The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  Eventually Paul surprised her with the trip, for her fiftieth birthday, the distance between them having become so great that the only thing that might fix it, he thought, was a visit to the biggest mountain on earth. He canceled a month’s worth of appointments. They flew to Kathmandu first class, making connections in DC and Doha; drank champagne forty thousand feet above the English Channel; watched five Julia Roberts movies back-to-back. They hired a driver to take them into the Himalayas. The roads were poor. In the villages, children came to the car windows begging for change or candy whenever Paul and DeeDee stopped. All the while, she held his hand. She’d dressed in a white Nehru and a cluster of jade necklaces. He thought she had never been more beautiful. Something about the Nehru or the jade necklaces. Oona listened carefully to this particular detail. The air, Paul said, was pure, a different air than the air in North America. He rolled down the window, took big gulps, and felt, out of either a sense of adventure or oxygen depletion, as if this indeed was the greatest decision of his life, to come here, to the top of the world. As they drew closer to the first camp, the roads became worse. Signs began to appear on the roadside. Prayer flags in every color were strung up above and across the gravel. Then the peaks. The moment she saw Everest she began sobbing hysterically.

  “What is it?” he kept asking. “Tell me.”

  She kept sobbing. The driver ignored them.

  “Tell me what it is,” he begged her.

  They drove on. The mountains became bigger. DeeDee cried harder. Out the window wild poppies swayed. Plant species for which he had no name astonished him. He put a hand on her knee. She shrugged it off. Her crying was something elemental. An animal’s noise. They kept going up a narrow road. She tugged at her jade. The peaks were occluded by mist and clouds and weather. He whispered to her the whole time.

  “It’s just that it’s so beautiful,” he told her. “That’s the reaction you’re having.”

  Long-haired Europeans stood on the roadside selling prayer books and beaded bracelets.

  “It’s so pretty,” he said. “It’s okay to cry. I want to cry. You’re right. It’s so damn pretty.”

  Finally they stopped. The driver parked and got out, leaving them alone. For a half hour DeeDee buried her face in her hands. While she wept, he expounded on the reasons for her outburst. It was the sudden confrontation with a larger force, he told her. A force capable of making mountains. Evidence of God. The fingerprints of the universe. When she refused this—Fingerprints of the universe?—he tried a different tack. It was the realization that she’d been right. That Everest was the cure. That she and he had been saved. It was not this either, however. DeeDee took off the jade necklaces. She was sweating. Maybe, he tried, it was the airplane food. You know, the food just sits in the holding bays gathering microbes, and it’s so much more heavily salted than normal food, and it’s no surprise that you’re not feeling well. Then, finally, she came out with it.

  “I have something I need to confess to you,” she said.

  Paul claimed that he smiled. To Oona he said, “I honestly believed she was going to say something beautiful.”

  She never wanted to go to Everest at all, she told him. She just didn’t want to be married to him anymore. They sat inside the car, parked on the side of the road in the shadow of Mount Everest, and she said this to him, with the tears gone, the sweat dried, mountain light on her skin, all trace of nerves vanished. She smiled because she was free of him. She’d realized just after they left Boston that she wanted this, the plane barely a thousand feet over land. Everest had turned out not to be the huge metaphor in her life that she’d imagined, the biggest, most unscalable mountain not the symbol of an egoless existence or a higher state of being that she’d expected, or even a symbol of the unattainable. Everest was just a long-held distraction from her marriage to an overly talkative Texas-born post-Freudian she didn’t want to sleep with any longer. She had the hired car turn around, leaving him there.

  When he told Oona this, near dawn, ylang-ylang essence breathing from a countertop dispenser, a microfiber blanket positioned just so over his groin, she asked him what he did then. “I stayed at Everest for a month,” he said. “I lived in a monastery near the base camp. I learned the constellations. I ate yak butter soup. I read Beowulf. I made friends with a group of Belgian climbers. I wore her jade necklaces. And I met the Sherpas, these people who lived with so little fear in their lives, who did what they did without any trace of ego. DeeDee was right. I was on the mountain. I let go of things. I touched something different and new. Something opened in me. It was life-changing. DeeDee was right. She was always right.”

  “Was she, now?” Oona said. Out the window the sun was rising. She sat up. “Tell me more about this wise, sage DeeDee.”

  They were in his bed, the windows open clear to the channel islands. He grew indignant.

  “I’m not kidding,” he told her.

  She felt the need to cover her breasts. “Yak soup,” she said.

  He stood up. “I’m still not kidding.”

  It did not help to hear this story right after she’d slept with him.

  After Spencer and Lydia left last night, she’d met up with Paul at a bar in Aveline, where she had three quick bourbons, and where he had none, and where they talked—she struggled to remember—about head wounds, and the physics of intercranial swelling, and her father’s passing, and the infinite permanence of death, and about how long blood can remain on a piece of flagstone. Afterward, she left her car in the lot there and they came here together. At one point, perhaps on the road to his apartment, or in the lobby of his building, or maybe even in his bed, Oona hoped that she could love Paul. That was all she would allow herself. The hope of love, the promise, or at least the seeds. In retrospect, these were the wrong goals. She did not believe in love at first sight, or in love that emerged solely through sex. Either because of a childhood full of bad television or because of her mother’s book, these were concepts that she had grown up believing were possible, just as she had once been led to believe that a woman could realistically reach orgasm in less than three minutes. The ideas were childish, she knew, and it infuriated her to encounter adults who held fast to the idea that sex, the physical activity of intercourse, was something sacred, something capable of replenishing the soul, when for her it was just a reflex. An urge. An itch to scratch. How shocking it had been to discover that Paul was one of these people.

  They had become nearly nude in the elevator up to his apartment. Admittedly she was drunk, and the prospect of a peering voyeuristic surveillance camera or a sudden passenger did not deter her. She was excited. It was important to remember this. Here was a new person. A new body. Something that might help her feel good about herself. They tumbled in through his front door. He wore a bandage on his head. She took a moment to collect herself, to ask, amid her drunkenness, Do I want to do this? Do I really, truly, actually want to go through with this? Is casual sex acceptable? Maybe I should recheck him for concussion symptoms. Am I substituting sex for self-esteem? Is this person going to murder me? Can’t I get someone better? Am I clean enough? Am I washed? Is casual sex with your therapist even legal? He interpreted her thinking as some kind of foreplay. Or a sign of her needing to be ravished. She backed up unwittingly into the doorway to the bedroom. “Stop,” he said, taking off his underpants, exposing his cock to her. “I want to do it on the floor.”

  To be sure, this was not the most uplifting moment of her life. But there was something in his animal desperation that she found compelling enough to make her willing to do what he asked. He’d cribbed the whole thing, she knew, note for note, from chapter 8 of The Inseparables, wherein Eugenia Davenport tells Templeton Grace, “I want to do it on the floor of the solarium.” She could only guess that he had read her mother’s book and loved it, and she could assume that fucking the daughter of the woman who wrote one of America’s most famously trashy books could only inspire something like this: the floor of his apartment,
overlooking the whole of Boston Harbor, any number of hundreds of people looking in through the glass. A few minutes later, she was on her back on the cold slate of his kitchen floor, with her therapist on top of her as he issued instructions, telling her, in the same soft voice that he used in their sessions, what he wanted her to do.

  “Put your fingers in my chest hair,” he told her.

  Which she did.

  Then: “Pull on my chest hair.”

  She did this also.

  Then: “Pull harder on my chest hair.”

  And there she was, tugging, pulling away, on her therapist’s chest hair.

  Some thoughts had occurred to her during the ordeal. One: It was not pleasant to rip a man’s chest hair from his skin. Two: She thought of her mother. For someone like Oona, tutored early on in the inherent power structures of sex—men asking, men demanding, men taking—and in the necessity of emotional consent, there was the sinking suspicion that she should have at least asked for a bed. Sex demanded dignity. Her mother had hammered this into her from the start. Make it your mission to feel good, she had told Oona. Refuse shame. Disregard the cacophony of catcalls, the ogling, the vacuousness of vanity. Fuck with the lights on. Possess your own body. Reject conformist ideas of beauty. Make others reckon with your body on your terms. Oona found the advice, like everything her mother had ever told her, at once impossible to disagree with and impossible to heed. There was a new hand on her body, after all. A hand that was not Spencer’s. For a very quick moment, this felt pleasant. Here, she thought, is someone new. With her hand on Paul’s back, she thought, this is a new back, a new piece of skin. Then the sensation passed. He squeezed her thigh so hard that she wondered whether he was trying to tear a piece of her off to keep for later. The light overhead felt indecent on her bare stomach. He made animal noises. Here, she thought, is a new hand. These, she thought, are new noises.

  Which brought her to the third thought: Paul was in terrible shape. She felt only moderately guilty registering this. Weren’t people supposed to ignore the failures of other people’s bodies? Wasn’t this the polite, decent thing to do? Wasn’t this the way to build a society free of degradation? In light of everything that had happened with her daughter recently, shouldn’t she at least feel a bit ashamed of judging his body? The truth, sadly, was that she didn’t. Sex for Paul looked so incredibly arduous. She thought of this now—the short, stubborn slope of his neck as he struggled for breath. The disconcerting flush of his skin. The way his eyes showed his exhaustion. Capillaries everywhere engorged and oxygen-starved. The whole time he was working so goddamned hard. He lowered his head because he was having such a difficult time of it, and she ended up just staring back at a reflection of herself. His head and scalp were so immaculately bald that she suffered the sensation that she was being fucked by a full-length wardrobe mirror.

  In his bed, she fought to keep herself from weeping. She had been afraid of the feeling she sensed growing—that particular breed of remorse and indignity that affixed itself to poor sexual decisions. She searched for her clothing. “Why would you tell me that story?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “About your ex-wife? Right after we slept together?” She stood up. A hint of latex hovered. She noticed that across the carpet, on the credenza, he had folded her underwear and jeans and her black bra into a perfect square.

  “It’s important to know this about me,” he said. “I know so much about you.”

  “This is the most important thing about you? Your ex-wife? Fucking Mount Everest?”

  Across the room, an alarm clock read an ungodly early hour. She had not slept in three days.

  “This was obviously a mistake,” she said.

  “I don’t think it was,” he said.

  “Well, thankfully, we don’t need to agree on this for it to be true,” she said.

  “Maybe I can make some coffee and we can hash it out.”

  He lived on the penthouse floor of the Intercontinental, in a corner unit with a view of the harbor. The collective mania and marital troubles of the city had clearly provided Paul with a luxurious life. The inside of the apartment was generous and sleek, and there were books everywhere: in lines, on shelves, in stacks, by the toilet, on the big Persian rug, and in the kitchen by the bowl of decorative kiwis. Out the window the water was gray-green, flecked with birds and boats and tourists, the beached-whale glimmer on the silver hide of the Aquarium throwing light in spangles onto the boat hulls bobbing. Paul had bought the place three years ago, after his own marriage had come apart. This was the way he talked about divorce in therapy, as if some couples were a poorly knit angora sweater that had fallen mistakenly into a washing machine. Initially Oona had thought that this was a profound metaphor for marriage, and she felt bonded to him over this fact. His sadness, her sadness: their conjoined loneliness and misery was like a mutually discovered taste for Lebanese food. Not entirely rare or special, but good enough for now. She mentioned this to Spencer at some point, having begun to think of their own marriage in these terms, the two of them a ball of yarn, raveling and unraveling.

  “It’s hard to get the yarn back into a ball,” she told him. “It’s just loose and messy. That’s us. That’s you and me. We’re yarn.”

  At which Spencer scoffed. “It’s not hard at all. You just roll the fucking yarn back up into a ball! It’s easy. It makes a perfectly fine ball of yarn.”

  Out in the kitchen, Paul made coffee with a sleek Italian machine embedded in his cabinetry.

  “Maybe this happened too soon,” he said. “Maybe we needed to wait another month for the feelings to evolve.”

  She noticed a small file folder across the room on the kitchen table. “Is that my patient file?”

  He flinched.

  16.

  Later that same morning, Lydia and her dad parked outside a sleek, black-glass high-rise near the harbor. She guessed at the building’s significance without asking.

  “This doesn’t seem like a good idea,” Lydia said.

  “No, it does not,” he agreed.

  The city this early was bright and cheerless. It was Tuesday. He’d let her drive a second time, having punched the address into the GPS. They were close to the ocean, and from here the city unfurled behind them, hills of buildings, hills of houses, hills and hills. Gulls loitered. A water taxi with a shark’s mouth painted on the hull carved out a path to the islands. Traffic helicopters hovered in the sky over the channel like robotic dragonflies.

  “How long have you known?” she asked.

  He collapsed deeper into his seat. “Six days,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Or, I guess, now that it’s morning, seven days.”

  “That’s a fairly exact number.”

  “I have very little else to do but count,” he said.

  “How did you find out?”

  “I wish I had a good story.”

  She turned and picked up a pair of binoculars on the backseat. “You’re stalking her, aren’t you?”

  “Is there a difference between following and stalking?”

  She tossed the binoculars back. “You asking that question is probably not a good sign.”

  “Probably not, no.”

  “You must have seen signs, at least,” she said. “Hints that this might happen. I mean, maybe not with your therapist. But you are divorced.”

  “We’re separated.”

  “Which, by definition, means that you’re not together.”

  “What’s a sign, and what’s a normal moment of your wife being annoyed with you?”

  “The frequency of those moments, maybe,” Lydia said.

  “Fine,” he said. “There were years of moments.”

  “So there were signs.”

  Her father lit a small, already burnt joint that he’d stashed in the change tray. He blew a stream of smoke that drifted and itched at her eyes. She tried not to show her disapproval, but this was not something she was particularly good at doing. His lack of
shame about getting high right in front of her felt like a new low. He hadn’t always been so hooked. Lydia knew full well that the escalation of his habit coincided exactly with her growing up and needing less of him. There were pictures in the living room in Crestview that attested to an earlier, optimistic, more motivated era of his life. Good hair, good shoes, cuff links, clarity behind the eyes. His present wounds were, she knew, largely self-inflicted. The narrative of his needing to quit working in order to raise her, which he sometimes cravenly pulled out during a fight with her mother, was easily debunked. Fatherhood fit him better than lawyering ever had. It struck her that her mother had probably loved him more then, despite his misery as an attorney. Occasionally she thought that the existence of these facts (miserable lawyer = love; happy househusband = divorce) made her mother a bad person, but most of the time Lydia seconded the opinion that maybe it was not such a terrible thing to want your husband to be sober and have ambitions and maybe a place to go in the morning. She felt confused about it all. On one hand, her father was her best friend. This was undeniably true. On the other hand, it was not the most encouraging thing to realize about yourself—that your very best friend was a middle-aged unemployed stoner.

  “I’m medicating,” her father said when he saw her frowning. “It’s medical.”

  “If it’s medical, then what’s the disease?” she asked.