The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

  For weeks, Lucy looked like she was about to sob. Our home felt empty without that cat; we were palpably down a man. It was a wet, gray winter and it passed slowly with very little daylight.

  —

  PERIODICALLY, LUCY WOULD STILL seem drunk.

  I heard her entering the house while I was taking a shower one afternoon, and I came out wrapped in a yellow towel, excited to see her. But I took one look and saw that it wasn’t really her. There was a blurriness in her eyes, a vacated twist to her facial expression. I felt the floor turn to water under my feet. Lucy had vanished, and in her place someone furtive and messy was telling me things that didn’t add up.

  Sometimes her speech would be slurred, but usually it was subtle. Something would just be…off. Then a terrible queasiness would slither through me and come out of my mouth in different ways. Sometimes fearful, sad, pleading: “Honey, have you been drinking?” Sometimes unhinged, abject: “I can’t take this anymore.” Sometimes icy, condemning, ruthless: “You’re the worst,” I said once, and meant it. (To my best friend in the world. To the person I had slept next to on a thousand naked nights, I said, You’re the worst.)

  I would bring it up later, when she seemed normal again, present. “It’s like you turn into a different person,” I’d say. I tried to make a joke of it: I called her alternate persona, her not-quite-right alter ego, Sophisticated Lucy, the way people nickname enormous men Tiny. (Her other’s defining characteristic was an eerie, plodding simplicity—a blunted lack of specificity.) She thought that was amusing, but her explanation for Sophisticated Lucy’s intermittent appearance was “I’m running a start-up; I’m just exhausted.”

  I alternated between knowing (but not believing) that she was lying and worrying that she was telling the truth and that something was terribly wrong with her. She must be having small strokes! What if she had a brain tumor? Or Lyme disease. And on top of all that she had to put up with me—treacherous me—accusing her of drinking when she was marshaling so much willpower to stay sober?

  Battering her with questions about her drinking did not make me feel good. I felt cruel, abusive, but also paranoid, hysterical. I lived in a state of bewilderment punctuated by fury and aching guilt.

  13

  Months inched by like that. And then, somehow, things got better.

  We decided to get another cat—no, two! A pair of tiny, spotted sisters from an animal shelter on Long Island. We brought them home in a cardboard box punched with holes that they poked their noses through. They ran around the house curious, fearless, and then abruptly collapsed, always right next to each other. They did everything that way: They ate and drank in unison; they got in the litter box at the same time, like a two-headed kitten. Paolo would have sneered at their sweetness.

  When Lucy was holding them, carefully clipping their nails, combing their fluff, she was the benevolent person I had met on the night of the blackout: Boy Scout Lady. She was the promise of family, decency, kin. And we were a kind of family now—they were only cats, but they were ours, new lives that we were taking on the care of, together. They slept in the bed with us and followed us around from room to room, except sometimes when we crossed paths with them and they looked at us as if they were seeing—for the first time in their lives—creatures so terrifying, so dangerous, they could barely stand to know that we existed. Then they went flying for the closets, where they hid until they were ready to recognize us again for who we were: the people who waited on them and met their every need. Their love slaves.

  —

  AN INVITATION CAME FROM ATHENS. My publisher there had decided for his own mysterious reasons to bring me over for a book tour during the worst of his country’s economic crisis. I found myself catching a case of his optimism: So things have been horrible; they can always get better. Lucy decided to come, too.

  When we got off the plane in Greece it was unseasonably warm. We stayed at the apartment of a friend of a friend, who was out of town, and there was something about it—the bed on the floor, the bathtub in the kitchen—that made us feel young and carefree. My publisher Dimitris took us out late at night to a rebetika club, a packed, smoky dance hall where men snapped their fingers as they spun in circles, and plates of lamb and eggplant kept arriving on the table in front of us. It was the kind of thing I always wish would happen but rarely does: We were brought into a private world and treated as if we belonged.

  Dimitris’s wife, Yiota, looked like a pretty, redheaded Muppet. She told me about how she used to hang around Dimitris’s bookshop when she was still married to her first husband. She had just given birth when she left to be with Dimitris. She smiled and shrugged and said, “People are not perfect.”

  One blue morning, Lucy and I took a ferry to an island called Aegina. We ate tiny fried fish off a waxed tablecloth in a café at the back of a marketplace, and men who looked like my grandfather stared at us. Stray cats ate our scraps. We walked through the alleyways in the pale winter light and talked about a drive we’d taken through Napa Valley eight years before, when we first got together. I’d been allergic to one of the wines and had hives on my eyelids and on the palms of my hands. Still, it was the happiest time, the most exciting. And now we had returned to each other.

  Dimitris and Yiota cooked for us one night in their apartment, a cramped, rowdy place full of cigarette smoke, dolmades, children, and friends. “Americans are not relaxed,” one of them told me, holding his three-year-old and drinking an ouzo. Greece was falling apart. The streets of Athens were crawling with cats and dogs that people had abandoned because they could no longer afford pet food. But our hosts were jubilant.

  Their family didn’t seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea bloomed in my head that being ruled by something other than my own wishes and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a release.

  —

  IN THAT MAGIC ATHENIAN LIGHT, Lucy and I looked better to each other—not duplicitous, not drunk—good again. Our pure selves, redeemed. We had torn our marriage apart and put it back together, which meant that we were solid now, we decided. We would endure. Finally, I was eligible for motherhood. And I was thirty-seven.

  We had several things going for us: shared values, dual incomes, extended family who lived nearby. We did not have any sperm, but that was not so hard to come by; you could buy it on the Internet, like everything else, and some people would just give it to you if you asked nicely. Lucy would be my co-parent, of course, but I wanted a man in our imaginary baby’s life, too. When the kid asked, “Who’s my dad?” I wanted to be able to answer with the name of a person whom he or she already knew and loved. Lucy and I both liked the idea of having another adult involved, who, we hoped, would want to spend the occasional weekend with his son or daughter, and could be an adjunct member of our family. We were intimidated by what we were taking on. We figured we could use all the help we could get. And pregnancy already seemed mysterious and unfathomable. I did not want a stranger’s spawn growing inside of me.

  On the morning we went to see the Acropolis, we started going through the attributes of all the potential donors we knew. One had a weak chin but an exceptional sense of humor, we agreed, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, and we took off our coats and hats in front of the Parthenon. Another was a talented athlete, but I worried about his temper. We climbed the narrow steps to the Temple of Athena, and I thought of my own father, who had loved to read to me from Bulfinch’s Mythology, and gave Poseidon, Hera, and Zeus each a distinct voice.

  It became obvious to whom we should turn. The boy who had fed us steak on his terrace on the night of the blackout—when we were innocents, before we’d done a single thing wrong—desperately wanted to be a parent, but a parent at a distance. He wanted the love without the labor. It was sort of perfect: from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.

  I excelled at nurturing, nagging, sterilizing germ-covered surfaces, and, so far as we knew, I had a working womb. Lucy was patient, good at math, an ex
cellent driver, and handy. Our friend, who was delighted by the prospect of the kind of fatherhood we offered him when we got back to New York, was brilliant, shy, gentle, and, not insignificantly, rich. “I’ll pay for college,” he told us immediately. We did not argue.

  For some time, my life had been an ugly, roiling mess, but I was going to pull it all together at the last minute. (It was better this way! I had acted out before I had children.) I had managed to solve the Jane Austen problems that women have been confronting for centuries—securing a provider for your children, finding a mate to pass the time with, and creating a convivial home—in an entirely unconventional way. I’d had to relinquish the poisonous heat of my affair, but with every day that felt like less of a sacrifice.

  “People are not perfect,” Yiota had said…and look at her. Bohemian but rooted, surrounded by children and cooking smells, out at all hours with her husband, drinking ouzo and watching plate-smashers dance. A spirited, sensuous matriarch who met human frailty with a redheaded shrug of broad-mindedness. The important thing was to love.

  —

  STILL, I WAS ANXIOUS when I went to the reproductive endocrinologist that spring. I lay back as he loaded our friend’s spun sperm into a syringe, and I worried. I was so sick of failing at matrimony, I couldn’t bear the idea of failing at maternity, too. I wondered if I was capable of the constancy I’d promised Lucy. I wondered if she was capable of the sobriety she’d promised me. And who would my child be? What murderous degenerate would I cook up in there? (Would my baby be as bad as I was?)

  All of those thoughts dispersed when I rose from the table with the knowledge that I could be pregnant. Every night I fell asleep hoping. Every morning I woke up wondering. I had been equivocating for a decade and now that I had acted, it was suddenly clear: I couldn’t wait to be a mother.

  14

  We had guests for the Fourth of July, the inauguration of summer. We took them to the placid bay beach on Shelter Island and to the shop down by the water where you can eat sandwiches out back by the docks. I showed the wife my tomatoes and she told me to glue pennies to the stakes because copper repels snails.

  Our friends left early Sunday morning to beat the traffic. I went to my desk to do some work, and Lucy went out to run errands. It was a hot day and I got up from the computer several times to take short, cold showers.

  She was gone a long time. As it got later into the afternoon, my stomach began to twist.

  When I finally heard Lucy turn onto the dirt road that led to our house, I went out to the front yard. I watched her tear into the driveway and stop the car abruptly, at a weird angle. She opened the driver’s-side door and nearly fell out. I went and looked in the backseat and saw the cardboard containers that had held two six-packs of beer. I counted the empty cans strewn on the floor: four, five, six…nine.

  It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it’s true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It’s more like, Oh, right. The man who has been staying over your whole life long is your mother’s lover. The reason Lucy seems off sometimes is that she’s still drinking. You have always known this. The only thing that’s mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious.

  A pricking adrenaline went through me, as if I were witnessing a disaster in progress, a fire devouring the curtains, rather than the mundane reality of another person’s inebriation. I felt myself departing, and my competent self taking over the controls.

  I got the car keys from Lucy and told her it was time to take a nap—she fell asleep quickly in our bed. Then I found the kittens and my computer, and got in the Jeep, sweat rolling down the back of my neck, the insides of my thighs. I drove past the mariners’ shops in Greenport and the stalwart farms and corny wineries of the North Fork. I looked at the people—from Guatemala, from Mexico—working in the fields, the sun pounding down on them indifferently. I wondered if everything that pained me would seem ridiculous to those women, or if some of our problems were the same. The cats roamed between the backseat and the passenger’s side in front, pushing their faces toward the air conditioner.

  It was the end of a holiday; the Long Island Expressway was smothered with traffic. We inched westward, and I told myself that this was simple: Get back to the city. Make more decisions later. But what if Lucy really is an alcoholic? And what if I’m pregnant? Either way, I told myself, you have to drive this car and park it.

  It took hours, but finally I was creeping past the cemeteries of Queens, the rolling acres of bones. And then Lucy was calling my cellphone. “It’s not your fault,” she kept saying when I picked up. She was on the roof; she said that she was going to jump off. It wasn’t my fault, but when she woke up and the house was empty, she felt that she was alone in the world and she wanted to die.

  Cars honked and the cats howled as I pulled the Jeep onto the shoulder of the highway. I told her that dying was not an option. I told her she had to get down from the roof, now. Later, I would almost laugh out loud when I remembered telling her that we had two cats and she couldn’t do this to them. I told her to go inside. I said it over and over again. I said it as many times as she said, “It’s not your fault.” I said, “We are going to hang up and then you are going to call me back from inside the house.” I kept saying it until she agreed, and then I hung up the phone.

  I called a friend of ours who I knew was on the island to ask her to go to our house, though we did not really know her well enough to ask for such a thing. But the phone just rang and rang and went to voicemail. I was sweating profusely; the cats were mewing in desperation. If I did nothing more, what would happen? Was there a real possibility that Lucy would hurt herself (that she would kill herself)? I thought: We can’t take that chance. Then I called the police.

  It all happened in seconds. I called 911 and got connected to the police department; I gave them my address and asked them to go to my house because a person there was threatening to commit suicide. Moments after I hung up, Lucy called back from inside and I wondered if I had just made a disastrous mistake.

  But no. She was inside, but now she had a noose around her neck. (A noose? Where the hell had she gotten a noose?) She still wanted to die. Then she said she saw a police car pulling into our driveway and I told her that I had called them and she hung up the phone.

  Our friend called back. I asked her to go to my house and see what she could do. Not much time passed—ten minutes? five?—before she called and said she was in my living room with the cops. But Lucy was gone.

  She’s dead. I felt my stomach falling through my body. She has found a way to die.

  “No, no, wait,” our friend was saying. “Hang on—they think they hear something in your bedroom, but they don’t…oh. Yeah.” They found Lucy sound asleep—snoring, in fact—on the floor under our bed.

  —

  THEY TOOK HER TO the emergency room in Greenport. She called me several hours later and said that she was all right, she was going to sleep. But at some point that night they moved her up to the psych ward, and nobody there would let me speak to her when I called the next morning; they wouldn’t even confirm that she was there. “We’re married,” I kept saying, but they didn’t care, or maybe it didn’t matter. I was back in the car with the cats again, driving past the cemeteries and the Paris hotel, calling over and over, hoping I would get someone who would tell me something else. I felt as if I’d relinquished my child to the foster-care system in a moment of desperation and now I would never be able to get her back.

  But eventually she called me herself, from a pay phone at the hospital. She did not sound like a child or a drunk or a person with a death wish. She sounded like my spouse. She said that it was awful; I had to get her out, now. She said to call her employees and tell them she’d had an accident, she was in the hospital, and then she gave me a complicated message to relay about a meeting with a client. I called her company.
I called the hospital over and over until someone told me when there were visiting hours. I called and called and drove and drove until it occurred to me that wherever I drove and whomever I called, the truth would still be the same: My spouse, the person with whom I hoped to raise a child, was on the locked floor of a mental ward.

  Finally, a doctor called me back—an articulate, straightforward woman who seemed competent and sane and who, I realized with wild relief, was now legally in charge of the situation. I asked her if she realized that my spouse was probably not really suicidal, that she was probably really an alcoholic. The doctor understood this. I asked why she was keeping Lucy in the hospital, then, and the psychiatrist said, “Because she needs to understand that her actions have consequences.”

  I was dazzled.

  —

  WHEN I FIRST SAW Lucy coming down the hall to greet me in the hospital, I was struck by how unmistakably I was still in love with her. I hadn’t just ended up with her. I was not stuck with her. Here, humbled, in a pair of green hospital pajamas and the T-shirt she’d been wearing the last time I saw her, was the person I loved.

  We sat on the burgundy couches in the lounge, where there were heaps of gummy old magazines on the end tables. “You won’t like the selection,” Lucy said. We could see the dark-blue Peconic Bay outside the windows, the sailboats floating off into the clouds on the horizon. Bleaching sun beat down on the black tar roofs of the other hospital buildings. I suggested that when this was all over, Lucy ought to try to sell them some solar panels.

  Something had happened to her. She was back. “I guess the jury’s in: I have a drinking problem,” she said, which made us both laugh. That morning, when she woke up and saw where she was, she had been furious with me. She had eaten breakfast with people who were falling apart: schizophrenics who’d stopped taking their meds, people with the shakes still getting through the last stages of withdrawal. She was in the wrong place and I had put her there. But as the hours crawled by, she felt the resentment and resistance leaving her. Of course I’d called the police—what would it say if I hadn’t? She’d started talking to people. For several hours, she was not ashamed. She did not feel better or worse than anyone else.