The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  He inhaled, held it in his lungs. “What’s it called,” he said, “when your wife starts going to bed with her therapist?”

  “Professional malfeasance,” she said. “Criminal misappropriation of power. Dereliction of psychological duty. Any of those things would do.”

  “You’re smart, but I’m being serious,” he said.

  “Heartbreak,” she said. “It’s called heartbreak.”

  He shook his head. “Heartbreak. Isn’t that convenient that a doctor would be the exact person you’d want to see in the event of your heart breaking.”

  “But that’s a metaphor,” Lydia said. “It’s not real. And she doesn’t cure heartbreak. She fixes bones. You’re high. There’s a difference. Actually and metaphorically.”

  “Look,” he said. “I’m trying to express my feelings, given the circumstances.”

  “What are the circumstances, exactly?”

  He raised his voice and was almost yelling. “That we’re here, downtown, stalking her lover—”

  “Oh God, please don’t say ‘lover.’”

  “—and that I’m really high at the moment, as you said, like, very high, and you know, maybe I’m underestimating the difference between heartbreak and cardiac arrest, but to me, Lydia, they’re kind of the same thing right now.”

  A yellow-footed gull landed on a curbstone ahead of the car and shook rain from its feathers. They were beautiful birds, she thought. Remarkably resilient. She had taken two weekend seminars on ornithology at Hartwell, if for no other reason than to have something to talk about with her grandmother, who liked birds. The gull spread its wings but did not take off. It was stretching, she guessed. It was looking right at them. Then it flew away. Her father ignored it.

  “What are we doing here, exactly?” she asked. “What’s the plan?”

  “A confrontation,” he said. “Obviously.”

  “You’re stoned out of your mind. What kind of confrontation are you envisioning? A very slow confrontation?”

  “Her going for a walk around the hospital garden with this creep is one thing. Her being here is another thing altogether. I’m going to tell him to back off. One man to another man.”

  “I don’t think that happens in real life, Dad. I think that’s just on television. I think in real life, when that happens, you know, someone ends up murdering someone else.”

  “Murder?” her father said, laughing. “I smoke pot. Pot smokers don’t murder people.”

  “But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility that he might murder you.”

  “Blah blah blah,” her father said, frustrated, senseless. “That shrink stole my wife.”

  “You guys are getting divorced!”

  Her father turned to her, his face a wreck of despair and pain. “It was supposed to be a trial separation! We were in couples therapy!”

  “With who?” she asked, pointing up at the black face of the Intercontinental. “With that guy? That guy up there with the nice view?”

  “Fuck,” her father said, leaning back against the seat. “This is depressing.”

  After a while she told him, “She’s not a six-pack of beer. He can’t steal her. She went willingly.”

  “Willingly,” he repeated. “Willingly.”

  There was a seafood restaurant across the road from the Aquarium concourse. This fact seemed unnecessarily cruel to Lydia. Her father used to take her to eat there when she was young. The dining room was built into the underside of a series of fresh- and saltwater fish tanks, the whole place done up as an aquarium in miniature. They came here when her mother worked late, to this blue room with the fish swimming up above their table. The vastness of the place, the huge blueness, had thrilled her. Her dad liked to tell her that this place was actually under the sea, that they had, when they went through the front door, gone underground. She was five—six, maybe—and perhaps he thought he could fool her. But really, she knew: they were just eating inside a fish tank, waiting for the same person to get off work.

  “You want me to take you across the street?” she said. “Cheer you up?”

  “Funny, Lydia.”

  “I don’t think I ever really connected the idea of seeing pretty fish and then going across the street and eating those same pretty fish.”

  “You always wanted to go,” he said. “You were always very confident with your opinions. I was reading a lot of books on fatherhood back then. The books said that I should listen.”

  “See? That’s where you went wrong,” she said. “You should ignore me always.”

  “That was what the marriage counselor told me about your mother,” he said.

  Lydia fell silent. The separation was only half a year old, but the dissolution of her parents’ marriage felt as substantial in her own small world as the disbanding of something enormous, like Europe. A breakup had always been possible, if not plainly obvious, but the reality of their being apart, her mom and dad, and in separate houses, and their occasionally falling in love with their therapists, and getting high pre-sunrise and smoking Cheech and Chong volumes of weed and freely stalking each other—it was too sudden and new for Lydia to laugh about.

  “I shouldn’t make a joke like that,” her father said. “That’s inappropriate.”

  “Of all the inappropriate things you’ve done today,” she said.

  He put his seat back all the way, until it lay flat, and he closed his eyes.

  After a while she spoke up. “You read books on fatherhood?” she asked.

  He smiled at her. His voice came out low. “Quite a few,” he said.

  “Did you learn anything?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”

  17.

  It wasn’t as if Oona went home with Paul without deliberation. Last night they’d been at the bar, talking about death, and he’d said it plainly enough, with no subterfuge involved, no mystery as to what they were agreeing to. “I think it would be nice if you came home with me to my condo,” he said. She hadn’t answered right away. Instead, she’d gotten up and walked to the back of the bar, pretending at first to wait in line for the restroom, and then she snuck off through the rear door, into the parking lot, where, through the thicket, she could see the rim of the lake that connected to the river that ran behind her house, and where, gathered in the shelter of the derelict bank of pay phones, there were young people, not much older than Lydia, all of them smoking cigarettes. She begged for one and smoked it alone by the side of the building, standing on a pile of soggy leaves, in full view of one of the bar’s windows. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette since the first George Bush was president, and she wanted to vomit. She spied on Paul inside. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Maybe some kind of oracular divination. A hint as to what to do. He finished his diet soda. He checked his email. He made the bartender laugh. These were good things, weren’t they? Did all people suffer these deliberations? The ancient questions rose up. To screw or not to screw? Go inside or flee? A woman passing behind Paul’s barstool tripped slightly, or stumbled, and Paul caught her elbow and helped her upright and made her laugh as well, and while Oona watched, he got up from his seat and walked her to the door. This tiny act of kindness had done it. Twenty years of immaculate fidelity. She had not so much as kissed or touched or corresponded inappropriately with another man since her first date with Spencer. She walked inside.

  Now, standing barefoot in Paul’s kitchen, she noticed that there were fingernail marks across the skin of her belly. Also, her sweater lay in a humiliating pile by the oven door, just where she’d had it torn off her body.

  Paul walked quickly to the file folder on the kitchen table, picking it up and stashing it on a bookcase.

  “So before our first date you read up on me?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  “Just so, what, you could remember more clearly what exactly makes me vulnerable?”

  “You’re putting the darkest possible spin on this,�
� he said.

  “Just so we could discuss…what was the phrase you used about my father dying? The transfer of energy between the living and the dead?”

  “It was a nice conversation between two people. There was nothing creepy about it.”

  “What is this, then? The transfer of fluids between the pursuer and the pursued?”

  “That, again, is a sinister way to think about what happened with us.”

  “There is something deeply creepy about this, Paul. First the long story about your wise, sage, gorgeous ex-wife with her red curls and her jade necklaces. Then this, the dossier to my emotional life?”

  “I can’t tell you whose file it is,” he said. “You know that. You know the rules.”

  “It’s clearly my file.”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Then give it to me. Let me see.”

  “Doctor-patient confidentiality,” he said.

  “I’m a doctor. Maybe I need to consult on the patient’s medical history.”

  “Oona, these are the rules.”

  “So now you like rules. Is that so? I’m in my underwear. Which is more than I was wearing ten minutes ago. How does that fit in with your rules?”

  They passed into the living room. She stood alone at the window. Buoys in the harbor rocked, wave-thrown. Boats in the channel passed, horns blowing. For a few minutes, helium balloons brushed by the glass, a stream of them released by children or peace protesters or perhaps a balloon vendor with a very poor grip. His office was on the ground floor of the building across the way. She could see the revolving door that she and Spencer had passed through, twice a week for months, listening all that time to Paul as he urged them to practice patience, because, as he told them, this is a process, life and love and fidelity and marriage, all of it a long, tough process. She wondered now where in the process fucking her therapist fell.

  “We waited the recommended length of time,” Paul said.

  “Who’s doing the recommending here: the doctor or the patient?”

  “Where is this aggression coming from? A half hour ago you were so lovely.”

  “Oh here we go. Unhinged woman acting so nuts and crazy! You tell me, doctor. Where is this aggression coming from? How long have I been in therapy with you? You must have the answer by now.”

  “You can’t use my therapy against me as a weapon. DeeDee had the hardest time with that.”

  “DeeDee.”

  “Yes,” he said, realizing perhaps that mentioning DeeDee was not a good thing to have done in this particular circumstance. “DeeDee had some difficulty with the rules.”

  Oona looked around. Pictures of DeeDee littered the place. Oona knew how it was. Leaving a marriage was like scraping plaque from a bad artery. You could never get rid of all of it. It was not as if she had not kept pictures of Spencer in her phone, or on the dresser in her bedroom in Aveline, but hers was a newer separation, everything still fresh. Apparently, in between catalog shoots DeeDee worked as a personal trainer at a gym in Concord not far from where the minutemen and the royalists began the Revolution. This was a fact that Paul believed was symbolic of some larger personal struggle within her. Oona had heard all of this in bed. Sovereignty rebelling against tyranny, or liberty overcoming the crush of imperialism, or some crap like that. DeeDee was the freedom fighter; he was the monarchic oppressor. None of this did anything to calm Oona’s concerns. If Paul was a tyrant, then who had she just slept with? And if DeeDee was too good for Paul, then where did that leave her?

  She said this to him. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? It’s like a math equation.”

  He acted confused. “What is this? A test? If A is bigger than B? I was never good at this kind of thing.”

  Finally Paul slunk into the seat of a leather sofa.

  “I thought we had a great time,” he said.

  “It was a decent time.”

  “In bed, I meant.”

  “Like I said.”

  He shook his head. “Earlier, you were so excited.”

  “I was excited for someone new,” she said.

  “But I am someone new.”

  18.

  For a while they waited. This had become a stakeout. Her father went across the street for sticky cinnamon donuts and scalding coffee. If they were going to wait, he told her, they might as well wait with some food, or at least something sweet and satisfying and terrible for you. Alone in the Toyota, with its silent climate system humming, Lydia surveyed the silver walls of the Aquarium, watching the streams of families coming off the MBTA and lining up outside, everyone holding hands, whole masses of humanity ready to see the fish in their fish tanks. The hand-holding moved her. It was the exhaustion, or the proximity to heartbreak. Toddlers ambled uncertainly across Atlantic Avenue in search of penguins or manatees or razor-nosed dolphins, oblivious to the hazards of traffic and urban life. Young couples, old couples, tourist couples. She could remember reaching for her father’s hand. It was always her father, for the unavoidable fact that her mother was always at work, too far away to reach. Some future therapist, she knew, would delight at hearing it put this way. She still suffered the instinct to reach for a hand when crossing a street. She had reached for Charlie’s hand in this way, grabbing it once while sneaking out of Hartwell and into the town center. This was at the beginning, when he was kind. They were in the forest that separated the school from the town. He had taken her hand freely. A teenage boy, she had learned, will take whatever physical contact he is given, but Charlie had regarded it with some confusion. Her small hand gripping his as they ran out through the campus forest and out to the state highway—intimacy stripped bare of any sexual context had clearly mystified him.

  She checked her phone and found, waiting for her on the screen, a fresh message from Charlie, delivered five minutes earlier.

  Thanks for the new picture(s). I’ll keep them safe. I promise.

  Then, a minute later:

  But only if you come to New Jersey to see me.

  The picture was a crime, she had decided. He had wanted to curry favor with his idiotic gang by scintillating them with her body. Her bare breasts were a form of currency that he had and wanted to trade for something like coolness or friendship. He wanted to shame her. That was the kind of boy he was. The boy who connects the nudity of his own body with shame, and who assumes that everyone else must feel the same way. This was the boy who had not been willing to take his own shirt off when they were together in his bed, while he played R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” on repeat, afraid to show her that he had a divot in his chest, pectus excavatum, cobbler’s chest, an indentation deep enough to hold half a cup of water. Here was the root cause of his sexual anxiety, this divot, the reason why he needed the lights off, why when she had deigned to rest her hand on his chest while she kissed him, something that she thought people did when they kissed, he had flinched beneath her.

  She clicked around, checked all her accounts, her feeds. She looked for new pictures. She suffered competing impulses. She knew that there were no other pictures of her out there. Nothing else to leak or hack or steal. She had taken only the one. But then, looking at the glint of the glass on the lens, she remembered his warning: Assume that someone’s watching you all the time.

  She composed a message back, struggling for the exact right words. She settled on this:

  You are a deeply sick human being.

  The irony of her ever taking a picture like this was that she had been so reluctant to be naked in front of anyone, ever. Here was a fact of the kind of place like Hartwell: public nudity was endemic. Girls walking back from the shower, towels slipping. Roommates changing out in the open. The Danish catalog models slept nude in exorbitantly expensive Frette linen, or else they occasionally set up impromptu figure drawing classes in the common spaces, one of them posing, the rest sketching. They sent nude selfies preprogrammed to self-destruct with such a dizzying regularity that Lydia felt foolishly prim. Which was why people thought she was an
alien—because she would not change in front of them. “What’s the big deal?” one of her roommates had asked. This came directly following a dorm-wide meeting during which everyone in Rosewater agreed to ban the color pink. No pink clothing, toothbrushes, underwear; no salmon-colored phone cases, pink being the color of conformity, of Barbie, of a widespread assumption of girlish insipidity. It seemed ridiculous now to admit that she’d taken the picture because she was curious, or because she’d felt some vague invidious peer pressure to do what everyone else was doing, or even because of the simple fact that her body was relatively new and potentially beautiful and that she hoped to be able to age without the heaping shitloads of shame everyone else she knew felt.

  The chime of Charlie’s new message startled her.

  Come to New Jersey

  She was quick with a response, and already she could see him typing on the other end:

  You’re a criminal

  I’m wonderful

  You’re revolting

  I need you in my life, Lydia

  You should be in jail you sick fuck

  I should be in your pants

  You wouldn’t know what to do in my pants if you got there.

  Come to New Jersey. Let’s make up. Make nice. Hang out. Get high.

  Please leave me alone Charlie

  In the car, she had to hold the phone against her knee, she was shaking so hard. She considered the photograph. She’d made it at three in the morning, alone in the shower. She’d gotten high for the first time that night. Not that it was an excuse. She had been out in the woods with Charlie, sneaking around on the lip of the ridge that looked out at the valley and Mount Thumb. Barn owls were hunting. He told her that they mated for life. Just like black vultures. Just like termites. He connected his phone to wireless headphones that they each wore, and as they went up through the underbrush he put on his kind of music for her. Ambient wind rushes of digital noise. Washes of color. He gave her a pill. She took it without thinking. They sat on a white rock and waited for it to hit. He knew the names of all the bugs in the mud, the Latin name for the tulip tree.