“I’ll be there by Friday, then,” I heard myself saying.
“My man. The wife is going to be thrilled, you have no idea. All she can think about is someone breaking in, stealing all her books.”
The entrée was served, “risotto ai funghi.” Apparently modern America was in Italy. I said that and Dave and Sadie laughed. The speeches began as we took our first bites: “a pleasure to work with…will be missed…more than a colleague…everybody’s friend…hard work and dedication…grace and generosity…heroic patience…respected within the community…life well spent…one door closes…” Each expectant pause was filled with obliging laughter. A few of the speakers couldn’t keep from crying. Behind them, a slideshow of Stephen’s life cycled continuously on the tall brick wall, and between these images and the speeches and the wine I began to feel as though he and I had known each other a long time.
Then there was dessert, and more wine, and dancing, and mostly I watched while Sadie danced with Dave and people I didn’t know danced with people I didn’t know and Stephen danced with everyone else in the restaurant, but when Dave gestured me toward him and said, “I’m exhausted, she’s all yours,” I danced with Sadie for a few songs, Motown everyone knew by heart. Dave came back to hug Sadie goodbye. He’d email me details about the house, he said, slapping me on the back. Sadie yelled over the music, “He’s coming off a big breakup!” and Dave said, “Oh, well then, this’ll be perfect for you. Napa’s full of pretty girls. You can tell ’em the house belongs to you if you want.” In no world would I ever do such a thing, I thought as I said, “That’s exactly what I’ll do.” Then Dave left, and the crowd began to thin, and soon it seemed time to go.
On the way home, through abandoned streets, Sadie said she had an idea. “You can say no. But it would be nice for me. I could use a few days to process and heal before going back to being a mom and wife.”
“Okay.”
“You might not want to do this.”
“But I might.”
Her idea was that we drive to California together; when we got there she’d take a plane back to New York; she’d figure out a way to get her car back to Des Moines. The two of us could see the country, eat at diners. “I’d completely understand if you said no,” she said. I was surprised, not by the idea itself, but that it should seem perfectly reasonable, a natural extension of our burgeoning friendship. Plus, if I was going to drive across half the country, it would be nice to have a companion. I said it sounded like a great idea.
Back home, I said good night to Sadie and made a couch-cushion bed on the floor of the family room. As I was setting a phone alarm I saw I had a voice message: Laura, saying she’d had a change of heart and wouldn’t mind bringing a date to her sister’s wedding after all, and, since I lived so close, would I consider going? In my addled state her question sounded to me practically like a proposal, as though she were inviting me to her own wedding, at which I would be the groom. Once, while watching Dallas together a couple of years after we’d broken up, we’d promised that if neither of us was married by forty, though neither of us cared about getting married, we’d marry each other. I don’t think we were joking, exactly. But we still had a lot of years to go before forty, and I’d made Dave Corwyn a promise, too, and it was only Laura’s sister’s wedding, and I was looking forward to my road trip with Sadie. I’d call with my apologies from the road.
For a long time I lay awake in the dark, trying to imagine the glass house on top of the mountain, but all my meager mind’s eye could conjure was an amalgam of the Botanical Center and Jordan Creek Mall. I felt no sadness in leaving Des Moines; I knew it would never stop returning to me. And yet I had the dim sense of fleeing something: my memories or desires, Maria, or Jess. Eventually I guess I fell asleep.
Next day Sadie and I bought granola bars and potato chips and oranges and kombucha and loaded the car and headed west on I-80. Better to start out with a short day, we decided, than to leave the day after and feel in a rush. We’d drive to some town in the middle of Nebraska, find a steakhouse, and have a relaxing evening. It was always a good idea to take Nebraska in two days if you had time for it, we agreed.
9
Sadie’s maternal grandfather (she told me somewhere near Lincoln, interrupting what until then had been a more or less linear chronology) was an English director and playwright of French ancestry whose grandmother was one of the famous beauties in the court of Napoléon III. He was friends with George Bernard Shaw and Leonard Woolf, exchanged letters (Sadie had read them) with Yeats and Proust, was considered one of the rising stars of English drama. Then he fell in love with Sadie’s grandmother. He was married, with three kids, a nice home, money; she was the leading actress in a play he was directing. They ran away to America together, first to Hollywood, where Sadie’s grandmother acted in silent movies, then to New York, where he produced plays. Sadie’s mother had always claimed they came over on the final voyage of the Lusitania, whose sinking by a German U-boat they survived, but at some point Sadie realized this couldn’t be true, since the Lusitania sank on a crossing from America to England—neither the last nor the most outlandish of Sadie’s mother’s lies.
Sadie spent the first part of her childhood in a large, ornately furnished apartment that looked out on Gramercy Park. Her mother spoiled her. She’d take Sadie and her sister out for ice cream for dinner, or she’d pull them out of school for a day and drive them down to Coney Island, or she’d buy them little fur coats from Macy’s so that the three of them all matched. She was fun. She had a way of making everyone around her smile. When she walked into a room people turned to her instinctively; they wanted to conspire with her, or sleep with her, or help her. Sadie’s father, an investment banker, often worked so late that Sadie was in bed by the time he got home—though many nights she lay awake, she told me, listening for his footsteps. Most of her memories of him were from Cape Cod, where they spent a month or so every summer in her grandmother’s beachfront home. She built sandcastles with him, and collected shells, and climbed the hundred and sixteen steps of Provincetown’s Pilgrim Monument, from which the curling strip of land that was the cape seemed to dissolve before her eyes into the ocean.
A steady stream of people passed through her grandmother’s house, mostly other vacationing families. The adults drank cocktails and sat on the deck while the children ran around on the beach. One family in particular became close with Sadie’s, another couple from New York with two boys the ages of her and her sister. One summer they started coming by every day, often arriving in time for lunch and staying late into the night. Same thing next summer. The parents liked to joke that Sadie and her sister would end up marrying the Thompson boys, thus making official the familial bond that everyone in any case already felt. Then, toward the end of the third summer, when Sadie was nine, her mother came to her one day and said, “You’re going to have two mommies and daddies now. And Ted and Philip will be your brothers. Isn’t that wonderful?”
And it was wonderful, Sadie said, for the next couple of years. She split her time between her old apartment and a new, even bigger one on Park Avenue and Sixty-sixth. Her mother and Cam Thompson lived there now, while her father and Mary Thompson lived on Gramercy Park with the two Thompson boys. Weekends, the two families got together for brunch, followed by a trip to a museum and then, if the weather was good, a park. She’d rarely seen her father before anyway, so not living with him all the time didn’t seem like much of a loss, plus Cam was always buying her things, which her father had rarely done. (Also, Sadie added, if it weren’t for Cam she probably wouldn’t have gotten into art: he was an art history professor and appraiser of antique furniture and seemed to take pleasure in explaining to her, in terms that made sense to a still-young girl, what made one thing beautiful, another not.) Sadie understood the arrangement was unusual, but her parents and the Thompsons projected a casual cheerfulness that filtered down to the children. A year
into this reconfigured reality, the original couples divorced and the new ones remarried in a joint ceremony on the beach.
A year and a half later her mother and Cam divorced. Sadie hadn’t sensed that anything was wrong; her mother had simply come to her and told her, in her easy, cheerful way. Sadie was twelve. Since they couldn’t go back to the Gramercy Park apartment, Sadie, her sister, and her mother moved into a two-bedroom in the Village. It was much smaller than anywhere Sadie had ever lived, but her mother billed it as the next adventure. Sadie couldn’t remember how long they’d been living there when she heard the news of her father’s death. She also couldn’t remember how she found out, though she sometimes had what she thought was a false memory of her mother coming to her one afternoon and saying, in her easy, cheerful way, “I’m afraid your father’s fallen off a balcony!”
The next three years were a blur of new homes, new schools, new men who “loved” her mother, endless stretches of interstate, landmarks, vacations, vacations from vacations. Sadie moved with her sister and mother to Baltimore, Key West, Nashville, Tucson, Santa Cruz, Eugene, Bozeman. “Let’s see the country,” her mother used to say. “Every American should see her country!” It was the seventies and lots of Americans were seeing their country, and Sadie’s mother would attach herself to fellow explorers who she sensed could take her somewhere better than where she was—and then she’d find someone else, or a group of people, to help her break free and find the next place, the next adventure, always the next adventure. She either started regularly doing cocaine or stopped trying to conceal it from her daughters. She started dressing like a hippie. She smelled of sex. Shirtless men with dazed smiles roamed their homes. “Your mom’s a real trip,” one told Sadie; within three months they’d married and divorced. (Sadie still had the Eagles record he gave her for her birthday.)
It was around this time that Sadie began to notice her mother’s compulsive lying. She lied about her age, where she was from, the reason she and her daughters were on the move (Sadie remembered her telling a new friend they were “fugitives from the law”), about topics consequential and inconsequential. “Their father’s coming to join us in a few months” was a refrain. “He just has to close out the fiscal year,” or, “He’s tying up loose ends with the old apartment.” She fabricated stories about her past: she and Sadie’s father met at Oxford, her parents were Holocaust survivors, were Nazis. When she introduced Sadie and her sister to principals at schools, she invented special talents and accolades: “Sadie’s state champion in the breaststroke for her age group.” “Oh, no, Sadie can skip trigonometry. She’s been learning that on her own.” Since Sadie could never live up to her mother’s version of her, this kind of lie filled her with fear. But mostly she accepted the lying as part of her life.
When her mother started stealing things, she wasn’t surprised. Sometimes she volunteered to help. She loved the thrill of walking out of a store with a dress, a frying pan, a Thanksgiving turkey hidden beneath her coat. Her biggest score was a pair of speakers her mother had been coveting; she just picked them up and walked out of the store, counting on her twelve-year-old innocence to protect her. Sometimes when they were driving and they came upon a vista, her mother would stop the car, get out, spread her arms, and say, “Look around! Everything here is ours.” And a lot of the time that’s what it felt like: everything they came in contact with belonged to Sadie and her mother and sister.
Then Sadie’s mother was visited by pain—first in her stomach, then her back, then spreading through her entire body. Sadie didn’t know what set it off, but over time she came to think it was psychosomatic. Her mother started taking Valium, Percodan, methadone, Demerol. Sometimes she asked Sadie to give her injections. She went days without leaving her bed; she barely spoke. Sadie had to take care of her sister: she made microwave dinners, walked her to and from school, took her to the doctor’s when she got sick. When her mother felt well enough to move around a little, she was usually in a terrible mood, either morose or angry or both. One day she slapped Sadie in the face, hard, Sadie couldn’t remember for what, and that evening Sadie began researching boarding schools. She found one in Vermont that would take her and her sister and bought plane tickets on her mother’s credit card. When the day of the flight came she broke down and told her mother, but instead of scolding or punishing her, her mother just cried and told her to go, it sounded like too good an opportunity to pass up. “She seemed almost happy,” Sadie told me as we drove, endless feedlots blurring by.
In Vermont she slept with everyone—classmates, teachers, everyone. It was her way of acting out. For a year she carried on a secret affair with a married sculptor slash goat farmer; they didn’t break it off until he told Sadie he wanted to leave his wife for her. She was fifteen. When she was bored she took buses into New York, looked up old friends, hung out at bars. She called Cam, whom she’d been out of touch with since the divorce, and they went to the Met and then out to dinner. He hadn’t gotten over her father’s death, he told her. Five years ago, if he’d known this was how things would play out…Sadie nodded. After dinner she invited him to her hotel room, to test her powers. She thought she saw him hesitate for a moment before declining.
At school, she gravitated toward the artists, self-proclaimed, whose knowingness she identified with even as she saw through it (she knew more than they ever would). She started making art herself. Her draftsmanship was awful, it always was, she told me, but she had a decent sense of composition and lots of feelings to express. Her teachers singled out her work for praise, and she started to believe she might have a calling, or at least an aptitude that would take her places. In any case she didn’t know how else to spend her life, so she applied to Rhode Island School of Design, got in, and went off to become an artist. Once there, she worked obsessively. Bored with sex, fed up with arty posturing, she locked herself in her studio and painted for two years. She hit upon a style she had the audacity to imagine she could one day, maybe, call her own. Many of her paintings, without her express consent, seemed to deal obscurely with her father’s death, which she began to realize she had never really reckoned with in the whirlwind years of its immediate aftermath. “The biggest lie the world will ever tell you,” she told me, “is that you can get over the death of a parent.”
She graduated. She spent the summer and fall in New York, haunting galleries and museums and plotting her next move. Then she went to her grandmother’s house to paint. It was winter, and she was alone, and her plan was to make fifty paintings by spring and go back to New York and sell them and be famous. Her paintings were abstract but with suggestions of figures, women mostly—mostly herself, though probably you wouldn’t know it by looking. She had an idea that what she was doing was aligned with the feminism her mother had embraced and passed down to her: something about women being effaced by forces outside of their control, she guessed.
She set up her studio in the room she used to stay in when her family visited when she was a girl, the one with the balcony facing the harbor. She ordered paint, brushes, canvases, red pajamas from L.L.Bean. She installed a stereo system. She bought green tea. And then she stood in front of her easel for a week and didn’t make a single painting. She felt oppressed by her grandmother’s old furniture and smells, her pink carpets, the pantry that reeked of some unidentifiable herb; her grandmother’s all-too-present absence seemed to stand in for the weight of art history. She felt trapped. She found herself wandering the dunes all day, as if she were in an Antonioni film. This was when she became interested in birds—seabirds, mostly, because that’s what were there, and the occasional snowy owl, white lump against the beige. She thought, “I’ll become an ornithologist!” having no idea what that would entail.
And then one day as she was walking along the beach she came across a man. A handsome man searching for seashells and taking photos. Normally she didn’t see anyone on her walks—if the cold didn’t keep people away, the wind di
d, and tourist season didn’t start till May—so to see a young, attractive man, alone, especially without a dog, was an event. The sky was gray, the ocean was gray, the tide was coming in. He was on vacation, the young man told her, from Iowa, a place she’d never been, an unreal place. He liked going places off-season, he said, finding out what they were really like, and then a gale made them turn away from the ocean in unison, huddling against the damp, and they laughed. Plus he’d found a great deal in town, he added. Sadie invited him to dinner that night.
And that spring instead of moving back to New York, she moved to Des Moines, where Ryan worked in insurance. Within weeks Sadie had found work as assistant curator at the Art Center. Just being from New York could get you the job back then, she said. “So you see: I’m just like you. I gave up my art. I retired. And I don’t regret it.”
“Wow,” I said idiotically. “That’s a lot.” We were sitting across from each other now, in a dimly lit faux-leather booth in the steakhouse across the parking lot from our motel just off of I-80 in North Platte, Nebraska. Sadie had parceled out her story in a few chapters over our drive and dinner, though some details I didn’t find out till later.
A waiter who looked about twelve years old came by to take our plates; Sadie ordered each of us a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie. When he left she said, “Well, if I ever want a biography of myself, I guess I know who to call.” I smiled. “Do you want to hear something really crazy, though?” I told her I’d been waiting for the really crazy part.
“A couple years ago I suddenly got interested in my mother’s parents, I can’t remember why. My grandfather died before I was born, and my grandmother died when I was three or four. I barely remember her. But I started doing all this research. I became especially interested in my grandmother’s acting; she was this child-prodigy stage actress in England before her career got cut short by the scandal of getting involved with my grandfather. And then it looked like she was going to have a career in Hollywood, but after starring in four films she got pregnant with my mother and as far as I can tell stopped acting. None of the films she was in has survived, but it wasn’t hard to get their titles and dig up a little information about them. And here’s what I found out: in one of them, two couples, each with children, swap spouses; they divorce and remarry and see each other regularly and everyone seems more or less happy with the setup, unconventional as it is, until one of the women starts to feel jealous and murders her ex-husband.”
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