My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  The speaker was one Janine Rollins, a lawyer. Her husband and Nancy’s father was a successful real estate developer, a term that, in San Francisco, had been a redundancy for well over a decade. Janine, Nancy, and David were sitting at the long library table in the dining room of David’s rented carriage house. This was where he’d been meeting clients to discuss plans for their children’s higher education for over fifteen years. On special occasions, he’d served meals at this table, but the surface and the room itself were so spotless, no one would have guessed it.

  Nancy was still tiny, a small-boned girl with a mass of hair that fell from a center part and created a teepee of sorts around her face. She had the disturbing pallor David had come to recognize as a sign of either genetic illness or an unhealthy familiarity with Harry Potter. It was hard to imagine Janine as her mother. She was dressed in a conservative, perfectly tailored business suit and high heels, a popular and confusing combination of mixed wardrobe messages.

  David had rarely worked with a parent who did not describe her child as “gifted.” Usually it had to do with the parent’s own identification with the title, if not quite the content, of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, a book as frequently invoked as it is misunderstood.

  “She’s been self-sufficient since she was two and spends most of her time writing as it is. Isn’t that so, Nancy?”

  Nancy shrugged. She’d said almost nothing since she and her mother arrived. David suspected it was not a question of timidity but a mixture of resentment and early-onset ennui over the fact that her time was being spent on this unnecessary outing.

  “Are you interested in schools that have strong writing programs?” David asked her.

  “She doesn’t need that,” her mother said. “She’s written three novels already.”

  “Actually, I’ve written four,” Nancy said. She had the uninflected, metallic voice of a robot in a low-budget sci-fi movie from the 1950s, a genre David was especially fond of. “I have two series. The Orgon Cascades and the Wreath of Mornia Glenn. I’m more interested in business so I can market my work and the merchandise I’m planning.”

  David found her use of “market” and “merchandise” upsetting. Like “investment portfolio” and “colonoscopy,” they were terms that didn’t sound right coming from the mouth of a sixteen-year-old.

  Nancy reached into her backpack and handed him a spreadsheet with schools ranked according to criteria she’d listed on a separate page. “This might help you,” she said, as if the whole project was for his benefit. Considering the fees he planned to charge her parents, he wasn’t in complete disagreement.

  At the end of their session, he handed Nancy a plastic folder with his logo printed on it and his standard (if not quite patented) questionnaires and timetables neatly tucked inside. The Seven Steps to Your Future. Really, there just as easily could have been four or even three, but he’d found that as parents became increasingly hysterical about the college application process, it helped to give their kids more to do. Last year there had been six steps. He was considering upping it to an even dozen for next year. By the time he retired, he’d be measuring it in miles. He’d actually had parents contact him to ask if there was anything their kids in grammar school should be doing to get ready for applying to college. “Looking for sane parents” was what he wanted to tell them.

  Janine gave him her hand and complimented him on the light and views from the dining room. He thanked her, as if he’d had anything to do with them. From the bank of windows behind the table, you could see in the far distance the Bay Bridge and the soulless glass mistake of the Rincon tower, all bathed in the winsome glow that’s typical of San Francisco light and, come to think of it, San Franciscans as well.

  As David ushered them out the front door, Janine’s heels clicking on the hardwood, Janine said, “If you ever decide to sell this place, promise you’ll tell me first. I’ve always admired the property when we drove past and wondered who owned the carriage house.”

  “I’m afraid I rent,” he said. “The landlady lives in the main house. She’s owned it for decades.”

  There was brief pause in which Janine absorbed this information, and David saw his stock sink. At some point, the idea of being a renter past the age of thirty had become shameful and unwholesome, like living with one’s mother into one’s forties. He watched as Janine scanned the obsessively tidy living room and then—a sharp contrast—his own recently acquired weight and taut shirt.

  “That’s brilliant,” she said, once she’d recovered. “Free to pick up and leave anytime. So unencumbered.” She rested a hand on Nancy’s back, either a subconscious acknowledgment of her own encumbrances or an attempt to get her daughter out of rented property as quickly as possible.

  David’s business was one he created out of the teaching and school counseling jobs that had formed the earlier part of his working life. It was a job he enjoyed and, based on the success of his clients and the frequency with which they referred their friends, one he was good at. He liked the editorial challenges, and it made him feel his professional life had progressed along a logical path, versus his personal life, which had followed a more circuitous route.

  His title was “independent, full-service college counselor.” He was paid to help the offspring of moneyed San Franciscans (a deep pool) select schools, organize visits, edit and structure essays, and get their applications in on time. He enjoyed the work—although there were moments when he tired of reading about saintly grandparents and/or cancer—but he was secretly baffled by the intensity with which parents approached what was, ultimately, a straightforward process.

  While he was paid for The Seven (and counting) Steps, he thought of his true mission as helping his teenaged clients gain a realistic understanding of who they were and what they could achieve in life once they stepped away from their parents’ self-aggrandizing fantasies of them. Their parents had been so insistent about instilling self-esteem, they’d fallen into the trap of telling their kids they could do anything. Unfortunately, almost everyone interprets doing “anything” as doing the same three or four glamorous and impressive things—going to Harvard, retiring before ever working, giving an Oscar acceptance speech, and becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg, except hot. When it becomes clear, as it inevitably must, that those goals are out of reach, a lot of kids have a crisis of faith. David saw it as his job to make them appreciate themselves as they are, limitations and all.

  David had nothing against self-esteem. After all, he’d spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years trying to buy some from an assortment of psychologists and therapists. It’s just that he didn’t believe it was something one should be given by one’s parents in childhood; rather, it was something one should earn by talking about one’s parents and childhood in therapy. He thought of the attainment of self-esteem as similar to aging with dignity—impossible but worth striving for nonetheless.

  The questions he asked his clients to respond to had little to do with academics. On the whole, he’d found this area the most obvious but least helpful in getting to know them. He liked to think of his questionnaires as the Myers-Briggs personality test that that estimable mother-daughter team would have composed if they’d been your nosy gay neighbors. What was your best birthday party and why? What were you wearing the last time you were happy? If asked to turn off your phone for eight hours, would your reaction be “I’m free!” or “I’m freaking out!”? Cake or potato chips? Do you know the difference between deciduous and coniferous trees? Without looking it up?

  The Seven Steps themselves were a good deal more mundane, but as a result, he’d become adept at setting up timelines and deadlines. He’d learned that it didn’t matter so much what you told kids to do as long as you gave them a date to do it by.

  Shortly after Janine and her prolific daughter left, David went for a walk to get some exercise and—its opposite—some cookies. As he was on the return leg, he received a call from Renata Miller. She was the m
other of a former client, and they’d become friends over the past few years.

  “You sound winded,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “Walking.”

  “If you’re trying to prove you’re a better person than me, you win.”

  “I’m trying to lose weight.” This was not strictly true, but it was an excuse fewer and fewer people questioned. Since Soren had left him about six months earlier, he’d gained over fifteen pounds, largely thanks to San Francisco’s excellent bakeries and Thai restaurants with twenty-four-hour delivery. “Where are you?” he asked. There was traffic and a police siren in the background.

  “Driving from an open house in North Beach. ‘Restful retreat.’”

  “No windows, I gather.”

  “I think there was one or two,” she said.

  “You’re obviously not the listing agent.”

  Renata was another successful real estate agent who’d made a name for herself by representing a select number of high-quality, aesthetically unspoiled properties. It was a career she’d stumbled into after giving up her aspirations to act. She’d acquired many of the archetypical characteristics of high-end real estate agents, which, it turned out, were not so different from those of actresses—tooth whitening, Botox, expensive clothes, a taste for younger men, and a resentment of younger women.

  “I went to look at the place for you,” she said.

  “Terribly thoughtful,” David said. “But I have a long-term lease on the last good deal in San Francisco, remember?” Increasingly, David’s low rent—the result of having a rich and eccentric landlady—had become one of the most interesting things about him in the real-estate-obsessed city.

  There was a pause, and then she said, “I’m not far from you, and I need to put my feet up. I could be there in twenty minutes.”

  “If you want, but I don’t have any food in the house. I’m dieting.”

  “It’s all right, I’m fasting.”

  When he arrived home, he immediately began to throw magazines and newspapers around the living room so it would look more lived in. Renata took a dim view of David’s increased tidiness since Soren’s departure.

  His business line rang, but he didn’t recognize the out-of-state number, so he didn’t pick up. No message.

  Renata arrived half an hour later, complaining of traffic and parking problems. She was carrying her phone, a briefcase, and what appeared to be an expensive leather handbag. She looked around the room and tossed all of her accoutrements on the sofa.

  “I’d love a drink,” she said. “White wine if you have it.”

  “I thought you were fasting.”

  “I didn’t ask for food. Anyway, they had sandwiches at the open house, if you can imagine anything more grotesque. I took a few for the office, and I was so frustrated with the traffic, I ate a couple before I knew what I was doing.”

  David led her into the kitchen, and as he uncorked the wine she stood leaning against the counter, surveying the appliances with the cash-register glance he’d noticed on all real estate agents. She opened a cabinet, one in which, to David’s horror, the boxes, cans, and bottles were lined up perfectly by height.

  They took their wine into the living room, and Renata dropped herself onto the sofa, removed her shoes, and arranged her long legs to their best advantage. She was an attractive woman with—despite her cosmetic adjustments—a casual nonchalance about her wardrobe. She wore expensive clothes but always looked as if she’d been in a rush putting them on. Someone else might have looked ragged with a blouse partly untucked or a clip coming loose from her hair, but those details gave Renata a world-weary glamour, like the former mistress of a French politician. She’d had Teddy—the son David had helped get into Tufts—when she was almost forty, and this, against all odds, added to her allure as well.

  She checked her phone and then flung it aside with a sigh. All the details of her life seemed to frustrate or disappoint Renata. “What are your summer plans?” she asked.

  “I might go on a wilderness backpacking trip for a month or so.”

  “Very funny. You should plan something. You’re too settled into this house. It’s not healthy.”

  “I’m not sure why settled is unhealthy. I prefer to think of it as stable.”

  “It’s always a matter of resignation.”

  “You include your settled marriage in that?”

  “Leonard and I stay together out of mutual antipathy, which is a different matter entirely. We despise each other enough to keep our marriage passionate. And yes, screaming at each other does count as passion.”

  Shortly after David met Renata, she took him out for coffee, ostensibly to describe her expectations for her son’s education. Instead, she went on at great length about an affair she’d had years earlier with Paolo, an Italian airline pilot. David had the feeling she thought gossiping was the sort of thing one did with a gay male friend, and since she’d been in San Francisco acting and real estate circles for decades, she might have learned from experience. The story did have the well-polished veneer of a tale edited over the course of multiple retellings. It was as if she was offering him credentials to excuse what might otherwise have been assumed was, god forbid, a faithful marriage to a man most viewed as unappealing. Apparently, she and the pilot had met in a variety of luxury hotels whenever Alitalia did them both the favor of putting him behind the controls of a San Francisco–bound 767. Despite Renata’s claims of a genuine emotional connection to Paolo, what she mostly discussed with David were the brands of the toiletries in the bathrooms of their expensive hotel rooms and the exotic beauty of his uncircumcised penis. He hadn’t heard anything about a more recent lover, leading him to believe she had none or, if she did, he had neither access to stellar hotels nor a foreskin.

  Although Renata’s mood was frequently a variation on her distracted crankiness of today, there was something about her frazzled energy that David found exciting. Her mind was always racing, and her body seemed to be set at a high temperature, releasing the scent of a signature Bottega Veneta perfume mixed with sweat. She could be so acerbic about other people, David remained in rapt anticipation of finding out what she found acceptable about him. When she’d had a few too many chardonnays, she liked to tell him that whether he knew it or not, he was almost certainly bisexual. He was insulted by these comments about his sexuality, mainly because she seemed to think he’d find them complimentary. He’d never mentioned having been married; he no longer considered his brief, youthful marriage to Julie Fiske or his earlier relationships with women evidence of bisexuality any more than he considered his weeklong trip to Prague in the 1990s evidence of Czech citizenship.

  “What are you paying for this place?” Renata asked. She took another sip of the wine and puckered disapprovingly.

  When David mentioned his rent, a sum Renata knew already, she said, “That’s ridiculous. I hope you’re not assuming it will last forever.”

  “No more than I’m assuming I will. And as a matter of fact, it will last for another five years, according to the terms of my lease.”

  “Your landlady has been a saint to you, David.” She put down the wine with a formality that suggested she wasn’t going to pick it up again. “I’ve heard a rumor that she’s been talking with brokers.”

  This announcement, which David had heard before from Renata, had lost its power to throw him into a panic. Even so, it was unwelcome news. “You’re not one of those brokers, are you?”

  “I’m your friend, David.”

  “That’s true, but it’s not an answer.”

  “She contacted me. What was I supposed to say?”

  He looked at her more closely. The conversation had entered new territory, and suddenly he saw malevolence in her unlined face. “As a friend, ‘no’ might have been a good place to start.”

  “And then what? She goes to the next name on the list, the property sells, and I lose the commission. As my friend, I doubt you’d want that to happen.”


  Part of what David found exhilarating about Renata was her ability to justify all her actions, not exactly an admirable quality, but, like anything done with conviction, compelling.

  She leaned down and took up the wineglass with a resigned, almost disgusted expression. She and her husband were wine connoisseurs, which is to say, incipient alcoholics with money. “Anyway, she seems resolved to go through with it this time. Since you love this place so much, you must know the kind of enthusiasm it will excite. And since she’s been so good to you all these years, I know you won’t raise a fuss about the lease.”

  “At least you came to tell me in person,” he said. “That shows character.”

  “If I wanted to show character, I’d stop getting my face injected. I came because you’re a friend. Also to extend an invitation. Leonard’s having some people over next week, and we’d love if you came.”

  “I’m not big on Leonard’s friends.”

  “Leonard doesn’t have friends. He has financial opportunities wearing socks. There’ll be a lot of spoiled couples with spoiled children unqualified to get into the schools they’re willing to pay you to help get them into.”

  “If you think this makes up for anything,” he said, “you’re mistaken.”

  Leonard was a pugnacious, excessively homely man who’d made a significant fortune for himself. He had a conviction in his own importance that made him seem, well, important. David had worked with a handful of families referred to him by Leonard and Renata, and with this house news, he was going to need to increase his client base in a major way.

  Renata gathered up her things and stood, dangling her shoes from her fingers. David ushered her to the door.

  “Maybe you should go on a hiking trip,” she said. “Preferably in a car. It would take your mind off things. When you get back we’ll find something for you to buy. Or rent, if you must. I know your landlady would like to have the place sold and be out of here by August thirty-first. Just so you have a deadline.”

  Upon hearing the word “deadline,” David felt blood rush to his face, making him feel hot and chilled simultaneously. He was being treated like one of his high school–aged clients. Across the walkway to the main house, he could see his landlady talking with a crew of painters who had arrived two days earlier. A clue he had missed.