by Lisa Tucker
“Of course not,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re saying this to me.”
Patrick had seen his wife flinch when Billy made fun of her voice, and now he noticed that Lila was about to cry. So he stepped in, even though he was nervous, not so much about Billy turning on him—though in truth, over the years, he’d grown a little tired of Lila’s brother’s caustic “wit”—but about how his wife would react to him interfering in her relationship with her brother. He’d never done it before, but then he’d never felt like the situation so clearly demanded something of him.
“She was only trying to be nice,” Patrick said.
“And ‘nice’ is so important, isn’t it?” Billy flashed him a mean smile. He knelt down in the sand, placing William beside him, still clutching the silent boy by the wrist. “All hail the new God of Nice, the most important quality in the modern world—more important than goodness, more important than depth, and much, much more important than truth.”
Lila was standing motionless, still watching her brother. Patrick took a breath and hoped he wasn’t blushing. Had he really said anything close to what Billy was accusing him of? “I don’t think being nice is more important than goodness and truth. I think it’s unfair to categorize my position that way.”
“Of course, because that wouldn’t be nice, would it?”
Billy was staring up at him. Finally Patrick shook his head and blurted out what he was thinking. “This is beyond ridiculous.”
“Aha,” Billy sputtered. “So you do disappoint your god on occasion. Good to know.” He waited a moment, then stood up and gave Patrick a smile that looked oddly genuine. His voice sounded normal now, too, and entirely sincere. “I knew I loved you for a reason, O brother-in-law of mine.”
Patrick was thoroughly confused, but his primary reaction was relief that this hadn’t escalated further. He knew if Billy ever pushed him too far, he’d have to act, but what could he do, punch Lila’s brother? He’d never punched anyone in his life.
“Well, now that that’s settled,” Ashley said, yawning, sounding annoyed, “I’m going to take the kids back to the house for a while. Maisie is hungry and William must be, too. Pearl can help me get them some lunch.”
“I’ll go with you,” Billy said. “I’m starving.” He glanced at Lila, but his eyes settled on Patrick. “How about you guys? Are you coming along?”
“In a few minutes,” Patrick said.
“Why wait?” Lila said cheerfully. “Let’s all head back together.” She put her right hand in Patrick’s and her left hand in Billy’s. As if she were trying to glue the three of them together after her brother’s outburst. As if she were trying to show she didn’t take sides, even if one of the “sides” was her own. Patrick was even more confused, and he tried to talk to Lila about it when they were in their room, changing out of their sandy bathing suits. She’d just gotten naked and she was shivering from the sudden blast of cold from the air-conditioner vent over by the dresser. He took her in his arms and told her it wasn’t right that Billy had yelled at her.
“He wasn’t yelling at me,” she said, stepping back. “I know it sounded like that, but Billy has always been exuberant. It’s just that he’s so passionate about everything he cares about. It matters to him in a way that it doesn’t to most people.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d explained away her brother’s bad behavior by some claim that Billy was different from most people—but it was the first time that Patrick didn’t buy it. This wasn’t Billy’s caustic wit or even just teasing. Her brother had gone off on her for no reason. It was a completely irrational way to behave.
But when he told her so, Lila insisted Billy did have a reason to be upset. That book was very important; some of her colleagues had been teaching it for years. Thomas Pynchon was one of the world’s greatest authors, and Gravity’s Rainbow was his masterpiece. Naturally, Billy cared that Lila read it as soon as possible. He wanted to discuss it with her before they went back to Philly on Saturday.
Patrick stood back and looked at his wife. “Okay, but why couldn’t he have been civil about it? Why didn’t he just say, ‘No thanks, keep reading’?”
“Because he felt alienated from me.” She threw her terry cloth robe on. “And that always hurts his feelings.”
“What about your feelings?” He felt frustrated as he wondered if he even understood what had just happened. “I thought you were hurt, too?”
She thought for a moment. “I was, but I should’ve known he’d react that way. I was being stupid.”
He hated Lila’s use of the word “stupid,” which she never applied to anyone but herself. He said, “You are not stupid,” firmly and forcefully, too forcefully, in fact. He sounded angry. No wonder Lila fled into the bathroom. They never talked that way to each other.
He dressed in silence, dreading an awkward lunch with Billy and his family. Lila had put on the cheerful pink-and-white sundress that he loved, but as they made their way into the kitchen she was quiet and distant and clearly still upset. Thankfully Billy, who was undoubtedly perceptive, despite whatever else he was, noticed immediately and insisted on blaming himself for the problem. He not only apologized, but he thanked Patrick for bringing him to his senses. A few minutes later, while Billy and Ashley were getting the kids settled at the table, Lila walked over to Patrick and hugged him. “I’m sorry, honey,” she whispered in his ear. “I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of this.”
“It’s okay,” he told her and smiled.
And it was okay now. His wife was back to herself and Billy had taken responsibility for causing the conflict. This was all Patrick wanted, or at least all he could think of to expect.
And it stayed fine the rest of the week. There were no more outbursts from Lila’s brother. If anything, Billy was friendlier than usual. He went so far as to insist that he would love Patrick’s take on Gravity’s Rainbow, too, since the author had studied science and used frequent math references. “I’m sure you’ll understand it on a level that I simply can’t,” Billy said. “Only if you have time to read it, of course. I know you’re working on an important proof. Lila told me about it.”
It wasn’t that important, really a minor result in his field, but at least it was a result and those had been in short supply for Patrick since he’d agreed to chair the calculus committee. He did need to work on it, but he started Gravity’s Rainbow the next morning, intending to relax a bit, too. Unfortunately the book was far from relaxing. He put it down before the vacation was over, and left it at page 57, never to pick it up again.
And the next spring, when the idea of renting a shore house came up again, Patrick surprised himself by surprising Lila with tickets to Paris instead.
Over the years they’d been together, Lila had often defended both Patrick and his profession by calling the idea that mathematicians don’t have feelings a “ridiculous pop-culture cliché.” He appreciated her support, though he suspected it might be true that, like himself, many mathematicians were a little uncomfortable with emotional complexity. Part of it was the job itself, which demanded that you check your feelings at the door to concentrate on a reality completely outside of yourself. One of his grad school professors had posted a sign on his wall: “Mathematics doesn’t care about what you want to be true or what you think might be true but only what is true.” Of course, discovering what that truth was could be immensely difficult, but that there was truth to be discovered was a given. Thousands of years of mathematics—and every single engineering and technological breakthrough—were hard to argue against.
Patrick considered his marriage to Lila to have turned out very well by and large, and not least because it had proven to be such a low-drama affair. Unlike some of his colleagues’ wives and girlfriends, Lila had never once demanded that he demonstrate his love by intuiting her feelings—and a good thing, too, because even on the rare occasion when he tried to, he usually couldn’t get there. His wife’s relationship with her brother, especiall
y, had continued to be mostly incomprehensible to him. This was despite the dozen or so times he’d put aside a problem he was working on to google the topic of bonds between twins. He never gained any useful information, though each time he read that twins ran in families, he found himself vaguely hoping that he and Lila would never have them.
He did want children, though, and he didn’t understand why Lila kept putting it off. Most faculty couples tried to get pregnant as soon as the wife got tenure, if not before. Lila had had tenure for nearly four years when she and Patrick took a trip back to St. Louis, to visit Patrick’s father and babysit Patrick’s cousin Jason’s kids. Jason and his wife, Doreen, had an active toddler and a three-month-old baby and they desperately needed a break. They were going on a trip to California to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary.
Patrick had always been close to his cousins on his mother’s side, and Jason had been his best friend throughout high school. The two of them had stayed close over the years. Lila liked Jason and his wife, but Patrick was still impressed and grateful when she didn’t hesitate to agree to use her spring break to help them out. Admittedly, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep a toddler and a baby happy, but Patrick understood since he felt the same way.
The first night was rough. The baby was fine, but the nineteen month-old boy, Theo, became hysterical when he had to face bedtime without his parents. Patrick walked him back and forth for fifteen minutes, which felt like hours, but the little kid was still letting out an earsplitting wail. When it was Lila’s turn to take over, Patrick had never been more relieved to get into bed and close his eyes. He knew he couldn’t sleep with that sound, but he was bone tired from all the activities of toddler care: the playing and talking and laughing and distracting he and Lila had been doing all day. At one point he told her, “Why can’t they stay babies forever?” The three-month-old girl had lain in her cradle or sat placidly in her bouncy chair most of the time, only needing to be fed and changed. Patrick enjoyed her big toothless grins and the odd motion she made with her legs, as if she were riding a bicycle only she could see.
He didn’t expect to fall asleep, and when he woke up and the clock by Jason and Doreen’s bed said 3:41, he was both surprised and a little worried. Lila had never joined him. Had she driven off into the night with Theo, hoping to calm him down with the motion of the car that had worked so well for his nap? Or had she snapped and thrown the squalling kid out the window, as Patrick had joked about doing hours ago?
He found her on the couch, with Theo lying on her, snoring softly. Lila herself was awake and stroking his cheeks lightly with her fingers. She also kissed the top of Theo’s head before she noticed Patrick standing in the hallway, watching her.
“He didn’t want to sleep alone,” she whispered. “I didn’t mind. It’s been kind of nice, holding him next to me.” She paused and inhaled. “He smells so good. Have you ever noticed that about babies?”
Somehow they managed to get Theo into his crib without waking him. It was no small feat, and Patrick would have been thrilled if he wasn’t so tired.
It wasn’t until the next day that he realized something had changed. At the first sound of Theo coming awake, Lila was out of bed and at the little boy’s side—and there she remained for the next few days, almost all of the time, surprising Patrick’s father, who called Lila a natural at mothering, and, of course, surprising Patrick himself. When a grateful Jason and Doreen returned, looking decidedly younger after a short time away from parenting, and asked how everything had gone, Lila said, “Perfectly. Theo is wonderful.” She sounded oddly shy. After a pause, she added, “Both your children are.”
It was the last thing Patrick expected: his wife had apparently become smitten with a toddler. Though Patrick himself had found parenting a lot more difficult than he’d anticipated, he still felt relieved. He wanted a family and now he felt confident Lila would, too.
He decided to wait a few days to discuss it with her. He wanted to be careful how he brought it up; he suspected she might have been embarrassed that she’d burst into tears when they’d left the little boy. Maybe he was hoping she’d bring it up herself? He wasn’t sure anymore; in any case, they never had the discussion. They went back to Philadelphia and back to work, since spring break was over. And then, only three days later, her brother committed suicide.
Watching Lila’s grief was so terrible that in some ways, he was glad whenever she started another rant about Ashley, though these rants also made him uncomfortable. He wanted to believe that Lila was right, and he agreed with his wife that if Ashley had no basis to accuse Billy of child abuse, then Ashley herself was the abusive one for keeping the children from their father. The operative word, though, was “if.” If the charges against Billy—which, after all, had been supported by the court, though the one time he reminded Lila of this, he instantly regretted it, as she went back to bed and stayed there for hours, sobbing like her heart would break—but if those charges were really baseless, then Ashley was an abuser and yes, as Lila kept saying, an unfit mother. Someone who should not be caring for Billy’s beautiful children.
Even so, he was stunned when Lila said she’d contacted a lawyer because she planned to raise those kids herself. “With your help, of course,” she added slowly. Her eyes were swollen; her lovely hair was a tangled mess. “I couldn’t do it without you.”
He said he would help, because it was the only answer he could think of. But he did talk her into waiting a while, giving the kids time to grieve for their father before their young lives were turned upside down again. He knew if his wife still wanted custody of Billy’s kids later on, they’d have to deal with it, but for now, his only focus was getting through the memorial service and the next few days.
The night before the funeral at a little after three a.m., he woke with the feeling that something was wrong. He looked over at Lila, but she was sound asleep. The room seemed cold; he got up and turned the heat up, and then he sat on the edge of the bed with his back straight and his feet on the floor, still alert, still listening for something: an intruder, a dog barking in the apartment next door, whatever it was that had woken him up. But there was no sound except Lila’s breathing and the usual traffic sounds in the street below.
Patrick had never understood or respected the kind of people who claimed to believe in psychic premonitions. To him it was irrational, even ludicrous, that whenever something bad happened, apparently sane people would insist that they’d known it was going to, that they’d dreamed it a month before or seen it in a vision or read it in their horoscope. Lila used to insist that what they were really expressing was their despair at human helplessness—that deep wish within us all that if only we could have known, we could have done something to stop it, or at least had time to prepare ourselves.
In Patrick’s case, though, even if he’d known what was about to happen to Lila, he wouldn’t have known how to stop it or how to prepare for it. This was what kept him up that night, back in bed but lying still so he wouldn’t wake her: the suspicion that he was inadequate in some essential way to what his wife needed from him now, and his fear that he might lose her for good if he couldn’t figure out how to change.
THE CURE FOR MODERN LIFE
A big-hearted novel about the way we live now: the choices we make, the decisions we let life make for us, and what it means in the twenty-first century to do the right thing.
Matthew and Amelia were once in love, but a decade later, they have become professional enemies. To Amelia, who has dedicated her life to medical ethics, Matthew’s job as a high-powered pharmaceutical executive has turned him into a heartless person who doesn’t care about anything but money. Now they’re kept in balance only by Matthew’s best and oldest friend, Ben—who also happens to be Amelia’s new boyfriend. But that balance begins to crumble one night when Matthew finds himself on a desolate bridge face-to-face with a boy screaming for help. Homeless for most of his life, ten-year-old Danny is as streetwise as he i
s world-weary, and his desperation to save his three-year-old sister means he will do whatever it takes to enlist Matthew’s aid. What follows is an escalating game of one-upmanship between Matthew, Amelia, and Danny, as all three struggle to defend what is most important to them—and are ultimately forced to reconsider what it is they truly want.
Read on for a look at Lisa Tucker’s
The Cure for Modern Life
Currently available from Atria Books
Chapter One
The Kindness of Strangers
Was Matthew Connelly a bad man? He’d never once asked himself that question. Make of it what you will. Of course it would have surprised him to know that, as he walked toward the bridge that night, a little boy was asking the question for him. Because Matthew didn’t notice people like this boy, he never wondered what they were thinking about, or if they thought at all. They were as invisible as the ants he’d crushed under his feet as he walked through the streets of Grand Cayman the weekend before, with Amelia and Ben, the happy couple, deliriously grateful to have found each other, all demons of the past behind them—and all thanks to him. His matchmaking was a good deed from their point of view, pure and simple. To Matthew it was something else entirely, something he didn’t dwell on but accepted as another delicate operation in an extremely complex job.
The boy watching Matthew, who gave his name as Timmy or Jacob or Danny, depending on the situation, was only ten years old, but his mother said he was closer to forty in his harsh judgments of other people, by which she usually meant his harsh judgments of herself. And it was true; the boy took an almost instant dislike to Matthew Connelly. It wasn’t just that the guy looked too young to be so filthy rich, with a fancy topcoat that had to cost more than it had cost to feed Isabelle for her entire life, or even that he was obviously in a hurry, striding up Walnut Street like he had somewhere important to be, though it was way past midnight. It wasn’t even the loud, idiotic singing the man was indulging in as he walked, as though no one could possibly be outside on that frigid November night in Philadelphia except Connelly himself, who no doubt considered the journey a reason to pat himself on the back that he was always up for a little exercise. No, the real thing that condemned him, from the boy’s perspective, was the position of his hands, which were jammed so far into his pockets that all you could see were the tops of what surely were the most luxurious leather gloves sold on the planet. So he wasn’t cold, which meant there was only one reason his hands were like that. He was a selfish person, the kind who wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone else. The kind of person his mother called a “natural-born Republican bastard,” even though she didn’t believe in her son’s hands theory, preferring instead the simpler principle that all rich people were bastards.