The Real Liddy James

by Anne-Marie Casey

  He lay down and she picked up her magazine, flicking the pages loudly, which always drove him crazy, but he fell into a deep sleep and she could not even niggle at him. She sat very still and tried to breathe slowly, but the pain that had entered her chest seemed to ripple through her whole body. She told herself to calm down. She knew better than most people how random hurts fuel the fires of discontent, and the most dramatic marital conflagrations can start over laundry or the school run. But she also knew there was a fundamental problem at the heart of her relationship.

  Peter didn’t love her anymore.

  This was a quiet and bloody realization in the stillness of a starlit Caribbean night.

  She walked out onto the balcony. It was impossible not to remember when they had stood together in the same place, arms around each other, full of hope and love, staring into the black sky and searching for the Milky Way.

  Oh the disappointment!

  “It’s over,” she said out loud, but quickly bit back the words in case saying it might make it happen, like in a novel of magic realism, although in such a novel there would be external drama too, another hurricane, certainly a flying coconut or two.

  Reassuringly, the weather was balmy and the waves lapped rhythmically, on and on. Liddy relaxed. They would go on too, she would make sure of it; she did not believe in divorce, particularly where children were involved, and she had sat through enough mediation sessions to absorb the message that if you want to change something, the only person you can change is yourself. She had no doubt she had become blinkered and boring. What she needed was to have some fun.

  In the hotel a band had started playing and she found herself swaying in time with the irrepressible reggae beat. She wondered what it would be like to hang out barefoot in the bar with people who were young and stayed up late. And she wanted another drink, not a glass of wine that tasted metallic in the heat, but a large cocktail with a straw, one that she could gulp down.

  She stuck her head back into the cottage.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said.

  Half-asleep, Peter rolled onto his side.

  “Don’t be too late, my love.”

  She strolled along the beach. She felt an intoxicating sense of freedom and she actually broke into a run, kicking the water as it slid over her feet. When she stopped and threw herself onto the sand to rest, she became aware of a gentle splashing in the distance. A ghostly figure was swimming in the black sea. She craned her head forward, peering into the darkness, and then the figure emerged and walked toward her waving hi.

  It was the alarmingly attractive surf instructor, six foot five with muscles in perfect proportion, his wetsuit rolled down over his impressive torso, glistening with sea salt. Liddy stared. She could not help herself. Across his entire chest crawled a vivid tattoo of a serpent, an image of biblical horror, its jaws wide, its tail snaking up around his right shoulder.

  He said nothing as he held out his hand to her. He whistled very softly.

  ADVENTURES OF THE GUILT-FREE WOMAN: PART I

  It was a Saturday, the third in April, but from force of habit, Liddy blinked blearily awake at 5:30 a.m. Where am I? What’s happening? The habitual moment of disorientation in the darkness before she located herself. Liddy always woke up raw. She lifted up her eye mask, glanced at her watch. Noooo!!!! She collapsed back into her pillows in frustration.

  She stretched her fingers and wiggled her toes. She gave thanks she had made it through another week. Then she propped herself up on her elbows to search for Cal. As usual, he had left his room and crawled into the bottom of her bed during the night, where he now lay, snoring softly, a leg and an arm flung luxuriously over the edge.

  Liddy knew she should have stopped this years ago. Matty had been put in his “big boy” room by his father at an appropriate five months of age, but there was no point even pretending that her two sons were treated the same way. Cal was six years old today. Incredible. Six years that had sometimes crawled and sometimes sprinted by, but enough time for her to have forgotten what life was like without him. Sometimes when she woke in the mornings, she would find that he had wriggled up close to her, curling himself against her belly in a fetal position as if they had never been separated.

  Liddy closed her eyes. Her current morning meditation was to take a mental inventory of her whole body, encouraging her every muscle to liquefy; instead, she saw herself as a skeleton in a biology lab that had fallen off its hook into a crumpled heap of bones on the floor. She did not think this was a very positive image, but she was prevented from doing better by a plaintive canine yap in the distance. She swung one leg over the side of the bed, then the other. She pushed her weight onto her feet and pulled herself up to her full height. She turned slowly and precisely and walked like an automaton toward her marble and steel kitchen, straight past the exercise equipment she had dutifully left out the previous night (following the plasticized weekly planner meticulously dotted with a rainbow of differently colored symbols). She switched on the coffee machine Lucia had left prepared and glanced around at the huge picture windows, the white walls, and the rows of white shelves and cupboards. Six years ago, Liddy had used all the spare time she had for swatches and sample paint pots and silk rugs to create her new office; all she had wanted from her new home was a place in which to hang her print of City of Ambition, and acres of storage space in anticipation of the new life that would fill it.

  The cupboards and shelves were still empty.

  She clipped the dog’s lead onto its collar and, with the boys still fast asleep, hurried into the elevator. In the lobby the night doorman, an elderly Lithuanian with a literary bent, was sitting behind the desk reading Doctor Zhivago in the original. Liddy smiled as she passed.

  “It’s quiet out there,” he said.

  And indeed, Hudson Street at six a.m. was deserted, apart from the odd jogger or comatose body wrapped in a filthy sleeping bag in a doorway. This early Liddy always felt she was walking into the opening scene of a disaster movie, the morning after a nuclear explosion or an alien attack, but it was at these times that she loved the city best. She sniffed the early-morning smell of coffee grinds and damp spring air. She heard the distant chugging of the tugboats on the river, watched a stray cat chase a small bird behind a scrubby tree, and remembered that, once, Manhattan had been a place of fields and farms. This is my New York, she thought, for at that moment it seemed as if it had been created as a location for her alone. Meanwhile, the dog obligingly delivered a fulsome crap on the sidewalk just as a high-pitched whine signaled the slow progress of a garbage truck trailing broken cardboard boxes like tumbleweeds. Liddy hurled the plastic baggy into its back with devastating aim. She felt disproportionately pleased because she had not excelled at sports in her youth. But as she looked skyward and saw the looming clouds her spirits sank. There was a green tinge to their grayness that even someone ignorant of freakish weather could tell looked bad. She turned back to the apartment as a few slow, heavy drips of rain began to fall. She thought of Cal’s birthday at the Central Park Zoo that afternoon and hoped umbrellas were provided in the party package. She sighed. The capricious late-spring weather was just one of the phenomena that refused to accommodate the demands of her new schedule.

  Liddy had longed for Matty’s return for a very long time, but she had anticipated that it would create challenges. Her mistake was that she had imagined these challenges would be concentrated in the area of time management. One of the first things she had done after he moved back in was to pay for an hour-long consultation with her life coach. As instructed, she had printed the data off her customized Jawbone and organized her day planner for a “typical” weekday in some detail. Afterward, the life coach sent his bill and three suggestions (although not one of these suggestions was an alchemical formula for creating more hours in a day). Liddy dutifully put Matty into homework club, cajoled Lucia into extra hours on a Saturday, and w
ent from three to two blowouts at the salon every week. She also canceled her personal trainer’s visits to the apartment at 5:45 a.m. in favor of online sessions, but the life coach had warned against this. To assuage him, Liddy promised to have a massage once a month.

  But, unfortunately for Liddy, a planning and prioritizing session with a life coach does not of itself calm a resentful and disoriented adolescent, particularly one determined to make the point that he would rather be anywhere but here. For example, she discovered almost immediately that, contrary to Chapter 1 of her new book, she did care about homework and table manners. Matty, however, did not, something he communicated with an eloquence and vigor that was never to be found in his Mandarin compositions. When he was not arguing, he did not speak, and while this should have been a respite, the monosyllabic grunting drove Liddy so crazy that she would command him to address her in proper sentences. There would follow a day or so of elaborate responses to simple requests involving exaggerated syntax and referring to her as Mommy Dearest. Inevitably, Liddy would lose her temper and shout at Matty until he stopped. The first few times this made Cal cry. After that, he would sigh, put his hands over his ears, and disappear into his bedroom.

  Liddy’s superproductive existence was based on a foundation of micromanagement and monastic order—green smoothies, exercise, and rest. When home alone with Cal they both went to bed at eight o’clock, and as he snored softly in his room, she answered e-mails and caught up on paperwork. Now she was lucky if a cacophony of discord and door slamming resulted in Matty’s lights off at eleven, at which point, on too many nights, she poured herself a second glass of wine to face an hour or two of writing her book, and then poured a third to wash down the Ambien that might give her five hours’ sleep. And on stormy mornings like this one, due to traffic snarling in the rain-soaked streets, Liddy had to send Matty off in the car with Vince at 7:20 a.m., walk Cal to school, and then, after trying and failing to hail a cab, race to the subway. There was no audiobook together, no chatting about the day ahead, no quality time whatsoever. Just nerves jangling, organization in shreds, a bundle of unread briefs, and a large cup of coffee with three shots.

  Liddy’s capsule wardrobe had become exclusively black. She could not risk a catastrophic spillage on a white silk shirt somewhere between Grand Central and Fifty-ninth Street.

  She lifted Coco up and ran back into the building. They took the elevator up to the apartment. On a sunlit morning, the effect was of walking into a perfect series of illuminated squares across the length of the dark wood floorboards, like a chessboard or an eighties disco, but today the windows were dark and streaked almost black with grimy running water. It was like being stuck inside an armored vehicle in a car wash, an insistent percussive sound track playing too loudly.

  In desperation one morning Liddy had called Rose, on the pretext of confirming the time of a music lesson, and made a couple of oblique references to Matty’s “mood swings” in the hope of eliciting some information on how best to deal with him. Rose had appeared bemused and, while conceding that he was sometimes a bit grumpy in the mornings, told Liddy that this was all to do with the shifts in the prefrontal cortex of the teenage brain and it was not his fault at all. There was even a hint of a sob in her voice as she reminisced about washing his filthy soccer shirts, so Liddy quickly backtracked and told her everything was fine. But Rose was not quite finished.

  “Have you thought about the summer?” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  The thought of Matty’s long summer vacation with no school, no structure, and no plan to cover it was something Liddy had been uncharacteristically avoiding. For the last few years it had not been an issue; Rose had taken over apart from the two weeks in August when Liddy took the boys to a cabana with a personal butler in a luxurious, all-inclusive hotel somewhere. (She always paid for Lucia to come too. But when Liddy tried to insist that Lucia visit the hotel spa or treat herself in the lobby shops, Lucia demurred, preferring to roast lobster red by the pool, eating the croissants she had saved from the buffet breakfast. This reminded Liddy of her parents, until she remembered that Lucia was two months younger than she was.)

  “I don’t know yet,” Liddy muttered. “What do people do?”

  “Well, a lot of his friends go to camp,” said Rose disapprovingly. “And to be honest, last year he was begging to go, but . . .”

  Camp? Begging? Brilliant! thought Liddy, and as she had indeed heard gruff mutterings about a “totally sick” place in Vermont the previous night, she had ended the conversation abruptly, as if it had been Rose who had called in desperation and disturbed her.

  Now she emptied the large bucket collecting water from the roof leak and sat down at her desk. She pulled out her desk drawer, only to be greeted by a pile of brown bills, the letters marked URGENT from the bank, and three pairs of pajamas she had bought online that didn’t fit and she’d never had the time to return. She pushed it back in again. She reached forward to switch on her laptop, but her carpal tunnel flared as she moved her arm, and so, although she should have used this time for the tasks itemized on her laminated weekend to-do list (call building repair company about roof being at number one), she sat quite still and stared at the corkboard hung at her eye level.

  On it were pinned two photographs: a black-and-white snap of her parents, young and excited, standing proudly behind a large old-fashioned stroller in front of a small terraced house on a street in Dublin, Ireland, and a school photograph of Liddy aged about twelve, grinning, a broad stripe of pink gum across her oversized front teeth, above the hideous uniform of her Catholic middle school in Silver Lake. There was also a faded announcement card of Matty’s birth, a Polaroid of Cal’s twelve-week ultrasound scan, and a copy of the poem Desiderata by Max Ehrmann. She started to read, but suddenly the words became blurry, and Liddy’s head jerked forward at “sham, drudgery, and broken dreams.” She blinked herself awake, narrowly missing a collision with her keyboard. She considered how tired it was possible for a person to be and still be alive.

  She stood up. She went to the fridge and peered at the bowl of millet porridge the nutritionist had recommended and which she ate most mornings as punishment for abandoning her dawn exercise regime. Not this morning. She decided she’d rather be starving. She inflated six red balloons with 6 TODAY! on them and tied them to an exposed pipe. Then she sent herself back to bed. Two hours later she was awoken by Cal, singing lustily in a pure choir-boy soprano.

  “Happy birthday, baby!” she said as she rested her forehead against his. She watched him dress and then marveled at the advanced development of his motor skills as he climbed up onto a kitchen stool, poured himself some juice, glugged it down, and washed out the glass before putting it in the dishwasher.

  Liddy would never fully understand what had fired her desire to have unprotected sex with a stranger on the floor of the scuba shack (although the disappointment with Peter, the drunkenness, and the lure of the serpent tattoo counted for a lot). She had only discovered his name by calling the hotel six weeks after her return. The manager had sniggered and told her that the Surfing Guy had been dismissed the previous week for professional misconduct and left no forwarding address. “Several angry ladies are looking for him, so if you have any information . . .” he enjoyed announcing before Liddy hung up. It was the single moment of comedy in the high tragedy that followed.

  But from the moment she learned they had procreated, she knew it must be for a reason. She watched Cal, his blond hair framing his angelic face like a halo, and was reminded of how Rose, one of the few people who knew the truth, had talked of him as a golden child in a myth, like Helen of Troy or Hercules, born of an encounter between a mortal woman and a god (who had appeared as a force of nature). Liddy deflected all questions about his paternity, apart from clarifying that Peter was not his father, and although she had resolved to tell Cal in an age-appropriate manner whenever he asked, so far he had not. In the mea
ntime, she felt curiously comforted by Rose’s poetic explanation; Cal had somehow been conceived out of her own passion and energy by an event she could not control. And who could say his unorthodox entrance into the world had disadvantaged him? Cal was advanced intellectually as well as physically, and coursed through with Liddy’s genes. His first question on being shown a new game was always “How do you win?”

  “Where’s Matty?” he said now.

  Liddy tripped jauntily to the door of Matty’s room and tapped on the door, calling his name with an enthusiasm that even she felt was unconvincing.

  “Go away!” was the response.

  “He must have been up late on his computer,” said Liddy to Cal and the dog.

  “Huh,” said Cal wearily. “He’s add-ict-ed.”

  He trotted over to her, opened the door, and went straight in, clambering on top of his brother and staring into his face.

  “Wake up!” Cal said. “It’s my birthday!”

  Matty’s eyes opened and Cal leaned forward and kissed him before exploding into giggles. Matty growled in mock horror, then threw his arms around him and they rolled across the bed together.

  A pulse of love rose within Liddy. The sight of her sons at play never failed to move her, and it was not just that they were adorable together (although they were). Rose’s point during the “golden child” conversation was to suggest that having such a half-divine younger sibling might be hard on Matty (in fact, in a world where a child who wasn’t “gifted and talented” felt like a parental failure, Rose worried that Matty’s contented ordinariness and resolutely average grades bothered his extraordinary mother), but Liddy had retorted that it was an immeasurable gift to the two boys to have each other.