“Hey, Niece!” Uncle Richard was carrying a tray. He had made us iced tea in plastic glasses with watermelons on them, and there were plum candies in a cereal bowl. “I know your aunt uses special dish, but I can’t find.” He set the tray down on the frosted glass tabletop and pulled up the second chaise alongside mine. “Look at us, the two invalids! Not such a bad life, eh?”
I plucked a candy and undid the waxy wrapping. Most of my American friends hated these. Who wanted salt and a hint of bitter when they expected sweet?
“I’ve only gained about ten pounds since I’ve been here,” I said.
“Good, good! Men don’t like too skinny, you know.”
“I’m not looking for a man, Uncle Richard.”
“Sometimes you don’t look, you find.” He sipped his tea and smacked his lips. “Lipton’s mix. You don’t tell your aunt. So what’s wrong with that husband of yours? Why you get divorce?”
“It was time, Uncle Richard. We both changed too much.”
Uncle Richard frowned. He knew this was bullshit.
The truth was, I’d run away.
Safety was what I was looking for, and safety was what I thought I’d found. Carey Acheson. The name had the comforting resonance of old money. Bourbon money, I found out later. We met at a lounge party at Brown when I was a freshman, dragged up the hill by a RISD roommate. My father had just died, I was listless in my classes, dreaming of I don’t know what. Carey was a junior, a gangly slow-talking molecular biologist from Cincinnati, prep school all the way. That he was even attracted to me was amazing, given my own boarding school experience, although that summer on the Cape Fran and I had perfected our slumming in local bars, flashing the IDs that proclaimed that we were newly eighteen and of drinking age. That was back when eighteen was the drinking age.
The first time we made love Carey whispered in my ear: “I want to be where you’ve been.” Goat’s Head Soup was blasting to cover up the noise from his apartment mate’s room next door, to cover up what we were about to do. I thought of Marty and Schuyler.
“You don’t know where I’ve been.”
Starfucker starfucker starfucker star.
He began unbuttoning my shirt.
Of course it was different from Monkey King. First, I knew what was going on. Mutual consent. And I liked it, a little. Although I wasn’t lying when I said it hurt, much more than I’d expected.
At one point Carey asked: “Are you sure you’re a virgin?”
I stared at the green light of the stereo. The music had gone off. “Of course I’m sure.”
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
It’s Carey, I told myself. A boy you know.
I shut my eyes and pretended I was my sister.
When it began to get light I put my clothes back on and I: walked back down the hill to my dorm. I was exhausted and I queasy, but I had done it, taken the first step to breaking the spell.
My mother looked Carey in the eye and loved him. We drove down from Providence one Saturday night to have dinner with her. It was just the three of us, since Marty was away for the weekend. Ma and I were in the kitchen clearing up while Carey, seated at my father’s place in the dining room, was smugly polishing off the Burgundy we’d brought. He knew he’d been a hit.
“It’s a good thing he’s scientist,” said Ma. Then she turned on the tap full force so I couldn’t say anything. It reminded me of when I was small and she’d be lecturing me about something in the car. Just as I was about to answer she’d say, “Not now, Sal-lee, I have to concentrate on this turn.”
But this time I continued covering bowls of leftovers with plastic wrap until she turned off the water, and then I asked, “What does that mean, it’s a good thing he’s a scientist?”
“You are a dreamy artist,” Ma said, pointing at me with a wet finger. She was wearing a navy-and-brown-checked dress for the occasion, and her cheeks were slightly flushed from the wine. I hadn’t seen her look so good since Daddy’s death. “Scientist is down-to-earth. This is a good match.”
It was true that on the outside Carey was perfect—intelligent, well-bred, and much more handsome than I deserved. He’d sung in the church choir when he was little, attended two boarding schools (he’d gotten kicked out of the first one for growing pot in his closet, but I didn’t tell Ma that). His parents were social register.
“Carey’s so dignified,” Ma told me. “I think your daddy would have liked him.”
True to character, Carey got into every grad program he’d applied to but decided on Columbia because it was in New York City. We’d been going out a little over a year, and I knew this was the best shot I’d ever have. It was I who proposed to him, over a late breakfast between classes at a greasy spoon on Thayer Street, although he’d first put the idea into my head by implying that I’d like sex better if we were married. When he asked me about my own plans for school I said I didn’t mind dropping out of RISD, I was sure I could get into Parsons.
“Well,” he said. He shook his head and smiled. “I guess I could picture us.” He put his fingertips on either side of my chin and brought my face close to his. “For the rest of my life, every morning waking up to this. Yes, I can see it.”
That was about as romantic as Carey got. I remember that the waitress was clearing the table next to ours, making a huge clatter, and I felt like telling her to get lost, but that would have made things worse.
I never got around to applying to Parsons, I guess I was sick of school. I got hired as a pasteup artist at the first place I interviewed, a small advertising agency whose specialty was toy accounts. My first big break came when they gave me a brochure for a new game, something to do with the alphabet and the names of different dinosaurs. I stayed late every night for a week, rifling through everyone’s type books, deconstructing letters into reptilian shapes. The result was a collage that got me promoted out of the pool to assistant designer.
Carey and I lived cozily in one of those rambling university housing apartments between Broadway and Riverside. After dinner, if he didn’t have a night lab, he’d take me into his lap and surprise me with presents from gift shops in the neighborhood, odd and mysterious things, like a bowl made of lava, or brass earrings crafted by an Italian monk.
The sex got better, but what I loved most about Carey, what I missed about him after the divorce, was simply his physical presence. Nights, I’d wait for him. Even if I fell asleep, some part of me would still be waiting, anticipating the dip of the mattress, the heat of his body. I knew this always, even through my dreams.
The second phase of our marriage, what I later thought of as the yuppie phase, was marked by Carey receiving his doctorate and a tenure-track teaching position at Columbia. By that time my agency had expanded and merged with a Madison Avenue one, and I’d been promoted from designer to director. It’s only now that I understand I was throwing myself into my job the way I’d thrown myself into painting at boarding school. I did it in order to numb the monster inside me, the one who wanted to murder Monkey King but instead ended up trying to murder herself.
We moved ten blocks downtown and over to Riverside into a fifteenth-floor co-op. One Saturday I started looking through my old boxes and found brushes and paints, which prompted me to set up a skeleton studio in the spare room that was supposed to be the nursery for our future progeny.
It’s funny how all the big decisions I’d ever made were about escape. Maybe that’s why I was able to make them so quickly—they were all basically the same decision. While Carey was away at a conference I went down to Charlottesville to visit Marty. God knows how she’d ended up there, something to do with an old boyfriend, like all her expeditions. I hung around in the old blues club where she was tending bar, Miss Exotic, the sleek mink in a pen full of mice. “What about your acting?” I asked.
“They let me sing here, sometimes. It’s worth it. It’s experience.” She was smoking a lot, to roughen her voice. Give it character, she said. I remember this: she had an Ace band
age wrapped around her left wrist.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Coffee burn.”
She was lying, but I didn’t call her on it.
I returned to the city, dropped my bags in the living room, and stood there in the dark looking out at our spectacular view: the midnight blue Hudson with the George Washington Bridge stretching jeweled and serene to the north into New Jersey. But when I turned on the light I was surrounded by the oppressive furniture of my life: the dining room table with its six walnut chairs whose flowered upholstery took Carey’s great-aunt twelve years to embroider, an elaborate teak sideboard with baroque scrollwork, ancient pale Oriental rugs, and four extremely ugly table lamps in the shape of bucking horses which Carey adored. The shelves were crammed with textbooks, lab notebooks, and boxes upon boxes of slides my husband had shot of the new kind of bacteria that had been the subject of his thesis. There was not a whisper of me in this room. I might as well have not been living there at all.
I played back the answering machine tape. There was a message from Carey, which I buzzed past. I changed into my painting clothes and went into my studio and started scraping away at an old canvas so I could start again. I was twenty-six years old and I wanted to start again.
You don’t know how to give in. You don’t know how to love like a wife has to love.
Maybe Ma had been right.
I came home from work the next day and saw my husband’s suit bag draped over the sofa and his shoes side by side on the carpet, heard the shower running. I sat down in the living room and waited till he was on the way to the bedroom, towel wrapped around his waist.
“Christ! I didn’t hear you come in.” He padded toward me making wet footprints, and I thought he looked just like a dog, all brown-eyed and hopeful.
“We have to talk,” I said.
“Okay, okay, let me put on a robe and my glasses. Did you get my message?”
“Uh-uh.” He looked perplexed and then went to the bedroom while I steeled myself. When he came back I said, “I think we should try living separately for a while.”
He looked absolutely floored and I felt cruel but continued. “I’ve been thinking things over. I’m not happy, Carey. I don’t know whether it’s us or what. I think I need some time away so I can think things out.”
“Sally. Dear.” That was his only endearment, and a rare one. He sat down on the sofa beside me. “Being alone is going to let you think more clearly? I don’t understand that.”
“Well, it’s true. Maybe not for you, but for me.”
“We can see a marriage counselor. There’s no need for hasty decisions.”
“We can see a counselor, but I still want my own apartment. I just need to be by myself for a while. Is that so much to ask?”
“Look, I told you anytime you want, you can just quit working. Don’t you want a baby? I thought you wanted a baby.”
He sounded simpleminded. I gripped my hands into fists. “I’m not talking about ending anything, Carey. I’m talking about a break.”
My husband looked down at the floor, noticed that his wing tips were out of alignment, straightened them, and then said, “Okay, Sally. If that’s what you really want. We’ll try it. How long were you thinking of?”
“Six months.”
He folded his arms across his chest. “Do you think you can find a place to rent for six months?”
“I don’t mind breaking a lease.”
“You’re sure of this now?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” He was being so reasonable I wanted to scream, pick up one of his damn shoes, hurl it across the room, and shatter a horse lamp. But I didn’t. We just sat there in silence for a while and then he leaned over and said softly: “Sally.” My stomach clenched.
“How can you want that now?” I asked him. “How can you even think it?”
“If we’re going to be living apart—”
“No,” I said. And it was as simple as that.
I was happy, at first. I went out with people in my office, who said, “God, Sally, we always thought of you as such the perfect little wife, and now here you are acting crazy like the rest of us.” I played pool, started wearing my skirts a little shorter, but not too short. I was not the one with great legs. Ma called every night. Carey had been talking to her, he was such a responsible, generous husband, he loved me so much. After I hung up with Ma, I’d call Fran. “I feel so free,” I said.
“Then stay free.”
“I want rapture.”
“Then hold out for it, honey.”
My husband did not let me alone. He sent me roses, took me out to every new restaurant that opened in town. It was the courtship we’d never had. I gained weight, from those dinners and from all the beer I was drinking on pool nights. Carey said I looked terrific. “Could you be, maybe you’re. . .?” he asked me once.
“I’m not pregnant,” I told him.
Six months turned into eight. Neither of us had done anything about counseling.
“I want you home,” he said. We were at a Tex-Mex place in Chelsea, where the food was so beautiful, blue corn everything and every color pepper you could think of, that it seemed a pity to eat it.
“I can’t,” I said. “I need more time.”
“I need a wife,” he said. Nothing more. I should have known. I didn’t hear from him for three weeks and then he called me at the office. “My lawyer will be in touch with you.”
“Why?” Panic did not begin to describe how I felt.
“I want a divorce.”
“Have you met someone?”
“I want a divorce,” he repeated.
I thought: so it begins, you asked for it, Sally, here it is.
It never occurred to me to try to win him back.
When I told this to Uncle Richard, naturally I left out the sex parts. He kept saying, “Mmmhmm, mmmhmm” until I realized that he hadn’t said it for a while. When I looked over he was fast asleep, his mouth open, the big belly rising and falling gently, one hand dangling childishly over the chaise as if he had dropped off in the middle of reaching for his glass of iced tea.
20
The calamondin was ripe, practically falling off the bush, and the day after my tete-a-tete with Uncle Richard I decided to pick them. In terms of worms and insects they had fared better than the grapefruit—every third one or so was salvageable. Aunty Mabel saw what I was doing and came out to help. It was around three o’clock, nearly one hundred degrees, and I was wearing Schuyler’s T-shirt and shorts, now paint stained, my hair tucked up into a bun under the Derby Lane hat. As we were stooped there, working, we heard a car zoom by the house, stop, back up, and then the spray of gravel as it slid into our driveway.
“Plumber not supposed to come till tomorrow,” Aunty Mabel said.
I didn’t recognize the car, an old teal Oldsmobile, but why would I, I’d never seen Mel out of the hospital, I didn’t know what he drove.
“Christ! You never called, you said you would call.”
“Good to see you, too, honey.” He was slightly smaller than I’d remembered, leaner, and as he removed his Ray-Bans I saw faint laugh lines that surprised me. The gold stud in his left lobe had been replaced by a pale sapphire that seemed especially picked for the Florida light. So neat, everything about him just so. A sight for sore eyes. He leaned to kiss me on the cheek and then he held out his hand to my aunt, who had come up, frowning, fruit gathered in the corner of her apron.
“Mel LaMonte. Mrs. Ding, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Sally’s told me so much about you.”
My aunt fussed with her hair a little, pushed her own sunglasses up on top of her head, shook his hand. How could I have forgotten the pure charm of him, those manners that would have put any of the snide New York boys I’d hankered after as a teenager to shame.
I said, “We’d invite you in, but my uncle’s resting.”
“No problem. We’ll go to the beach. Get your bathing suit.”
I t
urned back to my aunt, who flapped her hand at us. “Qu,qu, qu.”
“But what about the fruit?”
“One more teeny-weeny bush, big deal, I can do.”
He’d driven two days, stopping the night in North Carolina where a friend of his lived. He had a billion friends, something else I’d forgotten about him.
“How’d you know I was still here?” I asked him. “Why’d you take the chance and come all the way down without calling?”
“You’re never going to believe this, but I ran into your sister.”
“Marty?”
“On Chapel Street, in New Haven. She’s kind of hard to miss, with that sling and everything. She was awfully friendly.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I told you, honey, with her it’s so much surface. With you, on the other hand—”
“Make a left here.”
“Where are we going?”
“My favorite beach. But we kind of have to sneak in.”
“I love it.”
Mel was a graceful driver, maneuvering the tanklike Olds as adroitly as if it were my aunt and uncle’s Toyota. This was his dad’s car, he explained, he was sorry it didn’t have air-conditioning. I didn’t care. It was romantic with the windows rolled all the way down. He had his arm along the back of the seat, right behind my neck, and I could feel all the little hairs there rise in response. I felt like the kind of teenager I’d always wanted to be, the kind that Marty and Darcy had been. The radio was on, a song that was popular that spring, about a girl being the captain of a guy’s heart. Mel hummed along and then he laughed. “I think I’ve heard this idiotic tune two thousand times since I left Connecticut. Why so quiet, Sal?”
“It’s just so strange to see you out of the hospital. Like two worlds colliding or something.”
“You look great,” he said. “Like a Tahitian princess. Like that French artist, what’s his name.”
Monkey King Page 20