The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  “I love this: you sleep with your psychologist and it’s all your mother’s fault! How convenient!”

  Her mother was on record as thinking that Oona’s quasi-religious adherence to her own talk therapy was a simple matter of being addicted to her own voice. Oona was not sure she was wrong. In the New York of her mother’s youth, such things were not done. One simply worried with dignity. You lived down the hall from your aunt and your grandmother, and you listened to their stories about mass slaughter and poverty, and then you were alone with your problems. Making such a big deal out of your anxieties, her mother contended, was the most egregious of first-world luxuries. Like hiring a man to shower you. These complaints had not changed much over the last few months. Therapy exacerbated narcissism, or reinforced some upper-middle-class victim syndrome. After all, they weren’t talking about Jacques Lacan. Oona wasn’t involved in some deep intellectual reconfiguration of her psyche. Modern day, suburban psychotherapy was glorified adult day care. Twice a week for the past six months, Oona had heard her mother’s line about hiring a man to shower you. They agreed to disagree, but it was not for nothing that Oona had not told her mother about Paul. How did one ever explain such a thing, anyway? It might have been easier for Oona to have said, Remember the story I told you about the man whose knees I operated on last week? The man who was hit by the bus? Yes, well, when he woke up from the anesthesia we became lovers.

  “What did Spencer say about all of this?”

  “Oh,” Oona said, “he was super excited for me. It was a happy family moment for both of us.”

  Her mother looked genuinely concerned.

  “I just came from asking him to take me back,” Oona said.

  Her mother cringed. “You did nothing of the sort, I hope.”

  “I thought it was the smart thing to do.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Fucking my therapist on his kitchen floor also seemed intelligent.”

  Her mother smiled. “Look, I’m not going to make you feel guilty about it,” she said. “Any of it.”

  “What if I’m already feeling guilty?”

  “I think I can dig out my lecture notes on the nexus between sex and social shame, if you want.” She turned to a big wall of boxes. “It was fairly boring and obvious even in 1974. But there’s probably something worthwhile in it.”

  “Please no,” Oona said.

  “I’ll give you the same advice I gave your daughter about her nude picture. Which is that shame is a choice.”

  “She said you two talked.”

  “Briefly. It’s always brief with me and Lydia.”

  “What else did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t tell her much,” her mother said. “Mind you, I wanted to. There are things to tell a girl like that. Lots of things. But I didn’t want to step on any toes.”

  “What did she tell you?” Oona asked. It occurred to her that perhaps Lydia might have confided in her grandmother, really confided, and this possibility stung Oona.

  “She didn’t have to tell me anything,” her mother said. “It’s fine, honey. Really. She’s going to be fine. Everyone’s going to be fine.”

  Oona was not sure she believed this. Optimism felt impossible. Had her mother still been writing or teaching, she would have likely agreed. This house, all this space, the privacy—all of it had caused her to lose touch. The world was happening far away from here. Oona imagined the fiery lecture she might have given had she been more engaged. The Internet: Radicalizing the Future Misogynists of America. Or: Stay the Fuck Away from My Granddaughter. Her mother, however, let out an exhausted breath.

  “Come sit next to me,” she said, and when Oona did, her mother let her head fall slightly onto Oona’s shoulder. “There,” her mother said. “This is so much better.”

  For a moment they were silent. The fire warmed the room. Overhead the ceiling sagged. Oona put her hand in her mother’s hair, which was still wet from the snow. This was the best part of living here again. Being able to do this, to sit quietly with her mother. Outside, lights went by on the main road. Everything was packed already. The room was nothing but boxes. When she moved in here, Oona had imagined herself as a bulwark against her mother’s grief. As if she were strong enough on her own.

  She held on to her mother.

  When the fire went out, Oona got up and went into the back room and looked for some actual firewood to burn in the fireplace. This was where she found the small folded piece of paper, wedged into the back of the cabinet. She knew the handwriting. To you, it read, from me. She looked in at her mother, on the sofa, wrapped in her father’s old big sweater. Her mother had been finding these notes for the better part of the last two years, but Oona knew that her mother had not found one since her dad died. Oona had found her mother countless times opening drawers and emptying out cabinets, looking and looking. She hesitated, the paper in hand. Everything, everywhere, was packed.

  Then, quietly, she took her father’s suitcase and opened it just enough to slide the note inside.

  26.

  They went out that afternoon while the stores were still open. Oona drove. They went west at first, out of the suburbs and into the countryside, passing cow fields and Walden and then the high razored walls of the state prison. The sun set white and gray over the elms. In the first two stores they found nothing, which pleased Henrietta, and which allowed her—temporarily, at least—to believe that you could in fact live with a man and know that man and know in fact that man’s secrets and the things that shamed him so that when he died, perhaps in your arms, perhaps with his blood on your flagstone walkway and your blue jeans, you did not find, as she did, in a third store, his overcoat hanging in a closet full of overcoats that had belonged to other men.

  Objects, she used to teach, were inherently without value until a culture assigned that value. This was usually during a lesson about the female body as object, given typically to a group of college boys hostile to the idea, or in trouble for some sexual violation, all of them sitting sullenly in a lecture hall with their legs spread apart in subconscious defiance. She had a chart registering the price of an ounce of gold, the price of an ounce of marijuana, and the price of a woman on West 42nd Street.

  While Oona watched, Henrietta enacted a new, silent debate: the brain says, this is a coat, it’s worthless, fuck it. Everything else says, buy this coat, or steal it, or wreck it here, right on the rack, so no one else can wear it.

  Back in the car, they went east toward the city, into the towns where Harold had felt comfortable. All of these small villages near Aveline had stores that sold antiques and collectibles and proffered their meager hauls from less-than-impressive estate sales. Henrietta and Oona went to each of them.

  In the fourth and fifth stores, they found nothing.

  In the sixth, Henrietta found a copy of her own book for sale, autographed to a woman named Cindy. Be proud! Henrietta had written, the handwriting bubbly. Be bold!

  In the seventh store, they found leather belts and silver candlesticks and old kitchen knives. Were these his? Henrietta wasn’t sure. Oona was. Henrietta held them in her hand. There were fingernail marks on the handle of the butcher blade. She put her fingernails into the grooves.

  They went north along the shore. The weather warmed. Oona put down a window. Ocean salt and frozen ryegrass and clams frying in the grease huts. In Marblehead they waited at a red light, the languid sea tide lapping at the storm wall.

  “I gave you my credit card,” Oona said somewhere north of there. “In case you needed things.”

  “I saw,” Henrietta said.

  “You can use it,” she said.

  Henrietta nodded.

  “Let me rephrase that,” Oona said. “Use it. Please. Use it.”

  In Salem the witches were out taking pictures with the tourists.

  In Ipswich they passed a waterway called Labor in Vain Creek.

  In the eighth store, they found a watch. His thirty-seventh birthday gift.


  Back into the city. Easter decorations, hung prematurely, swung frozen in the tide wind.

  In Dedham she found, once more, her book for sale. Dear Judy, Thank you for reading.

  In Dorchester she stood outside, in tears.

  At the twenty-first store, she went next door to a liquor store for wine and drank it on the sidewalk.

  Finally, at the last store, a pawnshop in Mission Hill, they found tennis trophies, stand mixers, electric guitars, two cameras, a film projector, a silver necklace (birthday thirty-nine), a gold money clip inscribed by her to him (birthday forty-two), and also, importantly, a record of Harold’s signing over these items. Because Henrietta had gone to wait outside, Oona needed to walk out onto the sidewalk to show her the piece of paper bearing Harold’s handwriting.

  Look, she said. Look.

  Part

  III

  27.

  Lydia took the trolley back from Boston and walked the short route from downtown Crestview past the cemetery and the First Baptist Church and the flower nursery and the manmade lake with its buoyant and chlorinated fountain. Later in her life she would struggle to remember the way her town had felt to her this day, with its barren and treeless cul-de-sacs and its caravan of parked snow-slick SUVs and its chorus of snowblowers in place of wildlife or birds or children or joy. Her father was in the kitchen when she came home, the whole place heavy with meat smoke and bacon grease and messy with flour. All of this indicated to Lydia some low-level crisis happening with her dad, probably about her mother, probably about Dr. Paul, probably about the impending quiet doom of a divorced middle age. When he saw her he knew something was wrong. Maybe this was fatherly intuition. A genetic ability to sense distress. Or more probably this was because she looked so awful. On the train home she had watched the shape and condition of her reflection change in the mirror black of the trolley windows. In the city, on the bridge in Cambridge over the Charles, near Coolidge Corner, with the train full of college boys reading Kant, at Boston College, with two priests in front of her, she had fought to look composed, to feign an expression that read, Yes, there are pictures of my naked fifteen-year-old body available for download in every corner of the earth that has an Internet connection, but she did not wear this well. Anybody could download her. How did anyone ever wear this well?

  She did not have a phone now and so she needed to take her father’s. She swiped at the screen and found the site and then found the section of the site that advertised teenage girls, and then she found the section of the site with teenage girls where her picture was currently the advertised picture, beside a caption that she guessed was supposed to be alluring: Dumb Teen Sluts. She adjusted the screen so that it was just her face showing, not her body, her chest, stomach, legs, crotch, knees, toes. “This is me,” she said, giving the phone to him. Her goddamned eyes in that picture.

  He did not know what to do. She saw the thoughts happening. Tears welled. He turned away. He put reading glasses on. He squinted. He looked straight at her. He grabbed her and squeezed her and whispered in her ear, I will beat the blood out of this kid’s skull.

  This was not helpful. Charlie Perlmutter having the blood taken out of him, slaughtered like a kosher cow, did not eliminate the fact that in Ulaanbaatar, in Seoul, in Sydney, in Caracas, men in the open fields, in subway cars, on yachts, in football stadiums could and would look at her and masturbate.

  For a while he made calls. She watched him pace. He went out on the deck. He didn’t want her to hear. She could see him yelling but could not hear exactly what. He rolled up his sleeves. The hair on his arms was the thickest hair she’d ever seen on any arm. Something about this had always made her think that he was well suited to the job of being a dad, a superabundance of androgen being in some way directly proportional to his ability to parent, when instead he was just a guy, a failed lawyer in a cheaply built house in a blankly named American town, a guy with a daughter.

  He made more calls. He paced more. He came inside and burst out sweating. He went back out into the cold, onto the deck, and did more calling and pacing and sweating.

  When he came back inside, she allowed herself a moment of relief and optimism.

  “I called the cops,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, nodding. “Good.” She took a breath. She held out her hand for her father’s phone and began constantly refreshing the page. “So it must be down,” she said. Then: “Is it down?” She refreshed. “It’s not down.” She turned to him. “It’s not fucking down.”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  A new surge of panic hit her. Everywhere her phone had gone, it was possible that Charlie had gone also. Assume that someone’s watching you all the time, Charlie had told her. The reality of what exactly this meant hit her: her showering, her shitting, her idiotic dancing around in her room to illegally downloaded Nicki Minaj, drunk on Goldschläger and possibly high on caffeine pills. It was not just the pictures he had taken—her crotch, her chest, the fringe of her pubic hair beneath her skirt—but everything else. All of it. Her whole last six months.

  “Can’t we find someone who actually, really, genuinely knows what to do?”

  Her father reached over and took the phone from her. “First, stop looking at this thing. That’s step one.”

  Talking was difficult when you were hyperventilating. He put a hand on the back of her neck, soothing, calm.

  “Second thing: breathe.” She turned to him, dizzy, queasy, bloodless, mid–panic attack.

  “What if there’s more pictures?” she asked. “Why can’t they shut it down? Let’s call better cops. Surely there are better cops.”

  It was not as easy as it sounded to just flip a switch on the whole global architecture of the Internet, just for one picture, one body, one fifteen-year-old girl. His saying it this way, slowly, pedantically, explaining every tiny detail, did not help. Nor did it help when he told her that he had called around to friends of his at the old law firm, experts in cybersecurity, in domestic cyberassault, who told him that on quick glance the site that hosted her picture was located on a Southwestern Pacific island with no real government or law. This was where people went, evidently, to host their dark web, black-market-narcotics superstores, or their specious digital currency exchanges, or their wholesale Hollywood bootlegging businesses. Hearing this, she felt hopeless.

  Also, he told her, they simply couldn’t prove definitively that Charlie had been the one to upload it. She made him repeat this. “There is no real proof,” he said. She did not like this part of her father’s personality. The trained equanimity of lawyers enraged her.

  “What do you mean you can’t prove it?” she asked. “Who else would upload this picture?”

  They were at the kitchen table. The Singh family stood outside wearing matching lilac snowsuits.

  “The picture went around the whole school,” he said, simply, annoyingly. “Anybody could have done it.”

  “He did it.”

  “I believe you that he did it. But the police need actual evidence. Proof. Something that has his fingerprints on it. A chain of custody.”

  “I understand that fact. But he’s the one. I have the messages from him,” she said, realizing as she did that the phone was broken and the messages vanished.

  What her father wanted to do, he told her, was go talk to Charlie Perlmutter’s dad, man to man, father to father. If Charlie had really done it, and if the police were going to take their time looking into it, this was the best way to get the pictures gone. “I can get him to get Charlie to take it down,” her dad said. “I know I can do that.” Watching him as he said this, stubble on his chin, cheeks pink with anger, Lydia figured this to be some basic macho bullshit. A man needing to fight another man about a woman’s body—which it may have been. Or some vestigial primal violence that needed occasionally to rise up and find an outlet. But then she saw his hand shaking as he put the phone down on the table. Skin was missing from the nail bed of his thumb. Blood h
ad dried. He turned to her. “I’m going to fix this,” he said.

  For hours they drove in silence out from Crestview through the country, along the Aveline Trail, the fast river, the gray rocks, the slow river, the big white sky.

  The snow line stopped in Connecticut along the Merritt, where the earth was dry and brown and the sky through the thicket of alders in the rich towns and the railway towns and the seaside towns was clear and cloudless.

  Eventually they crossed over the George Washington Bridge. She turned to see Manhattan along the river, the whole ridged spine of the city.

  Night loomed. The city lit up.

  Over Hackensack, a child’s toy of the moon hung. Bridges were suspended, car-cluttered, across soot-wrecked marsh. The sky was full with clouds. There were clouds at the window side, polluted clouds, striated and hot with light, shelf upon shelf and drifting.

  Getting closer, they drove through a series of towns that could have been Crestview, full of red brick-laid sidewalks, handsome at dusk, cute and stately with Tudor storefronts. A standing clock in one of the town squares threw gold light into traffic. Municipal employees in reflective vests emptied parking meters in front of the antique shops. The layout of the American suburb was a uniform thing, multiplied across the country, like bacteria, one after the other, between rivers, amidst superhighways, obliterating landscapes, impervious to state borders. That this was not a new thought to anyone but her did not lessen the shock of realizing the eerie sameness of this town and her town. She sensed birds overhead. She closed her eyes. They had driven for hours and gone nowhere.

  The whole way, he kept asking her, Are you okay?, and she had the same answer, which was, I’m definitely not fucking okay. Her father managed to look composed and confident, and this was enough that when they got to the Perlmutters’ town, she said nothing, and as they got to Charlie’s street, she still said nothing, and as they went past the houses close to his, and her father sat up, she finally felt as though maybe he knew what he was doing.