by Robin Black
He didn’t respond. Another minute passed by. And then another.
He didn’t want her to go.
“Ah.” I changed lanes for no reason. “I guess it’s more complicated than that.” He really was in love with her—or something like. “Okay. What do you need from me?” It was the question I had sworn I would ask if this day ever came. “What can I do to help make this better? And keep us together? Assuming that’s what you want. Maybe the two of us should stay in Cape Cod. If she can’t leave, maybe we should be the ones to leave. If you can’t bring yourself to send her away, maybe you could bring yourself to stay away. Until …”
But I had lost him, I could tell. His mind was elsewhere.
“Five years ago,” he said. “You told me, afterward, you told me that you had needed … all of it. That it was, I don’t know. It was part of a journey you were on. That it had felt necessary to you.”
“I don’t believe I said ‘journey.’ I don’t say things like ‘part of a journey.’ That doesn’t sound like me.”
“Let me finish, Gus. This is difficult.”
“It’s difficult all around, Owen. Just in case that’s lost on you.”
“I don’t want to sleep with her, Gus.”
“Oh, please.” The image, sudden, vivid, seared. “The hell you don’t.”
“I don’t mean I have no desire. I mean I don’t want it to happen. And it won’t. I wouldn’t. She wouldn’t either. But there’s something I need to see through. I don’t think we can fix this with geography … Not by sending her away or by our running off to Europe. Or the Cape—with my parents, for God’s sake. You’d last ten minutes. And anyway I don’t think that’s going to help here. I suppose what I’m asking you to do …”
“You’re asking an awful lot. If you’re asking what I think you’re asking.”
“When I stuck with you, Gus, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t know if you ever understood. It actually wasn’t possible. That’s how it felt. For longer than you know. I was doing something I wasn’t capable of doing … And you’re the one who told me this. That sometimes life demands things of you, that just the fact of being alive means allowing for possibilities that may be far from what you’d planned or even hoped.”
“God, I just wish she weren’t so young. I wish it weren’t such a fucking cliché.”
“She’s young, but she’s also not young.”
“Oh, please, Owen, spare me.”
“It isn’t her youth I’m …”
“Let me guess. It’s her wisdom. It’s her spirituality.”
“Gus, if you let me see this through, it will be all right.”
“If I let you see this through? What does that even mean?”
He was shaking his head. “It doesn’t mean sex,” he said.
“Really? Can you honestly tell me that her confession of her love left you unstirred? Was she wearing one of her semi-see-through shirts? And you’re telling me you felt no temptation?”
“No.” His answer came with a strange purity. “No. It did not leave me unstirred. And I did not feel no temptation. But I’m not going to sleep with her.”
“What is it you want, Owen? Exactly?”
“I have never regretted staying with you. Miserable as it felt. Impossible as it was.”
I already knew what he wanted.
“But you didn’t know I was having an affair,” I said. “You wouldn’t have given me your blessing for that. It was over. Long over.”
“Not that long over.”
“You wouldn’t have put up with a neighbor, for Christ’s sake. You’re asking me to sit by and watch it all unfold.”
“Nothing’s going to unfold.”
“You’re not going to fuck her, you mean. You’re not going to fuck her—you say. Or you are. You haven’t been in this situation. I have. It isn’t so easy just to decide it isn’t going to happen.”
“I am not going to fuck her. And I’m not going to tell her I wish I could. And I’ll tell her she has to not say those things to me anymore. I can shut the subject down.”
“Yet you just had to tell me, didn’t you? You couldn’t have, I don’t know, put this down to a foolish infatuation and left me out of it?” But even as I asked, I knew he had done the right thing.
“We agreed to this, Gus. This is the plan. Your plan, as I recall. This is how we protect ourselves, right? We see it through together. We accept that it’s impossible only to be drawn to one person for our whole lives. You told me that. That it isn’t possible. Not for everyone. So we take whatever steps necessary to work that fact into our marriage. And we stay together. But we allow for inconvenient feelings. We act like adults—and that one was your phrase, Gus. And I did it. I acted like an adult. I don’t know if you’ve ever understood how difficult that was for me. But this was your plan, Gus. So once she’d said that to me, I had to tell you.”
He was right. I had thought we could construct some kind of behavioral flow chart to protect ourselves. If this, then that. If that, then the next step.
“I’m afraid if she goes away, I’ll stop writing,” he said.
And there it was.
“So she’s your muse,” I said. “That self-satisfied little girl is your muse.”
“I don’t know what she is. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘muse’ in my life.”
“She’s what got you back writing again, isn’t she?” Unadulterated. The word flashed through my mind. Unadulterated adoration. My love had been adulterated. By adultery. Whatever claims I might make, whatever devotion I might profess, it would always carry within its DNA the memory of my choosing another over him. Nature abhors a vacuum. I had left room for such a woman in his life.
“It’s been so fucking long, Gus. Since I could get anything but total shit on a page.”
I knew exactly how long it had been.
“You’re going to want her, Owen. Sexually, I mean. It isn’t going to be enough, just the fun of feeding her your work. The excitement of that.”
“It isn’t like that, Gus. I promise you.”
We had reached another bridge, this one at Groton. “Has she read what you’re working on?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Oh fuck,” I said. “Fuck you, Owen. That’s just mean.”
“It’s not mean. It’s not meant to be mean. It’s … it’s just what I need right now.”
“And what will you need in a month?”
He sighed. He looked out his window and then he said, “Gus.” Just that. Not even to me. Not really. But as though I were a thing or an event or a phenomenon. As though I were a problem and maybe also a solution. As though I were a fact that he alone knew and understood, a secret belonging to him.
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“She isn’t going to hurt us. I just want to see this through.”
“You really aren’t going to fuck her?” I asked—though I wasn’t even sure that was the point.
“Truly not. Never.”
“So if I say, go ahead, spend time with Nora, let her stir your creative embers, let her play that role in your life, that’s really it?”
“That’s really it.”
“You’ll want to. You already want to.”
“I want other things more.”
“Don’t you feel just the least bit like a fool? It’s such a cliché.”
“I don’t know, Gus. Yes. Maybe. I’m writing again. That compensates for a lot of foolishness.”
“I don’t understand it, Owen. She’s religious. She believes in God. She goes to church. You’ve been scoffing at people like her for decades. We both have. Is it really just the prettiness? The young girl thing? And please don’t tell me you find her spirituality refreshing.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Gus. I couldn’t write. I began spending time with her. I could. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Maybe I am an old fool and it’s all … pathetic. I would rather be in a car with you for an eight-
hour drive. But … but she got me back to work.”
“Great. I’m the chauffeur and she’s the inspiration. Since you don’t like the word ‘muse.’ ”
“It’s not like I’m having an affair,” he said.
But it was. Or it was worse. Very possibly it was worse. I had long ago forfeited the right to say that, though. “It’s a kind of affair,” I said. “You might as well be fucking her,” I said.
“That isn’t true. And you know that isn’t true. Let’s test that theory. How about I sleep with her?”
“Jesus, you can’t even bring yourself to be crude about it. Is she that precious? How about you sleep with her?”
“The point isn’t what I call it. The point is, I’m not.”
“The point is … oh, hell. I don’t even know what it is. I’m pulling over. You drive. I’m a mess.”
On the shoulder, we each got out and then Owen got into the driver’s seat. But I stood outside the van in the cold. I couldn’t bear the thought of being back in that space with him. Cars whirred by. I looked up at the sky, light gray, relentlessly so, no break in the cover, no evident source of light.
I had no choice. I knew that. Owen knew that. He had done the right thing by telling me about her professed love—an event, I realized, that explained his sudden desire to leave home for a few days. He had done the right thing, but he had also done the hurtful thing. Here it was again. The fact that to be truthful can so often be both right and wrong.
And none of it mattered, not really. Because I had no choice but to agree.
“Whatever,” I said, as I stepped into the van. “Just don’t fuck her. And don’t tell me about how wonderful she is. Spare me that, please.”
We drove in silence for a very long time then. We crossed into Rhode Island, skirted through Providence. All in silence. We reached Fall River without our usual comments about Lizzie Borden and her axe. And when we spoke again, it was of other things, things like traffic patterns; and desolate New England towns; cranberry bogs in winter; and then his parents, of course. What dinner would be waiting for us in Wellfleet.
The empty Sagamore Bridge, so strange with no other cars in sight, seemed to have been built for us alone. I half imagined that if I turned around, I would discover it had disappeared.
By the time we reached Wellfleet, I had gone through a dozen or more moods. Rage. Disbelief. More rage. But when we pulled up to his parents’ house I was gripped by a strange elation. After all, what had I really learned? That she was in love with him? I already knew that. That he was inspired by her? Arguably, I had known that too. That she had read his new work? Only that was real news and it did sting, but it did something else as well. Whether he’d meant to or not, Owen had finally given me a chance to be generous to him. Maybe even a little bit noble. And at a cost that felt bearable to me, used to Nora as I was. And so by the time we got out of the van, I felt almost exhilarated.
This was by no means my usual mood when faced with a few days of Lillian and Wolf. Often, they made me feel inconsequential, like a sapling unlikely to thrive. Both tall, both lean, they exuded an identical unflagging energy, as though all those months and years of work in sun-beaten deserts had forged them into super beings. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The first time I met them the line had stuck in my head—as had the conviction that whatever had made them stronger would undoubtedly have killed me.
Wolf answered the door with a quiet greeting, Lillian calling out from the living room, just behind him. “Hello, hello, welcome … don’t take off your coats, because we’re headed right out.”
“Only if you don’t mind driving,” Wolf said. “Our car is in the shop.”
He hadn’t hugged either of us and neither did she as she emerged. That was one of their peculiarities. Not only the absence of physical affection—which I was used to in my own family—but the way they could greet us after ten months as though we’d just been over the night before.
“I’ll put on a coat,” Lillian said. “Though it’s never really cold anymore, which would be just fine with me if it didn’t signal the end of life on Earth.”
They were strikingly elegant still, in that way that has little to do with anything as impermanent as clothing or as vulgar as money but everything to do with bearing. She looked like Amelia Earhart might have had she lived long enough for her cropped hair to turn white, with permanently tanned yet barely lined skin, and those loose joints of her son’s, long limbs, easy motions. And even in his eighties Wolf too seemed like he’d be best suited standing beside some early-twentieth-century biplane, white scarf fluttering, blue sky beckoning—not to mention that his name was Wolf, which wasn’t short for anything, his official first (or Christian) name being Edward, but was a title, an honorarium, he had acquired in his youth for quests or conquests or hungers unknown by me. Fearless. Happy. They were adventurers. By nature and in fact, putting themselves in situations time and again throughout their lives in which terrible things might have happened and sometimes did—which meant they were quick to scoff at such irritations as our impatience with having to wait endlessly at every summertime traffic light on Route 6.
I handed Owen the keys. “Tag, you’re it,” I said. “I could use a few drinks.”
I asked if I could step in to use the bathroom and Lillian looked at me for a moment as though I had named an activity of which she was unaware, and then said, “Oh. Yes. Of course. We’ll all wait in the car.”
Years before, it had surprised me that they didn’t share our preference for the desolation of the Cape midwinter. I’d thought that having worked so much in empty spots, they would; but they were as sociable as Owen and I were not. They loved the six-month-long hubbub of summers up there, only tolerating the winter because they couldn’t afford two homes. Without the crowds and chatter, they worked on the seemingly ceaseless project of writing up all their adventures. Of that, they spoke little, but then, occasionally, a rather touching memoir piece would appear in a journal of archaeology and a copy would appear at our home—both their names listed as authors. And there were reams of typescript tucked into odd cabinets throughout their house, so though it wasn’t a topic of conversation it was a backdrop to every visit.
As were copies of Owen’s books—except the novel depicting Lillian as a young woman. At publication, her sole comment had been, “As fiction I’m surprisingly compelling,” a response that Owen took as a lavish compliment, given what she might have said. “It was an assumed risk,” he said. “The fact that she didn’t sue me for slander or royalties or inadequate filial affection is a landslide victory.”
The oddity of Owen’s ties to Lillian and Wolf—whom he too called Lillian and Wolf—had been a relief to me from the start. I’m not sure I could have married a man with the sort of mother I fantasized my own would have been, the nurturing, clucking sort, who would love me up—as Alison might say. But I rather enjoyed being the oddball daughter-in-law to a pair of distinctly non-parental characters who seemed to have wandered off the set of a Noël Coward play, brandy snifters in hand.
And they were good people, at heart. At our few early family gatherings, I feared that these university-affiliated archaeologists, authors of books and articles, shabbily elegant WASPs, might make my Jewish high school history teacher father feel somehow lesser. But there had never been a glimmer of that. Wolf had gone out of his way to express admiration for those who could translate what he called the mare’s nest of human civilization to youngsters. “There isn’t an archaeologist worth a damn,” he said, “who can’t still tell you about the history teacher who first made the past come alive.”
The only truly awkward moment we’d ever experienced was when we’d all gathered for a brunch for some occasion—maybe Owen’s fortieth birthday, a June event—and Lillian made a toast to my mother’s memory, then began to quiz my father on the ways each of his daughters did or didn’t remind him of her. He’d made a puzzled face as if to say it had never occurred to him to make any such c
onnection at all; and it was Letty, a usually quiet presence, who’d saved the day with an abrupt subject change, asking us urgent, out-of-context questions about whether we had any travel plans for the summer.
After that, Owen must have clued them in, because it never happened again.
Since it was one of very few restaurants open that time of year, the dark basement bistro was more crowded than one might have guessed from the quiet street. Everyone there knew Lillian and Wolf, which meant endless introductions and appraisals of the degree to which Owen looked like one or the other or, as was genuinely the case, both.
Once all of that settled down we had what was really our first chance to talk, and Lillian asked immediately after my father. I gave her the basic report, nothing good to report, nothing imminent either. As I looked at her face, etched deep by experience, by keen interest in the world, I wondered if she might understand the new and better relationship I had with my father now that he was no longer himself but a strange, scrambled version of a man I barely knew, full of surprises, short on rules.
The drinks flowed and the meal won us over with its simple, fine quality. I found myself thinking that life was a pretty good thing, right then. And I enjoyed, too, surprising Owen with my good spirits. Look, I can be the bigger person also. I can let you have an adventure, let you explore something outside the close of us.
We had sex that night in the tiny bedroom down the hall from his parents. It wasn’t sweet and it wasn’t particularly loving. We were both drunk by then, both unguarded and both hungry for connection. At one point when he was deep inside me, I said, “Are you really sure you don’t want to do this with her?” And looking right at me, he said, “I never told you that.” I wanted to hate him, maybe I did; but I could also barely stand the level of excitement that I felt.
“Fuck you, Owen,” I said, for the second time that day.
19
That whole trip turned into a kind of strange sex holiday. We behaved in ways we hadn’t for years. We got each other off in the van, parked in vast empty lots. We walked on the beach, then stopped to make out with his hands under my coat, under my sweater. It was as though a dam of some kind had broken, or maybe we just knew that if we didn’t find the molten core of what kept us together, we would have no chance once we returned home. Or maybe he was so pent up from wanting Nora that he had endless sexual energy for me; and I was turned on by his being so turned on. Or maybe it was just the sea air. But for four days we were in a kind of haze of carnality, his usually non-parental parents transformed into strangely parental figures in front of whom we tried to behave ourselves.
