by Marian Thurm
ALSO BY MARIAN THURM
Floating
Walking Distance
These Things Happen
Henry in Love
The Way We Live Now
The Clairvoyant
What’s Come Over You?
Today is Not Your Day
UNDER THE NAME LUCY JACKSON
Posh
Slicker
MARIAN THURM
THE
GOOD
LIFE
THE PERMANENT PRESS
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Copyright © 2016 by Marian Thurm
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
For information, address:
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thurm, Marian—
The good life / Marian Thurm.
ISBN 978-1-57962-428-6
eISBN 978-1-57962-471-2
pages ; cm
1. Marital conflict—Fiction. 2. Upper class—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. 4. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.H83G66 2016
813'.54—dc23 2015041947
Printed in the United States of America
For Robin Rue, the agent of my dreams
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks to Robin Rue, Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, and Beth Miller, all at Writers House; to Lisa Shea, Joe Olshan, Joe Olshan, Amy Bloom, Dan Chaon, Josh Henkin, Joanna Hershon, Teddy Wayne, Stacy Schiff; to Yona Zeldis McDonough, Henry Landsman, Kate Axelrod, George Axelrod, and Marty and Judith Shepard. And to Barbara Anderson, copyeditor par excellence.
While his wife, Stacy, is busy with their young son and daughter at the egg-shaped swimming pool adjacent to his mother’s condo, Roger Goldenhar will drive in his rented Toyota to an indoor, air-conditioned shooting range in Pompano Beach where they also happen to sell guns and ammo—a fact he will learn on the Internet the night before he and Stacy and the kids fly out from JFK to Fort Lauderdale.
At the shooting range—to which he will return to pick up the handgun after a mandatory three-day waiting period and official approval from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement—he will be encouraged to take a class offered on-site that will teach him all about loading, unloading, and firing his weapon. He will politely decline, explaining that long ago, back when he was thirteen or fourteen and went to summer camp in Maine, he used to fire a .22-caliber rifle at paper targets with the image of a vivid orange Popsicle at the center. And was actually awarded a marksman’s badge in riflery. Oh, and also a complimentary junior membership in the NRA.
Thanks anyway, he will say to the guys behind the counter at the range; even though he’s never shot this particular pistol before today, he’s quite certain he doesn’t need any formal training in the handling of firearms. Though of course he’ll take a good long look at the instruction book that comes with it.
But wait, someone will ask him, don’t you need ammo to go with that newly purchased 9 mm semiautomatic Glock?
Oh, thanks, one small box of 9 mm bullets, please.
~ 1 ~
Of all the things they had in common—and there were many, including the fact that they’d both grown up on Long Island, Roger in the sixties and early seventies, Stacy a decade later—the crazy thing was that they were both born on April 20th, in, believe or not (and at first neither one of them could), the same hospital. This was Lenox Hill, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, just a few blocks from where, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Roger and Stacy Goldenhar would eventually buy a three-bedroom apartment and begin to raise their children together.
Kismet, karma, fate, destiny, call it what you will, these two had it, baby. In spades.
April 20th also happened to be Adolf Hitler’s birthday, a fact which was news to Stacy.
“What? No way!” she’d kept insisting to Roger the afternoon they first met. “How could I have missed something like that? No way!” It was 1998, the first week in June, and each of them had made it to Cambridge for their respective reunions; Stacy had been an undergrad at Harvard in the mid-eighties, just a couple of years before Roger had attended the Business School. They were seated now at a table for two in a muffin shop in Harvard Square, where the cashiers and employees behind the counter were dressed in Revolutionary War costumes, and the wallpaper was patterned with images of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams at the Continental Congress. Stacy and Roger had introduced themselves less than half an hour earlier, when each of them had ordered a glazed lemon drop muffin and an iced tea to go. While waiting in line at the cashier, absently fooling with her key ring, a two-inch plastic Pinocchio dangling from it, Stacy’s keys and wallet had slipped from her hands and onto the unvarnished wood floor of Ye Olde Muffin Shoppe. Where her imitation suede wallet then fell open, several credit cards and Stacy’s New York State driver’s license spilling out as the wallet hit the ground. And Roger, in his gentlemanly way, had bent down to retrieve her things for her. After a quick thank-you from Stacy and a spirited conversation about 1) their mutual birthday (which of course Roger had gleaned from her license) 2) the fact that they both currently lived in Manhattan 3) Lenox Hill Hospital 4) Hitler, and 5) the sprinkling of grated lemon peel they both liked in the muffins’ glaze, Roger suggested they sit down at a table together. Stacy, who had recently broken up with the work-obsessed, hard-to-please legal aid lawyer she’d been dating for about a year longer than she should have, silently admired the startling turquoise-green of Roger’s eyes and also his small ears with their delicate, attached lobes. He was taller than she was by four or five inches, she calculated—well over six feet—and she found that alluring, too. Stacy was almost five nine, and always on the lookout for men who hit the six-foot mark and then some. None of these features she was admiring in Roger had any weight to it, moral or otherwise, she understood, but, even so, she found herself willing to settle into a rickety, uncomfortable seat opposite him and explore the possible pleasures of his company.
As he talked, with great enthusiasm, about his job as a commercial real estate developer, Stacy stared at his clean-shaven, angular face, and realized she had no idea how old he was: Thirty-eight? Fortyish? How could you tell? She herself was thirty-three and, frankly, not getting any younger, as Lauren, her occasionally exasperating sister, liked to remind her. Lauren hadn’t celebrated her thirtieth birthday yet but already had a husband and two children—a pair of dark-haired, identical twin girls who were enrolled in the Kiddie Kollege Preschool in the suburbs of Connecticut, where they studied the alphabet and rode tricycles and finger painted, from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, while Lauren worked as an assistant teacher in the classroom next door.
The life her sister inhabited, deep in the suburbs of New Haven County, was one that Stacy—who’d never owned or operated a Chevy TrailBlazer or Ford Explorer, or changed a single diaper or coaxed a burp from a newborn baby—was entirely unfamiliar with. And did not aspire to. Unlike her college roommates, most of whom, it seemed, had ended up in med school, law school, or investment banking, Stacy had found a job after her senior year with a nonprofit, earning $19,000 a year working with Manhattan’s homeless population. And taking satisfaction in helping what her mother, Grace, had referred to as “those poor souls”—many of them Vietnam vets with schizophrenia and severe substance abuse problems whose wretched lives Stacy tried so hard to improve by securing housing and medical care for them even when they didn’t seem to much want what
she was offering.
“I can’t believe no one ever told you that you and der Führer shared a birthday,” Roger was saying now, while adding a packet of Sweet’N Low to his iced tea. He followed that with two more packets, and stirred vigorously with an extra-long spoon suitable for use with an ice cream soda.
Stacy laughed.
“What? You think I’m a wuss because I like my tea sweet?” Roger said. “Or do you think I’m an idiot because there’s a possible link between artificial sweeteners and cancer in laboratory rats?”
“We’ve known each other for, let’s see, twenty-seven minutes or so,” Stacy pointed out after checking the stainless steel Timex on her wrist. She noticed the white-gold Rolex around Roger’s, but it held little meaning for her. (Weeks later, when they were lying in bed together and she asked, out of simple curiosity, how much a watch like that actually cost, she was shocked to learn that this Rolex Daytona, as he proudly identified it, came with a $15,000 price tag. That’s a joke, I assume? she said. I mean, who in their right mind would ever pay that kind of money for a watch? And, more importantly, why? Roger explained—eagerly, without hesitation—that, for him, it was a measure of his success out there in the world, and that he loved to feel the weight of it around his wrist. You understand that, right? he said, and she very politely pretended that she did.)
“The truth is, I wasn’t thinking anything about you and your apparent fondness for Sweet’N Low,” she continued now. “That laugh of mine was just one of those nervous laughs, I guess, that came out of nowhere.” But this was a lie; she was actually thinking about those eyes of his—she’d never seen such a memorable, light bluish-green before. “Can I ask you something personal?” she said.
“Feel free,” Roger said. He took a sip of his iced tea, and made a face. “You wanna know what undrinkable tastes like?”
“Big surprise, right?” Stacy offered him some of hers, pushing the glass gently toward him, though only a moment later it seemed to her an oddly intimate gesture between two strangers, albeit ones who shared a birthday and birthplace. “So where’d you get those, um, really beautiful eyes from?” she asked, and watched as his lips touched her iced tea. “Or is that too personal a question?”
“I thought you were going to ask me how old I am,” Roger said, looking relieved. “And then I’d feel compelled to tell you the truth.”
“Well, I’m thirty-three, as you already know from my driver’s license,” said Stacy, lowering her voice just a bit. Years from now, she suspected, she’d long for the days when she could still announce that she was thirty-three; right now, though, she couldn’t quite believe that her thirtieth birthday had actually come and gone several years ago. Hanging around Harvard Square this weekend, slipping in and out of bookstores and cafés with teenagers and twenty-somethings everywhere you looked was a little depressing, as was contemplating the decade that had already passed since she and her friends had been students here. Which reminded her that several of them—including her longtime best friend, Jefrie- Ann Miller, with whom she’d lived off campus in a run-down Victorian house on Mass Ave their senior year—were waiting for her at the Coop, where they were going to shop for toddler-sized Harvard sweatshirts for their respective kids.
Roger confessed that he was forty-two. “But of course forty’s the new thirty,” he told her, and smiled hopefully.
Walking in their direction now was a beefy guy in a gray T-shirt imprinted with the words “STILL PISSED AT YOKO!”
Stacy gave him the thumbs-up, and the guy winked at her as he found a seat for himself and his tray of coffee and minimuffins toward the back of the small, crowded room.
“I get it,” she reassured Roger. “Prime of your life and all that.” She was suddenly thirsty, and wanted more of her iced tea. Roger was gulping it down without apology; perhaps he’d forgotten that it was hers. “And actually, I thought you were younger,” she said. Now that she knew how old he was, she wondered if he’d been married before, or even if he were married now, though the ring finger of his left hand was unadorned. There was nothing, after all, preventing a married person from pretending he or she was single. “Hey you, you’re not married, are you?” Stacy heard herself say.
“Divorced.”
His voice didn’t sound even the slightest bit rueful, a good sign, she knew. Because the last thing she needed in her life was some guy pining for the ex who’d so cruelly demolished his big dumb heart.
Just before Stacy left to catch up with her friends at the Harvard Coop, Roger suggested they exchange “contact info”; returning home to her apartment in New York the following night, she found a playful e-mail inviting her to dinner next April 20th to celebrate their birthdays. Or, Roger proposed, instead of waiting those eleven long months between now and then, they could have dinner at the end of the week.
Sure, why not?
S
They have been married for nearly nine years, and have two children, a daughter who is named Olivia, and a son named Will, two very good kids, Roger and Stacy will always say, though they both agree that Will, who is in preschool now, can be stubbornly rambunctious at times. Devilish, you could say. One time, a year ago, when he was only two and a half, he’d been sitting with them in a crowded Hamburger Heaven in midtown, and a gray-haired woman at the next table waved and asked him his name. Will flashed her his friendliest smile, inserted a single french fry into the side of his mouth like a cigarette, and said, with exquisite nonchalance, “My name is shit, lady.”
Parenthood. Who knew what they were getting themselves into?
Boarding the JetBlue plane now for their six fifteen a.m. flight to Fort Lauderdale, Stacy is loaded down with a sturdy canvas carry-on bag filled with children’s books, crayons and a thick sheaf of drawing paper, and a portable mini DVD player with a twelve-inch screen so that Olivia and Will can watch their favorite episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba and Dora the Explorer. She has Olivia by the hand; behind her, Roger’s hand is circling Will’s small wrist. All four of them are exhausted after a cruelly attenuated night’s sleep and two separate alarms set to awaken them at three a.m. so they could get to the airport in time. Early departure, early arrival, Roger’s idea of a good time. But Stacy has other ideas; frankly, southern Florida is one of her least favorite places in the universe. (God’s waiting room—whoever came up with that was spot-on.) If it weren’t for her mother-in-law’s condo that is theirs to use anytime they please—sparing them the expense of a hotel room—she would never have agreed to fly down here. But money is an issue these days; they’ve been living mostly on credit and there’s no denying it.
Stacy is trying desperately not to think about it, not to talk about it, not to worry about it. And that’s only because Roger worries enough for both of them. He’s often on the Internet until four thirty or five in the morning, conducting business on the other side of the world. (Most recently, something to do with alternative energy sources, one more subject that he declines to discuss with her in any great detail.) Roger sleeps for a few hours a day, from five a.m. until nine or so, and then takes the subway to his office in Long Island City, where, Stacy fears, he worries even more. (She pretends to be half-asleep when he finally crashes in their bed at five in the morning, pretends that she doesn’t feel his heart thudding when she rests her palm so lightly on his chest.)
He just can’t mellow out, no matter how hard she tries to persuade him.
Money-wise, things are bad, despite all his efforts to improve them, he’s told her again and again.
But life can be good nonetheless, she thinks. Compared to the homeless she worked with for so long, their lives, hers and Roger’s and the children’s, are still privileged.
Just not as privileged as they were before.
And it’s not as if they’re completely destitute, right? They can still pay their rent, can’t they?
Just deal with it, she’d like to tell Roger. And has told him, from time to time, though very delicately, probably too delicately to ma
ke much of an impression on him. She keeps her voice as gentle, as moderate, as can be, because Roger’s distressed enough as it is, and she doesn’t want to make things any more difficult for him.
S
She has no idea how much Xanax he swallowed this morning before they left for the airport, or what he’d be like without it. Or how much is currently required just to get him through the day.
She doesn’t have a clue.
S
“Welcome, y’all,” the flight attendant says as Stacy and her sleepy family step onto the aircraft. The woman, whose name badge identifies her as Doe, doesn’t look as perky as she should; her eyes are a little glassy, and the cranberry polish on her nails is chipped here and there, Stacy notices.
See, looky there, everyone has his or her problems, she’d like to point out to Roger.
Even twenty-five-year-olds named Doe with soft-looking, highlighted hair.
When the plane lifts off, Stacy, Olivia, and Will are seated all in a row, with Roger just across the aisle. Later, a half hour or so after takeoff, when the flight attendants come around with complimentary bottles of water, and tiny foil bags of chips or cookies (take your pick, but you can’t have both), Olivia and Will are already dozing, Will with his head against the Plexiglas window, Olivia with hers listing against Stacy’s shoulder.
Across the aisle, Roger smiles wistfully at all three of them. “Love you guys,” he says, though only Stacy is awake to hear him.
~ 2 ~
Allyson Stewart, Roger’s ex-wife, was a know-it-all of sorts. Their brief marriage had ended when Allyson, who worked as an administrator in a prep school in Riverdale, fell in love with someone named Warren Whitcomb, a geometry teacher who was from a wealthy, distinguished family and never cashed his paychecks, turning over every last one of them to the school’s headmaster on the final day of the term each June. Breaking up with Roger one night in their den on West End Avenue as they were watching Jay Leno chatting amiably with Tom Hanks, Allyson made a point of this, of what a saintly figure Warren was, working for free like that year after year; how could Roger deny that saintliness, that generosity of spirit?