See You in Paradise

by J. Robert Lennon

  I say this to establish that I did know that something was coming: some theatrical reveal of the whole plan; some kind of prim, professional report that I would receive one night, over wine and an elaborately simple knockout dessert. And so I can say with confidence that I was not entirely surprised by the moment when it came. But there was no wine, and there was no dessert, and the girls weren’t just in bed, they were in bed forty miles away at Margaret’s mother’s place, where she had dispatched them under the pretense that we would get to have an “intimate” “time alone,” which I thought meant wild nude abandon, but which actually meant something else.

  “I’m leaving you,” she said.

  “Nooo,” I replied, automatically, in a kind of friendly/skeptical tone, as if she’d gotten something slightly wrong.

  “I’m in love with Allan. He’s leaving his wife. We’re going to live at his lake place, and he will be investing in the expansion of my business.”

  I don’t know how I must have looked, staring at her like that across the brilliantly lit dining room table. After a time I was able to say, “I don’t understand this.”

  “Of course you knew, David. You’re just too simple and straight-forward to know what you know.” She made a face. “I mean that as a compliment. The fact is, you don’t need me. What you need is sex, music, and food. I need more than that. I need somebody with a vision. Allan understands what I want, and he wants to help me get it. He admires my ambition.”

  There was so much to digest and refute in that little speech, so much that, on one hand, made no sense whatsoever, and on another explained so terribly, terribly much of Margaret’s behavior around me since we married, that I could only sit there, staring, with my mouth agape. Allan, I should add, was one of her investors—the big one, I guess. I’d met him—he was just some rich guy. Or so he seemed to me. I must have missed something.

  “I do need you.” It was hardly the most important of her assertions to refute, but it was the thing I managed to blurt.

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, no.”

  “I’m ambitious!”

  This drew a sigh. “David, what have you done for the past decade?”

  “Raised our daughters,” I said.

  “Yes.” She nodded, as though conceding the point. “Yes, and good job. But look at what’s happened to you. What about your music—you could have been great. But you gave it up.”

  She was referring to the guitars and amplifiers, the tape machines and synthesizers and drums, which once I had used to record albums of instrumental music for independent films and television shows, and which I had gradually sold off, until all I had left was my trusty Gibson acoustic, the one I had found in a pawnshop in Nebraska during a road trip with an old girlfriend in 1982. It was true that I had sacrificed my ambitions. I had done this so that Margaret could go to cooking school, and then to open a restaurant, then run the restaurant while I raised Lyn and Rae. The money I got for selling those things, I gave to her.

  Of course she was right that I might have continued to write and record. I might someday have achieved considerable fame and fortune, won an Emmy, an Oscar. What I had managed to achieve instead was happiness—at home, with our girls, bringing them up while Margaret labored in the trenches. I know, I know, it sounds like cold comfort, and at times I had wondered if that was how I should see it myself. But I didn’t miss what I used to do. My work, the trappings of it, had become a burden to me. It stood in the way of the simplicity that, however annoying it was to hear Margaret ascribe it to me, I nevertheless strove for. Lack of ambition had become my ambition.

  In any event, ever since the I’m-leaving-you conversation, she had been going on a lot of “little trips,” the destination and purpose of which she refused to say. And then she would come home and stay with me and the girls for a couple of nights, and then she would leave again. And each time I figured she wouldn’t be back, and each time she returned as though she’d done nothing more scandalous than run down to the supermarket.

  After two weeks of this, I asked her, Hey, what are you doing here? Are you staying with me? Or are you leaving me? And she wouldn’t answer, only stare over my shoulder, blinking. I continued to ask her every few days for another two weeks, and every time got the stare, until at last, a week before our vacation, she turned to me and said, in much the way she had the first time, “Okay, I’m leaving you.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you’re demanding I decide, that’s my decision.”

  “Oh,” I said. We were back at the dining room table, with the girls in bed upstairs. Margaret looked thinner and more tired. “So you’re leaving me now because I keep asking you if you’re leaving me?”

  She covered her face with her hands. I was angry. And at the same time I felt bad for her, really bad. “I’m leaving you,” she said, “for the reasons I previously stated.”

  It was then that we agreed the lake trip would be the end, and when we got home, we would tell the girls. Or I would tell them. Or something.

  We spent the afternoon in separate spheres, Margaret on the porch with her BlackBerry, me on the lakeshore tossing stones, the girls out in the middle of the lake lying on inner tubes in the bikinis their mother had bought them and I wished to hell they had held off a few years before wearing. Their names had been Margaret’s idea, which, like most things, I went along with. But the nicknames were my innovation—Lyn and Rae—and those were the names they seemed most comfortable with. I was aware that Margaret resented me for this, but resentment fueled a lot of her most productive activity, and I was happy to provide it. Not that I had ever striven to do so—Margaret would have found something to resent regardless of what I did—but I figured that, like other bad habits, it was best kept in the home.

  Listen to me—trash-talking my wife. She was not all bad, Margaret. There were good times, moments of profound sweetness and fun. We were a team: us versus the fools. Nothing had changed, really, except that I wasn’t on the team anymore.

  That night we went to eat at the Grimy Fisherman’s. Though we hadn’t yet seen another soul down at the lakeside, the place was packed. Belinda was heavy but agile, with a round fleshy face, lively eyes, and cascading piles of gold hair. Honestly she was pretty hot, and I loved her place, the pleasure of her patrons, her pleasure in them, the dim brown light and deafening noise. She kissed the girls, called them by name (my versions, of course), told them they were absolute heartbreakers, brought them special treats they hadn’t ordered and which wouldn’t show up on the bill.

  At one point Margaret got up to go to the ladies. She brought her BlackBerry. Belinda showed up at our table in seconds, as if by chance, slipping into Margaret’s seat and resting a fishy hand on my shoulder. “So how are you doing?” she said seriously, and it was clear that somehow she knew everything.

  “Oh, fine!” I chirped.

  “Good,” she said seriously. “Good.”

  Lyn was buried in her paperback—she always brought something to read for the dull moments in life, and I found this habit both endearing and highly respectable—but Rae looked up with shy, alarmed curiosity.

  “We’re so glad to be back,” I offered.

  Belinda nodded slowly. “You are always welcome here. You know that.”

  “I do.”

  “Don’t forget,” she said, and tousled my hair, as though I were a child.

  When I looked up, Rae was staring at me. I smiled. She quickly bowed her head and moved the scraps around on her plate.

  “I wonder what’s taking your mother,” I said.

  Rae shrugged. “She brought her phone.”

  “Ah. Did she now.”

  A nod. At this moment Lyn looked up from her book and glanced at us both. “What?” she said. “What’d I miss?”

  “Nothing,” I told her. “We’re waiting for your mom. Then we’ll have dessert.”

  “No, thanks,” Rae said from under her hair.

  “I think I’ll pass too,” I agreed.
>
  Margaret returned, looking flushed and concerned. I ignored this. She didn’t want dessert either, but Lyn did of course, so we all sat for ten minutes watching her alternately eat an ice cream sundae and read. When she was through, she said, “You people are freaks,” and for once, none of us disagreed.

  That night Margaret and I lay awake. The moon was new, the sky had clouded over, and the only light in the room emanated from the bottom bunk, where she was tik-takking away, answering her email. I was thinking about a night long ago, when the girls were babies and asleep in their beds, and I was alone in the studio, writing a song for Margaret’s birthday. I turned off the lamp and played guitar, whisper-quiet, illuminated only by the moonlight through the window and the glowing LEDs and VU meters from my equipment racks.

  Oddly I don’t remember if she liked the song, or even how it went. I suppose I have it somewhere, the recording I made, but it hardly matters. It was the doing and the being that I loved, the experience of making something I liked. The perfect moment.

  How is it that I gave it up so easily? What was it in me that needed to sacrifice that pleasure? Margaret didn’t need my gear money. I could have gotten a night job. Maybe, I thought, she was right about me. Maybe ambition frightened me. And maybe there was something the matter with that, and maybe not.

  “Margaret,” I said to the darkness, “we are going to have to tell the girls something.”

  No answer, other than a pause in her clicky thumb-typing.

  “If you leave it to me,” I added, “I don’t know what I can say, other than that you’ve left us for Allan.”

  This time the typing stopped entirely. I heard her rolling off the bed, and a moment later, her thin face glared at me between the slats of the top bunk.

  “How dare you bring them into this,” she said, her teeth clenched.

  “But Margaret—”

  “You would dare to harm your own daughters for your petty resentment!”

  “Am I fucking Allan?” I asked her. “I don’t think it’s me doing that, is it?”

  “You bastard,” she spat.

  “No, sorry! That’s you, fucking Allan. I’m the one who still loves you and wants to keep our family together, sorry!”

  For a moment it appeared that her head might explode. Then, like Neptune descending into his kingdom, the sea, she withdrew from sight and settled back onto her bunk.

  Five minutes later, the clicking resumed.

  On the afternoon of the third day of our visit, the girls were sitting on the beach, poking the sand with sticks and talking. Margaret was in the house, working. I was in the boat, fishing. Not really. I’d grabbed one of the fishing poles from the bucket on the porch, stuck a worm on the end, rowed out to the middle of the lake, dunked the line in the water, and lay back to look at the sky. Thank heaven for small miracles, it was still blue.

  I must have fallen asleep, because my reaction to the commotion on the shore was to open my eyes. I sat up, blinking. The sun had tightened and probably burned the skin on my face, and I felt really old.

  The girls were pointing at a hole in the sand that they had dug. They were talking a mile a minute and sort of dancing around the hole in their little bikinis, as if as part of some exotic preteen summoning ritual, an effort to make an anti-zit djinn pop out of the ground. Margaret stood in the shade of the porch, looking on in stern curiosity. Lyn saw that I had sat up in the boat, and frantically motioned me in.

  It took me a couple of minutes, by which time Margaret had ventured onto the sand and was peering into the hole with the girls. At the bottom of it was a curved section of smooth metal about three inches in diameter.

  “Whoa!” I said.

  “Should we dig it out? Let’s dig it out!” That was Rae.

  “Mom says it might be dangerous,” Lyn said, trying not to sound accusatory.

  “It could be some electrical junction box,” Margaret offered. She seemed to doubt it herself.

  We stared at the object for a few silent seconds. Then I got down on my knees and cleared away more sand.

  What was revealed was the approximate size of a loaf of Wonder bread, the shape of a gelcap, the color of a toaster. It was bisected by a thin black line of rubber. The metal was corroded, but not too badly. I took hold of both ends, lifted it out of the hole, and gave it a shake. Loose objects clattered around inside.

  We all glanced at one another. I gripped one end in my crooked hairy arm and the other in my veined sweaty hand and gave it a sharp twist. It opened with a small groan of what sounded to me like relief.

  Immediately something fell out and landed on the sand at Lyn’s feet. It was a Pez dispenser, with the head of Papa Smurf on the end.

  “Huh?” she asked no one in particular.

  The end of the object I held in my arm contained a collection of papers, toys, shells, stones, and other objects. I reached in and pulled out a folded piece of construction paper. The words on it were printed in a neat, steady hand, using a marker. They read:

  THE HARRIS FAMILY

  VACATION 1987

  NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL

  THE YEAR 2000!!!!

  The four of us sat around the dining table, the contents of the time capsule spread out before us. There was a strong sense of waning enthusiasm, which we were desperate to artificially prop up: frankly, it was all a little disappointing. There was the obligatory newspaper, of course: fallout from Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court was big news, as was a tornado in Alberta. And people were fighting in Mecca. There was a Pac-Man keychain with no keys on it—Pac-Man was old news in 1987, if I remember correctly, so the keychain probably seemed a small sacrifice to make for posterity. Ditto the Elton John cassette (“Sad Songs (Say So Much)”? My God, what had become of him?), the Danielle Steel paperback, the deck of Star Wars playing cards that I bet had been stolen from the cabin, and which come to think of it might fetch a nice little sum on eBay.

  More interesting were the family artifacts that had been provided—a sun-soaked Polaroid of a small and homely family, Dad with his bald spot and paunch; Mom with her squint, her puffy do, and her short shorts; and son and daughter, approximately the girls’ ages, appearing sullen and standing as far apart from one another as possible. There were also neatly folded personal statements from each member of the family, printed in pencil on lined three-hole paper, which we solemnly passed around.

  Dad went in for brevity. “A great family, a great vacation. Here’s to 1987. Phil Harris.” Mom was wordier, yet circumspect, as though trying, gently, to ward off future unhappiness. “Thru good times and bad, the Harris family indures. We are loving and friendly and happy to be together on this beutiful lake, in this beutiful time of year. May the finder of this time capsule have peace in their life and happiness on the earth. Sincerly, Ruby Harris.”

  The boy had written, “BEN HARRIS. MY SISTER IS A WHITCH. THIS LAKE IS BORING. BE WARE! BEN HARRIS.” Lyn found this note to be hilarious, and laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks.

  The girl’s note, on the other hand, sucked the life out of our little party.

  I am Natalie Harris, and I want to say I hate my brother and I hate my dad, and I don’t hate my mother but I hope I never grow up like her and let somebody treat me the way my dad treats me here which is like shes an idiot or a child. He is creepy and mean and ruined the whole week by walking in on me when I was in the bathroom, and I was having my period and putting in a tampon and he laughed at me and wouldnt leave the room saying I had to say pretty please. It was TOTAL HUMILIATION and I called for mom and she didnt even bother getting up off the chair and who could blame her, my dad would just yell at her that she has no sense of humor because shes too dumb to get a joke. I cant stand it anymore and I am going to leave this place (home I mean) the second I am old enough to get a job. Or maybe even before, I could go live with Pam whos parents are dead and she lives with her aunt whos barely college aged and totally cool. I cant stand this lake and this cabin its like
a jail and I dont understand why we cant just go to disney like normal families and stop pretending we like each other so we can actually have some actual fun for one time in our stupid lives. So if you find this thats a good thing, because that means its the future and I am grown up and having a real life somewhere with real people instead of this stupid fake family. Thats all I have to say and lucky for you to not be in 1987 at the dumb f—k cabins at dumb f—k lake craig new york. Natalie Harris

  The note circulated around the table, and when we had all read it we sat in silence, listening to the dumbfuck lake creeping up the beach outside. Rae studied her fingertips, and I noticed that her fingernails, usually painted with care, were bitten and bare; Margaret stared into her coffee mug full of red wine. Lyn had been the last to receive the note and she continued to hold on to it, pressing it with both hands against her belly and gazing in mute wonder at the objects spread across the table.

  I broke the silence by suggesting we fill the capsule with our own artifacts, and this gave everybody something to do. While Margaret and the girls prepared the contributions, I gathered up the Harris family’s stuff and shoved it all into a plastic freezer bag. I used a ballpoint pen to write “1987” on the bag in a near-illegible scrawl, then tucked it into one end of the capsule. Our shitty lives would be interred together, I figured.

  Lyn requested that each of us get to be alone while we said goodbye to, as she put it, “our parts of ourselves,” and so I brought our half of the capsule outside and set it on the ground next to the hole it had come from, and one by one we paid it a visit in solitude. I was made to go first, but personally, I couldn’t think of anything to add. I traveled light, and what little I had, I wanted to keep. My life, after all, was the way I liked it, or at least had been until a few weeks before. And look what was happening to me! Look at my punishment, for the crime of contentment! In the end, as a gesture of solidarity, I stripped off my Timex and dropped it into the capsule. Who cared what time it was? It would be better, in the months and years to come, not to watch what remained of my fragile youth drain away into the future’s reeking maw. Now I wouldn’t be able to monitor my descent into bitterness and decrepitude, thank God!