Lucy didn’t disguise the hurt on her face, but said nothing, took my highlighted pages down from the windows, and walked out, and what I saw in her glance I ignored. I knew her technicians had been going through hell recently with their design experiments, and I could see she was hoarding their anxiety, trying to preserve a calm atmosphere and project confidence.
Lucy wasn’t the best writer on the team, maybe I’d been too harsh.
That afternoon, I went back down into town, picked up my car with its new windshield, drove to Seal Harbor, swam out to Rockefeller Island, came back, then did it again, carving through the water. I dived at the end to see how long I could hold my breath. Not long.
After my second slog, lying on my back, drip-drying on the swimming dock, it occurred to me: Sara wanted me to find those cards.
She’d left them behind as clues.
And yes, I had been hurt, I could admit, when success struck in New York. To be left behind in the apartment, home alone without her in my bed or in my life, right when I was striving to be a better partner. It was no fun, being abandoned at parties where I knew nobody, except I knew who everybody was, because everybody there except me was well known. Sara would say, “Don’t mope, go introduce yourself, look that’s so-and-so from such-and-such.” Of course it wounded me when she no longer sought my counsel, when I was edited out of her creative life. When Mark, and not me, was the one who read her first drafts. When someone else saw her photograph in a magazine before I did, since I hadn’t been told. To be unsure what good I was, and in what capacity as a husband?
And why, when the one job I’d thought I’d done best, better than anyone, was taken away from me, why wasn’t I informed?
Secrecy before discovery. Ambition rather than collaboration.
The summer when Jimmy Carter said in Playboy how he’d committed “adultery in my heart,” Sara was deeply disappointed. It was August ’76. We’d rented a cabin for a week in Connecticut on a lake, me and Sara, two mountains of books, a screened-in porch, an antique black-and-white TV, and two ceiling fans that spun only slightly. We were young, we were dopey with love, we even brought the Kama Sutra, but we never cracked it. The heat was too intense, the humidity oppressive. The only solution was to drink rosé with ice cubes (a French friend of Sara’s said that’s how it was done) and swim as much as possible. Most nights, I’d cook dinner, while Sara narrated the evening news, pronouncing her own judgments on world affairs. For a liberal from the avant-garde, Sara often surprised people with some of her more inflexible positions. She took public events personally, especially when loyalty was involved. She was reading in a wicker chair the night that Cronkite gave his report, sounding more stern than usual: adultery in his heart many times. I was in the kitchen, doing something in a wok. Politics were never my thing, but Sara was a junkie. She was among the fallen faithful. The indignation she’d felt after Ford’s pardon for Nixon burned her wick until Clinton took office, and then she was outraged all over again. She longed for honor, for Eagle Scouts. She’d been raised on her mother’s and Betsy’s stories of the Roosevelts coming to dinner in Northeast Harbor and taking the girls out sailing. Bobby Kennedy had been a big hero of Sara’s. She always kept a photograph of him sitting at his desk, in a pewter frame next to her hairbrush, his face half in shadow, seemingly injured. Around the time we got married, as an update to Goodnight, Icarus, she wrote a political one-act envisioning Bobby as the boy with wings, undone by the sun and his father’s second-rate engineering, anything that excluded his own culpability.
“I’ve never done that,” Sara said that night at the lake, referring to Carter’s secret infidelities. I remembered looking up from the stove, not sure I’d heard her correctly.
“What?” I said.
“Looked at someone else that way. I haven’t,” she insisted, and put her book down on her knee. “Have you?”
I remembered there were sounds of the neighbor’s children fighting: shrieking geese two cabins over sounding bloodthirsty. Sara was wearing one of my shirts, open three buttons from the top, and cut-off jean shorts. Her hair was in a single, long braid. It was probably her loveliest period, I thought, very easy and natural. Very easy to love.
Never was there anyone else for me.
“No,” I said, “but men look. They’re coded to reproduce. It’s not a wolf whistle.”
“I can’t be married to you if you’re like that.”
I laughed. “Like what, the president? Normal?”
Sara glared at me and turned back to the television, to some soap commercial.
The children next door had been silent for a minute.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Come on.”
“I won’t have a normal relationship. That’s not who I am.”
“Of course not.”
“I won’t be dragged down to what other people do.”
“That’s not us, you know that.”
I had my arms around her, but she wouldn’t look at me. Both of us were sweating through our clothes. “Swear to God,” she said, “if you’re just saying that.” We went straight to bed.
More important than children, more important than our careers to Sara was the singularity of our relationship, never compromised. Always growing, never-ending. Its own species, one that didn’t need millennia to evolve.
An unreasonable, unrealistic aspiration that I learned to share.
At home, I composed an e-mail to Regina, apologizing for our last afternoon together, for all the previous afternoons. Jesus, don’t apologize. You’re always apologizing. I deleted the text. “Kneeling,” I wrote in the subject box, then left the message area empty and clicked SEND.
An e-mail from the Toad appeared in my in-box, to all Soborg employees, congratulating my group on our grant. “Research thrives on challenge and risk. Victor Aaron, Lucy Sejung Park, and their team continue to be a model for how Soborg can participate in, even lead, the global fight against a vicious disease.”
But what difference did it make that we were leading? Lucy might have said. If not us, some other lab on a different campus could develop the same ligands, could offset amyloid-related degeneration, could reach our conclusions by the same paths of reason and late-night insights, and probably pretty quickly. I shut down the computer. I locked up. I turned on the radio, took two sleeping pills with a scotch, and closed my eyes.
None of us was special, I fell asleep thinking. Everyone performed as programmed, leering and wanting as intended by nature. Progress was time’s measure, not effort’s. The only surprise was when the unknown got bigger, just when we thought we’d reduced it some.
Friday night, I got home from work around ten-thirty. Because Betsy was out on Little Cranberry, we spoke on the phone in lieu of our regular date. She and Joel had spent the day fishing with a friend of his, a commercial fisherman whose son had recently been arrested for drunk driving. Betsy had promised to get her lawyers on the case.
“It’s going to cost you. You don’t know the guy.”
“Who asked you? Mike Wallace, you know, did a brilliant piece last week on methamphetamine, did you catch it? Trouble, Victor, and not just for the addict. We’re not talking cherry soda. If that girl’s mixed up in this, she’ll burn your house down.”
“Is that right?”
“Why don’t you call me more often?”
“Darling—”
“I had a dream last night,” she said. “You were working on my roof, the roof caved in, and you broke your legs.”
“Charming. Did I make it out okay?”
“Don’t make me regret you, Victor,” Betsy said, and clicked off. The house was empty. Cornelia was done with her training at Blue Sea and had begun working the dinner service six nights a week, fixing salads. In my home office, there was a new message from Regina, though not addressed to me. I’d been included in a group e-mail sent to all Soborg employees, an invitation to a poetry reading that she was giving in two weeks for her new book.
The title
of the book, I read, was Fair Merman.
I went out for a night swim. The dark was ravenous, swallowing up the road. At that hour, Long Pond was black and silver and grooved with ripples. No one was around, so I swam naked, a habit I’d picked up that summer years ago in Connecticut, when Jimmy Carter upset Sara and the nation with his betrayal.
No one ever told you that you could measure progress in a marriage by language. Say the two of you are in bed late one night. She’s engrossed in a biography and you’re reading a detective novel. She belches and you say as a joke, “You begin to interest me, vaguely.” Later, you employ it randomly and it becomes something fine and cute, part of a marriage’s filigree. You begin to interest me, vaguely. Then one day you drop it. For no good reason, it’s passé. Thirty years go by, other phrases come and go, but one night, a late-summer evening in Maine with the bedroom window open, with the air full of honeysuckle and pine needles, you’re both watching an old movie in bed, The Big Sleep, when Humphrey Bogart walks into a bookstore and a girl says to him that exact same phrase, the pet phrase you used to say to your wife, and the bookstore girl says it exactly the same way.
You begin to interest me, vaguely.
And you stare at the side of your wife’s face, the same you’ve known, though now framed by short hair, touched attractively by crow’s-feet. And she says without turning, “You didn’t realize that’s where it’s from?” And you think, all those years, it was just a reference in her mind, a synapse, a junction between two points, whereas for you it was something the two of you had made up from scratch, not just a step, but a path you’d forged together.
I dried off and drove down to the beach in my towel. The parking lot was empty, dark except for the one-tone glare from a streetlight. In the bay, dozens of masts gleamed like pins stuck in the water. There was a couple on the beach, over the dune, I could see them screwing, the man on top until he paused, turned the woman’s body around, and she backed into his thrust. Or maybe it was another man, Sara’s gay lovers grown up. It was hard to tell by the shapes involved. Either way, under the towel, I wasn’t hard.
I thought, watching, in a marriage you’re like two ships, two tankers crossing trade lanes in the dark, never knowing what cargo the other carries.
I watched the couple until they finished, donned their clothes, and walked out of sight. One moment I knew they were gay or straight, and the next I couldn’t remember. I didn’t trust my memory. I couldn’t turn the ignition or tune the radio. After a few more minutes, I called information from a cell phone I kept in the glove compartment for emergencies. Information gave me the number for Dr. Carrellas. I got voice mail again.
Lucy caught me in the kitchenette, crouching in front of a vending machine. I was trying to decide between chips and yogurt for lunch.
“Hey, I’m taking the rest of the day off.”
“It’s Saturday, Lucy. Good idea.”
“I’ve forwarded my calls to my cell phone. I just need a couple of hours.”
“Lucy, what’s going on?”
She sighed through her nose, like a bull. “Promise me, you can’t tell anyone.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I’m serious, if you tell anyone,” she said, digging into her pocket, “so help me God, Victor.”
The flyer said that evening’s performance would take place at an art gallery in Bar Harbor. Lucy shoved me when I laughed. As far back as New York, where she’d played violin with a highly competent quartet of other amateurs from NYU, Lucy always got a bad case of upset stomach on performance days.
I called Cornelia from my office.
“What are you doing?”
“Sunbathing. As though you’re not completely jealous.”
“What do you know about Shostakovich?”
“Sounds like a supermodel,” she said.
“You’ve got the night off, right?”
At seven on the dot, Cornelia posed in the doorway. I was shocked to see her dressed up, wearing a strapless ruby red dress that stopped at the knee. Gold dangling earrings matched the color of her dreadlocks, worn long down over her shoulders. But what really threw me were the brown leather work boots that came up to her knees, as though she were prepared for an evening of mucking stalls.
“You’re pretty for a farm lass,” I said as she got in the car.
Even furry, she had very nice legs. Cornelia wrinkled her nose.
“Who says lass? It’s not my fault you don’t keep up with fashion.” She flipped the visor down to inspect her hair. “I assume this is a concert?”
“Well, you look terrific,” I said.
Cornelia widened her eyes and stared away from me. “Whatever, you’re forgiven. So,” she said, ducking her head and putting up her hair, with a hair band in her teeth, “I listened to some of Shostakovich. Shostakovich. So, I mean, it wasn’t mind-blowing.” She finished with her hair and fell back against the car door. “Can we go? I’m seriously starving.”
We ate dinner at a Cuban restaurant. Near the bar was a three-piece band: a piano player, a drummer, and an overweight woman who sang in Spanish. During an interlude, the piano player said into the microphone, “My wife, ladies and gentlemen, she sings these sad songs because she is married to me. She says she would be selling me up the river tomorrow if she could.”
Everyone laughed and Cornelia whispered, “I am feeling so cultured right now.”
When the waitress took our orders, Cornelia insisted on tequila shots.
I asked Cornelia about work, and if she’d made any new friends. I focused on remembering their names, though mainly I noticed how terrible her posture was. I finally had to do something. I went around and straightened her shoulders, pulling her back against the chair.
“You’re like Russell to a T,” she said when I sat down. I noticed, though, she didn’t slump again before we left.
The gallery was a short walk away under the streetlamps through downtown Bar Harbor, past knife and taffy shops and crowded outdoor restaurants, and a buckboard hammered from copper. I could tell we both were a little drunk. We passed a Native American museum, and I explained to Cornelia how, before the Europeans showed up, Bangor’s Abnaki Indians would camp out on Mount Desert Island’s shores during the summer months. How the common upper-crust use of “summer” as a verb probably had a longer history than we realized. Cornelia feigned interest, slung her arm through mine, and clomped forward in her boots. People stared at us, probably mistaking us for some May-December couple.
The art gallery was built like a chapel with a glass ceiling. Everyone was pale and overfed or pink and over-exercised, in bow ties or yellow shawls, boat shoes or lime-green flip-flops. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. The other musicians were mingling and shaking hands. I seated Cornelia in the back row and left for the men’s room, nodding to a few colleagues on the way out. More than one glanced back at my date, who at that moment was applying lip gloss from a pink tube.
A minute later, at a urinal, reeling from the alcohol at dinner, I heard quiet sobs through an air vent just above my head, cries I r ecognized.
“Lucy?”
A moment later: “Victor?”
I waited in the hall for three minutes before she came out, patting her face with a paper towel. Lucy was wearing a red dress similar to Cornelia’s, but with shoulder straps, and high heels rather than farm boots. Her cheeks were damp.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Just my pregame ritual. Now it’s ruined, along with my mascara. Thank you. Enjoy the show,” she said, and waved and started to walk away. Perhaps it was the tequila, but I was overcome with tenderness. I reached out and grabbed Lucy’s arm and, when she let me, hugged her tightly. She resisted, but relaxed a little.
“This won’t improve my makeup.”
“Break a leg,” I whispered.
“Hey, that’s me, Miss Invulnerable.”
Back in the gallery, Cornelia snapped around in her seat so I wouldn’t see that she’d been watching for
me to return. Her program was folded on her lap into an origami crane. A hush went through the crowd when the musicians sat down and tuned their instruments. A few latecomers arrived, going up the center aisle and squeezing themselves past people’s legs, greeting their friends with whispers and small embraces.
I glanced up from my program just as Regina walked by, straight to the front where she took an aisle seat, sat down, and placed her program on her knees.
A Russian folk piece started. After a few minutes, Cornelia sighed loudly through her nose. I forced myself to look away, to look anywhere but at Regina, fearing that by some intuition she’d realize I was staring at her neck. Those shoulders. Those ears. Absolutely it was her. I’d known it when her ankles went past. I knew it from the cascade of her hair.
My Regina, or at least her ghost, but what was she doing there? Had she followed me, was it because of my e-mail? Had Regina heard about Cornelia somehow?
After fifteen minutes, Cornelia pretended her program had come alive as a paper bird, and flapped it around in circles. She leaned into my lap and whispered, “It’s like so cultural in here.” I shushed her and tried to concentrate on the music and ignore my stomach. By then, Lucy’s group had engaged with the score, they were leaning in and sliding back and forth over dynamics. I had half a mind to call Cornelia a taxi, half a heart to save her seat and invite Regina to sit down.
The group concluded for a brief intermission. Cornelia and I both quickly stood up. I followed her outside, daring a look back from the entrance. Regina was talking animatedly with the cello player, a man my age.
Then I remembered: Richard Cajal, senior scientist in the lab where Regina worked, married with triplet teenaged sons. Cancer survivor, very tame. Doubtful.
Cornelia had disappeared. I found her around the side of the building, smoking under some trees, leaning against a bronze sculpture of a seal.
You Lost Me There Page 16
