The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  In the living room she went through the desk’s narrow drawer and removed all of the city guides and stacked them on the desktop. The booklets made Newport look like a theme park, with its sugarcoated downtown lanes. The street where Nate and Emily now owned a house wasn’t on one of these picturesque thoroughfares. From what she remembered, it was on a slim cul-de-sac that was barely large enough for two cars to pass each other. Their house itself was purposefully middle-of-the-road. It was made to be lived in, with a small porch, an attic, and a basement. Nate’s eyes had lit up over these mundane details, as if the entire house was an aluminum-roofed fuck-you to his father. Emily had seen the covetous look in Nate’s eyes when they first walked up to the house, their babbling chipmunk of a real-estate agent leading the way, pointing out the slate walkway, the storm windows, the security system. We’ll take it!

  Emily hated feeling complicit in Nate’s cold war against his dad, but she knew it was the right house for them. She’d joked to Jeanne about this, about its lack of pretension, about its authenticity. The house was “real,” she’d told Jeanne. It was the kind of place where a family would live.

  On most days, when Emily imagined their new existence inside this new house, she saw a contained and routine life, the kind of life they’d have if their old selves were put inside a dryer on high and came out a few sizes smaller. On other days, she let herself fantasize about the wildly exuberant life they might live here, an unlikely fantasy existence, liberal and hippy and unabashedly intellectual (with free-flowing cash and a formal dining room and vegetables growing in the yard) and without Manhattan’s constraints. This glossy future was boldly unreal, but when she tried to conjure an in-between, she came up empty. Some days, recently, she worried that they might not have a future at all.

  The day they’d found the house, they’d walked through the structure from room to room, opening all of the closets and cabinets, and Emily asked Nate what he thought their life would be like here. “Who knows?” he responded.

  “But really?” she’d said.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged.

  Nate had never been one to imagine the years to come. At night, in New York, after they’d moved in together but before Trevor was conceived, Emily spoke to him of their future. This was when she’d still imagined both of their careers soaring if they persevered long enough, though it turned out that perseverance had little to do with it. They’d talked about traveling, two weeks of hiking remote Patagonian trails in Argentina or Chile once their debts were paid off, and buying an actual Manhattan apartment, throwing their own parties. What Nate couldn’t imagine, he said, was having kids. It was the sticking point. He could imagine marriage, he claimed to want that, but he always insisted that he couldn’t picture raising children. Emily had hoped it was just a phase he was going through, and she was relieved when, after he found out she was pregnant and planning to have (and keep) their child, he stuck around. Now his love for their son was fierce. You’d think the boy was set to die in a week the way Nate maintained a watchful eye on him, his gaze following Trevor as if the child had a homing beacon lodged in his gut. The marriage question came up again after Trevor’s birth (they’d unintentionally solved their stickiest issue, the baby thing), but by then, Emily was laughing it off. They’d missed the boat on marriage, hadn’t they? She didn’t want to wed just because they had a child. She wanted to wed because Nate was her soul mate. Most days she still thought he was. She looked at him and saw the Nate she’d met that first day in the cab from JFK: a man who seemed genuinely unable to take his eyes off her. But on other days, recently, he’d seemed aloof, unreachable. She still loved him, but she was no longer sure she understood him.

  The future remained a moot topic for him even after Trevor’s birth. It was Emily who had to insist that they draw up wills—not for financial reasons, they didn’t have anything except debt to leave behind, but to name a guardian for the boy in case he found himself parentless. They’d chosen Emily’s brother, Bobby, and his wife, Dahlia, even though Bobby and Emily hadn’t spoken much in recent years. He was eight years older and ever since he left for college, when Emily was still a child, he’d returned only once or twice a year to the East Coast. But he was a blood relation and lived in San Francisco, where his own children ate primarily organic food and volunteered at an animal shelter on the weekends, and it was the kind of childhood anyone, Emily thought, would want. Bobby was the one person Emily had considered calling yesterday and burdening with their sudden carless straits. He wouldn’t scorn Nate and her for their inability to hold on to their vehicle and its contents—he had a West Coaster’s predisposition toward irrational generosity of spirit. She could almost imagine telling him about her other problems, too. But this version of Bobby, the sympathetic older brother who’d help her get out of a jam, he was a fantasy, as well. Her actual brother was a kind but distant figure to whom she’d never truly opened up and whose generous spirit came tinged with a self-righteous edge.

  “I think I’ve got jet lag,” Nate said now. “I can’t sleep.”

  Emily looked up and saw him in the bedroom doorway, wearing one of the hotel’s robes.

  “I know. The little one outlasted both of us,” Emily said. Trevor usually awoke soon after eight, but hadn’t yet stirred and it was—Emily glanced at her watch again—almost eight thirty. He’d spent two hours fussing in the middle of the night, crying on and off, keeping Emily busy while Nate, oblivious or exhausted, slept. Emily would have been awake all night anyway. The stress of the day, the idiocy of her week, the loss of the car—on Emily, it had the cumulative effect of a strong liquid stimulant.

  “No word on the Jeep?” Nate asked

  Emily shook her head.

  Nate walked over to her, lifted one of the city guides from the desk, and rifled through its pages. For a man with such a steady, calm exterior, Nate had a surprising proclivity for fidgeting.

  “Good idea,” he said, placing the guide back in front of her.

  “What is?”

  “Doing the tourist crap today. Anything we can walk to.”

  “Maybe they’ll find our car,” Emily said.

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “No,” she said. “Well, maybe.”

  “We can’t sit around waiting for it to drive back to us. We’ll hit up a landmark or two. We’ve got the time.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be locals?” Emily found that saying it aloud, professing that they were residents, made that fact feel almost real.

  “As long as we’re staying in a hotel, we might as well do all the shameless sightseeing. We’ll never do it once we move in,” Nate said. “Trust me.” In New York, they made fun of tourists, even of friends who came to visit and insisted on seeing Broadway plays—well, not plays but musicals—though ever since Cats closed it had been harder to deride the out-of-towners. Manhattanites had lost their punch line.

  “I haven’t done touristy Newport since I was a kid,” Nate said. He walked toward the window. The sun was starting to stream in around the edge of the drapes.

  “You were here as a kid?” Emily said. He’d painted a picture of a glee-free childhood, and Emily had imagined his family dressed entirely in Puritan gray, eating Salisbury steak TV dinners. He rarely spoke about his family at all, in fact. When Emily first started dating Nate, she’d tried to draw him out with questions about his brother and his mother, both long dead already. In response to her inquests he merely shrugged and lamented that it all happened a long time ago.

  If Emily were like Nate, a person who ordered his life by lists and numbers, this lingering family trauma, along with his financial poverty, would have made up the whole of her “cons” column about building a life with him. The pros were profligate, she reminded herself. The cons, she feared, were mostly on her side now.

  “We, my family, vacationed in Newport once,” Nate said.

  “You told me you never went on family vacations.”

  “Barely. There
was one short Newport trip when I was in grade school. I mean, during a summer when I was that age.”

  “You never mentioned it.”

  Emily had assumed that famous architects were rich, until she met Nate and he explained that even the biggies struggled. They sank into debt with each commission they lost and tended to set up their offices in the heartland, where space and talent were cheaper than in New York and L.A.

  “I thought I had,” said Nate.

  A plaintive babbling—this one sounded like dada, Emily had to concede—came from Trevor’s direction. Emily was struck by the capaciousness of their suite.

  “I’m being called.” Nate smiled and leaned in to kiss her, then abruptly pulled away. “Oh, honey, secondhand nicotine.” He winced and made his way toward the bedroom and Trevor’s cries. “You’ve got to give up the gum, honestly.”

  “You want me to smoke?” Emily said, following him and standing in the door to the bedroom.

  “You hate smoking,” Nate said. He was already at the side of the Pack ’n Play, leaning down to pick up Trevor. “It’s an empty threat.”

  Emily glanced behind her and took one last look at the Newport area guide, which lay on the desk. Stupid sightseeing would be good for them, better than trekking to their new house and checking that the utilities were on and pacing the empty rooms, better than lamenting this life of hers and waiting for the future to hit. There’d be plenty of time for that later. Sightseeing would be a fine distraction, she thought, and mostly free of charge, too. They could walk the docks in the harbor and pretend to be legitimately married, utterly innocent Midwesterners seeing touristy Newport for the first time.

  CHAPTER 7

  Newport, 1974

  NATE, AT AGE EIGHT, had been thrilled when his mother announced they’d be taking a family vacation to a place called Newport. He’d have been thrilled to go anywhere, seeing as he’d rarely been out of Ohio, other than one trip to Vienna when he was a toddler and a small slew of summer weekends on lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan in the years since. Travel was alluring, exotic, practically unheard of. And travel with his entire family? It seemed all but impossible. Whole-family vacations, up until that very moment, had been the kind of thing that other people did. Bart Oaken and his parents went to Europe every summer, and each fall Bart returned to school with a new French catchword and beret. Art Eberly spent Christmases in Dallas with both sets of his grandparents. Shawn Doohan, who couldn’t make it the short distance from home to school without losing his permission slip—or even, once, his left shoe—went on lavish globetrotting family adventures while Nate, whose mother was from Europe, traveled almost nowhere. He couldn’t even remember his one visit to Austria, when he was an infant. Nate was told that he’d met his maternal grandmother during that trip. She died the following year and Nate’s parents flew to her funeral alone while Nate and his newborn brother Charlie stayed home.

  Nate’s father traveled solo all the time for work. He spent months at a stretch in Copenhagen or Charlottesville or Bangladesh, coming home only for a night or two to repack his suitcase and check the mail. Those were early-to-bed evenings for Nate and Charlie. They’d huddle in their bunks, arranged one atop the other, and listen to a baseball game on the radio while their parents did whatever parents did in the grand open space that was the rest of the house.

  Nate’s father seemed to love living in a home of his own design, a home he’d built specifically for this family. According to the house’s lore, George Bedecker had envisioned it as an update of Le Corbusier’s apartment complex in Marseille, stacked concrete blocks with large wall-spanning windows set back into the structure. At age eight, Nate—whose father gave him monographs on Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe for Christmas when other kids got Matchbox cars—had seen all of the articles about their house. He’d laid eyes on actual newspaper stories featuring grainy photos of his own front yard. Homage, one article said of the Bedecker house. Homage was a word Nate didn’t need to look up. He’d heard the term so often that it was part of his vernacular. Homage and derivative were the words most of the articles relied on to describe the spare square building where Nate lived. The cube lay nestled in the woods just outside Cleveland, a far cry from Marseille, from what Nate understood, though Nate’s mother, Annemarie, tried to raise its standing by holding Sunday night “Culture Court” for her sons, introducing them to Wagner and Kandinsky and serving homemade dumplings and sauerkraut and torten layered with apricot. The one thing she hadn’t managed to infuse into the home was warmth. No matter how much art she brought in, the Bedeckers’ residential box was still constructed completely out of raw concrete and glass, a massive open square only divided to make room for the boys’ beds, for their parents’ bed, and for two utilitarian bathrooms. Our house wasn’t made for sleeping, Nate heard Charlie tell one of his friends a year before the Newport trip, when Charlie was only five yet already viewed the world in a straightforward, nonjudgmental fashion. If there had been no Nate and no Charlie, Nate assumed the house would have been left entirely open, without walls whatsoever.

  In Newport, the Bedeckers stayed in a hotel that surpassed Nate’s expectations. He reveled in the small divided chambers, the satin drapes, and the bathroom tiled with tiny mosaic circles. Rather than concrete, the walls were wooden on the outside and wallpaper inside. On their first night, while Charlie unwrapped the shower cap in the bathroom, Nate opened and closed the drawers on the fragile wooden desk next to the window, taking out a toothpick-thin pencil and examining it in detail. The window itself was split into sixteen panes of wavy glass, speckled with age. The paint on the sash and the sill was a stark dove white.

  The next morning, the family gathered for breakfast in the hotel’s formal dining room and spoke in hushed voices as Nate’s mother described the schedule for the week ahead. After breakfast each day, Nate and Charlie would have a swim lesson and then play with their mother on the beach. Later in the day, the boys would take a group sailing class. Nate nodded and reached across the table for a saucer filled with rosettes of butter. He carefully cut one of the petals off with his knife and spread it across his pancakes, the fat melting even before he had a chance to pour hot syrup on top.

  The syrup, the sailing, the soft-serve window a block from the beach: Six-year-old Charlie was enchanted by the whole trip. He’d have been happy with the soft-serve only. The sailing and swimming were icing to him, but Nate, two years older, had been looking forward to an actual family getaway. He’d imagined his father ruffling his hair and letting them drink extra Cokes and watching from the beach as their sailing class debarked. As it turned out, Nate and his brother barely saw their father at all in Newport except at the breakfast and dinner tables—and dinner was so late (did everyone eat so long after dark on vacation? Charlie practically fell asleep at the table each night) that Nate was dazed through much of it. The only time they saw their father during the daylight hours was on their final afternoon.

  The sailing lessons had turned out to be torture every day at 2:00 p.m. Aside from the Bedeckers, there were only two kids in the class: a set of brothers from Washington, DC. These other boys spoke a hidden code, making secret jokes about the people in rowboats and the yacht club’s hot dogs. They’d been coming to Newport for their entire lives. Their swim trunks were brightly colored and the older one’s featured a stretch of actual rope around the waistband. They knew everything. As the DC brothers yammered on, Nate and Charlie remained largely silent during the lessons. The other boys’ noise was tough to compete with and the Bedeckers had more to learn anyway, having never sailed before. After each class was over and the other boys gone, Nate and Charlie came alive again, Nate summing up the events of the lesson.

  “Hello, Cleveland! Rookie Charlie Bedecker outperformed himself at the rudder today, slipping a fast one over the eyes of two bad trades from DC!” he’d say, mimicking Joe Tait, the voice of the Cleveland Indians on the radio. Nate and Charlie were like Tait and his partner, Herb Score. Score c
ould go three full innings without saying a word. When he did speak, it was simple trustworthy narration, true to the facts. Strong and silent, that was Charlie. He was conscientious and thoughtful, his life taking place inside his own head. Nate, like Tait, could fill empty space—between batters or between sailing class and dinner—with off-center observations and a steady stream of electrifyingly empty words.

  On the final afternoon their lesson was short, only a one-hour wrap-up where the boys were allowed to man the rudder and the sheet by themselves. Afterward they met up with their mother as they had every day, at the end of the dock, next to the sailing school’s warped flagpole. She usually fetched them on foot, but today, since they were done so early, she’d arrived in the rental car, briefly leaving it idling while she ran up to the sidewalk and motioned to the boys to get in. This afternoon they’d be accompanying their mother on her daily trek to nearby Narragansett to pick up their father. Nate assumed it was a work project that had drawn George to Rhode Island and kept him tied up in Narragansett this week; Nate had grown to assume that this family vacation was, for George, merely another business trip. Nate imagined that while he and Charlie were at swim class each morning, their father was building a beach house for another boy’s family.

  Nate and Charlie slouched in the back of the rental car, their tan legs spread fat against the vinyl seats.

  “I pulled on the halyard, Mom, it’s really hard, all by myself—”