“When you laugh like that, it’s hard to keep going,” Bash says, and he pushes harder.
“Oh—no—it’s”—she needs a breath or two for each syllable—“it’s—per—fect. Don’t. Stop.”
“I never do.”
He doesn’t. Bash at fifty-three is as priapic as a teenager, always ready, inexhaustible. Well, always ready for Lu, whom he sees once or twice a month in this sterile “corporate” apartment in Bethesda. She’s not sure he’s always ready for his wife of seven years, a hard number who lives in Capitol Hill in what Lu assumes is a drop-dead gorgeous town house. She has never been invited there. AJ, who has, dismissed it as “showy,” which told her nothing. But is it in good taste? she had yearned to ask her brother. Or just a little tacky? She knows the wife is drop-dead gorgeous and not the least bit tacky. Bash brought her to Gabe’s funeral, although his flirtation with Lu had begun a few months earlier. It was probably only the timing of Gabe’s death that kept Lu from becoming an adulteress; she was well on her way to sleeping with Bash when Gabe died. One might think that a husband’s sudden death would shake a woman up, force her to wonder if the universe was sending her a message about the affair she was considering in her head.
One would be wrong. Lu tried to resist Bash, but he had picked up a scent on Lu and pursued her relentlessly. He knew before she did that she was a woman who would revel in a truly secret affair, one that was all about sex, sex that pushed past some boundaries. Lu had been a late bloomer—a virgin until college, married in her twenties to her third-ever real boyfriend. In blue jeans and T-shirt, hair under a baseball cap, she could still pass for a boy from the back. Which explained why she didn’t wear such things. It had been a bizarre kind of relief when the flirtation—e-mails, phone calls, odd little gifts left anonymously at her office—finally ended and they settled into a straight sex thing. The flirtation had been the real betrayal of Gabe. The sex—that’s merely the betrayal of Lucinda, Bash’s wife. But that’s not Lu’s problem. Is it?
Spent, she makes her way to the bathroom on wobbly legs. She has a large bruise on her buttocks, but who will see it there? She doesn’t wash, not yet. He will probably want to go again, given how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other, how hard it is to find time since the election. She has let her secretary infer that she’s in therapy in D.C., which would require about three hours with travel time. She has confided something similar to Andi, although indicating she was seeing someone for ob-gyn issues of a vague-but-serious nature. Andi obligingly spread the gossip through the office, then blamed it on Della, who would never betray Lu that way. Thank God she never told Andi the real story, back when they were deputies together. Even then, before Lu had decided to own her real ambition, she understood that this must be a locked room inside her life, a place to which no one can ever be admitted. It scared her at first, the things she wanted to do with Bash, the things she let him do to her. But it thrills her more.
They do not consider what they do to have a name. Not quite an affair, yet more than sex, with a singular appetite for each other, although Lu assumes Bash sees other women. They are rough, but not particularly kinky, sexual soul mates who think it should be sweaty and athletic. Her other lovers, all five of them, were so damn careful with Lu, probably because of her size. Occasionally, she and Bash have sweet, tame sex, although that’s usually when one of them is a little under the weather. Last time, way back in November, a week before the general election, Bash had lain beneath her and said, “Fuck this cold right out of me, State’s Attorney Brant.” And she did.
She had not been drawn to Bash when he was part of her brother’s group. She’d had a crush on Noel, then Davey, never Bash. He was a bigger, brawnier version of her, which didn’t appeal at all. And she was a child, eight years his junior, precocious of mind, but not body, so he had certainly never noticed her. Their chance meeting in a Whole Foods six years ago had not seemed particularly portentous at the time, not to her. Bash says it was lust at first sight for him.
“Lu?” asked the man in the expensive cashmere coat, who a few minutes before had been staring morosely at the sausages and blocking her access to the good bacon.
She needed a beat to place him. “Bash. I’m sorry, you probably don’t go by that nickname anymore. AJ tells me you’re a lobbyist.”
“Is that what I am? Today I am a henpecked husband, trying to find sausages for my wife, who says they can’t have so much as a gram of sugar. But I can’t find a single sausage that meets her criterion.”
Lu flipped through the packages. They were in Baltimore’s Mount Washington neighborhood, only blocks from the home she shared with Gabe at the time, but certainly far afield for a Washington lobbyist. “What are you doing here?”
“Trying to buy sausages, obviously. And failing.”
“No, I mean in Mount Washington.”
“Oh, I have a client who lives in a huge spread not far from here. Claims the house belonged to Napoleon.”
“If you mean the house on Lake Avenue, it was Jérôme Bonaparte, and even his connection is tenuous at best. Isn’t it owned by some tech billionaire?”
“God, I hope he’s a billionaire or I have really wasted my afternoon. You’re married to one, too, right?”
“A billionaire? I don’t think so.”
“But a big tech guy. Gabriel—Schwartz?”
“Swartz. I still go by Brant.”
He snapped his fingers. “Right. He gets a lot of ink. You sure he’s not a billionaire?”
“Pretty sure.” She laughed, but it was to cover her embarrassment at her husband’s wealth. He was worth only $20 million. Only. “Look, here’s one that has less than one gram and it has pineapple, so that’s probably why it has any sugar at all. Will that do?”
“I don’t dare improvise. My wife gives very explicit instructions and expects them to be followed. I better call herr kommandant.”
“I think you mean frau,” Lu said icily.
She loathed men who portrayed their wives as nags and terrors. Eight months later, she was in bed with one. Although Lu and Bash don’t talk much—there is so much else to do—Bash’s wife often features in the conversations they do manage to have. Her special diets, her exacting workouts. She is Bash’s second wife, younger than Lu by at least five years. His first wife lives in Columbia with their two children, although in the western part, in the most desirable school district. That once provided cover for Bash to take the occasional room at the Columbia Inn, but it’s no longer possible for Lu to come and go there, convenient as it may be. It was risky enough when she was an assistant state’s attorney. So they use this corporate apartment he maintains in Bethesda, where he does absolutely no business, not that Lucinda—the non-Lu, the never-Lu, the not-you-Lu Bash calls her—has ever thought to wonder about this. Bash lives larger than Gabe ever dared, and Lu senses it’s more of a strain than he lets on. But that’s his problem. One of the great charms of Bash is that his problems are his. She’s not expected to solve them. She barely even listens to them.
Lu tells herself that she would never have started with Bash if he had children with Lucinda. She also tells herself that every time is the last time. And that their discretion means no one is harmed by what they do, the occasional bruise aside. She even congratulates herself on the concept of an affair as sensible time management for the busy widow with two children. Bash requires so much less attention than a husband or a boyfriend would. Three hours a month. Six, if she’s lucky.
“Come back here,” he calls. Demands. “I’m not finished.”
Ja, Herr Kommandant.
This time, it’s almost disappointingly normal at first, Bash on top of her, although his weight alone is enough to create a sensation of discomfort in this position. Then, toward the end, he grips her shoulders, hard.
“No marks,” she breathes. “Don’t leave marks that someone could see.”
He doesn’t listen, just continues to press on her shoulders. They don’t use sa
fe words. Again, that would mean labeling what they do, when part of the thrill is not organizing it under any banner, belonging to a club with only two members. “Trust me,” he says, but his voice is guttural, harsh, not at all conducive to trust. But that’s the fun part, says the little piece of her mind that stands back.
Later, as they dress, he produces a distinctive orange box. There is an Hermès scarf inside, a pattern of leaves in muted browns and golds. Perfect for her, Lu thinks, and not at all flattering to Lucinda, who has Snow White coloring. So it can’t be a castoff. He really bought this for her.
“This will cover that one place where I gnawed on you a little,” he says sheepishly, his manner that of a little boy offering something to a girl he likes.
“So you planned—”
“I never plan anything beyond the time. But I wanted to give you something to commemorate your new job. Is that okay? And then I wanted to take you somewhere you’ve never gone. I did that, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”
She kisses him, and it’s only a matter of seconds before they begin clawing at each other. It has been three months, after all. But there have been longer gaps over the years they’ve been meeting each other, so that can’t be the sole reason. Something has changed. She is new again, her title excites him. Her clothes are off in seconds, except for the scarf, which he ties around her eyes. The headboard slaps rhythmically against the wall, the sound familiar. It reminds her of the tiny wavelets of Wilde Lake, lapping at the shoreline. “Don’t stop,” she murmurs. “Don’t stop.” A vague memory tugs, but the present is stronger than the past. She wants to stay here, in this room, as long as possible. This is the only place where she is allowed just to be—no kids, no employees, no pink message slips. It’s as if time stops in this room.
Then she goes outside and is surprised to see the sun is already setting. It’s an orange sunset today, fiery and rude, a light that makes her glow, brings out the more subtle hues in her new scarf.
KODACHROME
It is possible to anticipate something ferociously, then one day forget that it’s happening at all. Part of this is the passage to adulthood; birthdays fade in importance, holidays become something to be endured. I know there are grown-ups who still become excited about Christmas, although I find them suspect. Part of the reason I agreed with Gabe to raise Penelope and Justin as Jews is because I wanted to be done with Christmas. The tree, the stockings, the crash that happens in every household sometime between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. on December twenty-fifth, when it’s all done and the first toy has broken and the kids are frayed from sugar and overstimulation.
Yet Christmas is back in our lives, with a vengeance. I made the mistake of having a holiday open house two years ago, in part to showcase what my father has done with the house, and it became a tradition, just that fast. Even this year, as I prepared to take office, I was still expected to put out platters of smoked salmon and cold turkey, make or procure cheese straws. Inevitably, I feel Gabe looking over my shoulder—not scolding, but disappointed that I would break a promise. However, I made the promise to a living man. His death invalidated all promises as far as I’m concerned. Heck, if I had been the one to abandon him by dying, he would have been married within the year, probably to some happy-to-stay-at-home little lady. His presence was especially strong at this year’s Christmas party, but perhaps that was because Bash, much to my annoyance, conned AJ into inviting him. Only Bash, no Lucinda. I’m not sure what he thought he was doing, but I was careful not to go anywhere alone in the house, not to drop my guard for a second.
Where was I? Oh, anticipation. Yes, it’s in adult life that we begin to lose track of things that once shaped our years, those little peaks of celebration—birthday, Christmas—and find ourselves living mostly in the valleys, and content to do so. This jadedness begins happening earlier than we might realize. In the fall of 1976, Life magazine had come to Wilde Lake High School and posed the then freshmen in the bleachers for what was to be a cover story about the Class of 1984, the year in which AJ and his friends would graduate from college. For weeks, they spoke about it constantly. Would the photo be big enough to show everyone? If so, would they be recognizable? And the accompanying article itself? Would they be interviewed, would they be identified as the best and the brightest? Why wasn’t the reporter more interested in them, so clearly the stars of the school?
Magazines worked exceedingly slowly then and by the time the article was published, almost everyone had forgotten it. When it showed up on newsstands in the fall of 1977, it was more like a hangover: bleary, vague, unpleasant.
The first disappointment was that my brother’s class was not on the cover. Instead, there was a girl in a sky-blue rugby shirt, caught midcheer under the heading: THE NEW YOUTH. Other words on the cover included TOUGH, CARING, WARY, PRACTICAL, and SUPERCOOL. Even at the time, I was not convinced that these things were particularly “new.” To be tough, caring, wary, practical, and supercool was to be an adolescent, then and always. But it was the fashion, then, to keep creating this narrative of innocence and a subsequent fall from grace. People were innocent before the JFK assassination, before Charles Manson, before Vietnam, before Altamont, before Watergate. It’s true, the concept of childhood is relatively modern, but I can’t imagine there was ever a time in which people were born anything but innocent. I don’t believe in innate evil. On the rare occasion that I’ve met a true sociopath, the person has been beyond evil. They want what they want and they don’t care how they get it. (This always makes me think of Pinkalicious, a book beloved by my twins: sociopaths get what they get and they do get upset.) Anyway, I hadn’t consciously worked this out when I saw the cover of Life magazine, but I think my letdown was more than disappointment that my brother wasn’t there. I was, as always, looking for guidance and gurus, information about this strange world that awaited me. Grown-ups were forever saying, “If you’re like this now, imagine when you’re a teenager.” Even my father said it. He and Teensy made my still far-off adolescence sound as if I were on the verge of becoming a werewolf. I was going to be wild, unpredictable, dangerous.
But also: Tough, Caring, Wary, Supercool, and Practical.
Okay, maybe not practical. But AJ was, as were his friends. Now in their sophomore year, they were doing practice runs for the PSAT, in hopes of scoring high enough in their junior year to win National Merit scholarships. They were beginning to game the college application process, ensuring they had a balance of extracurricular interests, visiting the guidance counselor and coming away with glossy brochures. Future generations would be more practical still. They would have to be. Whereas it was considered ambitious to set one’s sights on Stanford, as Davey had as a freshman, it verges on impossible dreaming now. Last year, Stanford admitted slightly more than 5 percent of applicants. Harvard was at 5.9 percent. Yale, AJ’s alma mater, was 6.26 percent. I used to tell myself that my twins, if they fancied Yale, at least had a sort of double legacy with their father and uncle. But maybe I shouldn’t count on that anymore.
At any rate—because AJ and his crew had serious plans for their future, they were dismayed when they read the actual article. A series of unattributed quotes grouped under headings—“Sex,” “Alcohol and Drugs,” “The Future,” “Clothes”—it coalesced into a portrait of aimless, disaffected youths. (“Pot is, like, everywhere.”) AJ was now appalled that he and his friends were so easily identified in the group photo that accompanied the article, front and center in the bleachers. For several days at dinner, he held forth about how the piece had been unfair and slanted. He worried that it could affect his chances at the college of his choice, or cost him the summer job he coveted, as an intern at the Columbia Flier. Finally, our father said to him: “Why not write a letter to the editor, making all these arguments? Or, better still, write your own piece, tell the truth as you see it.”
The gauntlet thrown, AJ did just that. He wrote an article for the Flier, in which he described his friends and their interests. He broke down their
days, hour by hour, detailing the life of the overscheduled child long before such a concept was fashionable. (He conveniently left out the information that they did, in fact, smoke pot all the time.) The piece, which appeared under the headline THE CLASS OF ’84 HAS ITS SAY, argued that AJ and his friends were making their way in the world, as every generation had, and were entitled to their mistakes and missteps. “The influences that will shape us are unknown at this point,” AJ wrote. “We will probably never go to war—it’s unlikely there will ever be a war again that involves Western countries.” (Yes, people believed that in 1977.) “We will almost certainly enjoy a higher standard of living than our parents, and isn’t that what they want for us? But how will we get there? What is the path we will take? Most of us have learned life from the Game of Life, and the only thing we know for certain is that taking the shortcut that allows you to bypass college means you will have less earning power. But, according to the rules, anyone can end up on the Poor Farm with just one bad spin.”
A few weeks after his piece appeared, an editor from a New York publishing house contacted our father and asked if AJ could expand his piece into a memoir. A few years earlier, a young woman had enjoyed success with such a book, published when she was only nineteen, and AJ was younger still. A book-length treatment of the same issues could be a sensation.
Our father brought the offer to AJ, advising him: “I don’t think you should.”
“Why not?” AJ asked. “I might make a lot of money.”
“We don’t have to worry about money.”
“Everyone has to worry about money,” AJ said. “Almost all the scholarships are needs-based now. You make just enough that I can’t get one, no matter what my grades or SAT scores are.”
“You would have to give up your privacy. Can you put a price on that? And”—a significant pause here, the kind he used in closing arguments—“you would have to tell the truth.”
Wilde Lake: A Novel Page 12
