by Jessica Lott
I’d seen myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were swollen like an ornamental goldfish’s. My upper lip was puffy and raw. I hadn’t showered, and my hair was matted in back. I was listless and weak from not eating.
“I didn’t even know you were here.” She sniffed. “You smell like a bar. Have you been drinking in bed?” She made me a cheese sandwich, while I sat at the table crying into my folded arms and choking out the story of Natasha. He was with her! When the entire time I’d just assumed he needed to concentrate on his work. That I was irreplaceable!
“Every woman’s got a story like yours,” she said. “You need to be more proactive. Remember how you said this separation was a good thing?”
“That was before he replaced me. Like I was nothing.”
“I’ll invite Rick and Nosh over—those idiots will distract you. Don’t take any bong hits.”
“I wish he knew what this felt like!” I looked up from the table. “Maybe he thinks I don’t care because I haven’t been showing it. Maybe I should ask him to meet me—”
“Oh, no,” Hallie said. “No. Believe me—he knows you care. He knows you better than you think. Cry as much as you want but stay away from him.”
She went to the phone. By the time the guys showed up, I was back in my room. They called to me, but I refused to come downstairs.
The next night, after thinking it over, I decided to go to Rhinehart’s house. I waited until Hallie went into the bathroom, and then, my pulse beating wildly, I snuck out. Manic energy carried me all the way to the edge of his lawn. The lights were on, curtain drawn. That’s when I started to have doubts. What if he was in there with her? I ducked over to the garage and peeped in the double-paned window. His car was next to the mower and the gasoline containers. Trampling his ivy, I made my way over to the living room window and peered through the open sliver between the curtains. My breath caught. He was alone, sitting in the armchair in the corner, reading, one pinkie against the wing of his nose, as when he was deep in thought. Relaxed. Peaceful, almost. I was suddenly furious. I tore around to the side door and slammed into the living room.
He jerked, dropping his book. “Tatie! You scared the crap out of me.”
I was unable to move from the doorway. He took off his reading glasses, while I watched his hands.
“You look a little wild. You haven’t come to kill me have you?” He hesitated. “Is that my shirt you have on?”
I hadn’t even thought about my clothes. I was still in the Carhartts I’d been wearing for several days, and an old shirt of Rhinehart’s. Hoping, in a vague voodoo way, that it would make him long for me.
“I want the things I gave you back,” I blurted out.
“What things?”
“My book of Renaissance paintings.”
“Have you been wandering about in the yard? You have something stuck in your hair, a leaf.”
When he stood up, I instinctively jerked forward to return the hug. He didn’t move, and I stopped mid-motion. I began to sob, taking air in big, gulping breaths.
“Oh, Tatie.”
“I saw you today,” I choked out. “I saw you with someone. On campus.”
“One of my students?”
“It wasn’t just a student! I know who she is.”
I waited for his eyes to shuttle around as he came up with an excuse. His face looked naked without its glasses. But instead he looked at me with something like pity. “You can’t be making yourself ill over this. I get jealous of you, too, but I try and understand that you need to live your life independent of mine.”
My heart surged to hear he was jealous, and to cover it I said, “Fuck that. You have no respect for me.”
“I do, and I’m sensitive to your feelings, trust me.” He sighed. “I sometimes forget how young you are.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just that these situations feel completely overwhelming before we get better trained in heartache.”
I lost my mother I wanted to shout at him, what could be a bigger grief than that? But I didn’t want to get us off track. “Natasha’s not even pretty! She smells like cabbage. I can’t believe you!”
My hands over my face, I bent towards him. He didn’t touch me. Instead, he said, almost to himself, “I’d thought you’d held this theory for weeks now.”
“Why? Who’d you hear it from?”
He winced slightly. “Natasha had mentioned that you glare at her. In class. I said that couldn’t be—it’s so unlike you, but I had wondered about it.”
The horror of my situation hit me. They had discussed me! Probably in bed! I started crying again.
Rhinehart patted my tangled hair. I hated myself for letting him. After a while, he said, “Your outfit reminds me of something. Summer, maybe, or backwoods camping. It’s very endearing.”
He led me over to the striped couch and sat me down on the cushion with the squeaky spring. “I’ll get you something to drink. Alcohol probably isn’t a good idea.”
He brought me orange juice in a glass from a set I’d bought him that had been similar to his mother’s long lost ones. “Where did you find these?” he’d said that day, looking as pleased as a little boy.
“Try to calm down,” Rhinehart was saying, and I thought of Hallie back in our snug place, watching a movie on the papasan chair, assuming I was in my room sleeping. Or maybe she’d found me out. She was right. I shouldn’t have come.
I felt a rush of anger. I hated him and was on the verge of saying so, but the thought of it brought on another wave of tears. “You’re such an asshole.”
He let go of me, and I sat down on the couch, still huffing.
He said, “How did we get here, you and me? You never think a relationship will get to this place and then it does. Listen, forget Natasha—”
Even the mention of her name stung. “I can’t forget her. The scene keeps replaying itself in my head over and over.”
“Suspend the movie for minute.”
This gave me a glimmer of hope. “So you’re not seeing her?”
“No. I’m not. You’re the only person I’ve been with since I arrived here. And you are more than enough for one man.”
I squinted at him to see if he was lying.
“But the relationship between us isn’t healthy anymore. Tatie—” He grabbed my knees. “You must see that. You must see how miserable you are with me.”
But I was miserable apart from him, too. That was the problem. I started to say that if we got back together but were more careful, maybe seeing each other only a few times a week, not overdoing it like we usually did.
He was shaking his head. “It’s a trick to think we can change it. Every time it gets worse. It’s excruciating to keep trying. It’s pathological.”
“But I love you,” I said, choking it out. “I never loved anyone as much as I love you. I don’t want to be unhappy with you. Why are we?”
He didn’t say anything, although I knew he had theories. I had theories. He retreated into his work, abandoning me. He made me jealous. I cried all the time and felt inferior. We separated, ostensibly for my good, but he was the one who became more productive, while I skipped class to listen to sad music and write in my journal about him. I didn’t want to discuss these things again. He put his arms around me, and I leaned into his chest and breathed in his cologne, trying to pretend none of what had happened over the past two months had happened at all.
The rest of the evening I remember as a nauseating daze, lying like that for a while, then kissing, then him pulling back, another argument after he said that we’d done the right thing by splitting up and that we needed to move on.
“I just need to feel better,” I said, trying to crawl into his bed. The sheet was too tight, and I had to jerk it back. “I just want to go to sleep and wake up again and feel better.” I wanted him to join me, but he stayed on the other side of the room, arms crossed. Then he left. The light clicked off. I stayed behind, holding myself in his bed.<
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• • •
Hallie remembered this story. She also remembered how, after graduation, suddenly I was interested in moving to New York City with her when originally I’d wanted to go to Seattle. “And then you get here, and he can’t even make time to meet you for a cup of coffee.”
I felt the need to defend our relationship. Its significance. “It’s difficult when there’s so much emotion and intensity. We were incredibly close.”
“This is what I was afraid of!” she said. “The rewriting of history. You were together for less than a year—and most of the time, you didn’t even seem like you were enjoying yourself! If you’d had a therapist back then, which you should have, she would have told you that you ‘modulated yourself around him.’ ”
“I was twenty. What girl doesn’t do that at that age?”
“Plenty. There were those bossy girls that made their boyfriends buy them Monistat. Remember Gertie? Her boyfriend used to vacuum our place. She used to yell at him, ‘Mark! Mark!’ ”
“Gertie was a hysteric. She made us take her to the emergency room for menstrual cramps.”
She waved this away. “Ever since that dinner party, the old man’s been coming up in conversation. Select cameos. As if you’re thinking about him a lot more than you’re saying. You’re not going to see him, are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, nonchalantly. “Maybe. I don’t have to make that decision yet. He’s not even in the country.”
She looked at me again, in that annoying, deliberately penetrating way. “You know that ‘separated’ is different from ‘divorced.’ ”
“I’m not looking to move in on him.”
“So you say now. Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t go to that party. I hate couples who fight in public. It’s not good energy for me to be around. Already I’m aware that Adán and I used to have a hell of a lot more fun when we were dating.”
“I don’t know how you could have sustained that momentum.” The two of them had been crazy about each other and just wild in general—at a corporate party at the Gansevoort they’d been caught having sex in the rooftop pool. And then they tried it again, two weeks later. Adán made a lot of money, so their partying hit a level of extremism that I, and even Hallie, were unfamiliar with. He was from Madrid, and slightly older than us, with thick black hair and hooded eyes that when he got drunk made him look a little wicked, like a satyr. What I found attractive about him was his vitality, not just sexual, which Hallie loved to boast about, but life vitality—the loud, warm laugh, a love of sharing, and a real interest in people and their ideas, even if, at times, his intensity had brought out the worst in Hallie, who hated to be shown up.
Hallie had moved on to a subject she liked. Adultery. She had a wealth of examples. “Did I tell you about my friend Dawn? The one whose husband was cheating on her and she got—hey, you remember her, you met her at a cocktail party at my house. Her husband’s from Guyana.”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, she gets it into her head that he could disappear. Disappear! Like a fucking elf. Because every time she thought she saw him out with another woman, she’d look again, and he’d be gone. He was probably ducking behind a car.”
My house phone rang. It was Adán. “Guapa, I am sorry to disrupt you, but my wife is missing. I have tried calling her phone three times. Before I make a missing persons poster I thought I should check at your house?”
I laughed and passed the phone to Hallie, who took it lazily, and I suspected that she knew Adán had been calling her and had chosen not to answer so that he’d have to track her down.
Even though it was freezing outside, she wore a silk dress with wide sleeves, an intoxicating pattern of black orchids that set off her white skin, the big green eyes and black hair. She resembled a burlesque dancer off-hours. Curled up on the couch, she murmured into the receiver. This was one of her mother’s gestures; Constance had had a range of movements and expressions that infused a sexy mystery into anything she did—it was part of her professional allure. In the 1960s, she had been considered a very promising film star and was often compared to Sharon Tate.
This was what I had heard, at any rate. By the time I knew her, Constance was spending the majority of her day in her bed, always made up as if going somewhere for the evening, her hair waved, her valentine mouth painted a bright red, her deep-set eyes, which were seductively half-closed from the tranquilizers, done in neutral grays. In that light-filled bedroom, Constance reclined against her satin pillows like a gorgeous doll, indulging us with compliments and speaking offhandedly about her affairs with various directors and other screen personalities. We’d be over at her vanity, putting on her makeup and making pucker faces into one of the three mirrors that were adjustable to show every angle of the face.
“Darling, not so much on both the lips and eyes,” Constance would call over. “Choose one feature to accent—a man can be frightened by too much beauty.” Standing there, in the heavy Payless shoes my father accidentally bought a size too big, I was in awe of her. Everything about her. Her warm, sweet scent, her languid movements and throaty voice.
The year I turned eleven, I began imitating her heavy-lidded gaze and way of speaking at a three-quarter profile. Although I’d never seen Constance outside the house, not even in the yard, I imagined us out doing mother-daughter things together, like shopping for bras, and eating ice cream on those benches by the harbor, and having our nails done at the salon I always passed on my way to school. “This must be your daughter,” the manicurist would say. “I can see the resemblance.” This part of the vision felt a little far-fetched to me. I looked nothing like Constance, although she had said to me once, “I used to have lovely legs like yours when I was young.”
I should have been Constance’s daughter. We got along much better than she and Hallie did. Hallie was rude and gave one-word answers and said her mother’s room smelled like a nursing home, while I could sit on the edge of the bed for hours listening to Constance, watching her dab her lips carefully with a napkin, then tip her plate to let the cat lick quiche crumbs from it. When Constance said, “Terry, tell me all about your week,” I gave the most minute details, anything I thought she would find diverting or amusing. Mr. Feinberg and his car breaking down so we all had to push it. How some kids had been busted for drinking beers and smoking cigarettes behind the town gazebo. Hallie glared at me—she had been behind the gazebo that day. After several of Hallie’s interruptions: “this is so boring,” “this is stupid,” Constance said to her, “Darling, fetch my purse and take out a ten and run down to Mr. Stevens’s. I need a new pair of eyelashes. Ask him to get them for you, he’ll know which ones. You can spend the change on whatever you like.” After she was gone, Constance and I exchanged glances. Both of us relieved.
It was shortly after the eyelashes errand that Hallie decided she no longer wanted me to come over. “We all feel you’ve been hanging around too much. Like a stray.” She and I could still hang out, she said, just not at her house. Which suited her, since her favorite activity at this time was either stealing or standing by the road, flashing her new boobs at cars. I knew within a week she’d be over it, but still it stung that when I rang for her, she had her visiting cousin come down and guard the door to prevent me from entering, while she cheerily called out Constance’s window, “Just a moment. My mom and I are talking.”
I wanted to cry out to Constance to let me in, tell her how horrible Hallie was, but of course I didn’t. I just waited on the porch, dreaming of my own mother. She was fiercely protective, to the point of holding grudges. If Hallie tried to come to my house, weeping out her apologies, my mother would slam the door in her face. Would she though? Or would she be charmed by Hallie, let her in, maybe even take her side against me?
It was frustrating how little I knew about her. There was a photograph that had been on the mantel ever since I could remember, and in it she was standing next to a horse, and so I had always thought of her as a great horsewoman
, although my father said that was just for the photo—she’d never ridden one. Throughout the course of my childhood, I had asked my father what she was like, particularly when he pointed out a resemblance between us, but his descriptive skills weren’t very good, and he would often fall back on “she was a great woman. One of the best. And that’s not just me being biased. Everyone who met her thought so.” Then he’d tell me about the Christmas ornaments, and how hers would sell out first.
• • •
Hallie didn’t like to talk about Constance, but when she got off the phone, I hazarded a comparison. “The way you move is like her.”
“I’ve been thinking about her lately,” she said carefully. “I just hope she never knew my dad cheated on her. It really fucked me up. I still can’t get over that he did that.”
I had never really taken the infidelity seriously. I had the impression it only happened once, if at all, and not until Constance was starting to lose it, which was what Hallie should have been afraid of emulating—the painkiller addiction. When I was growing up, I saw Hallie’s dad as way below Constance’s level. He looked like a short and rather fat bird with an overbite I was certain he must be ashamed of, and he had some nondescript office job in New York City. Constance belonged with a movie star husband. I pictured her kissing Robert Redford in the theater—their faces blown up to gigantic proportions on the screen in front of them. Yet, amazingly enough, it had been this ordinary businessman whose life had wandered into the crosshairs of Constance’s and all her private demons. He’d put up with it, and so if years after his wife’s death he wanted to move to New Mexico and take up watercolor painting and open a Navajo jewelry store with a loud, brassy woman who fussed over him and called him her “bubbalou,” who the hell could blame him?
But this wasn’t a subject I was allowed to have an opinion on, and so I said, “It’s strange, isn’t it, that a lot of men can’t stand to be alone? They go from relationship to relationship.” Except for my father, who’d been a widower for life and had a perverse pride about it, the way some military people claimed “Vet.” “Why is this bothering you now?”