My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  “I’m afraid I was,” David said, approaching him. “I’m a bit pressed for time this morning.”

  “I know Elaine told you about the petition.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And you chose to take it personally? Like I’d done all that work to hurt you and your ex-wife specifically? Isn’t that a little egotistical?”

  He had his arms folded across his chest in battle mode, but his voice revealed genuine disappointment, and David had to admit that he had hurt Kenneth after all, despite his promise not to.

  “Things got busy and complicated up at the house.”

  “Something always comes up, doesn’t it?” Kenneth said with the touchingly forced dignity of a short man trying to make a stand for himself. “You should know that I’ve resigned from the committee and taken my name off the petition.”

  There was something gratifying in this, even if it was coming a little too late to mean much to David. “What made you change your mind?” he asked.

  “I suppose you’ll try to take that personally, too, but it didn’t have anything to do with you. It turns out that a third of the storeowners in the group had rooms listed on Airbnb. I’m not interested in hypocrisy. I’ve dealt with enough of it in my life already.”

  This reminded David again of the struggles that Kenneth seemed to have risen above, and he was touched once more by that most sympathetic quality of his, the very one he did his best to keep hidden—his vulnerability.

  “I apologize for not telling you this sooner, but I have to move back to San Francisco. I’m leaving for the airport soon. Once I get settled back into my life, I’ll call and explain what happened.”

  Kenneth eyed David closely, probably trying to figure out whether or not to believe him. “No you won’t,” he said. “You’re a tourist. Once a tourist leaves a tourist town it becomes a postcard in his mind and all the inhabitants become props. I’ll save us both a lot of trouble and block you on my phone. But just so you’ll know, I did have a nice time with you.”

  David started to tell him that he felt the same way, but Kenneth turned and entered his store before he had a chance.

  * * *

  He checked his watch again as he was trudging up the hill. He had enough time to make one more sweep through the rooms of the house before driving off. Cars were coming down the street at a crawl as they usually did: visitors were desperate to make the most of the scenic vista of harbor and open ocean and sailing boats that was now at his back. A van was taking up the rear in the line of cars, honking impatiently, a discordant note. Having reached the limits of his patience, the driver swerved into the wrong lane and sped past the other cars. As if there was anyplace to hurry to in this town.

  As the van passed, David recognized it as the one Mandy had been leaning into that day after his arrival. There were faded letters on the side partly hidden by grime. Once, they’d probably said something about computers, but now all that was visible was “MPUT.” The driver was flushed and scowling as he raced past. If this was the not-really boyfriend Mandy was working for in Hammond, it was not a good sign. As he continued up the hill, David guiltily felt relieved that all this was no longer his responsibility, not that it ever had been.

  “It’s not my problem,” he said aloud. He didn’t know why he needed to explain himself to himself, and then he recognized that he was excusing himself to that specific but nameless imaginary other who visited him from time to time. “I’m sorry if I’m disappointing you,” he said, “but I did the best for them I could.”

  As he was turning into the drive at Julie’s house, Amira stepped out from her own property, dressed for the beach in what appeared to be a close relative of the white bathing suit Elizabeth Taylor had worn in Suddenly, Last Summer. She had a colorful cloth wrapped around her waist, a surprising nod toward modesty. She looked more harried than usual, but announced, in her typically ironic tones, that she’d heard David talking to himself.

  “Really?” he said. “Was I saying anything interesting?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t usually listen to other people, especially when they’re about to move away to a place that I wish I was moving to instead of staying here in hell.”

  “I’ve come to the conclusion, Amira, that you like Beauport about as well as you’d like anyplace. Which is to say, a lot more than you like to admit.”

  “Yes, the sad truth,” she said. “I’m easy to please. So humiliating.” She hugged him goodbye and waved as she walked off.

  “And that,” David said aloud as he turned into the drive, “is the best I can do for her.”

  He paused on the lawn and looked at the house one last time. There under the eaves was Mandy’s room, one window open with the curtains blowing out, the other stuffed with an air conditioner. He headed up the stairs and then went back to the lawn and looked up. It was a new air conditioner in Mandy’s window, spotlessly clean and installed with professional brackets to keep it in place. She’d complained that her air conditioner was noisy, but when had this come into the house and how had she paid for it? More to the point, why hadn’t she mentioned it?

  He jogged back to the sidewalk. By the time he reached Amira, he was winded.

  “Can I ask you one thing?” he said, puffing.

  “You can ask me anything as long as you do not require a serious answer.”

  He paused until he’d caught his breath. “Were you having computer problems today?”

  She raised her thin, pretty eyebrows and said, “You must be psychic. I am impressed.”

  “I saw a van leaving, and I thought maybe he’d been at your house.”

  “Yes, a handsome man with eyes out of a lunatic asylum. Just my type usually, but I’m afraid too stupid to fix my problems. I can’t give my lessons, so I am going to the beach instead.”

  Lessons? The idea that Amira was working was so distracting, David forgot the urgency he’d felt a minute earlier. “What kind of lessons?”

  “On Skype. Language lessons for international refugees. And do not look so shocked. I am not as stupid and vain as I like people to think. I have convictions and a desire to help. Mainly help myself, but sometimes others as well. But please don’t tell anyone. I prefer they think I am just a courtesan. You get more respect if people think you are doing your best with what you have instead of choosing not to use most of what you were given.”

  “So he wasn’t able to help you?”

  “No, and on top of that he insulted me terribly, David. He made an ugly, filthy suggestion.” She adjusted her sunhat and the shadow across her face moved. David saw that she was genuinely upset. “He asked me, if you can imagine, if I wanted a job! Someone who looks like me and lives in a house like mine is seeking employment? I threw him out.”

  “Yes, it’s outrageous,” he said, trying to make sense of these pieces. “What kind of job?”

  “He has models in his basement showing their bodies and talking dirty to a bunch of pathetic old men. He told me I could make a hundred dollars an hour doing it. The nerve. To be honest, it is something I could imagine doing, but at that price? If Richard is worth a quarter of what he claims, I will have made more than that a minute once he dies, even if he lives until ninety.”

  “I don’t suppose he gave you his business card?”

  She burst out laughing at the suggestion. “Do you think he would have one? Look him up on your phone. ‘Craig’s Computers’ in Hammond. Even the name has no imagination.”

  He thanked her and kissed her goodbye. “I should hurry,” he said, although he realized as he was saying it that he was probably already too late.

  The look Mandy had given him the night of the dinner and the seductive way she’d touched her hair came back to him as he drove into Hammond. It’s always the small gestures that give people away as they’re occupied with carefully trying to hide the bigger ones. According to what Julie had told him, he’d given himself away merely by laughing with Antrim in the kitchen of their apartment.

&nbs
p; The traffic into Hammond was slow with sightseers and lines of cars waiting to get to the beach. He decided he had to call Renata to tell her. Changing his plans yet again would probably infuriate her, but at least he could make sure she wasn’t waiting for him at the airport.

  “I hope you’re driving to Logan,” she said. “That airport is hopeless. Leonard and I missed our flight out last time we went for a parents’ weekend. Thank god Teddy is graduating next year.”

  “I’m driving,” he said, “but not to the airport. Unfortunately, something came up, and I had to cancel my reservation.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, a rarity when talking to Renata.

  “Are you there?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, I’m here. Were you expecting some explosive overreaction? I’m not about to give you the satisfaction, David. For once in my life, I’m going to maintain my composure. The braided academic will take the apartment, so it’s irrelevant. As an added bonus: no need for me to drive to the airport in Friday traffic. It all works out for the best.”

  “There’s a situation here, I’m afraid, and I have to attend to it. I’ll let you know when I’m coming back.”

  “Do that. Of course, if you want me to hire movers to clear out the carriage house and put your treasure in storage, I’d be delighted.”

  “I should go,” he said, but Renata had already hung up.

  David pulled into a dark little neighborhood of small, fenced houses behind the downtown center of Hammond. According to his phone, he was 120 feet from Craig’s Computers.

  45

  There were certain periods in the day when business spiked and other moments when it went into a lull. Mandy figured this was probably an indicator of human nature on one hand and office productivity in general on the other.

  For instance, she’d noted that on Fridays, business started to go up around noon, a sign that people were beginning to act as if their weekends were officially under way. Casual Fridays, indeed. She supposed it also meant that the men who visited the site were preparing for the weekends they’d spend with their wives and kids by first chatting with her. Some of them even referred to plans to go away for the weekend or on a family camping trip and then told her what they’d do if they could spend the weekend in a tent with her instead. It was lucrative once she got them talking, but there was something basically sad in it. Sad for the wives and kids, and sad for the men who were stuck in a life they weren’t truly committed to and didn’t appear to like all that much. More recently, she’d begun to realize that all of it said something sad about her, too, but why bother going there?

  The most depressing time of the week was now—late Friday afternoon. This was when the number of men online began to slowly drop as people turned off their computers. It made her feel as if she was being left in this dank basement. The men had places to go, even if they didn’t like where they were headed.

  That was why, ordinarily, she made sure she was home by now. But since David was leaving, she didn’t want to be around for the big goodbye. She was too angry with him, even if she knew the anger didn’t make a lot of sense. She’d asked him to come to Beauport, and he’d come. He’d helped get her father less worried about the college thing, had helped her mother tidy up the house, and now he was leaving. That had been the deal all along, so what right did she have to complain if he’d changed his mind about staying?

  She couldn’t completely put her finger on it, but if she had to guess, she’d guess that she was upset that he, like the creepy men she talked to, had somewhere else to go and was going, while she was stuck. Even though she often found the men she talked to awful in different ways—they probably all hated women, and a few had made racist comments about singers or the Obamas—she sometimes felt a flicker of jealousy when they signed off. As if they were abandoning her. The way David was abandoning her and her mother.

  She was, at the moment, making zero money, not a huge surprise since she was basically sitting there staring off into space. Who’d pay to see that?

  The worst of all her inconsistent and contradictory feelings was that she’d tried to hide what she’d been doing from David, billing it as a receptionist job or whatever he got from her vague comments, and now she resented him for not challenging her on it, for not realizing that she had been lying. For not—why try to kid herself?—rescuing her.

  According to the time on the computer, David would have left the house by now, would be on his way to the airport, or maybe was already there. It would be painful to walk into the house and walk past his tiny room and see it empty. He was so OCD about making everything tidy, she knew that the room would be spotless and the bed made and all his clean towels back in the locked linen closet.

  What she really hated to picture was him getting on the plane and putting on his seat belt and sitting back as the plane lifted off and all of this summer, including her and her mother and Opal, fell off into the insignificant distance.

  In the weeks she’d been coming to this house, she’d felt as if she was coming to an isolated island. This despite the fact that it was surrounded by houses on all sides. Craig liked to keep the shades down and the curtains pulled. Once, when she’d been in the kitchen getting water, she’d opened a shade to look out. He’d come in from the other room and pulled it down.

  “What’s wrong with a little sunlight?” she’d asked. “It’s good for you.”

  “I guess you haven’t heard that it causes skin cancer plus destroys your immune system.”

  Whatever.

  After all this time thinking about this house as its own isolated world, it was so strange to hear loud knocking, she at first didn’t realize what it was. She thought it was a sound coming from one of the neighboring houses. She’d heard the couple in the house behind fighting one day and had heard a pizza being delivered somewhere else.

  When she realized it was coming from upstairs, she froze in front of the computer. What was she supposed to do now? What if it was the police? Craig was constantly bragging that what he was doing (or more accurately, what she was doing) was perfectly legal, but who knew if that was true.

  The knocking stopped. Just as well. Probably a religious nut with pamphlets.

  Then she heard rapping, this time at the back door. It was amazing how much personality a sound could have. This wasn’t the police—it wasn’t forceful enough—but it was too loud and insistent to be the Seventh-Day Adventist people. Craig was due home soon, but he wouldn’t be knocking.

  Her instinct was to ignore it, but somehow she could tell it wasn’t going to stop.

  She went up to the kitchen quietly, or as quietly as she could on the old stairs. The person outside must have heard her, for there was a pause.

  She walked halfway to the door and called out, “Who’s there?”

  “Mandy? Open the door, please.”

  The red-and-blue warning signal started flashing and then stopped. He’d never been a threat to her. “David?”

  “Open the door, Mandy. I want to talk to you.”

  Craig had said he’d be back by now, but he was always later than he said he’d be. And more important, David ought to be long gone.

  She pulled back the curtain on the door and looked out. He was staring straight at her through a pair of aviator sunglasses. Not angrily, but with determination.

  “I thought you left a long time ago,” she said.

  “Obviously not. Open the door, Mandy.”

  There was something so disorienting about seeing David, someone she thought of as a part of her real life, standing outside this house, that she realized all of this—coming here, chatting in the basement, doing what she’d done with Craig—had felt like it was happening to someone else, or maybe wasn’t happening at all.

  She swung the door open, and a hot breeze from the ocean blew in, dispersing the smell of grease and ancient cigarettes that she’d become so used to by now, she barely noticed it anymore. He hesitated for a moment and then took off the glasses a
nd walked in.

  “Why are you here?” he asked her.

  “I told you. I’m working at this guy’s computer company.”

  His eyes scanned the kitchen and the living room beyond, and she saw what he was seeing—a dirty kitchen in a shabby house, a dining room cluttered with salvaged computer parts that might as well have been recovered from a building collapsed by an earthquake. Altogether, the least plausible computer company on planet Earth.

  “I never said it was Microsoft. And I thought you were leaving for the airport.”

  He was wearing worn green corduroys and a dress shirt, and he looked tall and authoritative in this little kitchen. Also, like a completely different man from the one she’d met in June.

  “I had a change of plans,” he said. He pulled out one of the yellow vinyl kitchen chairs, the one patched with red duct tape. “Why are you here, Mandy?” he asked again. He sat down at the table calmly, making it clear he wasn’t leaving until she answered. The question had a bigger meaning to it, one that couldn’t be answered by insisting she had a job. Why was she here? To answer that, she’d have to tell him so many things.

  “Why did you change your plans?” she asked.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I know. It’s a distraction.”

  He started to tap his fingers on the table, waiting.

  “Craig will be back any minute,” she said.

  “Good. I’m dying to meet him. We have a lot to talk about.”

  “He’s not a big talker.”

  He stopped tapping and folded his hands on the table. “You don’t have to be doing this, Mandy. You do realize that, don’t you? You’re too smart and too young and too full of other possibilities.”

  She heard his disappointment in her, and it sparked her own disappointment in herself. It was building up behind her eyes.

  “Everyone does stupid things in their life,” he said. “I’ve done more than my share. You can’t undo this any more than I can undo my marriage to your mother. But you can stop right now. I’m not going to ask you for details, because honestly, I’d rather not know. But I want you to understand that you don’t need to be doing this.”