I grin and take my towels. “Today I’m just a regular guy at the gym.”
Claudia apologizes, believing she’s crossed a boundary, so I say, “No big deal,” and leave her to wonder about my big deal while I find a treadmill and run and run and run.
• • •
There’s a trio of texts from Elizabeth waiting for me after I shower. She wants me to pick up a prescription on my way home, and did I get her text, and, Let me know you got this.
I reply: Got the texts. Picking up now. But when I finally make it to the front of the line at CVS, they can’t find her order, and I have to check with Elizabeth to make sure the script got called in, at which point she tells me I’m at the wrong store. I was supposed to go to Rite Aid down in Bridgehampton. Half an hour later, Rite Aid hasn’t filled it either, so I give up and head home empty-handed.
“There you are,” Elizabeth says, like a goose chase for Ativan had been my idea. Again, the choice: love or anger. Elizabeth is vibrant. Buzzing. I’m disoriented by how glad I am to see her this glad to see me. She’s done the cruelest thing, but hate feels too easy, too provincial, because yes, the worst has happened, but somehow we’re here, standing in the kitchen, alive and awake and blinking like a pair of plague victims after the fever breaks. To my astonishment, rage falls back. Relief takes the lead.
She asks, “Did you run?”
I nod. “Rowing machine, too. A few weights.”
“Tomorrow’s going to hurt.”
Maybe. Maybe not. Tomorrow is a foreign land. Today I have a choice: love or hate. Tonight offers a ritual reset, the opportunity to role-play forgiveness. “I want to take you out. Just the two of us.” Love.
She glances over her shoulder, instinctively considering the boys’ feelings and deciding they aren’t hers to manage anymore. “Sure,” she says. “That sounds nice.”
“You pick the place.” I crack open a Pellegrino. “Have you seen Nick this morning?”
“Hm?”
I drink from the bottle, carbonation like sandpaper on my throat, and wipe the back of my hand across my mouth before repeating, “Have you seen Nick?”
“No. Today, you mean? No, not yet.” She pulls her hair up, but finding no rubber band on her wrist, her fists full of hair remain stacked atop her head. “I don’t want to,” she says.
I move closer, putting her in range of my sweated-out pheromones, my heat, and I slide my body up to sit on the counter. “What don’t you want?”
“I don’t want—to see Nick. I don’t want to think about him.” She lets her hair and arms fall, lets it all go. “I just want to go back to how things were before.”
White-hot splinters pierce the corners of my eyes. “Things have been off-kilter around here,” I say, suddenly certain I couldn’t bear to hear her put it into words.
“Yes,” she says. “They have.” She scratches her collarbone. “It’s been strange to have people around all the time.”
I say, “It’s been distracting.”
She looks into me. Telepathy. She’s asking, What exactly do you know? Maybe even, How much do you know?
“All of it,” I answer, and she closes her eyes. “It’s all been too much.”
One flight above us, Jonah yells, “Yo.” We look up to find him leaning over the banister, listening to our private conversation about him invading our privacy. “I wasn’t eavesdropping.”
“Oh God,” says Elizabeth. “We didn’t mean—”
“Wait,” he interrupts. “Hold on.” His head disappears. Moments later, he reappears in full coming down the stairs. “My door was open, that’s all. You guys are right, though. You’re used to your privacy. This is a lot for you.”
“Jonah,” I begin, but Elizabeth interrupts.
“We love having you here,” she says. “This is heaven for us, believe me.” She must feel me wanting to acknowledge the gaseous way Nick permeates every corner of our world, because she flexes one hand—the hand closest to me—and in this tiny gesture, a mere extension of fingers, I recognize her scaled-down reaction, subtle enough for only me to see. In her way, she is lifting an arm, cutting me off, saying, I’ll take it from here. “But you’re right in that it’s totally new for us. New is great, we just weren’t prepared. We’re adjusting.” Her outstretched hand says, I got this, and I like it.
Jonah nods. “I understand. Which is why I’m thinking of going to Mom’s for a couple of days. It’ll make her happy and will give you guys a break.”
“You shouldn’t feel unwelcome here,” I say.
Elizabeth quiets me again, saying, “He probably needs a break from us, too.”
Jonah shrugs. “Nah. Mom’s on my case, anyway. She’ll never let me hear the end of it if I don’t visit soon.”
“Do what works for you,” I say.
“I’ve got to get some crap together, but I’ll probably roll out in about half an hour.”
“Like I said, whatever you want.”
He seems oddly touched by my flexibility. “Thanks, Dad.” Then, in pure break from form, says, “Love you, man.”
We both squirm—his words as surprising for him to say as they are for me to hear—but Elizabeth elbows my abs as soon as Jonah walks away, so I say, “Yeah, you too.” Then, for good measure, “Love you too, Son,” because God knows I do.
Elizabeth nuzzles against me—moved by a touching moment between father and son, made possible by Jonah’s imminent departure. He’ll only be an hour away, but an hour is plenty. Elizabeth presses her ribs against mine, wraps her arms around my neck and latches onto me. With hot breath against my face, she tells me that she loves me.
“I know,” I say, meaning, I’ll forgive you as soon as I can.
17.
Elizabeth picks Lemongrass. Wouldn’t have been my first choice, not even my second, but I’m a man of my word, so Thai it is.
Our server seats us on the patio and tells us we’ve chosen the perfect evening to dine al fresco, because tonight is a full moon, but tomorrow it’s supposed to rain again, so we’d better enjoy it while it lasts. We came here to eat, not to study lunar cycles, but he is correct. The night is lovely, and the food is very good, some of it great, even. Their tom yum is perfect, their pad kee mao spectacular, and these basil martinis are downright dangerous. Somewhere between cocktails one- and two-too-many, Elizabeth catches a feeling.
“I do love you,” she tells me, lazy-like.
“Me too.”
“You do?”
“Of course,” I say. “Don’t be strange.”
“But you’re a good man, Robert.”
“Thank you, Elizabeth.” I wave to a server. “Can we get some waters over here, please?”
“You don’t think I’m a bad person?” Elizabeth asks me.
“No.”
“I’m afraid I might be.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course I don’t think you’re a bad person. I think you’re a wonderful person. You’re my wife.”
“Plenty of people marry terrible people.”
“Well, you’re not terrible. You’ve made mistakes. I’m sure you’ve done bad things.” I pick up my fork, put it back down, say, “Maybe even terrible things. Elizabeth, those things don’t have to define you. Do you know what I mean?”
She shrugs. Her glassy eyes reflect candlelight.
“All that matters is what you do next,” I say. “We have to put the bad things behind us so we can move on and be better. Right? That’s the best we can hope for once the damage is done.”
Elizabeth seemed to be listening intently, but now I’m unclear as to whether she was listening at all, or whether she’s sleeping with her eyes open, or if she’s just very interested in the planters crammed next to our table, because she hasn’t taken her eyes off them for a minute at least. Turns out it was the latter, after all, because when a busboy comes by with two waters, Elizabeth asks him, “Are those begonias?”
He scans the red flowers, leafy vines, ornamental glass balls, and concrete urns, trying to de
cide which of these is most likely to be a begonia. “You know,” he bluffs, “I do believe so. Let me check with a manager, just to be sure.” He returns minutes later to confirm that yes, they are begonias, and a stoic Elizabeth nods and thanks him.
“Sometimes I think we made a mistake,” she tells me, and although I’d like to think she’s talking about restaurant choices or season tickets, I know she means us, and it kills me. “Do you think that?”
“Never.”
“Well,” she says. “That’s good.”
“Do you really, Elizabeth?”
“No. Kind of. Not about being together. About how we hurt people, though. How I hurt them.” She picks up the tiny spoon from a tiny jar of chili sauce, twirls it in front of her face, and smiles. “Did I ever tell you about how I used to spend my Saturday nights when I first moved to New York?”
“Maybe?”
“Bed, Bath and Beyond.”
“No. This is new.”
“I used to take the train down to Bed, Bath and Beyond and just look.”
“For bedding?”
“No, Robert. At people.”
I laugh.
“I’d go there to look at people.”
“Oh. You’re serious.”
“Yeah, I’m serious. I’d go down there to watch grown men buying colanders. Women shopping for vacuum filters. HEPA filters for thousand-dollar vacuum cleaners. Can you imagine? I mean, I’m still not sure what to do with a vacuum filter—and not because I’m spoiled. Yeah, I know we have a cleaning lady, I know that, but it’s not like we’d be living in squalor without one. It’s not like I’d have us shuffling around on dirty floors. It’s just that I grew up with mops and brooms. Didn’t you?”
“Sure,” I allow. “But we also had a vacuum. I’m certain your family did too, Lizzie.”
“Fine. But it wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t Our Man in Havana, okay? Maybe we had a plain old vacuum, but it would have been a DustBuster. A Dirt Devil. I mean, you know my parents.”
“I do.”
“They aren’t exactly the Dyson type. The Miele type.” She mouths the word Miele—meel-eh—to herself. “They’d never go out and buy a bread maker, right? A salad spinner? They’re more into microwave dinners.”
I smile. She said it, not me. “That sounds accurate.”
“Not that I’m complaining. I mean, no one bakes a meaner Stouffer’s French bread pizza than my mom. All I know is that twenty years ago, there were a whole lot of clean floors in Manhattan. There were a whole lot of couples eating off placemats.”
“You watched people shop.”
“Sometimes I’d push a cart around and fill it with curtain rods and those cookie press things that look like caulking guns. Sometimes I’d buy high-end Tupperware, whatever. For the most part, I just wandered around with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t want what those people had. Believe me, I did not want their Cuisinarts and table runners. I just liked how weird it felt to watch them.”
“Of all the places to people-watch in New York City, you went straight for the big-box chain. What’d you have against Grand Central? Penn Station?”
“But that’s just it, isn’t it? We’re in this spectacular city where you can eat whatever you want whenever you want without ever having to cook or wash a dish, and we don’t have to worry about fixing disposals or washers and driers in our apartments, because they aren’t there to fix, and I’m loving my life there for a very particular set of freedoms. Then one day I find out there’s a whole subset of individuals who actually want to stuff their cabinets with appliances. So I’m thinking either they have a whole lot of counter space, or they exist on a totally different plane. Obviously, it’s both: counter space and different plane. And it’s absurd and embarrassing to admit how eye-opening this was to me, because of course we were all on different planes, but for some reason, I could actually see the break whenever I walked down a housewares aisle. New York became prismatic.”
“I can only imagine what those security guards made of you.”
“Never mind.”
“No, I get it.”
“It was just weird, okay? Still is, a little. None of that comes naturally to me.”
“But you’re good at it.”
“But I hate it.” She licks her fingers and pinches the flaming wick of a tea candle in a votive between us. A ribbon of black smoke rises from her thumb and forefinger. She lets go of the wick, rubs her finger and thumb together and opens her hand, admiring the black smudges. “Do you know who was really good at it, though?”
“No,” I say, and I almost guess, because Elizabeth’s use of the past tense makes me think she must be talking about Stuart, who absolutely would have collected tea cozies and napkin rings—North of Blue Eye, deep inside your marvel cave, Jesus Christ—although his kitchen crap would have to have been handcrafted gifts from artsy friends. Never mass retail, not for Stuart. Before I can guess, though, and before Elizabeth can tell me, our server returns to sell us dessert.
“Sure,” Elizabeth says without pause. “Coconut crème brûlée, please.”
I decline but ask for two coffees, two spoons, and the check. “Who was good at it?”
“Shae.”
“Oh?” All things being equal, I’d rather hear about the tragic figure from her youth than about her ex-husband, if only by a small margin, so I say, “Was she?”
“Yeah. It came naturally to her. Even in high school, she’d save all her money for trivets instead of movie tickets. In college, she had, like, a tea set and a cheese board with little cheese knives, and she used them. I mean, we were eighteen years old, and she put out a cheese tray when people came over. ‘Company,’ she’d say. ‘We’re having company tonight.’ I’ve always wondered if she did things like that when she was alone, too.” Elizabeth’s focus drifts, fades, realigns. “I never did ask her. Wouldn’t surprise me, though, if she set out a hunk of Maytag Blue, a wedge of brie, and a block of sharp cheddar every night, just for her. Crackers and little knives.”
“Crackers and knives.”
“Want to know what I saw at the moment of impact?”
“Oh, hey. Come on.” I say it sweetly, but it’s an order. “Let’s not.”
“We were listening to From the Mars Hotel, trying to memorize lyrics so we wouldn’t be pariahs among Deadheads, and that song was on and we were singing along. And that truck driver wasn’t paying attention. Maybe he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel. Fine. But he wasn’t watching the road. He just wasn’t. I know, because I saw the deer in perfect silhouette against his headlights, and those lights held steady for a good two seconds at least before they swerved.”
“Elizabeth.” I lay my hand on the table, palm up, but she doesn’t take it.
“A deer in the headlights. Isn’t that something? That’s not the last thing I saw, though. It’s like, I knew we were about to get slammed by an eighteen-wheeler, and somehow I had the presence of mind to think, Keep your knees down, so I wouldn’t break my legs. Is that even a thing? I feel like I saw it in some awful Driver’s Ed video, where a dummy’s legs get smashed because its plastic feet were on the dash. I bet somebody’s mom wrote in that part to scare kids into keeping filthy shoes off the glove compartment, right? Well, it worked, because I thought, Keep your knees down, Elizabeth, and I wanted to have a whole conversation with Shae, but there wasn’t enough time to say even a single word, and I don’t know what I would have said anyway. So I turned my head and tried to tell her everything with my eyes—and I don’t know if this is even possible, like scientifically, but I swear, Robert, I swear I kept my eyes open the whole time. I was staring at Shae and I remember thinking, Don’t take your eyes off her, Elizabeth. As if me bearing witness would empower her to activate some magical survival skills or something. Just, Don’t you dare look away. And I didn’t, not through the whole thing. She closed her eyes, though. At the moment of impact, she closed her eyes.”
I’d never heard that part of the story, and I’m thoroughly ho
rrified, but I’m also preoccupied, because how am I to know which would be more inappropriate: asking Elizabeth to keep her voice down, or letting her carry on like this in public?
“That always gave me a little comfort, to be honest with you. I’m glad the last thing she saw was the inside of her eyelids rather than an airbag or shrapnel in her thigh.”
I reach across the table and grab her hand and squeeze it very hard, hoping to pinch her back to the moment.
“You want to know the dumbest part?” she asks. Her speech has started to slur.
“I think we should talk about this later,” I say.
But she’s in her own world in her head, so my answer doesn’t matter, and she goes and tells me the dumbest part anyway. “I didn’t even like the Dead. Neither did Shae. We’d never been fans and wouldn’t have even considered going to that show if Tonya hadn’t been out of town.”
I mimic the tone used by crisis counselors in movies, characters who successfully talk maniacs down from a ledge, when I ask, “Who’s Tonya again?”
“Shae’s sister. It was her Camaro, you know. Tonya had been flown out to some fancy interview in Memphis. Didn’t get the job, but she let us borrow her car while she was gone. So we did. We were eighteen. What did we know at eighteen? We thought we knew what we wanted, what was best for us. We didn’t care about the show. We just wanted to drive that car.”
Her laughter explodes. People at nearby tables turn to see what the fuss is about, but Elizabeth has no volume control or self-awareness at the moment, so when she throws her hands up to shout, “We just wanted to drive,” her napkin goes flying, cascading to the table, then her chair, then the floor. A quiet game of Plinko. Elizabeth picks it up, folds it in a square and puts it on her lap before resting her elbows on the table and leaning toward me.
She finds her inside voice. “I swore I’d never get over it, but people told me that I’d make other friends, that I’d move on. They acted like I couldn’t feel for myself because I was only eighteen, like I needed them to feel for me and report back so I could be a person. But guess what? They were wrong. I was right, and they were wrong. To this day, I’ve never made a better friend, and I’ve never gotten over it. Never. And you know what else? We really did just want to drive. So it’s like, fuck the Dead, you know? Fuck ‘Scarlet Begonias.’ ”
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