by Marian Thurm
S
His father, a dentist who’d also owned parking garages in midtown Manhattan, had been able to offer Roger and his mother and his sister the sort of comfortable life in Westchester that included a large house on three-quarters of an acre with a swimming pool and tennis court in the back, trips to the Caribbean every winter, and a live-in housekeeper who wore a uniform and served dinner every night. It was hard not to take these things for granted, hard not to go along with the mistaken assumption that, as an adult, this life of comfort and privilege would continue endlessly, no matter what. But his father retired too soon, foolishly sold the garages, invested unwisely and unluckily in the stock market, and lost most of the money that eventually would have gone to Roger and his sister and would have made their already comfortable lives even more so.
His father’s bad luck didn’t matter so much when Roger was doing well. But it sure as shit matters now.
S
Arranging his shirts in what was once his father’s closet, and tucking his boxers and socks away in the top drawer of what used to be his father’s dresser, Roger pops another Xanax, swallowing it down with a handful of warmish water from the faucet in the en suite bathroom. And then collapses on the king-size bed, too lazy to kick off his Top-Siders first. There’s barely an inch of uncovered space on the bedroom walls, which are painted a minty green and crowded with framed pictures of his mother and father, Beverly and Walter, most of them snapped down here in Florida. He can see how tanned they both were in their unflattering bathing suits and shorts and T-shirts, and also how much weight they both needed to lose—a good twenty pounds or so for each of them, Roger estimates (though at his death, back in the nineties, his father had been nearly skeletal). Overweight or not, his mother had been an attractive woman. As she still is today, never mind the Alzheimer’s that has robbed her of everything but her pretty face, and yet has, surprisingly, bestowed upon her a sweetness she never possessed before. Though she shrieks like you wouldn’t believe when the caregivers at the assisted-living residence dress her in the morning and undress her at night. (“You’re trying to killll meee!” she screams, and fights them every step of the way. Roger just can’t stay in her room when she’s like that, and, instead, has to escape into the common hallway and pace along the beige-and-gray commercial carpeting until his mother has calmed down.)
Stacy isn’t driven crazy like he is by all that carrying on; she goes right into his mother’s room at the residence— within walking distance of their apartment in the city and currently paid for, now that Roger can no longer afford to share the costs, entirely by his compassionate, well-heeled brother-in-law, Marshall—and helps to soothe her as the caregivers deal with the rest.
Roger’s wife is a good and remarkably generous person. But she doesn’t seem to understand the business world he’s in, or maybe it’s that she—an otherwise smart girl—simply won’t allow herself to make the effort to understand; wouldn’t allow herself to understand, just a few months ago, “soft costs” versus “hard costs,” and the misery that runs sickeningly through the words “cross-collateralize” and “construction cost overruns.” And won’t allow herself, even now, to truly fathom what deep shit they’re in, how bad, how truly terribly bad, things actually are.
~ 4 ~
Though he and Stacy had only been dating for a few months, Roger wanted her to meet his family, especially Clare, his sister and only sibling, and Marshall Tuckman, his brother-in-law, both of whom had been so openly sympathetic to him during the trauma of his divorce four years ago. Lately he considered Marshall one of his closest friends, even if he suspected that the feeling wasn’t mutual, and that Marshall had at least a few other friends who meant more to him. But that was fine; just knowing Marshall was the sort of benevolent guy he could count on was enough for him. After Allyson had moved in with Warren Whitcomb, it was Marshall who had recommended that Roger consider going back on the antidepressants he’d given up years ago. Marshall wasn’t a shrink—he was an orthodontist—but he seemed to have a keen understanding of Roger, a keener understanding, perhaps, than even Roger himself possessed. And so when Marshall had gently suggested that he get himself back into therapy and back on Zoloft, Roger took his advice. But first he’d surfed the Internet and taken a quiz:
“Do you have a persistent empty feeling?” Check.
“Do you suffer from insomnia?” Check.
“Do you have an inability to enjoy yourself?” Check.
“Do you have persistent feelings of hopelessness?” Check.
“Worthlessness?” Check.
“Helplessness?” Check.
His new therapist at the time, Dr. Avalon, a man in his late fifties, took pains to explain to him the obvious: that major life stresses, divorce among them, increased the likelihood of a person falling prey to depression. “Not that you have to be a genius to figure that one out,” he said, and smiled faintly.
Roger himself dwelled perhaps a bit too long on the subject of Warren Whitcomb and Allyson and the mortification he felt at having been thrown overboard. During one of his appointments those first few months after the divorce, as he talked, he caught Dr. Avalon dozing in his armchair, his ballpoint pen tucked between two fingers of his left hand, his head of dyed orangey-brown hair canted toward one shoulder. Though his initial reaction was one of outrage, Roger immediately began to worry that he’d bored Dr. Avalon to death and would be fired for it. And then what? It was so hard to find a good therapist; just the thought of looking for someone new exhausted him.
So why did you leave your last therapist? the new one would ask him.
Actually . . . I didn’t quit; I was fired, he imagined himself confessing.
As he watched Dr. Avalon snoozing, Roger had amused himself for a few moments by thinking of sarcastic things he might say when the doc awakened.
That boring, huh?
Out partying last night at a strip club with some of your fellow shrinks?
Didn’t they teach you in med school to at least pretend that you’re listening?
He decided to let Dr. Avalon sleep for five minutes and five minutes only; while he waited, he read the New York Times, catching up on O. J. Simpson’s legal troubles, the Clinton administration’s dislike of the word “genocide” to portray the mass killings in Rwanda, and the new finding that heavy usage of Tylenol could lead to serious liver damage. Just as Roger was starting to read about the death threats against Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Dr. Avalon’s eyes flew open, he straightened up in his seat, and said, “I’m sorry, this obsession with Warren Whitcomb has made you feel what?”
“Oh, forget it,” Roger said, and steered the subject toward Tylenol and his refusal to believe that just one a day, seven a week, could actually be dangerous. As long as he had his prescription for Zoloft, and could convince Dr. Avalon that he needed to keep taking it, what did it really matter what they talked about? He’d come to believe that talk therapy was pretty much bullshit, anyway. Sure it was horrible that Allyson had replaced him with Warren Whitcomb, but the Zoloft was making him feel a hell of a lot better. More optimistic about the future, and not as pissed off at Allyson. He boldly cut back his visits to Dr. Avalon to once every two weeks, and then, a couple of years later, to once a month, which was the schedule they were sticking to now. He appreciated Dr. Avalon’s Saturday office hours, and his willingness to conduct sessions over the phone, if necessary.
This afternoon, just hours before the family dinner, when he told Avalon that he’d invited Stacy to meet his family tonight, the doctor merely nodded. And scratched the tip of first one ear and then the other.
“What’s on the menu?” Avalon asked, as if he were hungry and interested in talking about food. “Your sister’s going to be cooking?”
“Well, Stacy just had a root canal the other day, and has to be very careful chewing until she gets the crown put in. So I think dinner’s just going to be something soft, like pasta.” Looking around the lower Fifth Avenue office i
n vain for some pictures of Dr. Avalon’s family, Roger thought about the inherent unfairness of their relationship: he was expected to reveal all about his family, while Avalon concealed everything about his. Shockingly Dr. Avalon had violated his own rules earlier in their session today, and bragged that his wife had, at the surprising age of fifty-six, passed her road test and gotten her driver’s license.
“Congratulations,” Roger said, “she should be very proud of herself.” But the conversation about the road test ended abruptly, and then they were back to discussing the family dinner that would be taking place shortly in his sister’s apartment all the way over on East End.
“Root canal,” Dr. Avalon was saying grimly. “And yet you feel confident Stacy will be up for this dinner?”
“I do,” Roger said. He hoped she’d be wearing one of those short, tight skirts of hers; he always looked admiringly at her shapely hips and legs, and hoped that his brother-in-law, Marshall, would, too. Even though, of course, Marshall was happily married to Clare, and had been for nearly fifteen years.
During the final minutes of his session, Roger began to talk about the new mall in which he and his business pals had invested in suburban Atlanta. There was valet parking, and there were high-end retailers like Neiman Marcus, Vuitton, Burberry, and Williams-Sonoma. There had been some complaints about the food court and its disappointing offerings, but that could be rectified, Roger said.
“You have high hopes, I gather,” Dr. Avalon remarked afterward, as Roger rose from his seat to let himself out. “Best of luck to you.”
“I’ll let you know how it goes,” Roger said. He meant Stacy and the family dinner, but then wondered if it had been the mall outside of Atlanta that Avalon was referring to.
S
Ah, Fort Lauderdale, spring break capital of the universe, Stacy thinks, navigating a shopping cart up and down the cereal aisle at Publix, the supermarket where she’s stocking up on staples before the family settles into her mother-in-law’s condo for the week. Will and Olivia argue over tall boxes of Cocoa Krispies and Cocoa Puffs while Roger acts as referee, and Stacy stares at the small mob of college students in bikinis and flip-flops, their arms goosebumped in the icy, extravagantly air-conditioned store. She herself is wearing a T-shirt and yoga pants, and absently rubs her hand over her slightly rounded, middle-aged stomach as she tries to ignore the college girls’ enviably flat ones. And hears one of them—a teenager with a large Hello Kitty tattoo on her shoulder—say to her friends, “She’s, like, nice, and pretty, and she’s REALLY popular—so why the hell would anyone want to be with her?”
“I know,” another girl says sympathetically. “It so totally makes no sense at all.”
When she looks away from the girls, Stacy sees that her family is gone. Without a word to her, they’ve disappeared and left her here on her own. Her iPhone is in the car, she realizes, and so she will have to roam one long, chilly aisle after another in search of the husband and children who so thoughtlessly left her behind.
She feels a little panic-stricken, as if caught in one of those banal nightmares, the one where you awaken in the wrong bed in the wrong house and can’t seem to find your old life, no matter how desperately you search for it.
~ 5 ~
Stacy’s plan had been to take the subway from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, and then walk over to Clare and Marshall’s apartment on East End. But Roger, who still lived in the same apartment in the city four years after his divorce, told her that was crazy; instead, he drove from the Upper West Side to Park Slope to pick her up, then back into the city to his sister’s apartment, leaving his BMW in the building’s expensive garage. Which impressed Stacy, because this was something none of her friends or previous boyfriends would ever have done. (They would have circled the neighborhood endlessly, she knew, looking for a parking space out on the street rather than spend money on a garage.)
In the mood to snuggle up to Roger now as they left the car and rode the elevator from the garage to the lobby, Stacy linked her arm in his. Roger was dressed smartly in khakis with an impressively ironed crease down the front, a pale-blue crewneck linen sweater, and, on his big feet, what Stacy guessed were very pricey loafers. Compared to Kurt—the legal aid lawyer she’d been with before she and Roger met— Roger was dressed like a prince. (She almost told him so, but then thought better of it. Mentioning the name of someone you’d slept with to someone you were currently sleeping with was never a good idea, she understood.) In fact, she’d come to realize, Roger was an exceptionally well-dressed guy. His apartment had a walk-in closet the depth of which she’d never seen before: it was really like a room unto itself, and lined with endless suits sporting labels that were mostly unfamiliar to her. Though Brioni and Zegna were names she’d never heard of, she sensed she would be better off not knowing the price tags that had been attached to them. Roger’s glossy leather shoes were neatly arranged on fancy wooden racks, and there wasn’t a scuffed or comfortably broken-backed pair among them; even his collection of running shoes, on a separate rack, looked nearly immaculate. There was a motorized tie rack that displayed one crisp-looking tie—there were seventy-two in all, he told her—after another; when you pressed a button, they rotated past, arranged by color. Silvery blues and mini-striped lavenders and tiny-checked pale greens drifted by, all of them silky to the touch, and handmade in Italy. And all those Sea Island cotton dress shirts, dozens and dozens of them, tattersall and mini-tattersall, pinstripe and microcheck windowpane, oxford stripe and houndstooth. Each one bespoke, made-to-measure. Once when she’d slept over and she and Roger were getting dressed in the morning to go to work, she saw his index finger stroking, almost lovingly, she thought, one of those silken ties, savoring what, to him, might have been the very texture of his success. When she gently questioned him about the need for all this stuff, Roger explained to her how important it was for him to show up at meetings with his investors or when he was closing a deal, dressed like a man who was at the top of his game. It was true, she realized—just peeking into this vast closet you thought, as you were meant to, that all of this belonged to one of those masters of the universe, someone who could, and did, have everything he wanted, all of it top of the line.
She saw, too, that it wasn’t that he paid undue, extravagant attention to his stuff, it was simply that he had a taste for fine, expensive things. That wasn’t a sin, after all, she told herself. In a way, perhaps she even admired him for it, just a little.
Now she was handing Roger the rather flamboyant bouquet of tulips, roses, orchids, and irises she’d bought for his sister, Clare, at the Korean market near her apartment. She’d spent ten dollars on the flowers, and it felt like a lot of money. Someday, she hoped, that ten dollars would seem like less than nothing to her. But if that day never came, and she spent the rest of her life working for a nonprofit social service agency, well, so be it.
Stacy had decided to listen to her grandmother and forgo both the short skirt and the extremely high heels. But her armfuls of bracelets and their metallic ringing against each other cheered her, as did the long, colorful peacock feather earrings she wore that gently skimmed the sides of her neck.
She and Roger got into the elevator that would take them up to the apartment, along with a child—about the age of Stacy’s twin nieces—who held on to the hand of her babysitter, a small, weary-looking Filipino woman dressed all in pink.
“I said,” the little girl shrieked, “we’re NOT allowed to WHISPER in school!”
“You hush now, Amanda,” the babysitter said. “It’s time to take a bath and settle down.”
“YOU hush now,” Amanda said, but her face turned sunny, and Stacy smiled at her. She thought of her nieces, Danielle and Savannah, and how sometimes, her sister had confided, they reduced her to weeping, even though they were only four years old and as well behaved as could be expected. It was just too hard, Lauren said, too, too hard. Getting them dressed in the morning in whatever outfits they insisted on, fixing thei
r wispy, tangled hair, their breakfast (strictly Count Chocula on school days, Boo Berry on weekends), the lunches they took to school in their Barbie lunch boxes, because they were obsessed with Barbie, and wanted to know why they couldn’t wear their Barbie pj’s to school if they felt like it, and no, they didn’t want to brush their teeth, not this morning, but maybe tomorrow morning, and why couldn’t the hamster sleep under the covers in Danielle’s bed, and Green Eggs and Ham was boring, and Sam I Am was a dumb, stupid name, and why couldn’t Lauren read them something else, something better, like the Barbie I Can Be a Ballerina book. Lauren had begun to weep over the phone just reciting the litany of things that sometimes made her life as a mother so difficult, and of course she didn’t expect Stacy to feel much sympathy for her because how could she, she who worked with all those damaged, pathetic people out on the filthy streets of the city, people who had nothing, less than nothing.
When the elevator drifted to a stop and Amanda and her babysitter got off, the little girl was rubbing her eyes with both hands and crying for her mother, who was apparently still at work, according to the babysitter, who said, “Mommy’s a doctor and has sick people to take care of, even on a Saturday, you know that, hon.” Which made Amanda cry even harder.
Stacy thought of how grateful she was for her own simple, childless, child-free life—a busy life that was filled with work and friends and, these past few months, Roger— but she could, with some effort, imagine what it would be like to feel otherwise. Suddenly, as they arrived at the apartment and Clare stood in the doorway to greet them, Stacy caught herself grinding her teeth (a nasty habit her dentist had repeatedly warned her against), and felt a spasm of pain deep in her mouth where her poor molar had been cleaned out with cruel instruments just the other day. She closed her eyes and let the pain pass through her, all the way through her cheekbone and up under her eye, and soon she was fine, smiling at Clare, a small woman in her midforties with lovely manicured hands, perfectly straight, light brown hair, and a long, elegant nose—Stacy’s future sister-in-law (though who knew at the time?), who hugged and kissed her even though they’d never met before.