My Ex-Life: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

  “What if I do?” she said. “What if I’m not good at anything else?”

  “You’re not listening to me. I’m telling you something, and I’m not wrong.”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. He was staring at her without blinking, as if he was looking into her head. She felt exposed and frightened, mostly because she was almost certain she was going to burst into tears, and she wouldn’t let that happen. Still, she heard it in her voice when she asked, “Why didn’t you leave like you planned?”

  “Because I found out about this.”

  “How?”

  “That’s the least important part of this. If you have a backpack or something, I want you to go get it. We’re leaving.”

  There was something about the way he’d said “we” that felt like a piece of tin foil on an exposed nerve in a tooth. It shot through her, and she felt tears start rolling down her face. She hadn’t been alone in all this, which at times had felt like the worst part of it. “Are you going to tell my mother?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not. You are.”

  “She’ll kill me,” she said. And then she realized this wasn’t what she was worried about at all. “It will kill her,” she said.

  “It will be extremely painful, but it won’t kill her. We’ll figure out a way to tell her.”

  “And then you leave.”

  “I’ll leave when the dust has settled.”

  “That could take years.”

  “I’m not an especially busy man.”

  She went to the basement and got her backpack and signed off the computer. As she did so, she felt a stab of sadness, not for herself but for the men she was now abandoning. Maybe some of them would wonder what had happened to her. Maybe they’d miss her. But she’d be completely out of reach and long gone. That, somehow, was sad, too. It seemed that life was going to be a series of sad moments that you couldn’t escape from. Sad because you were abandoned, sad because you were the one leaving.

  She walked into the kitchen, and David stood up. That’s when she heard Craig unlocking the door. It swung open and he was standing in the doorway, framed by the light, looking from her to David, assessing the situation. She saw two things right away—how short Craig really was, especially compared with David, and how young he was. He was decades closer to her age than David’s. How had he ever seemed so mature and important? He looked for a moment as if he was going to turn and run, and in that moment she saw what she should have seen all along—he had at least as much to lose as she did, maybe more.

  “Who’s this?” he said.

  “I’m Mandy’s uncle,” David said.

  He went toward Craig and held out his hand, and Mandy saw that Craig had no option but to shake it, and that having done so, everything shifted, and he lost his power. “I came to get Mandy,” David said. “She’s not going to be working here anymore.”

  Craig moved his gaze to Mandy. She wanted to think he was upset that she was leaving, that she wouldn’t be coming back, but probably it was simple worry about having been found out.

  “Fine,” he said. “Anything else? You want a letter of recommendation?”

  “I’ll let you know if we do,” David said.

  She didn’t look back as she led David out of the house.

  As they drove out of the neighborhood and toward downtown Hammond, David said nothing. She couldn’t stand the suspense and the feeling that he must hate her. Finally, he said, “It would help to have a hobby. Anything to take up the extra time you’re going to have.”

  “I know. But I can’t do anything. I wish I could.”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “There’s a ukulele in the window of the music store over there. I almost bought it a few times.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know how to play it.”

  David swerved and pulled the car into a parking space abruptly. “You can learn,” he said. “You can learn anything if you put your mind to it.”

  She saw the muscles in his jaw flexing, as if he was chewing gum. Except he wasn’t.

  “Where’s the store?” he asked.

  “Just up there. But I don’t have any money on me.”

  He turned off the car and opened his door.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I do. Come along.”

  46

  Julie checked the time as she drove home from the appointment with the rental agent. David’s flight was scheduled to be taking off now. He would be in his seat, putting a book into the pocket in front of him and securing his seat belt. It was safe to go home. No goodbyes.

  She was determined to be practical and adult about the whole situation and, most of all, to avoid self-pity. She’d tried everything she could think of to get the house, and she’d failed. So be it. Maybe if she tried really hard, she could talk herself into believing it was all for the best. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there yet. Whenever she looked around the house, at all the furniture and Aggressively Acquired items she’d bought from probably hundreds of sales over the years, she had trouble believing she was really going to have to move. As if stuff could save her. Probably as people were dying, they clung unrealistically to the belief that they couldn’t go while there was still food in the fridge far from its expiration date and newspapers that were being delivered.

  She’d left a message for Henry this morning, telling him the closing was off. He’d won. They could proceed with the sale and then they’d finalize the divorce. By October, it would all be over.

  The rental agent had been kind and understanding when she spoke with her on the phone. Within seconds, she understood that Julie was on the verge of being single again. “I help a lot of women in your situation,” she’d said.

  It had been such a short trip from wife, mother, and enthusiastic homeowner to “woman in a situation.”

  “We’ll have no trouble finding you something,” she’d said. “There are three lovely places we can see immediately.”

  And so, Julie had gone this afternoon. Two of the lovely places were in what had formerly been a motel near a new industrial park. (“No one wants to stay in motels anymore,” the agent had said. “They rent houses or rooms in someone else’s house.”) The third was a “townhome” in a development called Mill Stream Meadow Estates. A strange name considering there was no mill, meadow, stream, or estates. It was a collection of stripped-down boxes behind a shopping center with a Super Stop and Shop, a Five Guys burger joint, and a few other stores that could be anywhere at all. For decades, Beauport had managed to keep out chains, but the efforts had been swamped by the influence of money and promises of jobs that rarely materialized.

  The inside of the townhome was so blank and featureless, Julie had felt herself slipping into an existential malaise, mainly at the thought that there were people who actually liked living in places like this.

  “Isn’t there something with a little more age and character?” she’d asked. “It doesn’t have to be large, but some personality would help. Maybe closer to the center of the town?”

  “I’m afraid not,” the agent had said. “The year-round-rental market is practically dead. Anything with the kind of character you’re looking for and in a decent location is being rented on Airbnb for more per week than the owners could charge for a month.”

  Karma. There was some consolation in knowing she partly deserved this. Even so, she’d had to excuse herself and go into the townhome bathroom to splash water on her face to stave off a townhome panic attack. As she was shaking her hands dry, she looked out the window and saw the massive parking lot of the shopping center, baking under the sun and shimmering with heat waves. It was so awful, it almost crossed into beauty. She composed herself and went out to tell the agent she’d take it. It was just for a year.

  When she pulled into the driveway of her house, she saw that David’s rental car was still there. Maybe she’d confused the time of his departure just as she’d confused the time of his arrival. Sh
e had a moment of fleeting happiness and then felt a confused flutter in her chest, a premonition that something was amiss.

  She sat in the car for another moment, and then, following instinct or perhaps a desire to delay, she walked around the perimeter of the yard to the front of the house. David and Mandy were sitting there on the porch, side by side in the rockers. David was reading to her from one of the Lucia novels, as if it was the most normal, expected thing in the world. Opal was lying quietly at their feet, completely content. David looked at her and smiled, as if he was surprised to see her, but Mandy was averting her eyes. Opal hopped down to her and barked. You’re home, you’re home, you’re home.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, picking up her dog and hugging her to her chest. “Was your flight canceled?”

  He stood and put down the book. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t. Mandy wants to talk with you about something, but before she does, I want you to know that I’m going to stay with you until everything gets settled and we figure out a plan for her. Will that be okay?”

  A strange calm came over her and her whole body went slack. Supposedly, this was the best way to prevent injury if you had a fall—go limp. She was, she knew, about to have a fall. When Mandy looked up, Julie smiled at her, trying to mimic David’s calm. She looked especially young and guileless sitting on the porch, especially pretty in the soft light of the August afternoon. Julie studied her for a minute, her kind, round eyes and sweet face. As she went up to the porch, she tried to take it all in. She had a terrible feeling she’d never be able to see her quite this way again.

  47

  Renata looked out the window of her Uber and shook her head. Boston.

  As she saw it, there were certain cities in the country that were pointless. Yes, they had their fleeting beauty, their esteemed institutions, but on the whole, looked at objectively, they were inessential and pointless. Boston was one of those places. The city made sense only if you thought of it as a sprawling college campus decorated with historic sites and with a few hospitals tossed in for the convenience of Saudi princes in need of cancer treatment.

  The college campus aspect of the place explained why Teddy had decided to go to school here. That’s what she kept telling herself, but she’d never been able to completely shrug off the suspicion that going to college three thousand miles from home had something to do with his desire to get away from Leonard. Oh, and all right, probably her as well.

  If she had it to do over again, she wouldn’t marry Leonard. She’d have him impregnate her so she could still have Teddy, and then dump him. For all the financial advantages of the marriage, it was just too contentious, too distant, too abrasive. The marriage had made her a harder, more cynical person. At this point, though, there was no doing it over. She had some happy memories to live on, although those had nothing to do with Leonard. How weird to count as the best and most memorable moments of your life the few hours—which, all totaled, probably didn’t amount to twenty-four—she’d spent in hotel rooms with someone she barely knew. Paolo. Mr. Alitalia. Who knew what had happened to him? Their affair had come at the last possible second she could attract such a man. If he suddenly called again, would she take the bait and agree to see him? Absolutely not. Too much had changed in the past fifteen years—a loss of muscle tone in her legs, a pad of fat around her abdomen, an eyelift that hadn’t disguised her actual age but instead had made her look perpetually startled by the reality of being in her sixties.

  Oh, not that she was going to get any second chances, but what the hell, if she did, maybe she would marry Leonard after all. He had been a good father to Teddy, at least in the sense that he’d had the decency to let her raise him. And the truth was, since they’d taken sex off the table altogether, they were becoming mildly affectionate with each other. She could snuggle into his warm, pudgy body without having to worry that anyone was going to remove clothing. Secretly, she was more physically attracted to him than she’d been in her forties, although she suspected it was similar to the attraction she felt for Mumbai now that she knew she’d never have to visit that hellishly humid and crowded city again. In a marriage, you either kept at it on a weekly basis or you kept to different sides of a bed wide enough to count as separate rooms. The middle ground of fucking twice a year was grotesque.

  She liked seeing life in stages. Very Eric Erikson. The current stage (the Yes-to-Mirrors-No-to-Photos Stage) would lead to the It’s-Not-Cancer Stage (although in Leonard’s case, it might be) and then, the inevitable next stage—the Bedpan Stage. It was important to have someone there for the final stages. And by “there” she meant in the distance signing the checks.

  When she first moved to San Francisco, she’d thought it was one of the pointless cities. The prettiness was iconic, but somehow counted against it. Yes, it was constantly on the edge of disaster—earthquakes, drought, AIDS, massive economic inequality—but even those didn’t give it the gravitas of New York or Los Angeles or even lesser lights like Miami and Chicago. She had conquered the city. She’d made a name for herself, in an insignificant way. She’d never have been able to do that in Los Angeles or New York—not in acting, naturally, and not even in real estate.

  The Boston sky was gray. She certainly could have conquered this city, or at least made a name for herself in it. It was that minor. The air was heavy and humid. September 4 and still summer here on the East Coast.

  “How long is the ride to Beauport?” she asked the driver.

  “Probably an hour,” he said.

  “An hour? How much is this going to cost?”

  “It should have come up on your app.”

  “Oh, right.” Her app.

  The driver was attractive in an awkward way, one of those clumsy young men who might turn out to be an ardent and unexpectedly unselfish lover with an older woman, if only because he believed in showing his mother respect. He was wearing a white shirt and a tie and a pair of red suspenders. The outfit commented on the role he was playing. Seduction was, thank god, out of the question, but flirtation was still on the table. If she could no longer get someone like this to want her, she could get him to be intimidated by her, which was, in its way, the bigger thrill. All you had to do was act a little languid and this type backed off, terrified you were going to make an advance that would be impossible to accept and embarrassing to reject, like an inappropriate kiss from a drunken, aging aunt.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Clarke.”

  “Have you been to Beauport, Clarke?”

  “Once.”

  “Did you like it?”

  He looked at her in the rearview. “It’s all right, especially if you’re into the ocean. Otherwise, I’m not sure I see the point.”

  “We think alike, Clarke. I’m going to make a surprise visit to a friend. I was coming to Boston to visit my son—another surprise visit, but irrelevant to this conversation—and I thought I might as well drop in on David. He was supposed to return to San Francisco two weeks ago and he canceled at the last minute.”

  “Will he be happy to see you?”

  “Very few people are happy to see me these days, Clarke, but he’ll be overjoyed once I hand him the envelope I have in my bag.”

  “Money?”

  “Is there another option?”

  “What if he’s not home?”

  “I was under the impression Beauport was the kind of place where there’s nowhere else to go but home.”

  “There are a lot of seafood restaurants,” he said.

  “Any you’d recommend? I wouldn’t mind a lobster roll.”

  “I’m vegan.”

  This word had become ubiquitous and absurdly trendy. She supposed there were a few young women with anorexia who kept to this diet, but otherwise it had to be lip service.

  “I have a theory, Clarke. Want to hear it? There are no male vegans. There are men who say they are to appear more sensitive to their girlfriends or anyone else they’re hoping to lure into bed with them. Once they�
�re on their own, they’re in a drive-through line at Burger King.”

  “McDonald’s,” he said.

  “I’m famous for my burgers, Clarke. We didn’t have vegans when I was your age, dear. We had macrobiotics. I don’t know where they all went. We didn’t have gluten intolerance, either. We had hypoglycemia. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of that.”

  She didn’t care what she sounded like. They still had a long way to go, and she was enjoying herself.

  “We had aerobics, not Pilates. We didn’t have different layers of gender. We had Martina Navratilova and no one thought anything of it.”

  “You didn’t have Uber.”

  “No, of course not. We had jobs.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat. The flight had been long and at times bumpy. Once upon a time, she’d been a nervous flyer, but now that the best years of her life were, by almost any measure, behind her, the idea of dying in a crash was unpleasant but not tragic. She took off her shoes and folded her feet under her.

  Teddy had refused to come home for the summer, claiming he had an internship with a public relations firm. Internships. Please! Classes started later in the week, so she decided to pop in for a visit before he got too busy. And then the plan to surprise David. She needed to find out what the hell had been going on. He’d actually taken her up on the offer to have everything moved out of the carriage house and into storage so Porter and Soren—bless their rich hearts—could get the house. He’d be back “later in the fall,” whatever that meant. She’d pressed Michael Taylor for details. Lovely Michael. Essentially dull in that Midwestern way she knew from her childhood, but endlessly interested in her salacious tales of Paolo. When he told her of David’s plans to help out his ex-wife and stay in Beauport, she’d actually been touched. It undoubtedly wasn’t selfless, but it seemed to be. She’d been even more horrible to him than she’d admitted. She’d sought out the listing for the property he’d been living on by calling the landlady for months and promising her she’d have a buyer without any inconvenience to her. Then she’d contacted Porter. (If Leonard needed to have his chest sawed open at some point, Porter was getting a call.) Worst of all, she didn’t need the commission. She had more than enough money already. She’d just been trying to show the young agents in her office she still had it. The envelope contained a check equal to the commission she’d earn—found money or ill-gotten gains, dispensable either way—a nice fat profit for David, and, she hoped, a new beginning for her. She was going to become a kinder, gentler person, less selfish, less greedy. That would deflect attention from her harder, less expressive face.