My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  * * *

  The rain had stopped, and the streets, when they stepped outside, were slick from the earlier downpour. After a few days of heat, the air smelled of damp earth and refreshed flowers. As she and David walked home, she said, “What do you think he meant when he said Henry can’t take ‘maybe’ for an answer?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, but considering the context, I’d say it has something to do with the house.”

  “It worries me that I haven’t heard back from the woman who has my mother’s jewelry. She said it wouldn’t take more than three weeks and it’s coming up on the third week.”

  “People always underestimate,” he said.

  “Maybe I should call.”

  He took her arm. “Give it another week,” he said. “Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out.”

  Even if his optimism wasn’t convincing, his calm was catching. Why wouldn’t she want to believe he could help her make things work out?

  “I’ve added a new item to your Seven Steps,” he said. “It’s a big one. Ready? I think we should invite Henry and his girlfriend for dinner.”

  “I don’t see that being a glittering success as a social event,” Julie said.

  “Probably not, but it might be useful. Make it for a few weeks from now. We’ll have a better handle on the finances, and I’ll have made more progress with Mandy. It will also force us to get through some of the earlier steps related to home repair.”

  “What happens when we get to Step Seven or Eight or whatever ends up being the last one? Is that when you leave?”

  “I’d rather not think about that,” he said. “I’m too happy waking up every morning and having you hand me a cup of tea. And we still have the rest of the Lucia series to get through.”

  As they turned into her yard, Julie thought she saw Mandy hurrying into the house, but when they went into the living room, she was lying on the sofa with a book. “You worked late,” Julie said.

  Mandy looked up at her, flushed and surprised. “No. I’ve been home for over an hour.”

  It occurred to Julie that if she’d been stoned, she probably wouldn’t have noticed Mandy sneaking in or would have doubted what she’d seen if she had. She was about to press the issue, but what was the point? Mandy had a right to her own privacy, didn’t she? It didn’t seem as if she could get into too much trouble between Beachy Keen and home.

  28

  Nancy, the budding novelist and upcoming senior in San Francisco with whom David was continuing to work, had shifted the focus of her application essay from her grandmother’s cancer to her grandfather’s heart attack. He’d found it nearly impossible to talk students out of writing about death and fatal illness. “It made my parents cry” was the usual defense of these predictable and typically uninsightful essays. Even the most pallid apparently led to floods of parental tears. Cynically, David sometimes wondered if the emotional reactions didn’t have more to do with being reminded of pending tuition costs than any specific content.

  If he couldn’t talk kids out of writing about death, he at least insisted they open the work with a strong scene, something admissions committees would remember, even if they forgot everything else.

  To her credit, Nancy had written a good one. One evening when he and Mandy were discussing the latest draft of her own attempt at an essay, he handed her a copy of Nancy’s and asked her to read it aloud. She did so without stumbling and with a surprising amount of dramatic flair.

  “As the ski lift sped up the California mountain,” she read, “the air around us grew colder and the wind blew stronger. I wrapped my cloak around me more tightly and brushed the crystal snowflakes from my eyes. When Grandfather leaned against me, clutching at his jacket, I thought he was trying to keep me warm. He had always been kind and protective. But as the wind grew colder and his weight against me got heavier, I sensed that something was wrong, and before we reached the top of the mountain, I knew he was dead. What I didn’t know was what to do next.

  “That’s a cliff-hanger paragraph,” she said.

  “Almost literally,” he said. “Go on.”

  The essay described, in harrowing fashion, the decision Nancy faced about what to do at the top of the mountain, and how to signal to the operators that there was a problem, without doing something that might cause her grandfather’s body to fall prey to gravity and be “sucked from the lift and into the piles of deep, cloudlike snow beneath us.”

  When Mandy came to the end, he asked her what she thought.

  “It was a good story,” she said. “It made me a little jealous that nothing like that happened to me.”

  “Consider yourself lucky. Anything else?”

  She silently reread some of the essay and handed it back to him. “I like the story, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Some of the details are too weird. Like, who wears a cloak skiing? That and ‘crystal snowflakes’ sound like something out of a fantasy novel. And if your dead grandfather was leaning against you, wouldn’t the snow look scary and forbidding instead of ‘cloudlike’?”

  As soon as he heard her critique, he realized that he’d been troubled by something in the essay without being able to pinpoint what it was. He looked at Mandy with new respect, wondering why, when she was such a careful reader, her grades in English were so uninspired.

  When he wrote to Nancy with a few pointed questions, she admitted, without coaxing or concern, that although her grandfather had died at a ski resort in California, he had not been on a lift, and she had not been with him. She had no interest in skiing, she’d proudly informed him. When he’d been unable to talk Nancy into writing something more truthful, he’d appealed to her mother, Janine. Her response had been swift and definitive, although not in the way David would have guessed. “It’s close enough to the truth,” she’d written back. “She’s writing about my father, and I have no plans to sue, if that’s what worries you. Besides, it made me cry, and I assure you I don’t cry easily.”

  He decided to let the matter slide.

  As for the content of an essay his own imaginary daughter might have written, David liked to think she would have composed something meaningful about her gay father and the complicated, original arrangement her parents had constructed to give her a sense of family and continuity. The complicated, original arrangement would probably have ended up looking a lot like the life he’d been living with Mandy and Julie over the past few weeks. Unlike Janine, he hadn’t wept when thinking about this, but to be fair, he’d come close.

  While he waited for Michael to update him on the progress of the buyout negotiations, he and Julie worked around the outside of the house to create a few memorable vignettes that guests would focus on and thereby overlook the generally shabby appearance of the rest. David had been obsessed with the concept of outdoor rooms since reading the opening pages of The Portrait of a Lady in his early thirties. After searching through multiple closets, Julie had produced the key to a lock on the door of a garden shed behind the house. The inside proved to be a mausoleum for abandoned tools. “When did you last come in here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly, but I have a feeling Mandy was in a papoose on my back.”

  They salvaged a lawn mower, some clippers, and a few other basics. He cut the grass and Julie weeded a few sadly neglected flower beds—these latter being testaments, he suspected, to a happier and more optimistic period of Julie’s marriage to Henry. He spent one entire day trimming the privet hedge by hand with the rusty clippers they’d found, while Julie stood below, steadying the ladder for him and telling him about her favorite student at Crawford School, a neurotic girl with the unfortunate name Ankell Brightman. “Her mother couldn’t decide between Angel and Kelly, either of which would have been bad enough, so she crammed them together and saddled her with that. Not that Mandy is happy with her name, either. It was Henry’s idea.”

  “What was your choice? And I have to go up to the top rung to g
et the high branches, so make sure I don’t topple over, if you would.”

  “I was considering Lucia,” she said as he wobbled to the unsteady top of the stepladder. He looked down and saw that she’d turned away and was frowning. Mandy had loaned him the boxy old record player she’d found in the basement, and they’d stacked up a few of his old albums. Juliette Gréco was singing to the accompaniment of an accordion. It was an ostensibly cheerful song that now sounded haunting and sad. He and Julie had joked about naming their baby this, although they’d never made real plans. She seemed to regret making this reference, and before he could respond, she said, “Hurry up there, please. I have to go in to the bathroom.”

  They repainted the peeling Adirondack chairs and placed them on a durable carpet that had been in the barn. With a couple of wrought-iron tables, this created one of those charming spaces that everyone would comment on enthusiastically and no one would ever use.

  The hanging gutters and wobbly porch railings proved—with the advice of a cluster of employees at the local hardware store—relatively easy fixes. He took paint chips from the outside of the house and brought them to a store owner in Hammond who was said to be able to match any color exactly, even taking into consideration sun damage and winter weathering. “On second thought,” David said, “don’t make them 100 percent accurate. I want someone to register the repainting, even if subconsciously.”

  The “someone” was Henry. He needed to be wooed, possibly asked for more time, depending on the outcome of the San Francisco buyout negotiations. He couldn’t put off telling Julie about the jewelry much longer; the bag under his bed troubled him when he was working at his desk and was making it hard for him to sleep at night.

  For help with the fixes, David hired Amira’s pot dealer. Granger turned out to have the lean, long-haired brand of good looks that has been popular among a certain class of seaside families since James Taylor bought his property on Martha’s Vineyard. He was helpful in a vain, nonchalant way that made David think Amira’s assessment of him as a lover was probably accurate. Although he tended to be lackluster at painting and scraping the siding of the house and clearly didn’t approve of deodorant, it was easy to be around him. After the house repairs, it came time to move out some of the furniture and rearrange what was left. Because David knew it would be difficult for Julie to deal with her precious yard-sale finds being sent into exile, he chose to do this piece of the job on a day when she would be out. Specifically, the day she was seeing her musician-lover at his hotel.

  “He’s not my lover,” she insisted, but she’d spent an extravagantly long time getting ready, and when he’d hugged her as she was leaving, he felt like he was giving her his blessing. Was he jealous? Certainly not. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be jealous, besides which, it seemed likely that this man wasn’t available enough to usurp David’s place in the household.

  Granger showed up at the house half an hour after Julie had left. He was especially adept at figuring out spatial relations at a glance and conceiving the best way to maneuver sofas and tables and loveseats to get them down narrow staircases and out nineteenth-century doorways.

  “Did you ever work for a moving company?” David asked him as they were walking a red velvet sofa out of the front parlor.

  He had not, but he informed David with languid stoner pride that he’d always had an uncanny ability to envision rooms and structures in vivid, 3-D detail. “It started after the first time I dropped acid.”

  Of course it had.

  “Have you considered studying architecture?” David asked.

  This suggestion was met with a look of appalled confusion. “Why would I pay a fortune for an education that’s going to put me in a profession where I can’t make as much money as I’m making now?”

  It was a valid point, as far as it went. “You might not feel as drawn to selling pot when you get older. This would be something you could grow into.”

  “I don’t have the talent to stand out. There’s more status in being a really good dealer than in being a mediocre architect. Plus there are some great opportunities in Colorado for people in my field. I’ve been approached by a couple of headhunters to move out there.”

  A big reorganization of the economy was under way just below the surface. David had heard from a few former clients who’d moved to Colorado for agricultural ventures after graduation or development projects for resorts and entertainment complexes related to marijuana. Maybe Julie had decided to quit at exactly the wrong moment.

  “Amira will miss you if you leave,” he said.

  Granger gave a fond, sly grin that might have been from recalling an adventure with her or might have been from dreaming about finally receiving her praise. “She’s crazy,” he said. “But not nearly as crazy as she’d like you to believe.”

  After several hours of moving and rearranging, the house had a more clear and refreshed look. He was pleased. He went around vacuuming, polishing furniture with one of those products that’s credibly better for the environment because it’s less effective as a cleaner, and replacing lightbulbs with new ones that supposedly lasted longer than he expected to live. He sat in the living room, awaiting Julie’s return, growing more anxious as the time passed.

  29

  The room at the Marriott Courtyard was too aggressively air-conditioned, but they were under the covers. Her back was pressed against Raymond’s chest, and his long arms were wrapped around her. There was a little pool of sweat cooling in her lower back. It felt now as if what they’d finished a few minutes earlier was just to get to this—cuddling.

  “I was looking forward to that for so long,” he said quietly. “You have no idea.” He lifted her hair off her neck and blew on it lightly.

  “I have, too,” she said. “Thank you.”

  And yet she’d been anxious about meeting him in his hotel room. Partly because of the lighting. The several times they’d been together in her house that April weekend, she’d made sure the lights were low or nonexistent. The fact that he seemed to understand the necessity for this was one of the many things about him that had charmed her. It hadn’t occurred to her until much later that he might have had his own reasons for wanting the lights off. He radiated complete confidence in his body, or maybe it was complete comfort and acceptance. He had a stringy, athletic physique, but he was in his late fifties and surely there were some features that had to trouble him just as the slackness of her upper arms and the crepey skin of her thighs troubled her. She’d always been thin, a genetic gift from her impossible mother, but there were downsides to that, too. She didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about her aging appearance, but she had spent a few hours since meeting Raymond wishing that things were as full and firm as they’d been decades ago, that she’d been able to be at her best for him. Not that she’d cared much for her appearance back then, either.

  Julie had never met a man in a hotel room before. She saw this as a gap in her résumé, an indication that she’d always been too steady and steadfast, too reliable, too cautious. She’d never cheated on a husband or the three boyfriends she’d had between David and Henry, even the one who had lived in Chicago and she only saw once every few months.

  At the same time, there was something inherently sad about a hotel assignation. Two people meeting on middle ground that had nothing to do with either of their lives and had been designed to radiate pale neutrality. The perfect metaphor for this relationship, if it could even properly be called a relationship.

  He was playing with a small orchestra that was backing up a singer at the North Shore Music Tent. The singer was Louise Lundy, a former soap opera star who sang a program of romantic ballads and up-tempo pop hits from the nineties that vaguely mimicked the drama of her life or the life of the character she’d played for twenty-five years on TV, not that anyone could tell the difference. Julie had looked her up on YouTube so she’d have something to talk about with Raymond. She didn’t have a pleasant or appealing voice but she was able
to hit notes and had great costumes, and much of her appeal was probably due to the fact that audiences were so surprised she could carry a tune, they were willing to ignore something as insignificant as quality. On the whole, Julie would have enjoyed it more than the experimental jazz concert. The touring company was paying for Raymond’s hotel room for two nights. She wondered if he’d invite her back tomorrow afternoon.

  She’d driven there trying to balance her excitement and anxiety. She’d texted Raymond from the parking lot, and he’d run down to the lobby to meet her. It had been a small, gallant gesture, the way turning out the kitchen lights had been that first night he arrived in Beauport. He put his arm around her waist and walked her back to his room.

  “You’ve been getting sun!” he said enthusiastically, as if he’d harbored a memory of how she’d looked back in April.

  She’d been plagued by an unanswered question, and had asked David if he thought she should ask him about his wife.

  “What about his wife?” he’d said.

  “If he has one, for starters. I’m sure he does, but if we don’t say anything about it, it feels like we’re pretending.”

  “Then you should,” David had said. “But wait until after. And expect to feel upset even if you already know the answer.”

  Now was officially “after.”

  “We can raid the minibar,” he said, “if you happen to be craving pretzels and Toblerone.”

  “I’m craving this,” she said, and leaned back into him. “Tell me about the show.”

  She could tell he was thinking it over, carefully coming up with a diplomatic answer. “It’s at the opposite end of the accessibility scale from what you saw in Beauport.”

  “I looked her up on YouTube.”

  “She draws a huge audience and gets huge applause. Ovations, even. I think people like standing as a way of convincing themselves they got their money’s worth. She isn’t great, but she’s professional, which is a kind of greatness. It would be easy to condescend to it because, to be honest, there’s a lot that’s embarrassing. But it makes twelve hundred people happy every night, so who am I to judge? Some of the happiness spills over to the orchestra. You feel as if you’ve done a good deed in a world that’s falling apart.”