Bread Alone: A Novel

by Judith R. Hendricks

  We pulled up the suicidally precarious drive of his little house in the Hollywood Hills. When he pulled the key from the ignition, I turned my face to the window, making no move to get out of the car.

  “Just tell me.”

  He said, “Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

  “You’re the one who had the damn window down. Just tell me.”

  “Tell you …?”

  “Don’t be a wimp, just say it. Then you can take me home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That it’s over, of course.”

  “Over?”

  I turned abruptly. “Is this an echo chamber? Look, I’m not going to make a scene and get tears all over your squeaky-clean car. Just tell me you don’t want to see me anymore, and you can take me home. I’ll live.”

  His laugh broke the silence.

  “Is that what you think?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he got out, locked the door, came around and opened mine. I let him take my hand and tug me gently out of the seat.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” I said. “And when—”

  “I know. When you don’t know what’s going on, you get edgy. Come on. Let’s be edgy inside, where it’s warm.”

  I’d been to his house a few times, but always in daylight. It struck me as cold and sort of temporary looking in spite of the artsy black-and-white photographs on the walls and the caramel-colored leather sofa, more like a model home than a place where a real person lived. Nothing was ever out of place or dusty. There weren’t any old newspapers or books turned upside down to mark the page. No glasses in the sink. No spare change on the dining room table. No mail stacked by the phone.

  At night it looked completely different. Strategically placed lamps glowed, giving the rooms shape and depth. A fire was already laid in the fireplace, an Oscar Peterson tape cued up, more wine chilling in an ice bucket. All carefully planned. For me. He was seducing me. I was amused and touched and exquisitely flattered.

  Near my grandparents’ cabin on the Russian River, there was a swimming hole where the water was clear, cold, and deep. On hot summer afternoons, I’d haul myself out, wet and shivering, and lie down on my favorite boulder. It was warm from the sun and smooth from the river, and I loved the feel of its contours under my hands. His body was like that. If his lovemaking lacked spontaneity, he more than compensated with intensity. I’d never before had such attention given to every square inch of my body.

  At some point, it began to rain. Gently at first, then increasing in speed and volume till I thought the hill would liquefy and send the whole house sledding down onto Sunset Boulevard, the two of us inside. Finally, toward dawn, the skies relented and we fell asleep, exhausted.

  In the morning, I discovered that his ocean-blue eyes were gray. He saw me staring and smiled.

  “Contacts,” he said, pulling me over on top of him.

  Ten days later, on my twenty-fourth birthday, he asked me to marry him. I was nearly as astonished and grateful as my mother was.

  After we were married, I had one spectacular year of selling real estate—spectacularly bad. Eventually my company agreed not to make me pay for my training on the condition that I promise never to work in the industry again. I made a few half-assed attempts to find something else, because I liked having my own money, but then David pointed out to me that tax-wise, it was better if I didn’t work. And I would have more time to do the things he wanted me to do. I didn’t need much persuading.

  What he wanted me to do was easy enough. I was to be the Executive Wife—the charming hostess, the source of contacts. He gave me books to read, subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine. He made sure I read his copies of Ad Age. He told me in great detail what was happening at work, what they were doing for which clients, who he thought they might lose, who they were pitching.

  We gave parties, went to parties, dinners, benefits, concerts, gallery openings, plays three or four nights a week. There were pro-am golf tournaments, political fund-raisers, walk-a-thons, wine auctions. I served on committees for the Philharmonic, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Sierra Club. I worked out religiously at LA Fitness, played tennis at the club where JMP paid for our membership. And in my spare time, I did lunch with my “friends,” mostly women with strategically placed husbands that David might want to know.

  I soon realized that when he told me he’d been too busy working to have a relationship, he wasn’t kidding. He seemed to thrive on all the activity, but I was exhausted, and vaguely uneasy, like I was the great imposter and would be exposed sooner than later. I felt guilty about cultivating friends based on their potential to help us economically. But David explained that it was my job; I was his partner. As with any job, there would be facets of it that were less enjoyable, maybe even distasteful, but necessary nonetheless. In those too few, too brief times when we could relax by ourselves, he made it all seem okay. And for a while, it was.

  One morning when I woke up with a sore throat and a body that felt like the doormat for a herd of buffalo, I lay in bed, drifting between consciousness and un, like you do when you’re sick, and I thought in strange little shards and crumbs about my life. I realized with a jolt that I’d been married for five years. That I hadn’t seen my best friend in months and I couldn’t remember when I’d last spoken to my mother. Or read a book just for the pleasure of it.

  Or baked a loaf of bread. My chef that I’d carried home on the plane from France and nurtured and used for six years—or was it seven?—had long since expired because I’d forgotten to feed it. The thought of my faithful little yeasts starving to death and drowning in their own acid wastes had depressed me so that I’d cried for days. Scared the shit out of David. He was ready to bundle me off to a Beverly Hills shrink to get on the Prozac program, but I refused to go, having developed a deep distrust of the species after my father died.

  Out of desperation, I think, he came home one night with a bread machine. From the start, he loved the thing, loved the whole concept of it. Loved the way you just dumped in all the ingredients, set the timer, and presto—fresh, hot bread overnight. Never even had to touch the stuff. Wouldn’t mess up my manicure. I was appalled.

  He listened patiently while I explained that bread is a process, not a product, but admitted that he didn’t get it, and it just made both of us sad. I refused to use the machine, so he began to play with it. He got in the routine of making bread—if you could call it that—almost every night. But in the mornings, he was often so focused on work or in a hurry to go to some meeting that he’d rush off without waiting for it to be ready.

  By then he was being mentioned as the next likely director of marketing—at twenty-nine, he’d be the youngest director in the company—and things began to change in earnest. There began to be even more meetings, weekend gatherings, sometimes including spouses. I wanted to be supportive, but these things were boring beyond all imagining; I didn’t handle them well. When I did attend, David was distant and condescending. We’d fight about it while we were getting dressed, driving in the car, or in our room if it was an overnight party. Then we’d have to go in to cocktails and dinner and pretend everything was fine.

  I’d watch him over the shoulder of someone who was describing to me his hip-replacement surgery, and it was like watching a total stranger, or someone famous whose picture you’ve seen so many times that you recognize them instantly but there’s no personal acquaintance. His charm rarely failed him. One of the officers or the directors would put an arm across his shoulders, and you just knew they were thinking of him as the son they’d never had, or wondering why their son couldn’t have been like him instead of dropping out of school to be a surf bum. David made every one of those men feel like his hero, his mentor, and I think he sort of wished it, too. He never came on too strong, too challenging, too threatening.

  And their wives—my God, the older ones wanted to take him home for milk and cookies. S
ome of the younger ones just wanted to take him home. I’d never considered myself a jealous woman, but there were a couple of times when I wanted to pour my drink down someone’s cleavage. If David hadn’t been so absolutely circumspect, I might have done it.

  Most ominous of all, however, was his new tendency to be annoyed and embarrassed by my frankness and my disinclination toward social jockeying—the very things he’d once said he loved about me. I tried to do what I thought would please him, but I began to feel like I was walking on eggshells. Still, when the meetings were over and we were safe at home, old comforts returned and we’d settle back into our life.

  Nothing was really wrong. Things were going to get better. Just as soon as this meeting or that project or the next pitch was over. After he became director of marketing. We’d have more time. We’d go away for more long weekends and long talks. We’d find it again.

  In the movies, when it’s time for The Bad Thing to happen, the music changes. When the homesteaders have got all the crops in the barn and they’re having the harvest hoedown and everybody’s dancing and having fun, then the menacing cello tremolo lets you know that the cattle baron’s henchmen are about to show up and gun down a few innocent bystanders. I’ve always thought it extremely unfair that real life doesn’t come with that sort of sound track. Not that it would change anything, but advance notice would be nice.

  So I came home on a Friday afternoon from a meeting of the Hancock Park Green Spaces Association to find a gold Lexus parked in our driveway behind David’s black Mercedes. I had to park my Mazda at the curb. Before I could even get to the porch, the front door opened and out stepped Kelley Hamlin, one of the account managers. Not just any old account manager, but the company MVP for the last two years. I’d talked to her briefly a couple of times at office social functions, but I’d heard from some of the other women on the management side that she was brilliant. Driven. She was also beautiful.

  “Hello, Wyn.” She smiled at me, flicked her blonde hair back over her shoulder. David stood behind her, a file folder in his hand. “Thanks for dropping this off, Kelley.”

  The faintest little ping sounded somewhere in my brain, so quiet that I almost missed it. I looked at him, and he looked right back at me, smiled into my eyes. But there was no exchange. It was like looking at someone who’s wearing those mirrored sunglasses. All you see is your own reflection.

  After a quiet and seemingly endless dinner, I was reading the new Los Angeles Magazine in the room I call the den but that David always refers to as the “library.” He came in, sat down next to me on the black leather couch.

  That in itself was a guaranteed attention grabber, because lately we’d been simply two people who found themselves asleep in the same bed every now and then. He sat on the edge of the seat, smiled almost shyly, as if he was going to start a conversation about something other than picking up the dry cleaning.

  I remembered how it had been before. How it might be again. I smiled back. Détente.

  Then he said, “Wyn, I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?” The wrong thing to say. It elicited his hurt/disappointed look.

  “I can’t keep pretending everything is fine.”

  “I know everything’s not fine. You’re working much too hard and the stress must be—”

  “Yes, I have been busy, and there is a lot of stress. But it’s not just that.”

  An image flared. David rolling over in our bed next to someone. Indistinct, no more than a shape under the covers. The scene evaporated instantly, but it left a white shadow, the way a match flame leaves a ghost of itself on your eye.

  We looked at each other for a minute before I went for broke.

  “Are you seeing someone?”

  He frowned. “Seeing someone? You mean like a shrink?”

  “No. I mean like a woman. Is there something you want to tell me?”

  He took the magazine out of my hands and tossed it onto the aluminum-sculpture coffee table. “Of course not. I mean, yes, there’s something I want to tell you, but it has nothing to do with a woman.”

  But he didn’t look at me.

  “I’ve just been really unhappy. I’m not even sure why, except I feel confined, like I can’t move. Sometimes, during the day, I’m sitting there in my office and I feel like I can’t breathe.”

  I started to touch his face, but he intercepted my hand and placed it in my lap. I said, “Maybe you should go see Dr. Geary and—”

  “I just had a complete physical in January. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Then what is it?”

  He blinked twice. “It’s my whole goddamned life. The house, the job”—he paused, but only for a second before plunging on—”us. Everything. This guy I knew at the club dropped dead during a squash game last week. He was only forty-five, for Chrissake. It makes you question what the hell you’re doing. What we’re doing.”

  I felt a lurching sickness in my stomach. “Can’t you tell me what’s bothering you about … everything? I thought this was what you wanted. I mean—”

  “So did I.” His eyes had lost their clarity, become like flat, blue stone. “I don’t know if JMP is where I belong. Whether I should try a bigger agency. Or even a completely different—Where do I want to end up ten or twenty years from now? Maybe there’s something else, somewhere else I haven’t even thought of yet.”

  While he cataloged possible causes of his malaise, my mind raced. I wanted to shout at him that he was too young for a midlife crisis. I had to stifle the impulse to reach over and trace the line of his dark eyebrows, his perfectly straight nose, the plane of his cheek. I remembered how his face felt next to mine, the crisp scent of his Polo cologne, the way his hair slipped between my fingers like corn silk.

  “David, believe me, I understand. You’re working too hard. The money’s not that important to me, honestly. I want you to do whatever you want to. Whatever makes you happy. I don’t need—”

  “You’re not listening to me.” His voice took on a too familiar edge of impatience. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I need a complete break from the whole …” His hands opened, then closed into fists. “I need to have the psychological freedom to take risks, to fail. I can’t feel like you’re depending on me to take care of you.”

  “I don’t want you to feel like I’m depending on you. I wouldn’t mind if you depended on me a little more. I’m perfectly willing to go back to work, so you can—”

  “Wyn.” He cleared his throat. “You’re missing the point here. What I need is to be completely independent. Of you.”

  A somewhat belated flash of insight. This wasn’t about us, it was about him. What he wanted. What he didn’t want.

  He said, “I’ve wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know exactly how to explain it. And the other problem is, you don’t deal well with the unvarnished truth.”

  Sudden tears pooled in my eyes and overflowed, dripping into my lap. He handed me the pressed, white linen square he just happened to have in his pocket.

  “David, the unvarnished truth is, I love you. Don’t you—?”

  “It’s not that I don’t love you.” The words sliced cleanly through the mush of my sentiment. “I just think it was a mistake to get married. Like we did. So quickly. I don’t think we really knew each other. And I need …” He picked up the handkerchief off the floor where I’d dropped it, handed it to me again. “I need to figure out what’s important to me.”

  Sound concerned, but not hysterical. “If that’s how you’ve been feeling, why didn’t you say something before now?”

  He looked pained. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that we’re miserable. Don’t you even know when you’re unhappy?”

  “I know it hasn’t been so wonderful lately, but we’ve had seven good years. Let’s not throw it all away just because—”

  “Wyn, listen to me.” He eased closer, took both my hands. I hated that determined look on his face. “I’m being suffocated—not by you,” he
added quickly. “It’s everything. I feel like all my options are closing off Like I’m trapped in this—”

  Outside, a car alarm began to shriek. One of ours? I remembered that rain was forecast for tonight and we should close the windows on the west side of the house. The housekeeper was coming tomorrow. Did I write her a check? Was I supposed to call Lisa Hathaway about the publicity committee meeting for the symphony fund-raiser?

  My life was going down the toilet and my brain had picked this moment to go out on strike.

  “I don’t know.” He took his hands from mine, carefully, as if he wasn’t sure mine would stay put.

  “So what are you saying? That you want a—”

  “No.” Too quickly. Then, “I don’t know. Maybe we both just need some time alone, some space.”

  “David, I don’t need any more time alone. That’s about all I have right now.”

  He seemed not to hear me. “Maybe you should move out for a while. I saw a great condo the other day. Not too far away. We could still see each other.” His voice rose just slightly. Like you do when you’re trying to talk a child into taking her medicine: Hmm? Wouldn’t we like to do that? It would be so good for us.

  A tiny prickle of anger started at the back of my throat. He’d been looking at condos for me?

  “If you’re the one who needs some space, why do I have to move? Why don’t you get a condo?”

  He straightened, his gaze over my head someplace. “Because it’s my house,” he said.

  I remembered this woman I knew who was hypnotized at a magic show and made to do all kinds of funny things. When the guy brought her out of it, and she noticed everyone in the audience laughing, she felt stupid without knowing why. Just now I had that same sense of having missed something important.

  He slept in the guest room. We hadn’t made love in months anyway, but sleeping by myself in the king-size bed without even the shape of his body nearby was cataclysmic. I couldn’t have felt more alone if I’d been sleeping in a crater on the moon.

  The weekend was interminable. He spent most of it at the office. Or at least that’s what he said. On Sunday afternoon, I dialed his extension, listened to it ring six, seven times, till voice mail picked up. It didn’t mean he wasn’t there. He could have been in the men’s room, the kitchen, a conference room, a screening room. He could have been on another line. I knew if I asked him, that’s what he’d say. “I was talking to Hank.” Or Tom. Or Grady.