by Kim Wright
Kelly smiles faintly. “I’m pretty sure they let divorced women into the Ben & Jerry’s.”
“When did the word ‘divorced’ get thrown on the table?” Nancy snaps. “They’ve had a little setback, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry about Pascal,” Kelly says.
“I just can’t,” I say, rubbing my eyes, “I can’t seem to remember why I married him.”
“Don’t drive yourself crazy,” says Belinda. “We all feel like that sometimes.” Nancy is running her finger around the rim of her wineglass.
“I’ve had a bad decade.”
“What you fail to understand, my dear,” says Kelly, “is that we’ve all had the same decade.”
We sit for a minute without conversation, just eating. Kelly signals to the server for another glass of wine. We all have a glass of wine when we meet somewhere nice for lunch and sometimes we have two, although this is rare, and I’m a little surprised at how fast Kelly has thrown down her first one. Belinda is near the bottom too. I haven’t touched mine and I look at it, pale in the glass, and wonder exactly what kind it is. I usually go first and then the others get whatever I’m drinking, but I was late today and someone else must have looked at the list.
The wine at lunch is one of our things. We’ll order four glasses but we would never think to order a bottle. Somehow drinking a bottle of wine at lunch seems completely different than drinking four glasses. There’s no numeric logic to it, but this is how we do things, one of the ways we hide from ourselves and each other how much we’re really drinking, that there are times—not too often, but maybe once or twice a year—when we have no business leaving these cafés and heading straight for the carpool line.
“You look pretty today,” Belinda finally says to Kelly.
“Thank you,” says Kelly. “We all look pretty.” And it’s true enough. Despite the palpable strain at the table, despite the fact that Nancy has wrapped herself like a mummy and my eyes are puffy and red, we are an attractive group of women. For all the good it does us.
“Those men sitting over there,” I say, pointing with my head, “why do you think they don’t look at us?”
Nancy shifts a little in her chair. “This isn’t exactly a pickup joint.”
“No, I know that. I know they’re not going to come up and start talking to us or pay for our lunch or anything like that. But why do you think they don’t even look at us?” The other women turn slightly in their seats, glancing at the men with extreme nonchalance. I’ve been buying stuff lately—calcium tablets and better bras and ergonomically designed bedpillows and the whole La Mer skin care line. Pointless gestures, futile attempts to hold back the inevitable. I see a horizon going narrow, hear a window slamming shut. “Time’s running out,” I say. “I’ll be forty next year. Anything that doesn’t happen to me right now, maybe it’s never going to happen.”
“Time isn’t running out,” Nancy says.
“Of course it is,” I say. “It’s time. What else is it supposed to do?”
“People go in and out of stages,” Nancy says, her voice a little singsong, as if she’s repeating something Jeff had told her. “Tory will grow up and she’ll leave and you and Phil will be in a whole different stage.”
“No. He’ll still be the same man. I’ll still be the same woman. I’m sorry to be like this, really I am, I’m sorry to ruin this lunch and all the other lunches that I’ve ruined through the years, but it’s true, and you all know it. I married the wrong man.”
“Elyse…” Kelly says.
“Excuse me,” Nancy says abruptly. She stands up, pushing her chair back with a squeal, and heads in the direction of the bathroom. I have a bad effect on Nancy. She’s always walking out.
“It’s hard on her when you talk like this,” Kelly says. “Jeff is so much like Phil.”
He is?
“You do at least get that, don’t you?” Kelly goes on. “If you leave Phil it’ll be like you left Jeff. It’ll be like you’re saying she should leave Jeff, and she doesn’t want to leave Jeff.”
“I never said she needs to leave Jeff.”
“You don’t have to say it out loud, it’s your whole philosophy of life. You think if a woman is smart that automatically means marriage is going to make her miserable.”
“She becomes disenchanted with the bourgeois life,” Belinda says. “Like Madame Bovary.”
It may be the one sentence she could have said that would shut both me and Kelly up.
“Yes… like Madame Bovary…” Kelly says, speaking slowly as she tries to regain her momentum. “So if you’re saying that the smarter a woman is, the more she’s going to resent her marriage, it only makes sense that the opposite is true too. If a woman is content, then she must be stupid, at least according to the world of Elyse.”
“You know the one thing I thought was funny in that book,” Belinda says. “Madame Bovary didn’t have any girlfriends.”
I take a gulp of my wine. Pinot Gris. “We all used to sit around…”
“Yeah,” says Kelly. “We all sat around and bitched about our husbands, we all bitched about our lives, and you bitched louder than anybody. That was sort of your job. But I didn’t really think you were going to do anything about it, Elyse. Nobody did. You’re scaring the shit out of people.”
“I know,” I say, and I really do know, and despite what everybody thinks, I’m sorry.
“Can I tempt you?” A server is pushing a three-tiered dessert cart toward us. It sways precariously on the cobblestone patio and she begins to point out items with her shiny black fingertips. “We have butterscotch crème brûlée, margarita mousse, berries in a Galliano broth topped with mascarpone and biscotti, grapefruit sorbet, chocolate pot pie with peanut butter ice cream…”
“Stop,” I say. I feel like crying.
“It’s obscene,” says Kelly.
“Or, if you’d prefer, Chef can make you a strawberry milkshake.” The server is young and very thin, and her hair is so blond that for a moment I have to avert my eyes. It’s like looking directly into the sun.
“Just bring us a sampler platter,” says Kelly.
“Great choice,” she chirps and teeters away, pulling the cart behind her.
Kelly gazes after her. “Jesus, it really is all too much sometimes, isn’t it? We should tell those guys at the next table to drag over their chairs and pick up a fork.”
“Do you think Madame Bovary would have gotten away with it if she’d had some girlfriends?” Belinda asks.
“I think Madame Bovary would have gotten away with it if she’d had a cell phone,” I say.
“Please,” Kelly says. “Don’t encourage her.” I’m not sure which one of us she’s speaking to.
“Actually, Belinda, you’ve got a point,” I say. “I didn’t even notice it, but Madame Bovary didn’t have any girlfriends.”
Nancy is back from the bathroom. It looks like she’s washed her face. “What did I miss?”
“We ordered a dessert sampler,” Kelly says. “And, oh yeah, Elyse is having some problems in her marriage.”
“It was your anniversary a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it?” Belinda asks.
I nod.
“Did you have sex?”
“Yeah. In the shower.”
“In the shower? You had that special shower sex where you were standing up? You gotta stop doing that, Elyse. Move him into the guest room. As long as you’re giving him shower sex of course he’s not gonna take you seriously. ”
Kelly smiles at Belinda. “You’re really fired up today.”
I smile too. “She should have read Madame Bovary years ago.”
“We just make it way too easy on them, that’s all I’m saying.”
The sampler platter is upon us. Someone has squirted a grid of sauces across the white plate, caramel tic-tac-toed with chocolate, a swirl of raspberry in a corner. Four desserts, four forks, a knife in case we want to get geometric about things. Enough for everyone to have a little bit of eve
rything. I drag my finger across the pattern of sauces on the plate and lift it to my mouth. Paint it on my lower lip, wait a second, and then lick it off.
“But I didn’t kiss him when we were in the shower,” I say. The bright blond girl is pushing her three-tiered cart toward the men. They look up at her, smiling and hopeful. “Why do you think that’s the first thing to go?”
“Oh Lord,” mutters Kelly. “Why don’t you just pick up that knife and stab us all in the chests?”
“Well, I guess you win some and you lose some,” Nancy says, stuffing a bite of the chocolate pot pie into her mouth. Kelly and Belinda look down at their plates.
“What does that mean?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Nancy says sweetly, pushing her sunglasses back and looking at me, straight in the eye. “Now see, that’s weird. I would have sworn you’d be the first to know. Lynn and Andy left for Belize this morning. She got him back.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Not only wasn’t I the first to know, but it turns out I was the last to know. Throughout the rest of the week, the story comes to me in pieces.
The thing with the secretary didn’t work out, Kelly tells me on Wednesday at the gym. The girl was so damn young, what did Andy expect? Anyway, he called Lynn and he was abject. Bereft. Contrite. He’d moved into a Residence Inn, one of those pathetic places out by the airport that are full of men who’ve screwed up.
She’s got him right where she wants him, Belinda adds, when she calls on Thursday. He told her to start looking for a new house and that money was no object. They were even thinking about moving north of the city, up toward the lake. That would mean the kids would have to change schools, but Lynn thought they needed a fresh start. Smart of her, Belinda says. She’s playing it real smart, but then Lynn always did. The Belize trip is sort of a second honeymoon. They’re going to swim with the dolphins.
Not exactly a second honeymoon, Nancy corrects me, when I see her in Trader Joe’s later that day. Lynn and Andy aren’t married anymore—their divorce has been final for almost a year. So there will have to be some sort of ceremony, maybe a whole new wedding, and wouldn’t that feel a little strange, to go through it all again with the same man?
The weirdest part, Kelly whispers, during coffee hour on Sunday, was that while Lynn was packing to go to Belize, this young man shows up in the parking lot of her apartment complex and starts honking his horn. A boy, really. He’d evidently developed a crush on Lynn, because there was some sort of scene…
The cops came, Belinda says. Can you believe it?
Who knows what the kid got in his head, Nancy murmurs. You know Lynn. She’s always been too nice for her own good. Obviously he’d misread the situation, he’d interpreted her kindness toward him as something else…
Situations can get out of hand so fast, Kelly says.
Can you imagine the cops showing up at Lynn’s door? Belinda asks. Lynn, of all people?
No, she’s not coming back to her job at the church at all, Nancy explains. Jeff was a little upset about it at first—he’d gone out on a limb to convince the council to cough up the money and hire her. But if this is what’s best for Lynn and Andy and the boys then of course he understands. Because that’s all that really matters. What’s best for Lynn and Andy and the boys.
Twenty-three, Belinda says, raising her eyebrows. That’s how old the boy in the parking lot turned out to be. Twen-ty-three.
Look, Nancy says, waving a postcard of a jungle under my nose. She says it’s beautiful there. Like some sort of Eden.
Kelly got a postcard from Belize too.
So did Belinda.
Lynn had been a good wife—probably, I think, the best of us all. She was the one who had the greatest mastery of the myriad skills the job requires. Not just running the house, raising the kids, cooking, or providing her husband comfort and pleasure. That’s the easy part. Lynn was also gifted at the interior tasks of marriage. She knew how to create pockets to disappear into, places to tuck her true mind away, like an extra set of car keys.
But it didn’t seem to matter in the end. One morning her husband informed her, with the stickiness of his semen still on her thighs, that she had been replaced. When he walked out the door that day, walked out and turned left and started down the block, she followed him. Followed him until he was no longer in sight. “I lost him,” she told me. “Literally lost him.” What is this, some sort of muscle memory that all women have, some dark part of our brain that takes over and compels us, apart from all logic, to follow men? If it compelled Lynn—sensible, disciplined Lynn—then it must be a very strong impulse indeed.
But then, at some point—probably not the first year, possibly the second—she had begun to like being alone. Maybe it was that bald boy from the Starbucks, but I suspect it also had something to do with her hard solid work at the church. The smell of turpentine, the weight of the trash sack on her shoulder, the comforting heft of the hammer in her hand. Each day this week I have gone out to my mailbox and looked for my card from Belize, half believing that Lynn would write something on the back that would explain everything to me. She would tell me why it is so hard to leave and—here’s the shock that has me now standing flat-footed and numb in my kitchen, a cup of coffee raised to my lips—why it is apparently so hard to stay gone. That’s the part I didn’t bargain for. I understand the gravitational pull of marriage. But I believed that if I ever got up enough power to break out of it… What am I to think now? That Jesus and Elvis and a team of wild horses must have shown up and dragged her back into this marriage that everyone honestly believed to be over?
He came after her. That’s what men do, apparently. Once you’re gone, really gone, finally gone, then that’s the point when they decide that they want you back.
On the morning that he left her, Lynn followed Andy until he was out of sight, then she turned and walked back to her house. She got the kids up and dressed and ready for school. She made the beds and loaded the dishwasher. She strapped on her heart monitor and did her four-mile lap around the neighborhood. She opened a bank account in her maiden name. She ordered a college catalog online. She cut her hair. She got an apartment, she got a job, she got a new boyfriend. She began wearing her pink Chanel jacket with jeans and boots.
At what point did Andy notice she was no longer following him? At what point did he turn around and see that the woman who had always been there no longer was? I can imagine her picking up the phone one night, her heart a little in her throat, wondering what could be wrong that someone would call so late. His voice is on the line. He says he’s sorry. It’s all been a mistake. He says he still loves her. Nothing has been done that cannot be undone. And then there’s the fact that her children call him Daddy.
People can change, he says.
He tells her he wants to come home.
I carry my coffee out onto the deck, superstitiously stepping over the spot where we found Pascal. Everyone thinks that Andy has learned his lesson but Kelly says no, that Lynn is really the one who’s different. (“I’m basing this theory,” she says archly, “on the fact that it’s always the woman who changes.”) Kelly is on that dark path where she believes marriages work best when women expect little. She thinks Lynn has seen how hard it is on the outside and adjusted her expectations. But I remember Lynn saying that it wasn’t until Andy left her that she’d remembered how reasonable he could be. For the first time in years they had begun making joint decisions—the selling of the house, the divvying up of funds, the scheduling of their sons—and she had to wonder. Why couldn’t they do that when they lived together? “It takes divorce,” she said, “to show you how to be married.”
Garcia ambles up. She does not jump into my lap as her brother used to do but instead curls around my feet and begins a loud purr. In his absence she has gotten sweeter. It’s almost as if her personality has expanded to fill the space where Pascal once was. When I picture divorce my mind leads only to the threshold and no farther. Try as I might, I
can’t quite visualize that first day alone and I think, sitting here on this sunny deck, that perhaps my sanity depends on not trying to. It has taken too much effort to build up my escape velocity, it has taken me too long to put together the right combination of momentum, anger, and money, and now that I can finally, finally feel the engines beneath me I can’t afford to stop and think. At least not about Lynn.
“She got him back,” Nancy said, in her heartless way, and it’s strange how the language of revenge echoes the language of reconciliation. Nancy considers this some sort of victory for our entire gender. Lynn gained an advantage, she leveraged her position, she won a free trip to Belize. It can only be a matter of time before she’s knocking out walls and putting a sunroom on the back of her house. “I’m so proud of her,” Nancy said, and I think, finishing my coffee and pulling Garcia against her will into my lap, of Belinda’s mother down in that trailer park in Alabama with a picture of Belinda’s big red-brick house stuck on her refrigerator door.
“She told me,” Belinda said grimly, “that you’ve gotta learn to love the game you’ve won. Do you think that’s really true? That none of us will ever be happy until we’ve learned to love the game we’ve won?”
That afternoon when I check the mail my postcard has finally come. A picture of Mayan ruins is on the front.
The postcard is bent and battered. It looks as if it came from Belize to North Carolina by way of Guam and I wonder if Lynn wrote it last, if she had trouble thinking of what to say to me. Perhaps she carried the card in her purse for days, debating whether it was worth sending. Or maybe she wrote them all at once, sitting at a pool bar with a fruity drink by her side, and mine was simply the message that mysteriously went astray.
I walk down the driveway with the card on top of the stack of mail, carry it in, and place it on the counter. It stays there for a couple of hours as I go back and forth between the house and the studio, as I’m taking the chicken out to defrost, as I come in to pick up my keys for the afternoon carpool. It is not until I start supper that I pick it up again.
