I smiled. I wouldn’t want to speak ill of the dead, and I met Brian’s father only once, on the very formal and uneasy occasion of our postnuptial tea, but I had to agree with Brian. Any communication technique that Arthur Oliver would have disapproved of was probably a good idea.
And hearing that Brian was concerned enough about saving our marriage to actually read “touchy-feely” books on the subject impressed me. Lanie, of course, would have told me that it was just another piece of maneuvering on his part, another deception, but I didn’t think so. Saying he was sorry was easy enough. People say they’re sorry all the time, even when what they really mean is that they’re sorry they got caught, or sorry that they’re being put in a situation where they’ve been forced to apologize. Apologies cost nothing. But taking responsibility for your actions comes at a price. It’s not about what you say; it’s about what you do.
Brian was here. He was trying. I had to give him points for that. I put one elbow on the table and rested my chin in my hand. It was my listening posture. I wanted him to know he had my full attention.
“Here’s how it works. You’ll talk, and I’ll listen. Wait,” he said, holding up his hand to interrupt my forthcoming interruption. “There’s more to it. You talk about your life from birth through age five—anything that comes to mind at all—for twenty minutes. And I listen. I don’t comment or ask questions until you’re finished. And then we trade sides and repeat the process—I’ll talk and you listen. What do you think?”
“You want me to talk about my life up until I was five? For twenty minutes?”
He had to be kidding. My memories of my first five years of life wouldn’t take two minutes to tell. I was born, my family lived in New Jersey, my father worked at a job he hated, my mother was bitter, and they fought constantly, agreeing about only two things: that life had cheated them and that I should grow up and go to Princeton. That was it—the first five years of my life. The rest of my growing-up years were pretty similar. Brian knew all that already. What was the point in repeating it?
“I know, I know,” he said. “I’m as skeptical as you are, but I was talking to Ian about it and he says that it works. When he and Pamela were having some problems, their therapist recommended they get the book and work through some of the techniques on their own. He said they were very effective.”
“You talked to Ian?”
That surprised me. It really did. Ian and Brian had been rivals back in their days at Harrow. When Ian left England and moved to New York, married well, and found a high-paying job on Wall Street, the two men, bound by a common history and nationality, became friends—of a sort. Every time we went to dinner with Ian and Pamela, which, thankfully, wasn’t more than twice a year, the men spent most of the evening engaged in a quiet and very British game of one-upsmanship, subtly dropping names and hinting at their accomplishments. But they never, ever discussed their failures or fears. It was hard to imagine Brian allowing Ian to see a chink in his armor. Almost as hard as it was to imagine him canceling his travel for a month.
He was trying. He truly was.
“You told Ian about us? That I’m living up here?”
“I didn’t go into specifics,” Brian assured me. “I simply told him we were having some marital issues. A few years back, when we went to that party at his house to watch the World Cup final and he’d had a few too many, I remembered him saying something about he and Pamela having gone to a marriage counselor, so I just asked him if he knew of anyone good. That’s all. It’s not like we’re the only people on earth who have problems, you know.” Brian stared at his plate, separating the croutons from the salad and shoving them to one side.
“I know,” I said, taking a sip from my wineglass. “I was just surprised to hear you’d spoken to him.”
“Well.” Brian shrugged. “I figured it was worth asking. He said he could give me the name of the therapist if I wanted but thought that working through the book might do us just as well. And be far less expensive.”
“Ah, yes.” I smiled. “Trust Ian to think of that.”
“Right. Have you noticed that people who bring down seven-figure annual bonuses doing nothing terribly useful are the first to whinge about the exorbitant salaries of the lesser mortals?” Brian speared a lettuce leaf. “All the same. It can’t hurt to try. Shall we? Ladies first.”
I took off my watch, making a joke about not wanting to go beyond my time, and laid it on the table near my empty plate. And then, after lifting my glass to my lips and taking a final swallow of wine—a swallow, not a sip—I started talking.
I began, as I always did when anyone asked about my childhood, with the Princeton Tigers pennant that my parents hung on the nursery wall even before I was born. That pennant is part of our family apocrypha, a story that my parents told regularly, a symbol of their unshakable faith in my intelligence and promise. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I realized the story was less about me than them, that what it really represented was their personal determination as parents and individuals, the weight of their expectations, and their absolute need to make their lives count for something.
Why Princeton? I honestly don’t know. Except that it was located in New Jersey and that the president of the company where my father worked for thirty-eight years, years that never saw him rise above the ranks of lower-middle management, had sent his son there.
“See that?” he said, pointing to the television screen when I was about four, as we watched a montage of campus buildings during a sportscast about a recent Princeton football victory. “That’s where the bigwigs go to school. That’s where you’re going.”
I knew that, of course. I had always known that. And I was on board with it. I wanted to be a bigwig. Who wouldn’t? And I wanted to make my parents proud.
I told the rest of the story, about my parents’ arguments, about my mother’s resentment about the size of their house and the fact that it was a “man’s world,” and about the time she made me solemnly promise never to learn how to type because if I did, I would spend the rest of my life doing it. I told him all of it, though he’d heard it all many years before. But my memories weren’t all bad, and my parents weren’t always unhappy.
I told him about summer vacations in Atlantic City, riding the roller coaster on the boardwalk with my mother five times in one day, and how she had insisted that we ride in the front car and told the operator we would stand aside and wait for the next run so we could have our preferred spot.
I told him about our Christmases—my parents loved Christmas—and how Dad would drive eighty miles to the same tree farm in Pennsylvania year after year, cutting the tree himself, the biggest he could find, so big we had to set it up in the foyer of our little Victorian house, because that was the only room tall enough. I told him how we had to stand on ladders or climb the stairs and hang over the banisters to get the decorations on the upper branches.
And I told him about the huge storm when I was five, the one that dumped close to three feet of snow in less than a day and knocked out power to the whole town. I told him about how Dad had pulled the sofas close around the fireplace and then hung quilts and blankets behind them, using pushpins to suspend them from the ceiling, making a kind of fabric den to keep the heat in, and how we had lived in that little den for most of the three days that followed, playing board games, reading aloud, cooking hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks over the fire, pretending we were camping, and how my parents had not had one fight during that entire time—not one! And how I had opened my eyes one night, stirring momentarily from sleep, and seen my father and mother lying together in front of the fireplace under a blanket, nested together like silver spoons wrapped in felt, staring into the flames, and how my father had stroked her arm with his hand, up and down, over and over again, very gently, and pressed his lips into her hair, kissing the crown of her head.
“You never told me that story before,” Brian said when I was finished.
“Didn’t I? Maybe not. I
haven’t thought about it for a long time.”
We talked a little more about my childhood, about why my parents had waited so long to have me, and why there were no other children after me. I didn’t know the answers. I assumed that my status as an only child had something to do with my parents’ ages—Mother was thirty-three when I was born—but who knew? These things were not openly discussed in our home.
It was the same for Brian, I knew. Though when it came to taboo subjects in the Oliver household, fertility and sex were just the tip of the iceberg.
“Basically, we didn’t talk about anything personal. It was acceptable to discuss what you’d done but not how you felt about it. Weather was always the first topic of discussion. I can’t think why,” he said in a bemused tone, “there was so little to discuss. It was always either raining or threatening rain. While you were sunbathing on the Jersey shore and riding roller coasters with your mother, my brother and I took ‘bracing’ walks in the rain with Father, who would share his observations about how exposure to warm climates led to indolence and widespread social decline. He had a theory that access to inexpensive transportation, the ability of ordinary people to go on holiday abroad to places like Spain and Italy, marked the beginning of the decline of the British Empire.”
“Wait a minute.” I laughed. “Vacations in sunny Spain brought down the empire? What about all those incursions into other continents? The whole colonization thing? India has a pretty hot climate, too, you know. So does Africa.”
Brian shook his head, feigning seriousness. “Different situation entirely. The people who went to India and Africa were soldiers, disciplined, driven by duty.”
“Ah. I see. But what about—”
Brian leaned across the table. “You’re not following the rules,” he informed me. “No questions until I’m finished.”
“Sorry.”
“Right. Now, where was I?” he asked, nudging his wineglass to the edge of the table, making it easier for our waitress, who had appeared from nowhere, to refill it. “Oh, yes. According to Arthur, the sight of all those happy people lolling about in cafés on a fine Mediterranean afternoon, instead of spending their days nose to the grindstone, bred dissatisfaction among the working classes and was directly related to the rise of socialism.”
Brian paused, taking a test sip from his newly filled glass. I lifted my hand to a spot near my ear, as if asking for permission to speak, though I didn’t wait for it to be granted. “Hold on. These were the discussions you had with your father between birth and age five? Now who’s breaking the rules?”
“Point taken,” he said, setting down his glass. “I don’t remember when he first started discussing his theories with us, but probably not as early as that. Though he may have. The point I was trying to make is that it was permissible to talk about externals, like the weather, or sport, or world affairs—as long as it wasn’t too controversial—or history. Especially the history of the Oliver family—the more ancient, the better, since we’d seen our peak well before the Protestant Reformation. But it wasn’t acceptable to talk about ourselves or people we knew in anything but the most detached manner. And under no circumstances was it permissible to express or display strong emotion.
“I remember once—I must have been about five—that I wanted to go see Mary Poppins at the local cinema, but my parents wouldn’t let me. I think Father may have objected to a classic British book being brought to the screen by an American company. In any case, I wasn’t permitted to go. We were eating lunch, and I was very angry about that, so I started kicking the table leg, harder and harder. I suppose I was trying to get some sort of rise out of my parents, but it didn’t work. After a few minutes, Mother simply removed me from the table and made me go sit in a chair in the hallway. I was still angry, so I started to sing as loud as I could.”
He screwed his eyes shut, a smile on his lips, and said, “Can’t remember all the lyrics anymore, but I remember that the chorus said something like . . .
Mary Poppins, what a lark,
Flew Jane and Michael to the park,
But all that I can do is bark,
And I shall bark until it’s dark,
While I wait for Mary Poppins,
Oh when, oh when, oh when shall I see Mary Poppins . . .
He opened his eyes and laughed to himself. “Not much of a rhyme scheme, eh?”
“Pretty good for a five-year-old,” I said. “Was that the first song you wrote?”
Brian tipped his head thoughtfully to one side and dabbed his lips with the edge of his napkin. “You know, I think it may have been. If my parents would have realized what they were unleashing, they might have just let me go see the damned film.”
“Then I’m glad they didn’t. Otherwise, you might never have found your musical voice.”
“Perhaps not,” he murmured, the bow of his lips flattening to a line. “Though it wouldn’t have been any great loss to the world if I hadn’t.”
I was about to say that it would have been a great loss to me, but given the circumstances, it didn’t seem quite an appropriate comment.
The waitress had quietly and discreetly cleared our salad plates at the end of my monologue. After that, aside from continuing to make sure our wine- and water glasses remained full, she let us alone, either out of respect for the intensity of our conversation or perhaps just because it was Saturday night, the restaurant was full, and the kitchen was running behind. Finally she brought the entrées—rack of lamb for Brian and diver scallops for me—and then disappeared.
Brian picked up his fork, looked at my plate, and frowned. “She brought you the wrong entrée.”
“No, she didn’t. I ordered scallops.”
“You don’t eat scallops.”
“It’s not that I don’t,” I said. “It’s just that I haven’t. Until today. As long as I’m up here, I thought I might try an experiment of my own.”
I explained about the sabbatical, how the phrase I’d tossed out as a smokescreen to overly inquisitive locals had, upon further reflection, started to seem like a pretty good idea.
I told him about my ill-considered and blessedly brief attempt to master trampoline Zumba, a story he enjoyed, and my newfound quilting circle, which he approved of, saying he thought it would be good for me to make some new friends. For a moment, I thought he was about to add “some friends besides Lanie” to that remark, but if so, he restrained himself, which was probably a smart move. And I told him about the quilting itself, which he seemed to find interesting.
“What a great idea,” he said. “You really need an artistic outlet.”
I couldn’t have agreed more, but something about the way he said it seemed a little patronizing. Of course, I reminded myself, he was just trying to be agreeable, but maybe that was the problem. Maybe he was being a little too agreeable, trying a little too hard, and I thought, maybe things were going just a little too well. Was it really supposed to be this easy? Was a nice dinner together, or even a few, and the unearthing of some nearly forgotten memories supposed to make up for the fact that he had slept with somebody else? Maybe in his mind it did.
He said that the encounter, the affair—no, let’s call it what it was—the sex with that woman, that Deanna, meant nothing to him. And I could just about believe him, but it didn’t mean nothing to me, and wasn’t that what counted? I was the injured party here. I was the one called upon to make the magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, but really, was that fair? At the end of the day, what was this costing him? Not much. Not in comparison to what it had cost me—the humiliation, the heartbreak, my lost sense of self. And what it would continue to cost me if I stayed in the marriage—the fear that it could happen again, a fear that might fade in time but that I doubted could ever be erased completely.
Was that a fair trade?
My mood darkened alongside my thoughts, but Brian didn’t seem to notice. He was talking, cutting his lamb into bites and dragging it through the sauce, ruining the careful design of c
urlicues and dots that artfully decorated his plate, a design that someone in the kitchen had spent a long time creating, and saying that he thought it was good I was getting a rest, that I had been working too hard ever since I’d opened the business, and that a sabbatical was a brilliant idea.
He was trying so hard to be nice, to be agreeable, to appease me.
Did he think it was that easy? From the look on his face, I could see that he did. A few more dinners like this, a call to the florist, maybe a trip to the jeweler’s, and all would be forgiven.
Screw him.
That’s what I wanted to say—to scream, really. Screw you! And then, quite possibly, to flip over the table, scattering the cutlery, breaking the dishes, and shattering the glasses, giving him a chance to experience chaos firsthand, to figure out how to handle the embarrassment and aftermath of an irrational act he’d never seen coming.
Crazy, right? That kind of impulse? Completely crazy. Completely unlike me. An impulse that no one who knew me, not even me, would ever believe I was capable of giving in to. And I didn’t. But I imagined doing it, and that was frightening enough. What was wrong with me?
It was like I was right back at the beginning, feeling just as irrational and out of control and broken as I had on that first day. I felt like I wanted to punch someone, him, her, or even the strangers sitting around us in the restaurant innocently enjoying plates of lamb chops and rubbery, fishy scallops that tasted just as nasty as I’d always thought they would.
I hated them. I hated everything. I hated Brian most of all.
Stop! Stop right now. You’re acting crazy. And unfair. He’s being nice; what’s wrong with that? He’s apologized—more than once. What more can he do? What more do you expect him to do?
I didn’t know. I really didn’t. But . . . more. More than he was doing now, though I had no concept of what more looked like or when more would become enough. But after a moment and with superhuman effort, Rational Me, the Gayla I recognized, wrestled the reins from Crazy Me.
Apart at the Seams Page 19
