“For a married couple it might as well be years. I kind of thought if our marriage ended you’d give me the benefit of a little notice instead of making me figure it out via your lack of communication and propensity to hide out in foreign countries.”
Troy stepped onto the sand and began plodding across the beach. April glanced down at her own fancy shoes and then over to the homeless guy. With a few curses, she kicked off her heels and trekked across the sand toward her husband, almost ex.
“Real nice,” April said when she finally caught up. Troy was seated, face toward the sea. “You’re talking divorce one hour after my mother’s funeral. Thanks a fucking lot for making this a banner day.”
“I’m only talking divorce because you started the conversation. In your April sort of way. And your mom? Don’t act as if this is a huge shock. You’ve treated her as dead since the day I met you. That she was actually alive and not long since expired of some unnamed illness was the biggest revelation I’ve ever heard on a fifth date.”
“You’re not being fair,” April said. Then she thought of Luc’s words. “You told me she already died.” Maybe Troy was right. Maybe both of them were.
“I don’t disagree,” he said. “On some level I’m not being fair. But neither are you.”
Troy shook his head as April continued to stand above him, wind tossing her hair, arms wrapped tightly around her waist.
“What am I supposed to think?” she said. “First you cheated. Then you act like you’re a superswell guy for admitting it. Then you were in London, a train ride away, with the mistress in question at your side—”
“She was hardly a mistress.”
“Sex buddy. Whatever. You were with her in London and refused to come see me. How else would a reasonable person interpret the situation?”
“I didn’t make an effort. I can’t dispute that. But what about when you were a breakfast table away? A couch away? In the same bed? You refused to see me in New York, too. You were right there, but you might as well have been in Paris.”
“What did you expect? You made this huge confession that left me questioning whether I knew you at all. Because my husband is sweet and loyal and would never do anything like that. You didn’t even tell me in person. You picked up the phone and started firing away, emptying your chamber before I had a chance to catch my breath.”
“Fair enough. It would’ve been better in person—”
“Yes.” Or better still not at all. “And on top of this you later admit, whoops, I also cheated on my first wife! Which, I get it, has nothing to do with me. Except everything. Because now it’s a pattern of behavior. And patterns are what make the person.”
“I never should’ve told you about Susannah.”
“No shit,” April mumbled, the surf and sky burying her words.
“But you did ask. And you can’t compare the two relationships. My first marriage was over before it started. I remember standing at the altar, sweat pouring off my face, thinking, all right, exactly how quickly would Susannah’s mob-adjacent family have me murdered if I bailed? You know my entire marriage to Susannah was shorter than the length of time you and I dated, right?”
“Really?” April said as she dug her toes into the cold, damp sand. “I don’t think I ever knew that.”
“Susannah and I were married exactly long enough to produce two daughters fifteen months apart. The first time Susannah served me with divorce papers, the first of four total instances, she was seven months pregnant with Chelsea. She pulled the papers each time, but doubtless there would’ve been a fifth process server tracking me down had I not grown the balls to end it myself.”
“She filed when she was pregnant? With Chelsea?”
“Yes. And again with Chloe. So you can’t even talk patterns. It’s not the same thing. With you, with what happened, I was so goddamned lonely. And make no mistake, I’m not blaming you. But you’d gotten back from that big auction in Texas. Something happened with your mom, or your dad. Or something. You wouldn’t tell me. You came home sullen and sad but with the insistence that everything was fine! You were so far away from me.”
“Texas?” April thought for a minute. Yes, there was Texas, but Texas was nothing. Had she come back that distraught?
“It’d been building,” he said. “Your distance. I guess that happens in marriages longer than two years, but what did I know about that? You don’t have to explain yourself, all right? Relationships go through cycles. I get that now. Marriages shift. They are happy or sad or neither. They have high tides and low tides.”
“Which is which?” April asked. “Is high tide good or is it low? Because I could argue for either.”
Growing up three blocks from the Pacific, they planned their days around the tide cycles. When you walked, when you surfed, when you sunbathed, when you watched the sunset while slugging beer stolen from the Qwik-e-mart. At high tide the water was closer, bigger, more majestic. But at low tide you had the space to run, to walk, to explore the wide expanse of beach.
“Actually,” Troy said and chuckled a little. “I don’t know. I don’t even understand my own analogy.”
“Nothing happened in Texas,” April said. “Not really. There was a piece in that auction I thought was a replica of an old dresser of my mom’s. Anyway, it wasn’t the same. The dates were all wrong. Then my dad called, said it was urgent. I flew out to see him, as you probably remember. Turned out there was no actual alarm. So when I said everything was fine I meant it. Everything was as it had been, nothing had changed. Funny how nothing can be such a blow.”
Troy nodded.
“So,” April said. “If I seemed remote, I’m sorry. But your response was disproportionate to the infraction.”
Not that lonely sex was unheard of. Not that April hadn’t done the same.
“Absolutely,” Troy said. “I’m only trying to explain where I was coming from, which is not the same as an excuse. Bottom line, it felt like a rejection. Then I went to Singapore, and there she was, a female, open and listening.”
“They always are.”
“And it was horrible. When I cheated on Susannah I felt nothing. Nothing. When I cheated on you I instantly felt like the biggest piece of shit alive.”
“Good.”
“Well. As long as we’re on the same page.”
“I wish you never told me,” April blurted.
“Excuse me?”
“About Singapore. Why did you tell me if it was a onetime thing? So different from what happened with Susannah the two couldn’t possibly be linked?”
“Because I believe in honesty in a marriage,” Troy said. “I’m kind of alarmed you don’t.”
“But it assuaged your guilt and did nothing to help me. Nothing. It only left me sitting around wondering when you were going to announce the next piece of bad news.”
“You’ve got to be kidding—”
“I know it’s an unpopular opinion, okay? But there it is. I’m angrier that you dragged me into it than I am it happened in the first place, assuming the first would be the only place. Spouses don’t have to know everything about each other. What happened did not affect us at all until you decided that it should.”
“Fuck,” Troy said and rested his head on his forearms. “I never thought of it like that. I believe in complete and total honesty in a marriage, especially in our marriage because my parents never had that, and I certainly didn’t in my first. I wanted us to be different because we were. We were—are—different. But fuck. I don’t necessarily agree, but I get where you’re coming from. I really do.”
April spent months questioning whether she really knew this man after seven years of marriage. But suddenly and at once she realized that Troy’s immediate revelation of the misdeed was exactly in line with everything she knew of her husband. Troy was black-and-white, a rule follower, and because no one was perfect all the time, if a rule was broken he rectified it immediately, regardless of collateral damage.
“And I unders
tand why you told me,” she said. “At all, and in the manner you did. I’ve been mad about it, but that’s not fair. I never told you how I felt, probably because I didn’t know myself. But it’s like when something bad happens, a path is clear, inviting in ever-more crap. You realize what worst-case-scenario looks like and can picture it fully formed and in color.”
Worst case wasn’t even that your husband cheated on you once. You could probably get through that. But could you really survive a second time, three times, or more? Would he have a one-night stand and then an affair and then some family sequestered in Connecticut? To April infidelity felt like a permanent and long-term diagnosis, one that would eventually result in death.
“I’ve been waiting twenty years for my mom to die,” April said. “Everything—my life—was going along fine, and then suddenly we found out she was sick, and that the sickness would only get worse. It would gnaw away at her brain, they told us, eventually turning it to Swiss cheese and then to nothing. I’d been waiting, waiting for the eventuality of her illness. I’m sorry if I did that to you, too. I’m sorry if I kept expecting the worst.”
“God, April,” Troy said and looked up, a red circle on his forehead from his watch. “You can’t think like that. You can’t live life waiting for something bad to happen. That’s miserable.”
April shrugged. Troy was right. It was miserable.
“There’s more,” April said with a sigh. “Remember a couple of years ago? It was right around our fifth anniversary. I was on the phone with my brother, in the closet—”
“You were crying.” Troy squinted toward the ocean, remembering. “Wearing a cocktail dress, diamonds, and crying. Sort of yelling, too. You’re always so calm. I’d never heard you yell before, especially at the magnificent Brian Potter, doer of no wrong.”
He looked toward April and winked, the sibling bond a source of teasing between them. What kind of brother-sister duo was so respectful of one another, so never-complaining? It was downright unnatural.
“Yes,” April said. “I was yelling at him. Sort of.
“I can’t do it, Brian. I’m glad you’re stronger than I am. But I can’t and I won’t.
“Brian had taken a test,” she went on. “To indicate whether he had the gene my mother did. It’s genetic. I’m not sure I exactly ever mentioned that.”
“You never did,” Troy said. “I always wondered—but you never said—I figured—”
“Dad had only just told us. Brian marched right out to get the test. And me? Well, I simply didn’t want to learn exactly how shitty my provenance, as we say in the biz. In layman’s terms, how damaged my goods.”
“And Brian?” he said. “His goods?”
“Perfectly undamaged.”
“What about you? Are you ever going to find out? Wait. I think I already know the answer.” He smiled wanly.
“I thought ‘no way,’ but now I’m not so sure. Sometimes waiting to see if there will be bad news is worse than finding out one way or another. The mental torture I’ve put myself through over the last few months was several times worse than the shock of finding out what happened in the first place. Likewise waiting for my mom to die was weirdly more painful than the death itself. So. Maybe. Maybe I will find out.”
And there was another thing, unspoken. Back in the glory days of their marriage, before its longevity was in question, April always said she married up. Troy claimed he felt the same, her brother insisting that the best marriages were like theirs, ones where both parties thought they were getting the better end of the deal.
But Troy would not claim a better deal if April was guaranteed to end up bedridden and incoherent. He would not think he married up if such a shitty provenance were discovered. Now it didn’t matter so much. Nothing was signed, filed, or otherwise legally recognized, but it remained unlikely he’d be the one manning any future bedsides.
“I won’t tell you what I think you should do,” Troy said. “But to be clear, you know I don’t give a shit about that, right? Whether you have the gene or you don’t? You’re probably thinking about the dreaded provenance and crap—”
April smiled, surprised he could still read her so well.
“Bottom line, I don’t care what disease you end up with,” he said.
“Uh, thanks.” Her smile spread wider. “That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“We’ll deal with whatever happens, that or some other thing. And by ‘we’ I mean exactly that. You told me to say I wanted a divorce, but I won’t say it because it’s not true.”
Troy’s voice, which was always strong, flat, unwavering, started to quiver. April was taken aback. She’d never seen him this upset, so vulnerable, even when he told her about Willow. That was over the phone, which probably had something to do with it, but in none of their subsequent conversations did he once show such a crack. Troy was perpetually understated, yes, and not a soul on the beach would mistake this for a bona fide scene. But for Troy this was a demonstration, and a large one at that.
“Thank you,” April said. “Thank you for saying so.”
I don’t want a divorce either.
The words were there, but she could not say them. Did she mean it? Or was it merely a reflexive response? Your husband tells you something, you respond in kind.
When she didn’t respond, Troy nodded, biting his bottom lip, eyes watering.
“Shall we go?” he said and jerked his head toward the road. “The conversation’s not over, but I’m sort of out of things to say.”
April nodded in return. She was almost done as well, but there was one last question she had to pose. Troy respected her point of view on the Willow admission. April had to respect his, too.
“I have to ask you something,” she said as they made their way to the street. “I’m not trying to bring up old wounds, I’m really not. But I have to ask.”
“Uh, okay.” He laughed nervously. “I can only imagine what kind of trouble I’m about to get myself into this time.”
“No trouble. Promise.” April took a deep breath. “What if I slept with someone, too? A one-night stand. Would you want to know?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course—” Troy stopped. He looked at her and tilted his head slightly to the left.
“Think before you respond,” April said, holding his gaze in hers.
“Of course— “
“Think.”
“Of course it would depend on the situation,” he finally said.
“What if you flew home tonight—”
“I’m not flying home tonight.”
“What if you flew home tonight and I went out drinking with my brother and hooked up with some guy I went to high school with?”
“A guy you went to high school with?” Troy looked wary, a little off-balance.
“Like, I don’t know, Miguel Guttierez. He was a really good soccer player.”
“Uh, is there something I should know about this Miguel person?”
“No! Not at all. Haven’t talked to the guy in fifteen years. Never even kissed him. Just picking someone random.”
“And foreign,” Troy noted.
“Yes.”
“And your liaison tonight. It will happen because you are sad and lonely and maybe still quite pissed at me? And Miguel is charming and interesting and perhaps also hot?”
“Something like that.”
He sighed.
“No,” he said. “I agree with what you said before. I’m a little surprised to hear myself say it, but I agree. I would not want to know. You can keep that to yourself.”
April thought, though she wasn’t sure, but she thought that Troy understood all she said with her question. April would not bring it up again.
“So I’m almost done with Paris,” she said as they found their discarded shoes, thankfully not hocked for malt liquor by any transients. “I should be home within a week.”
“Home.” His voice was craggy. “Are you planning to come back to the apartment?”<
br />
“Yes.” April tried to stop her words from weaving. “For now. I mean, if I’m welcome.”
Troy bobbed his head in a way that was neither nod nor shake. Together they wiped sand from the bottoms of their feet. After slipping back into her heels April glanced up to find Troy staring at her with an expression she could not name.
“Is this decision,” he said. “Is it a decision? Or only the first step of many?”
“The first step. I don’t know what will happen but it’s something.”
“Odds, Vogt. Give me odds.”
“Probably about fifty-fifty,” she said and winked. April was kidding, mostly, but she suspected fifty-fifty was not too far from the truth. The odds sucked, but April still liked her chances.
“Wow, you’re killing me,” Troy said and smiled in return. “A coin flip.”
“Right? What a noncommittal jerk of a statistic.”
Troy’s face broke into a full-blown grin.
“Well,” he said. “At least I know where we stand. For now.”
He reached out. April took his hand.
Fingers laced together, they stepped into the crosswalk. April felt lighter somehow, hopeful. It was an odd reaction given she stood at the edge of her marriage after having just watched her mother’s life fall away. Although that was the thing about low points: The only place to look was up.
Chapitre LXVII
April returned to Paris raw, her nerves fried. She could hardly step outside the flat without the smells and noises of the city overpowering her. Had the scooters always been that obnoxious? The scent of warm chicken outside her building so pronounced?
Her flight left in three days, and the clock in April’s head clicked loudly. Each second was one step closer to the end, the end of her Paris trip at a minimum, her efforts to do something with Marthe’s legacy still wildly unhinged. April could not picture what the catalog might look like, whether it’d contain the words “private collection” or Marthe’s full name. Never mind the catalog, April could not picture what her life might look after she touched down. New York had seemed so distant but was now hurtling toward her at breakneck speed.
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