cinematic. Perhaps it was something he’d written himself. She thought she recognized in it a melodic line that recalled the one he’d played for her that first night at the concert in Beauport. But she couldn’t be sure. He’d written nothing in the email, as if the sad, haunting piece of music said everything he needed to say. Maybe, when she thought about it, it said everything she needed to hear.

  44

  David had booked himself on a late-afternoon flight and had rented a car he planned to return at the airport. Julie had offered to drive him, but he preferred to say goodbye to her as he’d said hello two months earlier—at the house. She’d gone to school in the morning for a preliminary faculty meeting but promised him she’d be back before he left. He wondered if it might not be better for everyone if she got held up at school; they’d already said more than enough goodbyes over the years already. His rented car was packed. All he needed to do was make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

  He checked his watch and decided to walk through the village. Despite everything that had happened, he’d grown attached to it and was already feeling an ache at the thought of leaving it behind. It was easy to imagine that over time, his feelings about the past would change, and he’d come back here for a visit, perhaps an extended one, but it was equally easy to imagine he never would.

  He set off
down the hill toward town. It was hot again, but the heat at this late point in the summer had lost its edge; like a snowstorm in springtime, it wasn’t a harbinger of the season ahead, more of an aberration. He’d been looking forward to autumn in New England, but now he thought he might be better off missing it. Given his age, that particular season had too much metaphoric significance.

  Renata had sent him a series of photos of the apartment in Noe Valley, and it was just as she’d described it—brightly lit and outdated. It was indeed small. He could tell that right away because in the photos it looked large. Real estate photos emphasized the intimacy of sprawling rooms and exaggerated the size of small ones. Renata had also sent a photo of the couple renting the apartment, a dour pair that were a cross between an urban, homosexual American Gothic type and a couple of elderly priests impatiently waiting for cocktail hour. It was not going to be a rollicking life, he could see that, but then, rollicking had never been his forte. He was resigning himself to a quiet life, which he hoped would not turn out to be a life of quiet desperation.

  As he got close to Kenneth’s Kitchen, he decided to cross the street and avoid any possible confrontation. He stepped onto the crosswalk, but before he had a chance to cross, Kenneth called out to him: “You’re just going to avoid me altogether? Is that the plan?”

  David stopped, defeated, and turned around. Kenneth was standing in the doorway of his store, dwarfed by the shingled building around him, and, although dressed with characteristic care, somehow looking a little more worn than usual.