The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  Back home, her father put on his black apron and cooked them lunch. Linguine and clams. Her grandfather had given him lessons and he had become over time a very good cook. She watched him, hoping for inspiration about how she might fix this, what she might say to make it better. All the typical words of consolation felt hackneyed and worthless. Forget that guy. Visualize happiness. Maybe think about not being stoned all the time. The noise of his knife against the cutting board was immense and angry. Bowls appeared, stuffed with parsley he had savaged. Lemons were juiced. Clams shucked. More Coltrane on the in-home wireless. They ate in silence with a soccer game on in the background. Some Spanish team full of beautiful men sprinting around in the honeyed sunshine of Valencia. He ate with his mouth ajar, a continuous open passageway for his fork. He finished a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. Sports consumed him so deeply and so hypnotically that she felt, watching him watch these men run, a deep jealousy of his capacity to disappear into something meaningless. He roused only when the action commanded him to. On the screen a tiny, beautiful, black-haired Spaniard scored a goal and then took off his shirt to reveal an abdomen cleaved into so many tiny squares. Accordingly, her dad, in his drowsiness, lifted his own shirt. “I’ve become convinced that I don’t have those things,” he said, looking at her, and then at his own belly. “The square things. Abs? Like, I think we could hire an archeological expedition to dig around there, and I don’t think they’d come up with anything.”

  She blinked at him.

  “It’s okay to laugh at my jokes,” he said.

  It had been, by any measure, a bad day. Cuckoldry, disgrace, spilled coffee, ruined camel hair, indignation. And for her, the continued threat of more leaked pornography. How could she laugh?

  Across the room, she found her reflection in a hanging bistro mirror. A cheesy decorative touch made by a neo-Georgian decorator her mother had hired, it hung as a divider between the culinary badlands of their kitchen and the trophy room of their library, filled even now with the self-help paperbacks her parents hoarded—books with titles like Thinking: A Graphic Novel and Role-Playing Exercises to Cure Your Panic. Years ago her mother had become convinced that the true path to happiness lay in creating a lovely home. Perhaps this was something she’d read about, maybe in an instructive guide to homemaking that promised a replenishment of the soul, or perhaps this was merely the predictable response to having grown up the way she had, alongside the pink shadow of her mother’s book. But there was a problem: the home she’d made with her husband was a dump. The decorator had left their house full of velvet chaises, brass sconces, and a since-removed Rembrandt print that showed a fifteenth-century autopsy. The kitchen light against the mirror erased the contours of Lydia’s face. It made her look like an old person trying to look young. She used to believe that a person looked different in each mirror she came across. Small variations, subtle changes, the shape of an eye. She wondered sometimes about the ancient people of the Bible, how in the desert there was no water or mirrors, and no way to see what it was you looked like exactly, except in the flickering, tiny reflection of another human’s eye. You would need to really hold on to someone to truly see yourself.

  She and her father both looked out to the backyard. The members of the Singh family were on their deck grilling octopus and slamming the hell out of a badminton birdie. Priya Singh, resplendent in azure Gore-Tex, equipped with a wicked forehand, the current Crestview High champion of being effortlessly good at shit, caught Lydia staring across the fence and waved. They had been best friends when they were young but had grown apart—Priya to boys, field hockey, and pop music, and Lydia to Hartwell.

  “Wave back,” her father said.

  “Maybe first we should talk about what happened today,” Lydia said.

  “Just wave at your neighbor.”

  “We don’t know what happened up there in his apartment, is all I’m saying. They could have been having coffee.”

  “Coffee? Is that a metaphor for sex? Or maybe a euphemism for some new illegal therapeutic technique in which psychologists sleep with their patients?”

  Priya stood at the fence. Lydia’s father turned to her.

  “I’m waving with my mind,” Lydia told him. “I assure you.”

  “She’s being generous and nice. So wave with your hand so that you don’t come off as an alien.”

  “Oh,” Lydia said, waving with mock happiness. “Priya Singh believes me to be a hundred percent alien, I assure you.”

  “She’s happy to see you. And she might turn out one day to be your best friend again,” her father said. “And it all might hinge on this very moment. You waving at her.”

  “Explain to me a scenario in which that beautiful girl over there becomes my best friend.”

  “Is it so outrageous?”

  “She’s beautiful in that stupid, hideous coat. Nobody could be beautiful in a coat like that. Gore-Tex is a natural beauty reducer. So, yes, it is outrageous. In another context, with another person who is not me, it might not be.”

  “Do you have to go someplace to special-order teenage self-loathing like that? Or does it just happen that on your fifteenth birthday a stork appears in your window in the guise of Morrissey, and he touches his beak to you, and then gloomy clouds fill the sky and you’re miserable until you’re thirty?”

  “That would make a great children’s book,” she said.

  “You’re just as pretty as she is,” he said.

  “Seriously, write that book. Make millions.”

  “She could be your maid of honor at your wedding. I could see a version of the future in which it isn’t so outrageous. People crop up places.”

  “With all this awesome marital happiness around me—I can’t wait.”

  This hurt him, she knew. He’d kept the wedding photos up as well as the picture taken the moment they’d met each other at the party in Tribeca. While he’d ditched the bed, he’d kept the photos. At first this had seemed a sentimental touch, a reminder of happier times. Lydia wondered, though, whether this was simply a cruel way to remind him of his new reality.

  “Don’t let the present trouble sour you on love,” her dad said.

  She laughed. “My present trouble or your present trouble?”

  He didn’t want to answer. Outside, Priya Singh continued to wave. Lydia’s father’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair standing on end. Please play along, he appeared to be saying.

  “Hypothetically speaking, where will I be living when Priya Singh happens to just crop up?”

  “Let’s say that in this version of the future, you’re living in Chicago.”

  “Chicago? I’ve never heard you say anything about Chicago.”

  He screwed up his face. She wondered whether this was where he was planning to go when everything finally fell apart here. “I like Chicago. It’s a good city. Not as showy as New York. Or as vapid as L.A.”

  “What am I doing in Chicago, then?”

  He squinted at her. She knew this game. Occasionally she got a glimpse of the kind of life her parents had imagined for her. A slim, cheerful-looking fifteen-year-old waiting in line for a skim latte, having come from rehearsals for the school production of Into the Woods, the script under her arm—this urbane young woman, looking healthy, ruddy-cheeked, looking positively well-adjusted, this woman and all the young women like her, invariably elicited pangs of quasi-nostalgic longing from her parents.

  “You’re an actress,” he said.

  “Ooh. No. That won’t happen.”

  “A fashion designer?”

  “Again, no.”

  “I don’t know what you want to do when you grow up.”

  “Do I have to choose right this instant?”

  “Okay,” he said, searching. “You own a hip little coffee shop. You know, cupcakes in the display case. And Stevie Nicks on the stereo.”

  “Do I serve alcohol?”

  “Do you want to serve alcohol?”

  “Knowing my childhood, probably.”

&n
bsp; He didn’t find this funny. “Sure. Alcohol. Whatever.”

  “I’ll agree to play along, then.”

  “But only really expensive alcohol,” he said.

  “So this is for rich people?” she asked.

  “Unemployed former attorneys, mostly.”

  “This actually sounds like a good business model. You’re full of ideas tonight.”

  “So, one day, this young woman comes to visit.”

  “Is she, perhaps, South Asian, and wearing a tight blue Gore-Tex coat, and is she maybe holding a plate of grilled octopus in one hand and a badminton racket in the other?”

  “You’re working the counter. It’s been a tough day. Something’s off.”

  “Money trouble?”

  “Maybe illicit pictures of you have turned up online and derailed your fledgling congressional campaign.”

  Lydia threw up her hands.

  “Okay,” her father said. “Too soon to joke.”

  “You can never ever joke about this,” she said. “Ever.”

  The moment stung. Her father waited at the table for her anger to pass, something she knew he was doing and which, in retrospect, she probably should have allowed. Instead, she leaned back and crossed her arms against her chest. He sighed and got up to wash dishes, leaving on the table his new phone—black, gleaming, and reflecting back the image of a happy, waving Priya Singh.

  A few things occurred next.

  One: Lydia reached immediately for her phone and found herself within moments scrolling frantically through all her accounts and feeds and inboxes. While doing this, she considered the fact that she had been, for the past two hours or so, at least, completely off-line, a stretch of time that was practically equal to the Victorian epoch. She scrolled her fingers across the smudged glass, past all the new crude messages and the come-ons.

  Then she stopped.

  Her father had the water on.

  First, a short message delivered by email and text: New Jersey really is wonderful this time of year. Too bad you didn’t show. I warned you.

  Then, in her inbox and online: a pair of pictures from the night she had gone to Charlie’s bed. In the first, they were together on his unmade, fetid mattress, as if to dispel any rumor on campus to the contrary. His hand rested on her bare thigh, her skirt pushed up. Behind them rain hung in fat beads on the window screen. He had, it was easy to see, taken this picture himself. His arm was outstretched. She had not noticed. She had, senselessly, been trying to enjoy herself.

  The second picture was more simple. Just a photograph of her underwear, her pink underwear, taken, clearly, up her skirt.

  The final thing that happened was that a horrible noise escaped her.

  “You all right over there?” her father asked.

  Priya Singh had jumped the fence and was on the deck, waving and smiling and at that very moment knocking on the window. He thought that was what the scream was about.

  Lydia slid the phone back across the table. “I’m perfectly fine,” she said.

  21.

  Henrietta went to see Jerry Stern at his club at Mount Pleasant. She knew what he would say. It always came back to money. Harold had none, spent too much, always needed more. The Feast had been the biggest drain. The rent had been exorbitant, the bills from the vendors excruciating. Harold refused to skimp on ingredients. Refused to move the restaurant to the suburbs. They kept the animals until there was no point. The day they were trucked off, Jerry had to come because Harold knew that if Jerry was there he would never allow himself to weep. Despite all of this, he’d kept on with the place. How the hell could she ever tell him not to? For months, it went on like this—dripping, then bleeding, then hemorrhaging money. The empty restaurant, the wasted food, the electric bills, the staff salaries—she kept the books and watched the debt grow. Eventually she stepped in to pay everything. It bought Harold another half a year and ruined their finances. She’d had to explain all of this to everyone lately—the lawyers, the creditors, the real estate agents, the motley collection of doomsayers analyzing her future prospects—because everyone assumed she was rich. Money from the book had been good in the beginning, it was true, and it was also true that there was a horrendously bad movie with Loni Anderson, in which Anderson, or a body double, went topless in a hot-air balloon, but it was also true that this was 1977 money, Jimmy Carter–level currencies, stagnation dollars. But over twenty years, The Inseparables had slowly stopped selling and then had eventually gone out of print, its supposed pornography eclipsed by books far smarter and smuttier than hers and by the digital torrents of actual pornography. She loved Harold and so she gave him everything until she had nothing left. It always came back to money.

  Jerry did not seem surprised. “Since he’s dead, and since you loved him, I don’t want to say exactly that he was an idiot.”

  “Seems like you just did.”

  “Just with money. That was all.”

  “Most people are idiots with money.”

  He pointed at himself.

  “Not you, Jerry. I know. Mazel tov. You’re the king of aluminum siding. You should be nominated to run the Federal Reserve. You win.”

  “Both of you were uninterested in money. That was the problem. Disinterest leads to ignorance. Then, before you know it, you’re pouring all your money into some restaurant that nobody’s eating in.”

  She shook her head. Every time she was with Jerry they talked about money, and every time she talked about money she felt the need to articulate the fear. Because this was what these last few months had meant. All at once, the shape of things had collapsed. Her husband, her house, all her money, her daughter’s marriage, and then, week by week, the idea of her future.

  “I always told Harry two things. I said don’t ever borrow from someone you don’t know. And don’t start selling shit.”

  “It seems so desperate,” she said. “Birthday gifts?”

  “It’s pathetic,” he said.

  “A pen is a bad birthday gift, I admit it. But—”

  “At least he didn’t sell his blood,” he said. “Or his semen.”

  When she winced, he put up his hands.

  “For the record, I’m positive he didn’t do any of that.”

  Jerry had lived at Mount Pleasant for sixteen months, and for the past seven he’d been after Henrietta to move in. It wasn’t as bad as it looked, he told her, which was almost certainly impossible. He could get her a deal. Skip the wait list. He could get her into the Ladies’ Group, whatever that was. He told her about the greens fees, about the electric golf carts, about the carbon neutrality of the dining facilities, the performances that the local children’s choruses put on this past weekend. A bunch of miniature Maria Callases, he claimed. Honestly! Voices like birdsong! She understood the attraction to the promise of an institutionalized decline. The opposite had the potential to be horrifying. Here, at least, there were things to look forward to. The structure of the place promised escalators on the way to death. And when the time did come, nurses would live in your spare bedroom, or wheel you across the ninth fairway to the on-site hospice. In the meantime, you could sit back and enjoy the mahjong tournaments or the piped-in sound track that somehow always played the hits from when you were seventeen.

  Henrietta felt the men around her staring. If she needed any other reason to resist this place, here was one. The men here were the perfect age to have known of her when she first published That Motherfucking Thing, to have acted scandalized by her, to have written sanctimonious op-eds in the Aveline Beacon decrying the diseased state of her soul, and then to have gone home and devoured her book in private before fucking their wives with a new vigor. Jerry knew all of this, certainly, but he kept trying to sell her.

  “Let me just show you around,” he said.

  “This again?”

  “It’ll be better than wherever you’re moving, Henrietta. Plus, you’d have all this land. Just like at the house. You could still see animals out your window. It’s just
like the wilderness.”

  “Do you hear yourself? Just like the ‘wilderness’?”

  “Look around. Picture this in summer. There are birds. We have buttercups in the grass.”

  “It’s a golf course, Jerry. There’ll be men in shorts swinging huge clubs at a tiny ball, breaking my living room window.”

  “That does happen,” he said. “I can’t lie.”

  “I don’t see myself at home here,” she said.

  “You like birds, though!”

  “I do,” she said. “That’s true. I really like birds. I especially like them with teriyaki sauce.”

  “You’d have a community of people here.”

  “Like I need a bunch of old codgers harassing me day in and day out,” she said, looking back at a particular group of men in white Lacoste and plaid trousers, all of them smiling at her.

  “It’s all fun and games with that bunch,” he said.

  “They’d make lecherous comments to a mannequin, Jerry.”

  “Probably.”

  “So you’re saying I should move here and have my beautiful granddaughter come to visit me? The girl’s getting harassed already as it is. And that’s at her fancy school.”

  “Is that true?” he asked with genuine concern. “That’s awful.”

  “She barely talks to me as it is, Jerry. If I move here, and she has to contend with all these degenerates, she might never speak to me again.”

  He grimaced at this, knowing that she was right. She thought to mention to him everything about what had happened with Lydia and the picture, but what would a guy like Jerry know about something like this? A guy who, for an embarrassingly long time, believed that the Internet was a physical product you could buy in the store, like a television. Henrietta missed Jerry’s wife at moments like this. Shirley made Aveline tolerable those first years away from Manhattan, especially after the book was out in the world and it became impossible for Henrietta to do the simplest things, like go to the grocery without being accosted by strangers. Shirley came every Saturday afternoon, did so for decades, bringing along her dogs, or bags of candy, or Bogart movies that they watched together.