by Zoe Heller
“Dave is not gay. He has a girlfriend.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not proof of anything, is it?”
“Why are you trying to make this into something bad? Dave’s a really good guy. He knows a lot about recovery, and he wants to help me—”
“Fuck it, Lenny!” Audrey shouted. “You’re so…you’re so suggestible! All it takes is one beardy arsehole telling you some shit about codependence, and you’re ready to shaft me.”
“I’m not shafting you, Mom. Jesus, I’m not married to you…”
Audrey clutched the arm of the sofa. “You little shit.”
“No!” Lenny protested. “I didn’t mean…I wasn’t talking about Dad. I just meant—”
“Forget it.” She looked away. “I’m not going to argue with you. If you want to bugger off with a bunch of yokels, go ahead. I’m warning you, though, this is it. If you do this, I’m not having you back again. You’re on your own.”
Lenny lowered his head. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way, Mom.”
“You’ll wish it even more when you get tired of carving stair rails with old beardy-face. You’ll come crawling back to New York, and you won’t have me to bail you out anymore.” She paused, searching his face for any sign of hesitation, of second thoughts. “Go on then, fuck off,” she said. “Go complain about your wicked mother at your meeting.”
After he had gone, she sat for several minutes, considering the long lavender shadows that the afternoon sun had cast across the floorboards. Presently she stood up and went outside to look for Jean.
She found her in the walled vegetable garden, tenderly examining her tomato plants. “You’re in luck!” Jean cried when she saw Audrey. “We’re having tomato salad for dinner tonight!”
“I assume,” Audrey said, “that you knew about Lenny’s plan to become a carpenter?”
“Ah.” Jean sat back on her haunches. “I did, yes. I would have said something, but he really wanted to tell you himself.”
“And since when did we start going by Lenny’s fricking agenda?” Audrey cried. “He’s a baby, Jean! And you were meant to be in loco whatsit! I only let him come down here in the first place because you made me. Now look what’s happened.”
Jean shrugged. “He’s not a baby. He’s thirty-four. And nothing so terrible has happened, as far as I can see. He’s off drugs, he’s attending meetings, he may even be going to learn a new trade.”
“Oh, right,” Audrey said. “Oh, right. He’s a totally new fucking man, isn’t he? Let me explain something to you, Jean. This born-again routine of his is going to last for a couple more weeks, tops, and then he’ll be right back to scrounging money for dime bags.”
“Well, don’t let’s declare it a failure before he’s had a chance to—”
“I see what this is. You’re dying to show how much better a job you can do with Lenny, aren’t you? Silly old Audrey made a mess of things for thirty years, and now, here comes Jean, the Flying Nun, to turn his life around in a month!”
Jean stuck out her bottom lip and exhaled a little puff of air, trying to remove the strands of hair that had fallen into her eyes. “That’s absolutely unfair, Audrey.”
“Well, that’s me, isn’t it? Nasty, unfair Audrey. I expect you and Lenny have had a lovely time together discussing my character flaws.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
Audrey stomped away. “I’m going to bed,” she shouted as she disappeared through the door in the garden wall.
She did not go to bed, though. When she got back inside the house, the thought of returning to the junk-filled guest room and lying on that ridiculous four-poster bed like the princess and the pea was too unbearable. She retreated instead to the sitting room. She was still there, flipping disconsolately through a pile of holiday brochures, when Jean came in half an hour later.
“It’s gotten quite chilly,” Jean said. “Shall we have a fire?”
Audrey looked away haughtily. “I don’t mind.”
“Are we going to make up? Or are you going to mope all night?”
Audrey shrugged. “Are those the only choices?” she asked, continuing to examine the brochures.
Jean smiled and went over to the fireplace. “I’m glad you’re looking at those,” she said, pointing to the brochures. “I was thinking there might be something in there for the two of us to do one of these days.”
“Oh, sure,” Audrey said. “Because I’ve got lots of free time and money for fancy holidays.”
Jean began rolling sheets of old newspaper into balls and assembling them in the fireplace. “Are you worried about money, Audrey?”
“Well, Joel’s accountant did tell me the other day that I was facing a liquidity crisis…”
“Oh?”
“He thinks I should sell Perry Street, buy myself a granny flat, and invest the leftover in a low-something mutual something…”
“A low-risk mutual fund?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him to bugger off, didn’t I?” Audrey laughed. “He was quite upset, the poor sod.”
Jean nodded gravely. “Accountants can be beastly, I know. But it pays to listen to them, Audrey. They usually have sensible things to say—”
“Yes, well,” Audrey said, stretching her arms languorously, “Joel and I have never been sensible about money, thank God.”
“No, quite. And it’s wonderful, of course, not to care too much about that sort of thing. But money does tend to become important when you don’t have enough of it.”
Audrey scowled. “And how would you know?”
Jean looked down at the ball of paper in her hand and sighed. “Well, in any case, I was thinking that our holiday would be my treat.”
Audrey held up a brochure for walking tours of Italy, opened to a photograph of an elderly man in knee socks and sandals, striding along the Via Appia. “Just imagine having to face that fucker over your espresso every morning.”
“There are lots of other things there,” Jean said patiently. “There’s a Caribbean cruise that the Nation magazine organizes…”
“I’d rather stick a pin in my eye.”
“Oh? It looked quite fun to me.”
“What, floating around the islands with a bunch of old guys quarreling over who gets to sit in the Jacuzzi with Katrina van den Heuvel? You know, don’t you, those boats are all riddled with Legionnaires’ Disease?”
“Okay, then, not the Nation cruise, but there’s bound to be something in that lot that you’d find interesting…”
“Jean, what are you going on about? I have a husband lying in hospital. I can’t be going off on pleasure trips with you.”
Jean gathered up a handful of kindling from a basket and began arranging it over the newspaper in the grate. “I do think, Audrey, that at some point you’re going to have to start facing up to certain things about Joel’s condition.”
Audrey looked up. “How do you mean?”
“I just think there’s going to come a point when you have to, you know, let him go…”
Audrey clapped her hands. “Ohhh! Here it comes—the ‘Let’s Kill Joel’ speech. Yeah, well, thanks for that.”
“Audrey, you know I don’t…”
“Yes, you do. You all do. Especially now he’s turned out to have been shtupping that silly cow. You just want to get rid of him and wrap the whole thing up already. Well, let me tell you, I’m not letting that woman have the last word on my marriage—”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” Jean cried, “stop it!”
Audrey stared. “Excuse me?”
Jean shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just—ever since this business with Berenice came out, you’ve been angry with her, with me, with the children—with every one of us except Joel. I don’t care if he’s in a coma: he’s behaved abominably. I think it would help you to acknowledge that.”
Audrey stood up slowly. “You think I’m not angry with hi
m?” she said. “You think I don’t hate him for what he’s done to me? Of course I’m fucking angry, Jean! What am I, an idiot?”
Jean shrank back. “I’m sorry, Audrey…you never said—”
“I’ve spent my life serving that man. I put up with his affairs for forty years, and now, at the end of it all, I find out that he didn’t love me at all. I find out that the great passion of his life was some fat fucking photographer!”
“Oh, you don’t really think that. You know Joel adored you—”
“Please!” Audrey raised her hand. “I know what my marriage was and wasn’t.”
“But Audrey—”
“He wrote that woman poems! Do you think he ever wrote poems for me?”
“I…I didn’t realize you felt this way, Audrey.”
Audrey sat down again. “Well, now you do.”
Jean laid a couple of logs on top of the kindling and struck a match. The two women watched as the flame caught the newspaper and crept upward.
“Whatever your marriage was or wasn’t,” Jean said, “you can’t change it now, Audrey. You have to let it go.”
Audrey shook her head. “And what am I supposed to do when I’ve let it go? Arse about on cruises with you for the rest of my life?”
“Forget the cruises, okay? There are hundreds of other things you can do with your life. Productive, fulfilling things. You’re only fifty-nine.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“That’s young! You’re still an attractive woman. Perhaps you’ll meet someone else.”
Audrey moaned. It was terrifying, certainly, to think that her sex life was over for good, but marginally more terrifying to think that it was not. The idea of courtship at her age was grotesque. She did not want to become one of those hormone-replacement floozies bopping around in a leather skirt, boasting about her still-vibrant sexuality, trawling in the back of the New York Review of Books for someone to share her love of Pinter and Klee and rainy days in Montauk. No. It was ridiculous, it was so…American, all this talk of reinventing herself and moving on. She had made her apple-pie bed, and now she would have to lie in it.
“You could get more involved in politics,” Jean said. “You could get a job. Or write a book. You might even decide you want to go back and live in England.”
Audrey covered her eyes with her hand. “Are you trying to depress me?”
“All I’m saying is that your life is not over. You’ve given up a great deal to be Joel’s wife—you’ve said so yourself, many times—and now you have a chance to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do.”
Audrey shook her head forlornly. It was true: she had often spoken of the accomplishments that might have been hers had she not dedicated her life to Joel. But she had never really believed what she was saying. Deep down, she had always known these aggrieved remarks for what they were—self-flattering delusions, face-saving fantasies. The truth was, Joel had held her back from nothing. He had saved her. Without Joel, she would still be typing in Camden Town, or living in some hellish suburb, married to a man like her sister’s husband, Colin.
She looked down at the brochures splayed on the floor. “No, Jean,” she murmured. “It’s no good. I’m done.”
CHAPTER
20
“Welcome,” Berenice said, standing in the middle of her living room and extending her heavily braceleted arms toward Rosa and Karla. She was wearing a long scarlet dress—a robe, really—and golden sneakers, cloven at the toe, like camel’s feet. She shook her head, “This is wild, isn’t it?”
Karla laughed nervously. None of her imaginings had prepared her for the exotic reality of her father’s mistress. She wondered whether Berenice had dressed up for the occasion, or if she looked this extraordinary all the time.
“Wow,” Berenice said, shaking her head. “It’s pretty weird to meet you guys at last.”
Sensing that Berenice could not go on mining the theme of her amazement indefinitely, Karla struggled to think of something to say that might carry the conversation forward. She glanced at her sister, hoping for assistance, but Rosa, who appeared to have absented herself from all responsibility for this encounter, was staring glassily at the floor. “You…have a lovely apartment,” she stuttered.
Berenice nodded serenely. “Isn’t it great?
The three women looked around them. The walls of Berenice’s living room were busy with framed black-and-white photographs and cryptic bits of text torn out from newspapers and magazines. WE ARE ALL UNDER FIRE NOW, one of the cuttings said; LOCALS HATE US, said another. An old chair, upholstered in cracked pink vinyl, stood in one corner of the room, and a bookshelf fashioned out of milk crates and planks stood in another. The center of the room was completely empty, as if in readiness for a performance of some kind.
“Joel was responsible for getting me this place, you know,” Berenice said.
Karla started at the mention of her father. “Oh, yes?”
“Yeah, these apartments are rent-controlled, so they’re really tough to get into. Joel did a deal for me with the super.” She made a rubbing gesture with her thumb and forefinger. “Gave him a little baksheesh.”
Karla’s eyes widened.
“Hey, can I get you guys something to drink?”
“Sure,” Karla said.
Rosa shook her head. “I’m good.”
Berenice disappeared into the kitchen, and Rosa knelt down to examine the books on her bookshelf. Karla watched her scanning the gerund-heavy nonfiction titles: Mindful Eating, Writing the Body, Understanding Gynocritical Theory, Reading Tarot. After a while, she wandered over to the window. Berenice’s apartment was on the fifteenth floor of a building overlooking the FDR Drive. In fine weather, you could probably have seen clear across to JFK Airport from here, but today it was overcast and drizzling. As Karla stood staring out at the ruined watercolor of slate sky and rain-dimpled river, a tear fattened in her eye and fell.
Ten days ago, at a noisy bar in Midtown (her cowardly choice of venue) with the evening news blasting from a television overhead, she had ended her affair with Khaled. “I can’t see you anymore,” she had told him.
“What do you mean?” Khaled had asked. “What are you saying?”
“I can’t do this.” It was embarrassing, and at the same time oddly thrilling, to find herself using the time-honored locutions.
“What do you mean, ‘this’?”
“You know, this. Us.”
“I don’t understand. Aren’t you happy with me?”
She felt a stab of irritation at his guilelessness. “This isn’t what I want to do.”
“Why then?”
“Because—oh, you know why.”
He smacked his hand on the table. “Christ!”
The two of them gazed miserably at the television over the bar. The president was on, giving a speech at a Labor Day picnic in Pittsburgh. “My most important job is to keep our families safe. That’s my most important job now. I want you to know that there’s still a enemy out there that hates America. I’m sure your kids, they’re wondering, why would you hate America? We didn’t do anything to anybody. Well, they hate America because we love freedom. We cherish our freedoms. We value our freedoms. We love the fact that people can worship an almighty God in a free land, any way they choose to worship…”
“When did you decide this?” Khaled asked.
“I don’t know. A couple of days ago.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’ve just been seeing what my mother is going through, and I—you know, I just don’t want to lie any more.”
“So don’t lie! Tell your husband you love someone else and leave him.”
Karla lowered her head. “I—I couldn’t. I—”
“You’re not brave enough.”
“It’s not about being brave, Khaled. I’m trying to do what’s right.”
“No, you’re not. This is the right thing. You know it. You’re just scared.”
&
nbsp; “Well, yes, okay, I am. I’m scared of hurting Mike—”
“No, you’re scared of what he and everyone else will say about you if you do what you really want.”
Karla was astounded by the unfairness of this. And yet she was glad of Khaled’s anger. Now, at least, they were both being unkind.
“You don’t love your husband,” Khaled said. “He doesn’t love you. You said so.”
“That’s not…why are you being like this?”
“How should I be, then? You want me to smile, be nice, tell you it’s all right? Okay, you are a great saint. You are going to spend the rest of your life with your shitty little union man. Congratulations.”
It was hard to believe now, but when she left the bar that night, she had felt almost euphoric with relief. Her thrilling day at the fair was over, she had told herself: now she was back on solid ground, ready to resume the plain, nutritious diet of real life. The high had not lasted long. By the time she arrived back in the Bronx and found Mike online ordering household fire extinguishers in preparation for the adoption agency’s home study inspection, it was already beginning to fade. Mike was in a foul mood. He wanted to know why he was doing all the work for the home study, and she was contributing nothing. Pitying him his unknowing ingratitude, Karla did not attempt to defend herself. She endured the complaint in silence and then retired to bed.
Depression, in Karla’s experience, was a dull, inert thing—a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was a quite different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn’t sit, it assailed. It hurt her. In the mornings, it slapped her so hard in the face that she reeled as she walked to the bathroom. At night, as she lay next to Mike, with a filthy film loop of the things she and Khaled had done together running through her head, it bit her in the neck and kicked her in the groin.
She wiped her eyes now and turned around to face the room. Rosa had abandoned the bookshelf and was standing in front of one of Berenice’s black-and-white photographs. Karla went over and joined her. Clasping her hands behind her in the reverent manner of a museum visitor, she peered closely at the picture. It was a blurry, tenebrous close-up of something—what exactly, she was unsure.