They chatted for a few more minutes in the dim yellow glow of the living room, and then he said she must be tired after trying to stay awake through the whole concert. He got up and shut off the lights in the dining room and kitchen, a small kindness that felt so spontaneous, she almost swooned. It had all the comforting familiarity of a long-term relationship mixed with the excitement of the new and unknowable.
They walked up the main staircase together and then, in front of his room, he opened his door and whispered, “Good night, Julie.”
“Good night,” she said.
If she’d turned then, nothing, she was sure, would have happened. But she’d waited maybe three seconds, during which they held eye contact and everything that followed was decided. He took her hand, and they went into his room.
When he left on Sunday afternoon, she waved cheerfully from the porch, and then went into the house and wept with a mix of gratitude and loneliness.
And soon, he was coming back.
21
“I suppose you thought I was joking when I said I’d be opening drawers and cabinets,” Michael’s email read. “I’ve learned quite a lot about you I didn’t know before.”
David hadn’t thought Michael was joking. Having lived most of his life with secrets, Michael was now committed to absolute truth; when he said something, he meant it. What surprised him most was that Michael had found anything of interest. As far as he could remember, he’d never hidden any of his exploits from Michael; occasionally, he’d exaggerated them. It was July 3, and Michael had been in the carriage house for almost two weeks, had blocked Renata from entering twice, and had even learned to use the espresso machine with the help of a young visitor who (of course) turned out to be a barista.
David took another bite of the expensive dog biscuit, the only dessert he was allowing himself these days. And considering the lack of moisture and sandy texture, he preferred to think of it as desert. Tasteless as they were, they had a hardy, punitive appeal to him—satisfaction and punishment for it all in one compact package. It was fortunate Opal had refused to touch them.
Michael’s email continued:
I found some interesting papers in the unlocked file cabinet in your bedroom. You never told me you had a lease. And a long-term one at that! I had assumed some eccentric verbal agreement with the nutty landlady. It has my lawyerly brain churning. I see a potential windfall for you and a commission for me. Call! When are you returning?
He wrote back:
I don’t know what your lawyerly brain is cooking up, but I’m not litigious. The landlady was good to me for so many years, I couldn’t possibly cause trouble. And I’m not sure about returning. I’m loving Beauport so I’m in no rush. Sitting at my spacious desk looking at the Atlantic.
Well, he was looking toward the Atlantic. No need to say he was in a coffin-size room with a view of a privet hedge. It was true that he was in no rush to leave; he’d returned his rental car two days ago and hadn’t bothered to book another westbound flight since he’d canceled two already. He was measuring his contentment in inverse proportion to his weight. He eyed the dog biscuits but resisted. If he stayed another month, he’d have to buy new clothes. After removing half the furniture that had been in the room, he had enough floor space to do a desultory round of calisthenics each morning. And then there were the marathon walks he and Julie took nightly, which seemed to have become the center of his days. She was extending these to cover more and more ground, an act of kindness to him.
His waistline was not the only improvement.
Since taking the recommendations on changing their Airbnb profile Sandra had sent in her hostile written report (“Raise your rates and block off some dates so it at least appears to be a desirable property”), they’d had significantly more inquiries. Two days ago, an enthusiastic (about everything) couple had moved into the Window Seat Room for a week, and last night, a florid middle-aged woman named Mona had settled into the Street-View Room.
The latter had arrived with one overflowing bag that had been stuffed with clothes rather than packed in an organized way. She claimed she was scouting apartments to buy or rent, but David hadn’t seen her since she’d checked in.
Mona was a certain type of woman that Beauport attracted, a type that appeared to have been blown to this easternmost point of land on a tide of misfortune. Like Mona, many had obviously been beauties in an earlier phase of their lives but now gave the impression of having been badly used by life in general and by men in particular. David suspected Mona’s overstuffed bag had a few prescription bottles in it. Barbiturates, naturally. To be fair, David himself had been blown here by misfortune. Happily, with Julie’s help, he was turning it around.
As for Mandy, he hadn’t given up, but he wasn’t wildly optimistic about her college plans. After their initial meeting, she hadn’t seemed eager to get together and answer his questions, investigate websites of colleges he’d mentioned, or struggle through a few attempts at essays. She was clearly bright and had an instinct for reading people that was unusual in kids her age, but her grades and lack of activities meant it was going to be difficult getting her into a decent school. Usually, David could find a toehold with even an unpromising student from which he could begin to build a case—a summer internship that could be made to sound interesting, a poem that had been published in the school literary journal, even a Twitter account that showed some wit and an expansive awareness of the world. He hadn’t found any logical starting point for Mandy.
After pressing her on her interests, she admitted, sheepishly, that she was interested in studying psychology. “And I was before you brought it up,” she made clear. “Unfortunately, I’m probably too screwed up to go into it.”
He assured her that being screwed up was practically one of the requirements for studying psychology, but even there, it was hard to pinpoint what her particular problems were.
They’d compiled a list of an even dozen schools—four reaches, four targets, and four safeties. Privately, David was beginning to think that the target schools—Carlton College, Farmingdale State, Providence College among them—were more like reaches. As for Smith, Wellesley, and Sarah Lawrence, there was no point in even trying. Not that he was going to tell her that just yet.
She’d been quick to make a stab at an essay, and the opening paragraph had had some quirky potential:
“For a long time, I thought Clara Dunston was my arch-nemesis. It wasn’t until she’d been bullied online and taken out of school that I realized I thought that because we were a lot alike.”
After that, it drifted into essay clichés about lessons learned that clearly, from his experience of her, she hadn’t learned at all. Honesty in these essays was what counted most (a stunning admission about peeing in the kitchen sink, for example), and aside from a few exceptions, it was what he had the most difficulty coaxing from his young clients. At least Mandy was educable, and Massachusetts had a few good state schools. It was hard to know what Henry was expecting for her, although his impression was that he mostly wanted to use her as a bargaining chip in the divorce.
Would he, he wondered, have been a selfless parent himself, always choosing what was best for his child no matter what kind of sacrifice was involved? It was easy for David to believe so since now he would never be tested. The truth was, once he’d gotten over the shock and the sadness of Julie’s miscarriage, he’d been relieved. It wasn’t until the past decade that a more insistent disappointment gnawed at him when he thought about the child who’d never been. Eventually he and Julie would have divorced anyway, but they’d have figured out a way to form an eccentric little family. Probably not unlike the eccentric arrangement they were forming this summer. Unlike Mandy, their child would have been in her late twenties by now, so they would have weathered (or not) this rough adolescent period.
One maudlin night after Soren had left him and he’d had too many glasses of bad wine, he’d started writing an explanation of what had happened to their relatio
nship and how things had gone wrong. It wasn’t exactly a journal entry (he’d had an aversion to keeping journals since reading one he’d kept in college and discovering it was mostly lies) and it wasn’t a note to himself. After writing a full page, he realized what he’d been composing, in his addled state, was a letter to his adult daughter. (He and Julie had never known the sex of their baby, but he’d always imagined a girl.) A letter explaining himself to someone whose connection to him could not be broken by the arrival of a better offer. Since then, he’d occasionally found himself addressing this imaginary person and even filling in a few details of her life. She played the piano reasonably well; she was married to an honest man of modest means; she didn’t like to cook, but occasionally baked bread.
“How can you sit in this horrible closet with that noisy fan?”
Amira was standing in his doorway. He rarely closed the door since doing so made the room seem even smaller. She looked radiant in cork sandals and a short yellow sundress that screamed, “I’m not wearing panties.”
“I’m doing some work,” he said, “and having a snack. Would you like one?”
She came into the room and looked around with a mixture of dread and disapproval. “So ugly,” she said. She reached into the proffered bag and bit into a biscuit. “But these are wonderful!”
David was disappointed by this reaction; he was hoping to shock her. “I’m glad you like them.”
“Yes, if I have another one, I’ll throw up. I’m not a bulimic, but if it happens, I usually don’t mind.”
She had, as Julie had predicted, wandered into the house a few times since he’d been there, made outrageous statements, and settled into a chair somewhere, pouting. Despite her intrusiveness and a general attitude that suggested she was performing for a large audience of appreciative fans and appalled prudes, there was a sympathetic, childlike quality about her that was irresistible. When the topic of Julie’s house came up, she usually turned vague, but it was difficult to know if this was because she was planning a coup or because she was an inveterate tease.
As David watched her take a seat on the edge of his bed in her provocative sundress (no, she was not wearing panties and yes, she did wax), it occurred to him that she was, in her own way, not unlike Mona and the other lost ladies of Beauport, blown east to this rocky spit of land, next stop open ocean. True, in her case, it was into the safe haven of a rich husband who would provide a buffer between her beauty and a world that was eager to exploit her for it, but the open ocean was right at the end of the street if Richard suddenly tired of her antics.
“You’re making the house nicer,” she said. “I was not hit by a dust storm when I came in.”
“That’s my goal,” David said. “And speaking of which, I’m planning to move some furniture out of a few of the other rooms and into the barn. Do you know anyone who could help me?”
“Of course,” she said. “I am a wonderful resource for everything. I will send you my pot dealer. He does for me whatever I tell him.”
“That’s convenient,” David said. “How did you manage to enslave him?”
“The only way possible,” she said. “I figured out what he wants and then I never give it to him.”
David assumed this was a reference to what she was endeavoring to not conceal under her sundress, but when he asked for clarification, she said, “He wants praise. It’s what everyone wants.”
“I suppose that’s true,” David said.
“Don’t pay him more than twenty dollars an hour. He did some work for me and he works like he fucks—lazy. He has a long penis but it is thin. Do you prefer them long or thick?”
“To be honest,” David said, “I’m mainly interested in my own.”
“Oh, that’s no fun. You’re as bad as a straight man. I thought I could complain with you about my husband’s thing.”
“I’d prefer you didn’t.” He enjoyed listening to discussions, no matter how lurid, about a person’s extracurricular sex life, but discussions of the sexual activity of married or long-partnered couples struck him as related to discussions of medical problems and bodily functions and made him cringe. To change the subject he said, “What about the party you claimed you were going to have? As far as I know, we haven’t received any invitations.”
“What’s the rush? You will probably stay forever.”
“I’m afraid this room is too small for me for forever.”
“There are other rooms in the house,” she said. “And the disgusting barn. But we’ll have the party next week anyway.”
As soon as she mentioned his staying on, he recognized it as something he’d thought about previously, in a fleeting way. He felt strangely detached from San Francisco, as if a wire that had connected him to the West Coast had been snipped. He hadn’t brought this up with Julie, but then again, he hadn’t fully acknowledged it to himself until this moment. “Forever” seemed like the wrong word, but then again, he was approaching the age at which “forever” was only a matter of a few decades.
She stood and smoothed down her dress. “I hope you’re helping Julie steal the house from my husband. I’d love a pool, but I’d much rather see him disappointed. Please walk me out? I hate running into the inmates. They resent me for being allowed to leave the institution while they remain confined in their cells.”
He walked her to her gate. Her house was carefully hidden behind hedges and evergreens, and he’d yet to set eyes on this fabled dwelling. As he was returning to Julie’s house, a car pulled into the drive, and a woman dressed in a tailored summer suit stepped out. Not their typical clientele, and as far as he knew, there was no room at the inn for walk-ins.
“You must be David,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “Pamela Kern. Julie’s told me all about you.” He supposed from this that she assumed he’d heard about her as well, but if so, he didn’t remember. “Not all, of course, but the essential biographical details. I’m impressed the two of you have remained friends. Julie needs friends.”
She was an energetic woman, and between the fast talk and the incredibly spotless car, it seemed certain she was in sales of some kind.
“I’m afraid Julie isn’t home,” he said. “She should be back in an hour or two.”
“I should have checked first. I should have called. To be honest, I wanted to tell her in person, but now I’m relieved she’s not here. It’s not good news. Not bad news exactly, just disappointing.”
She hit a button on her keychain and the trunk popped open. She handed David a large Hermès shopping bag. When he felt the weight of it, he had a sense of what this was about. “Her mother’s jewelry?” he asked.
“There are some lovely pieces in there. I’m tempted by some of them myself. I’m sure there are a lot of memories attached to many of them. In the end, that’s usually the greatest value there is to the things we inherit.”
The meaning of this was abundantly clear. “Would you like to come in?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t. I have two potential clients who want estimates on the contents of their mothers’ houses. It’s always mothers’ houses. The women invariably outlive the husbands. It’s revenge. People think I’m in the business of antiques, but really I’m in the business of death. I get called shortly after the family calls the funeral director.”
“So the jewelry…”
“There’s an itemized list in the bag. It’s not nothing, but it’s about a tenth of what Julie was told, or what she was hoping. That’s the way it usually is with jewelry. The Cartiers are rarely by Cartier. That’s the way it is with everything, come to think of it. You’d be amazed at the number of people who plan to put a child through college with a couple of pre-Columbian artifacts great-great-uncle so-and-so sneaked back in his luggage from a dig in Peru in 1920. I can usually get more for an original-in-box Star Wars action figure.”
David took the bag to his room and opened up the itemized list. When he read the grand total at the bottom of the fourth page, he sat at his desk
and gazed out the window at the hedge. It seemed to be even closer than it had been a few minutes ago. No, as Pamela had said, it wasn’t nothing, but it was so far from what Julie would need to get the house, it counted as mere frosting.
“I wish I had some pre-Columbian artifacts of my own to sell,” he said to himself. Or perhaps not quite to himself. To that nameless, imaginary adult daughter, to assure her that he’d help out her mother if he could. They were all in it together.
The orange Hermès shopping bag with the box of dashed hopes inside seemed to be in flames on his bed. If he had any possibilities of his own, he’d hide it from Julie for a few days, but he had nothing of great value to sell. It was probably best to climb up to her room and leave it on her bed and let her discover it in private when she returned from the grocery store.
On the landing on the second floor, an idea came to him. He went back to his room, slid the bag into the suitcase under his bed, and called Michael. It was always a mistake to underestimate lawyerly minds, and although it was true he hated litigious people as a rule, that didn’t mean his behavior couldn’t be hypocritical.
22
Classes were over for the summer, but twenty-five years of teaching had made Julie an early riser, even when she’d stayed up late the night before or had, possibly, had a hit of pot out in the yard at some point in the evening. She usually got up at six, which gave her enough time to make David a pot of the strong black tea he’d been drinking for as long as she’d known him. “Thank you,” he’d say every morning when she set it before him, as if she’d given him an elaborate present. In fact, she felt as if she was the one who’d received a gift by having him there.
After they’d eaten, they laid out the defrosted muffins and pieces of fruit, items Sandra had recommended they refer to as the “breakfast buffet.” “Never cut up the fruit,” she’d written on her blog. “People are much more likely to eat it.” And then, proudly: “The apples and oranges I set out typically sit there for so long, I have to throw them out!”
My Ex-Life: A Novel Page 15