“I have been listening.”
“This isn’t what I want.”
“I realize.”
She sighed. I waited.
“Fine,” she said. “Do you have anything for breakfast?”
We ate eggs and drank coffee, and afterward I uploaded the posts I’d written before Paige showed up, time-stamping them to appear at intervals throughout the day (the last thing I needed was Derrick on my case). I didn’t want to leave the apartment and let this strange dream reach its inevitable end. Still, there was my life, and in the late morning I told Paige I needed to run a few errands, then head over to Charles Street to pick up my rental car. She could come, of course, but—
“Aidan, no.”
“I didn’t think so. Make yourself at home then. I’ll bring back some lunch.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
And so I donned a hoodie and left her. The morning was crisp and cloudless . . . and suddenly surreal. How disconcerting it had been, the two of us in that small apartment together, like the morning after a one-night stand—the shy backpedaling after the drunken deed, knowing everything and nothing, too much and too little. I walked east on Christopher, past dog walkers and squealing schoolchildren, past mothers pushing babies, past a cop at the entrance to the PATH. I nodded to him out of habit, then, a half block later, cursed my stupidity. I was at the corner of Hudson Street and had forgotten what I needed to do. Drugstore, wine store, supermarket. Spare keys at the hardware store (Cressida had my other set), a stop-off at the dry cleaner. I hurried from place to place, two lists in my head, for two lives—mine and Paige’s, the mundane and the outlandish. I was drawn to her, both because of and despite who she was, what she believed. But what did she believe? How much of all this was a symptom of her grief? And how much came from the woman underneath? Suddenly, I wanted to run home and ask her, run home and see her, just run home. But I stayed out, stayed away. Give her space, some time to breathe, or bolt. I considered heading over to Paul Smith to find my father a birthday present, but like every man with money and a young wife, he was almost impossible to shop for, stuck as he was between styles and generations, the acceptable and unseemly. Taste, which had once emanated from him, was no longer in evidence in Litchfield. Indeed, the last time I’d been up to see him, a year ago, he’d worn nothing but blowsy golf shirts and pleated slacks. He was getting old.
The thought cowed me. And made me miss him. I gave up on shopping and made my way to the Dollar Rent A Car on Charles Street. Through the glass door I could see the woman behind the front desk. I paused. Should I really be leaving Paige? For that matter, should I be handing my driver’s license over to someone with a computer? Yes, and yes. What had Touché called it? Indirect support. That’s all I was offering. Nothing more. I wouldn’t let her rough landing into my life completely disrupt it. And I wouldn’t become paranoid either. Of course I could hand over my license. My name wasn’t on any lists. I wasn’t the one setting off bombs. I could write a single blog post and be free and clear of any trouble.
Fifteen minutes later I was sitting behind the wheel of a soulless Chrysler Sebring. If the Dollar woman had suspected I was harboring a terrorist, she certainly hadn’t let on. In fact, she’d offered to upgrade me to a PT Cruiser (I’d politely declined). I turned west and weaved my way through Village streets that never quite pointed in the right direction. Would Paige be there when I got back? I’d been gone more than an hour, plenty of time to take off if that was her plan. And what if she’d stolen something, cash or my computer, or worse, been somehow tracked or traced? By the time I turned onto Weehawken Street I half-expected the block to be cordoned off, cop cars pulled up on sidewalks, a crowd, reporters, cameras.
But the street was empty, as usual. I parked nearby, grabbed my shirts and groceries, and walked briskly home. When I opened the door, Paige looked up from the couch. She was writing a letter, an art book serving as a makeshift table on her lap.
“It’s to my parents,” she said, when I asked. “Don’t worry. I won’t mail it from around here.”
“Okay, good,” I said, as if I might have suggested that precaution myself. “I got you a salad. I thought you might be a vegetarian or something so . . .”
“Thanks. I’m not.”
I started fiddling with things. Plastic forks and napkins, and the hangers from the dry cleaner, which had attached themselves to everything I was holding. Paige went back to her letter, as if this were the most normal day two people could spend together.
“Have you been in contact with them?” I asked.
“My mom and dad? Not really. Just the pay-phone call they told you about—to hear their voices, let them know I was alive. It was stupid; I shouldn’t have done it. But I’m glad they realized it was me.”
“Why’d you hang up? You think their phone’s tapped?”
“It’s possible.”
“But it’s okay to write them now?”
“Probably not, but it may be the last chance I get. Plus, you were talking about your father’s birthday . . .” She let the thought die.
I got lunch together, and we ate quickly. Then I packed a small overnight bag. I had to get going, and anyway, Paige had turned quiet.
“Are you sure I should leave you alone?” I asked.
“Yeah, sorry. I’m just . . . I’m thinking about Keith.”
“How to find him, you mean?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Why don’t I call you when I get to Litchfield.”
“Okay, but wait until later tonight, after dinner.” She peered at me through her hair, like a boy looking through the woods. “Let’s say ten o’clock. Let it ring twice, then hang up and call back right away. Use your dad’s house phone, not your cell.”
“Meaning . . . ?” I felt for the phone in my pocket.
“Meaning let’s not take unnecessary chances.”
“And what if you don’t answer?”
She brushed her hair aside. “Then stay up there.”
AIDAN
THE MONDAY-AFTERNOON TRAFFIC WAS LIGHT LEAVING MANHATTAN, AND I rolled my window down to take in the breeze off the river. It felt good to be on the road, and then, as I crossed the northern tip of the island, it suddenly didn’t. I almost turned around in White Plains, and again as I merged onto I-84. What was I doing, leaving Paige alone at a moment like that? Did she even think I’d come back? My mind raced every which way as my car continued north, but by the time I reached Danbury I’d acquitted myself of any wrongdoing. I had done what I could. The rest was up to her. Of the larger picture I remained decidedly ignorant. Like a junkie—and as a bartender I’d known plenty of them—the vague awareness of my tenuous situation was accompanied not only by denial, but also a strange euphoria, and I didn’t want the feeling to end. Besides, I told myself, again and again, I could always write the Roorback post and wriggle free of any trouble or blame. It was like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it made me play more fearlessly. For this still felt like a game. Make-believe.
I turned off the highway and tried to shift my attention from the mess I’d left behind to the mess that lay ahead. My father and Julie lived in a century-old lake house surrounded by horse farms and rolling hills. It was hard to think of a more picturesque place for a couple to retire to after decades in the city, but Julie hadn’t spent decades in the city. She was only a year older than me. A reformed party girl. An absentee mother. And the only (half) Asian I’d ever seen in Litchfield County. For several years now I’d been trying to figure out what she was doing living a rural life she clearly hated, with a man she didn’t love. Was money that important? Or was she running from something?
Julie wasn’t responsible for my parents’ divorce (that title went to a “Porsche Girl” my father met at an auto-show advertising dinner while I was in college). No, she came several years and women later, after my father had squeezed everything he could from his extended midlife crisis and settled, creased and furrowed, int
o semiretirement outside Litchfield. It was during this period that I grew closest to him, the two of us stung by recent—repeated—failures (I’d just dropped out of NYU), but with all of life suddenly open to us. We saw each other every month, even took a road trip together. We were becoming friends.
Then Julie appeared. They met for the first time at a Midtown-hotel lounge where my father was entertaining a table of big-shot marketing people. Julie was their cocktail waitress, and somehow numbers were exchanged. She played it perfectly after that, stretched the chase out over several months so as to serve up her spicy past in digestible morsels. There were her children, for instance, two twin girls and a boy—ages six, six, and five—who lived with their father in Nassau County, begging the question—
Oh, there were so many questions it was hard to know where to begin.
As is a son’s obligation, I’d rebelled against every stage of their courtship, from the sordid Phil Spector–ness of their initial meeting, through the dark days of the engagement, and on to the awkward wedding itself, which officially completed my father’s reduction to cliché. He had doomed himself to play out the string with a washed-up stripper—because at some point, with her tits and attitude, Julie must have been a stripper—and that was just too much to bear. I refused to accept his new reality—or mine—and instead defaulted to a strategy of mordant disregard to get me through my Litchfield visits. This further distanced me from my father, of course, while exacerbating the significant tension and discord already present in the house. Still, I couldn’t help myself. It was a rough situation. And I’d never been much of a bigger person.
Whether by accident or not, my father’s birthday fell on one of the few weeks all year that Julie played host to her kids. Which is why he always begged me to come—even sprang for the rental car. And I couldn’t blame him. They—Amber, Ashley, and their brother, Jordan (some real Asian-American names for you)—were miniature hooligans who pillaged with no fear of reprisal. Everyone ignored them, or tried to, except poor Loretta, the Honduran maid, whose job it was to keep them under control.
“She’d have better luck in the green-card lottery,” my father muttered, after one particularly difficult night a few years back.
The poor guy, turning sixty in a cyclone. But he would try to rally while I reverted to form, did what I always did: mock Julie’s mindless small talk at dinner, and after she’d drunkenly gone to bed, slowly shake my head in disdain as my father sipped his scotch and kept the conversation away from anything personal or approaching important. Indeed, it was only out of some enduring filial respect that I hadn’t yet asked the question that hovered over his house like an electric cloud—that being what the hell my father’s thirty-four-year-old wife had done to lose custody of her three confused children. Because something pretty unbelievable must have happened.
Two cars—two vehicles—were parked in the driveway. The tiny Prius belonged to the long-suffering Loretta, keeper of secrets and nominal order. Beside the Prius sat another hybrid, this one brand-new and bright red, and it would have been exciting news, would have marked an evolution in family environmental thinking, if it weren’t a massive Escalade, complete with step-up running boards and what looked like monster-truck tires. The thing was so wide the rearview mirrors had necks. I could only shake my head. That they’d gone to the trouble of buying the hybrid somehow made it worse.
I walked into the house and was immediately assaulted by the piercing screams of my young stepsiblings. They were in the den, jumping up and down on the couches while a TV gunfight droned on in the background. This is what a Yoko Ono karaoke party must sound like, I thought, as I turned and walked the other way. I found Loretta in the kitchen, watching a Spanish game show as she tended to a pot of vegetables. She was momentarily startled, but recovered enough to say, “Hallo.” “Hola,” I responded, and from there we fumbled through each other’s languages until I came to understand that my father and Julie were at the golf club.
“Practice,” Loretta said, making an odd attempt at a golf swing.
A shriek alit from the other room, so loud it echoed.
“La casa mucho noisy,” I said pathetically. “No wonder señor et señorita left.”
“Señor-a,” Loretta said. “No señorita.” We grinned in some kind of collusion.
I couldn’t wait around at the house, not with Romper Room in full swing, so I set off across town to find them. My father had joined the Torrington Country Club before Julie appeared on the scene, so the membership—a genteel roster of aging blue bloods—had no choice but to tolerate her plunging dinner dresses, skintight tennis whites, and thong bikinis at the children’s pool (I hadn’t seen her golf outfit yet). The wives wouldn’t speak to her, of course, and the husbands weren’t allowed to, but Julie didn’t give a shit. She thought the place was hilarious. It’s the one thing I liked about her.
I parked in the members lot and walked past the clubhouse to the driving range. I spotted Julie right away, at the far end of a row of comically clothed bodies hacking at stationary golf balls. She was wearing a sleeveless white top and a blue daisy-print miniskirt that barely reached her thighs. A matching choker added just the right touch of S&M to the proceedings, while allowing for an unobstructed view of her wondrous breasts. I stopped a moment to take in the scene, its lavish, unadulterated spectacle. Julie was taking a lesson from the head pro, who was down on one knee, like an on-deck hitter, patiently placing balls on tees, while my stepmother, still fit as a showgirl, stood up tall, spread her legs past shoulder-width, and took abbreviated swipes at the earth with some kind of high iron. In the four swings I witnessed, she made contact—with the golf ball—exactly half the time. The problem was simple to diagnose: her assets were a liability. She couldn’t swing her arms without her tits getting in the way. Not that anyone cared. This performance had nothing to do with sport, and everything to do with a thirty-four-year-old seductress stuck in the middle of nowhere with a sixty-year-old retiree. It was only a matter of time—weeks by the look of it—before a dock boy or yoga instructor or this golf pro here began complicating matters—if it wasn’t already happening.
And my father? you might ask. He was a few spots down, hitting wedge shots at a crooked flag a hundred yards away. Could he be that oblivious? Or did he truly not care about the swirl of activity surrounding his wife? Christ, maybe he actually enjoyed it, in some perverse Hugh Hefner–ish way. I don’t know. It was hard enough to view from a distance, this tragic final act of an American life, without delving under the sheets for the particulars. The total detachment. The absence of self-awareness. Or was it too much self-awareness? Had my father won or given up?
Bill Cole stayed poised over the ball as I approached him, but he must have sensed I was there, for his awkward swing produced a hand-rattling shank that sliced off toward the trees at all deliberate speed. He grimaced and looked up.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
“Aidan. How are you? So sorry we weren’t home.”
“Don’t worry about it.” We shook hands and sort of patted each other on the back at the same time. A hybrid hug, I thought.
“It’s just that Julie had a lesson scheduled—”
“I see that.”
“—and we were getting in Loretta’s way. She’s cooking dinner for us. Did you see the kids?” Something weird was happening. Two trickles of sweat had escaped from under his cap and were now wandering down past his ear. Except they were . . . black. Was his cap dirty or something? “Here, come say hello to your stepmother.”
“I don’t want to interrupt.”
“No, no.”
We made our way down the firing line. In front of us, Julie swung and missed and giggled; the pro chuckled along with her, but stood up abruptly when he saw us. Julie turned around, and what Touché once described as “the greatest fake smile in the stepmother business” now spread across her face. She held her arms out, shirt stretched taut, and I stepped up to her. Her breasts felt like water ball
oons that could only give so much before bursting, which is not to say I didn’t test them. Indeed, we held on a beat too long, the moment heightened by sweat and perfume and the audience that was watching. She knew what she was doing. She knew that if I saw her in some Brooklyn bar (or, more likely, a Vegas lounge), I, like any man, would have been all over her. And who knows what she would have done then. We let go, and I backed away.
A few minutes later, her lesson came to a merciful end, and the four of us paraded toward the pro shop. Flustered after our encounter, I had somehow picked up Julie’s golf bag and was now carrying it like a caddy, while the pro spoke—apparently seriously—about Julie’s swing-plane.
One night, I thought. Just one night.
I followed my father’s vintage MG along Route 4 toward Woodbridge Lake. The air was dry and cool with the wind, and I realized I’d gone almost two hours without thinking, without obsessing, about Paige. Which is exactly what I started to do. But then we stopped at an intersection and something in the lead car caught my eye; the top was down and my father had taken his cap off, and his hair was . . . darker. That’s what it was! The bastard was dyeing it.
A frazzled-looking Loretta was waiting for us when we turned into the driveway. She began speaking rapidly in Spanish, which no one understood, but the gist of it was that Ashley or Amber (did Loretta get them confused as well? Did Julie?) had got loose in my father’s study and knocked one of his prized advertising awards off the shelf.
“A CLIO?” my father asked, before realizing Loretta (and Julie, for that matter) would have no idea what he was talking about.
“Is broken,” Loretta said.
My father brushed past her into the house. The kids were nowhere to be heard.
“Want a drink?” Julie asked. “I’ll make a pitcher of margaritas before I shower.”
“You’ve got him drinking margaritas?” I asked.
“I meant for you and me. He’s strictly whisky or wine.”
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