The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

  God. People and their romantic idiocy. Of course it was true. True for Peter and for most men having midlife affairs. Here’s the key again: Nobody wants to believe the obvious and visible reality that we are all quite the same. Most would rather believe in the invisible and the improbable—that fate is determined by the alignment of stars, that there is a spiritual entity rooting for them, for unique and wonderful them, that humans can read minds, that their destiny can be foretold and possibly altered. The simple truth is this: Most humans are very much alike. The simple and obvious truth is that there are very few variables to what a person might do, think, fear, or desire in any given situation.

  “One day,” Rebecca continued, “I needed to call Magda to check on the kids. It was a Friday. Peter had stopped seeing patients on Fridays because he was trying to work on his book when he was up here, and he was writing, but he always took breaks and came down to see what I was working on. So he told me to come into his house to make the call. And I did. When I hung up, he was standing in the doorway leading out to the porch. I had to walk past him to leave, and as I did, I don’t know what inspired me, but I took my finger and touched his arm, just on the inside of his elbow, then I sort of traced this invisible line down to his hand. He grabbed my hand then … and held it. That’s when it began.”

  That was interesting. Peter made the first move. He had drawn her into the house and then it was he who held her. I had imagined it otherwise, but now it all was spelled out for me.

  “You like a man who takes charge in bed, and for all Brian’s bravado and tough Southie exterior, he’s a bit of a nice guy in the sack.”

  Rebecca nearly choked on her wine with astounded laughter.

  “I can’t believe you just said that. Yeah, Brian’s a vanilla kind of guy, it’s true.”

  Peter, according to Rebecca, was a very take-command type in bed. He would grab both of her thin wrists in one large hand and pin them above her head while managing to kiss her and work her clothes off with the other hand.

  “It’s the kissing,” Rebecca said. “The man knows how to kiss.”

  I sighed then, and poured myself another glass of wine.

  Yes, the kissing. Yes.

  “You used to meet him at his office at night,” I said, recalling the night I’d stopped in for the closing papers. It really was shameful how easy this all was, but I was enjoying myself.

  “Yes, Peter started getting flipped out about meeting at his house. He worried that somebody might notice my car, or that we might leave behind some … evidence, I guess. So we met up in his office a few times, but it wasn’t for therapy. It was, you know … they were romantic meetings. Now we meet in the office over his garage. Where he writes. Elise never goes in there. It’s pretty cozy. It was set up as a little guest apartment, so there’s a bed and everything. I usually park in town and Peter picks me up so nobody will see my car. Now he’s all worried about you, since you have the office downstairs. Worried that you might think I was his patient or something and now you might be suspicious.”

  “But you were his patient.”

  “Not really, Hildy. When people are in therapy, they’re in therapy for months and sometimes years. I saw him twice and then realized I didn’t need it at all. It’s completely different.”

  “Are you going to tell him you told me about the two of you?”

  “Told you? I didn’t tell you. You just read my mind. You pulled it out of my brain. No. Hildy, he would totally freak out if he knew we’d had this conversation. I’m trusting you. But I’m glad you know. I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this. You’re like a … sister to me.”

  I know she almost said “mother.” She was wise to think twice. I can be a little sensitive about my age. Who isn’t?

  “I can trust you, right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  Normally, I would have felt pleased with myself after such a successful reading. You really know you’ve hit pay dirt when the person believes you so much that she starts filling in the gaps for you. And it’s not something I would ever tell anybody. I believed then that everybody would know in time, that things would come undone, as these things usually do. One of the spouses would become suspicious. Or, like Scott, one of them would become tired of “living the lie.” I thought it likely that Rebecca and Peter would leave their marriages and end up together. Normally, I get a little twinge of the huntress, a taste of the kill when I learn news like this. I admit, I salivate a little, because there will probably be at least one property sacrificed before the whole thing is over, and of course I want the listing.

  But that night in front of the fire with Rebecca, I was so enchanted with her sweet company, so happy not to be drinking alone, I didn’t think about real estate at all; instead, I calmly tantalized her with little juicy tidbits about Peter Newbold. I told her about how his father, Dr. David Newbold, was a family practitioner who used to make house calls when I was little. How Peter was an only child, born late in his father’s life, to a second wife. How my friend Allie Dyer used to baby-sit him during the summers and on weekends.

  “He was such a cute kid,” I mused, moving the embers about the fireplace with the poker in a distracted manner.

  “He was?” Rebecca asked.

  “We used to play hide-and-seek—it was his favorite thing. We would hide and he would tiptoe around the house, wanting to find us, but also slightly terrified, because sometimes, when he got close to our hiding spots, we’d leap out and scare the crap out of him.” I laughed, remembering now how much Peter had loved and hated this, how he would sometimes laugh and cry at once, then beg us to play one more time.

  I could feel Rebecca’s gaze on me as I fussed with the fire. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be bathing in the attention of another after so long in nightly exile. I put down the poker and saw that our glasses were empty.

  “I was always surprised that he married Elise. She just never really seemed his type.… More wine?” I asked Rebecca.

  “Oh God, no, I really should get home,” she replied, but she lifted her glass up toward the bottle I was holding.

  I loved her like my own child then. More. More. She wanted more.

  ten

  I had a friend. I hadn’t realized until that night with Rebecca that I needed a friend. In fact, I had always considered myself a woman with many friends. Most people in Wendover would tell you that they consider me a friend. But since my return from rehab, I had sort of straddled two worlds. By day I was a businesswoman, a contributor to local charities, a “friend” to my neighbors, clients, and fellow brokers. But my nights had become a little bit lonely. I rarely socialized with anyone. No more late nights with Mamie. No more wet lunches and celebratory dinners after deals were closed. I usually declined dinner parties, especially once I started drinking again.

  It was odd, but during those first months after Hazelden, I didn’t really have the desire to drink, and attending parties where people were drinking wasn’t so intolerable. I had, somehow, lost the obsession with alcohol, and any urges I had to drink were fleeting and momentary. The consequences of ordering a drink and possibly ending up back at Hazelden were always on my mind.

  Then, one day, I was in my cellar, trying to find some old photos that Tess wanted, and I came across a case of wine. Scott and I were never wine drinkers. It must have been left over from a party. I opened the box and took out a bottle. It was a Merlot. I cradled it in my hands for a moment, studying the label. I moved the bottle around in little circles and watched the dark red liquid swirl up the neck of the bottle and lap at the bottom of the cork. I turned it upside down and saw that there was some sediment at the bottom. It was dusty, so I took my sleeve and wiped the glass clear and blew the dust from the label. Then I carefully tucked it back into the box. Presumably, I’d have the occasion to serve wine to guests someday. It was nice to know it was there.

  From that moment on, every second that I was in the house, I knew it wa
s there. I thought about it when I woke up in the morning, and I thought about it when I walked into the house after work. Tess and Michael had removed (stolen) every bottle containing alcohol in my liquor cabinet while I was away. It was for my own good, they had explained. They didn’t want me to be tempted after doing so well in rehab. I guess they never thought to check the cellar. It was a little thrilling and satisfying to know that they had missed something—an entire case of wine. I left it alone for a good couple of weeks. Then one Friday night, after returning home from baby-sitting Grady, I was lonely and a little sad. I had read Grady one of the girls’ favorite books from their childhood—Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. I don’t know why, but the part where the little microscopic Whos call out from the speck of dust, “We are here! We are here! We are here!” always gets me a little choked up, and I’m not the most emotional person. I don’t know why that always gets me, but it does.

  When the story was over, I had placed little Grady in his crib in his soft jammies. He closed his eyes, clutching his “bewkey” (a tattered old beloved blanket) to his pink cheek, and I suddenly envied him his comfort. It felt like ages before Tess and Michael arrived home, and when they did, Michael was a little tipsy. They wanted to chat, but I told them how exhausted I was, and I left.

  When I finally got back to my house, I went straight down to the cellar, with Babs and Molly charging ahead of me. Babs raced comically down the steps on her front legs, only touching every other step with a hind toe and Molly, in order to hit the earthen floor first, soared over the bottom four steps in one leap, then they both sniffed maniacally for cellar mice. I marched straight to the dusty box. I removed one of the bottles. I cradled it in the crook of my arm. I carried it upstairs. In the kitchen, after some rummaging around, I found a corkscrew, uncorked the bottle, and poured some of the rich Merlot out into a wineglass, a beautiful crystal wineglass, part of a Waterford set that Scott had bought at an auction years ago. Then I took a sip. Then I took another sip—a nice long one—and I felt the familiar warmth, first on the back of my tongue and in my throat, and then down deep in my belly. I took another sip and it was everywhere. All the warmth and comfort I had missed, it all came back, just after those first few sips. It bolstered me and soothed me, the way it always had.

  The goodness—that inner goodness that had been lost for so many months—revealed itself to me again. It was a cold night in late February and I sat on the couch in the living room with my dear, dear dogs beside me, and I drank that glass of wine and I refilled it. I didn’t drink the entire bottle, not the whole bottle, no. All I needed was a couple of glasses of that divine red wine, and I felt as if I had surfaced from some murky underground place and that I was drawing oxygen, once again, into my stagnant blood.

  But it wasn’t until I finally got to share my wine with Rebecca that I realized how much I had tired of drinking alone.

  It’s not normal to drink alone all the time. I learned that at Hazelden.

  I knew Rebecca had also been a little lonely until that night. Her kids had started at the Montessori school, and I was aware that she had become friendly with a few of the moms, but I also knew that she didn’t have a real friend, a confidante.

  We had a short Indian summer in early November and Rebecca brought her boys over to fish in the river a few times. I grew rather fond of young Ben and Liam. I admit that I have a slight prejudice against the often outrageously precocious products of our local Montessori school. They don’t get grades and they don’t keep score in games, you see, because it might deflate their industrial-size self-esteems. The adults aren’t “teachers”; they’re “learning partners.” And I’m told that even the four-year-olds call their teachers by their first names. This, I believe, helps explain why I recently had a young Montessori-educated girl say to me in the grocery store, “Hey, Hildy, you shouldn’t buy ice cream; it’ll just make you fatter.”

  I knew the family. I had recently rented them a house, so I crossed my arms and waited for her mother to reprimand the seven-year-old. Instead, the mom smiled at her little cherub and said nothing. The child said, “Why are you buying it if it makes you fat?”

  Again, I glared at her.

  “Well, Ashley, that’s Hildy’s prerogative,” her mother said.

  “What does prerogative mean?” asked the brat.

  I reached into the freezer and grabbed another pint of ice cream. “If you don’t teach manners now,” I said to the mother, “you’re really doing her a disservice. She’ll have a hard time as an adult.”

  As I started to walk off, the mother said, “Well, I don’t think you were setting a very good example by ignoring my daughter.”

  So I walked back to the child and said, “I’m an adult, so it would have been more respectful for you to call me Mrs. Good. And it’s rude to tell people they’re fat.”

  “OH, puhLEEZE!” exclaimed the mother, and she stormed down the aisle, dragging her daughter along by the hand. Her daughter looked over her shoulder at me and I gave her a menacing stare. It was my prerogative.

  But Rebecca’s boys always called me Mrs. Good, and they looked me in the eye when they spoke to me. Rebecca had a great sense of humor with her boys, but she corrected them anytime they wavered even slightly toward disrespectful behavior, and she didn’t have much tolerance for whining and complaining. One day, for example, we were seated on a couple of chairs by the river, watching the boys fishing. Liam, the seven-year-old, hadn’t caught a thing.

  “Mom, how come Ben has caught three and I haven’t caught any?”

  “Oh, Liam,” Rebecca said, laughing, “don’t bellyache about it. Go fish closer to where Ben is fishing.”

  “It’s true, Liam, see how Ben’s in the shade?” I said. “That’s where the trout like to hide on warm days.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Drop your hook close to shore; they hang out there under the stony ledges.”

  A few minutes later, when he’d hooked his first fish of the day, Liam said, “Hey, thanks for the tip, Mrs. Good.” Then he carried the bowed pole with the trout gyrating at the end of the line to his mother. The boys always asked Rebecca or me to remove the fish from the hooks.

  “Stop being so squeamish,” Rebecca had chided him. Then she helped him work the trout off the hook. “Now you take it and toss it back. Go ahead.”

  Liam gingerly took the fish from her. He ran to the riverbank and flung it back into the water. Then he wiped his hands on his jeans, saying, “GROSS, it was all slimy, like a snake.”

  Rebecca laughed. “He’s going to have another snake dream again tonight. He keeps dreaming about snakes, which is so adorable.”

  “Oh?” I said, slightly puzzled.

  “It’s … you know, he’s obsessed with his penis. Peter told me it’s normal for boys to have dreams like that. I love telling Peter about our dreams, mine and the kids. He’s so good at analyzing them.”

  “Really? You tell him your dreams? Like when you’re … together?” I whispered.

  “Of course. Dreams are so fascinating. They’re full of information about us.”

  “Mine aren’t. I tend to dream about houses all the time. It’s because I’m in real estate, I guess.”

  “No!” Rebecca exclaimed. “The other day I was reading a book Peter gave me about dreams, and it said that houses in dreams always represent the self. If you dream about being up in an attic or on top of a house, it represents your intellect or a search for something spiritual. The basement represents your subconscious impulses, primitive longings, sexuality. Where are you in the dreams about your house?” she asked.

  “I think I’m always in the kitchen.”

  “That means you have an appetite for something. You want to fill some kind of void.”

  I laughed good-naturedly. Rebecca acted as if she were an expert in analysis, solely based on her romance with Peter. I looked at my watch.

  “Five o’clock, how about a glass of wine?”

  “Okay
, just one, though.”

  At night, at least once or twice a week, when Brian was staying in town, Rebecca would leave the boys with the nanny, after they went to bed, and she’d come sit by the fire with me and we’d have a little wine. It was usually a Tuesday or Wednesday. Thursday was her night with Peter. Fridays, Brian would be home for the weekend.

  Rebecca was such pleasant company that I literally rejoiced in our friendship. She was very funny. Being an outsider, she had hysterically comic takes on a lot of the people I had known my whole life, people whose eccentricities were so much a part of the fabric of my hometown that I didn’t see their irregularities until she pointed them out. For example, the Winston boys—Ed and Phil Winston. Identical twins who still, now in their late eighties, dressed in matching outfits for their afternoon walk through the Crossing. Anorexic old Diana Merchant, who, despite her advanced age, wore halter tops and heels at the grocery store. And crazy Nell Hamlyn, whose goats got loose all the time and terrorized Rebecca’s horses. Rebecca did a great impersonation of Linda Barlow, who helped her out with the gardening and barn chores. I had known Linda all her life, so I had never noticed how manly she was until Rebecca strode across my living room, barking at me in Linda’s gutteral, gruff manner.

  We would laugh until we cried some nights, Rebecca and I. She was clearly dissatisfied with her husband and told stories of his outrageously egomaniacal behavior, which would sometimes make us choke on our wine. She also told me of the real source of her dissatisfaction with him: He was a womanizer and a cheat. He had had an affair with a young model the year before they moved up here. There had been a photograph in the Boston Herald showing the two, seated together, right on the floor of the Garden at a Celtics game. He had told Rebecca that the affair was over. But she didn’t believe him. And, oddly, she didn’t appear to care. She told me that she had cared very much at first. It was one of the causes of her depression when they had first moved here—his infidelity and her years-long grief over her own infertility. She was terrified of being abandoned by Brian, and feared that everything she did was driving him further and further away. She’d immediately regretted moving up here because she couldn’t keep as close an eye on him. Laughing about it now, she recalled the way she used to phone him at all hours of the night at their place in Boston and accuse him of being with his girlfriend, then tell him she wanted to sell the Barlow place and move back.