“Hey, I have an idea. You can take a vacation, right? Without your kids. I know this place, this goddamn perfect place in Thailand on the border of Burma . . . even though I know, I know we’re not supposed to call it Burma anymore. It’s in the jungle in the Dawna mountains, a zen center, all tree houses on stilts and silence. I wrote my last book there in two months. I have to go to L.A. for a quick hop. They want to cast Jennifer Lawrence as me, and she is trying to convince me she can pull off multiple orgasms. I don’t buy it. Anyway, after that I can meet you there. We’ll go to the jungle . . . decompress, get five massages a day, and then stop in Bangkok on the way home. We can dance all night, get tattoos, and flirt with boys . . . and maybe some girls.”
The sound that came out of my mouth wasn’t a laugh, but more of a croak, a choking sound.
“I can’t exactly just leave everything, Nina.”
“Just for a week, maybe two. You’ll be back before they know it.”
I thought about it then.
I couldn’t believe it was something I would even think about, but the booze must have been going to my head. I scooted closer to Nina and began to gently sway to the wedding music echoing off the cliff. I loved this song. I couldn’t remember the name of it, but I knew I loved it. I wanted to stand and dance to it right then. I wanted to take off my dress and run into the water and dance.
Nina pulled the bottle away from me and finished it in one swift pull. The water was now mere inches from our toes, and before long it would rise to meet the cliff face.
I stood and grabbed Nina by the elbow.
“Let’s dance.”
“Yeah, mama. That means you’re coming.”
I didn’t say no.
“Race you,” I said as I dashed up the stairs. I should have been out of breath, but I had more energy than I’d had in years. I felt like I could conquer the world. Everything was alive with possibility. I could go to Thailand, why not? I could write a novel? I mean, why had I stopped writing, anyway? Nina was right, I was making excuses. The truth was I could do it. I could do anything. I felt a surge of electricity—I was goddamn invincible. I turned to look up at the moon and I swear I saw a big eye wink at me.
“Tag. You’re it.” Nina smacked my ass and tugged on my hair as she passed me, stilettos in one hand, bare feet jogging to the dance floor.
I got there just in time to see Nina pull Alex away from a flummoxed Aunt Peggy and begin a sultry tango to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” I joined the two of them, wrapping Alex in a Kate-and-Nina sandwich, a move we’d perfected, teasing men in the sweaty meatpacking clubs we used to frequent when we got sick of literary theory.
If only Karl could see me now. I slid my hands up Alex’s taut back, feeling every muscle strain and flex. I reached my hand back to pull my hair out of its tight chignon and shook my head like a wet dog.
Nina slinked around Alex’s stomach and began dancing with me.
“How great is this? I fucking love dancing on molly.”
I could hardly hear her above the booming bass of my own pulse in my head. I rubbed my hands up and down my thighs and swung my head from side to side. “Dancing to poly? Is that some kind of new electronic music?”
Nina threw her head back and opened her mouth so wide I could see the soft pink skin in the back of her throat. Alex was grinding low behind her. His eyes were a golden brown, like a perfectly cooked chocolate chip cookie. I wanted to lick one.
“Dancing on molly, Kate. I laced those brownies with MDMA. How good do you feel?” She leaned in so close to me, I thought she was going to kiss me on the mouth, her upper lip slick with sweat and saliva.
It still took a few seconds to sink in. Molly. MDMA . . .
I stopped dancing. “Ecstasy. You put Ecstasy in those brownies?”
Nina never stopped moving. “Technically it’s a more pure form of Ecstasy. We’re gonna roll all night, girl!”
I should have been furious. I should have screamed right in her face. Instead I laughed. It came out sounding raw and feral. I’d done my fair share of fun drugs in my twenties, but I’d slowed and then stopped when I met Karl, who was as straitlaced as a Supreme Court nominee from New England. I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t miss this feeling, like the bottom of the world could fall from beneath your feet and you wouldn’t care, you’d be glad to allow yourself to float in some glorious orgasmic free fall. There was something even better about how furtive it all was, how Nina and I had shared a secret from everyone else at this wedding, except maybe Alex. As I watched his eyes roll into his head as he slid his hands up and down Nina’s hips, I began to suspect he had partaken in Nina’s stash.
The band began to play the requisite wedding version of “Shout,” and even more guests crowded onto the dance floor.
A little bit louder now . . .
I found myself in hysterics in a tangle of limbs with Nina lying on the floor before we exploded back onto our feet.
Shout!
Alex dragged Aunt Peggy back onto the floor and gave her a little love. Nina held hands with three little girls and skipped a ring-around-the-rosy dance. I began to twirl all alone, letting the cool ocean breeze tickle my skin.
Before I knew what was happening I was running back toward the ocean. My shoes were long gone. We half ran, half fell down those rickety stairs. Nina, Alex, and me and a handful of other guests I didn’t know who Nina had befriended the night before at the rehearsal dinner when she offered everyone some of her medicinal pot. Clothes were flung onto the stair railing and into the sand.
We waded into the freezing surf. If we’d been in our right minds it would have killed us, the northern Pacific isn’t exactly bathwater, but we didn’t care. In the moonlight Alex’s naked body glowed like a god. I loved my own skin. Gone was the self-conscious anxiety I often felt among the perfect size-twos at the beach in the Hamptons, all of them tucked, tightened, and buffed to perfection. Right now, I felt beautiful.
I wanted Karl then. I wanted him here in this ocean. We’d once skinny-dipped in the Aegean off a secret beach in Mykonos. I’d wrapped my legs around his hips and eased him inside me right there in the water, bucking and grinding against him in time with the waves, letting him nearly slip out of me before bringing him back to me with a violent thrust. We crawled out of the water, our limbs still trembling, and collapsed on the sand, sticky and satiated.
I wanted my husband more than ever, needed him more than ever. Only one lingering thought punctured my ecstatic reverie: Did my husband still want me?
Chapter Two
* * *
The sunlight streaming through the large window next to my bed assaulted all of my senses before I opened my eyes. I lay splayed naked on top of the covers. My body was dry and warm from the fire raging in the fireplace in my room. I had a spotty memory of coming back up here with Nina and Alex and building a fire and drinking two stolen bottles of wedding wine while Nina braided my hair and Alex smoked a joint in the corner. While Nina would have been down for an orgy, the night devolved into a vaguely awkward massage chain.
My hair was still damp and smelled of salt and sea, a faint reminder that I’d taken my clothes off and run into the freezing ocean.
My head pounded, my mouth tasted like a shoe. Not a nice shoe either, a dirty old Croc some old lady would have worn in the garden.
The thought of an old lady in Crocs reminded me of Aunt Peggy, and I felt a twinge of guilt for my complicity in tearing Alex away from her for the evening.
I heard a bold knock at the door and thought for a split second that it might be Karl coming to surprise me. I ran my hand down between my legs, still slightly tingling from the memories I’d conjured the night before.
“Can I come in?” Lauren’s voice, with its fading Southern twang, traveled through the door.
What time was it?
“Hold on a second. Let me get decent.”
When I sat up, my entire body felt as though I’d rolled in broken glass. I looked aroun
d the room, half expecting to see Nina cuddled up in a pile of cushions in the corner.
I grabbed a cozy white bathrobe from a brass hook behind the bathroom door. “Come on in. I don’t think it’s locked.”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and found my phone within the folds of the crisp sheets. It was already close to noon. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept this late. I didn’t have any missed calls—Karl had apparently been too busy to call me back.
“You missed brunch.” Lauren surveyed the empty wine bottles and glasses littering the tops of the furniture and a tumbler filled with cigarette butts and a half inch of red wine on the balcony.
“You had more fun at my wedding than I did,” she snorted. “Did you guys do drugs? Did you do drugs at my wedding and not give me drugs, because if so that’s the shittiest thing a friend could do.”
I lay back down on the bed and flung my arm over my eyes and groaned.
“Ohhhhhhh, honey,” Lauren said with real sympathy. “There’s nothing worse than a hangover in your forties is there? I have three glasses of wine these days and I wake up feeling like a donkey kicked me in the face.”
“I want to die,” I murmured into the crook of my elbow.
“At least your kids aren’t here. Actually what’s worse than a middle-aged hangover is trying to parent through one. All you want to do is hit pause on those little terrorists for six blessed hours while you recover . . . but you can’t because you’re being held hostage.”
“You can’t call your children terrorists,” I said. “Someone will take them away.”
“They’d give them back in a heartbeat.” She laughed.
“I can’t get on a plane today,” I whispered. “I think I’m going to puke.”
“So don’t leave. Snuggle into that bed as long as you can . . . as long as you want actually. We had to rent this place for the whole damn week just to get it for the weekend.”
“Wow. Are you staying?”
“No. We need to get the kids back to school tomorrow, and I didn’t get any of your good drugs so I’m doing OK this morning. But, I hardly got to talk to you last night,” Lauren said with a sigh.
“It was your wedding. You never talk to anyone at your own wedding.”
“I know. But we’re so old. I thought it would be different if we had the wedding after we already had bunions and neck waddles. I thought we’d get to enjoy it more. I wanted to catch up. It’s been too long.”
“Come to New York—visit us soon, we’d love that.”
“Or you could come to us.” We both laughed at the verbal tango of friends with kids.
“We’ll figure it out.”
Lauren spied the notebook before I did, the one Nina had handed me on the beach. I couldn’t remember how it had gotten up here.
“What’s that?”
For a second I considered making up a story, but then I told the truth. “Nina brought it. It’s an old one from school. It had a story in it I never finished.”
We sat in silence for a few moments.
“Do you miss writing?” Lauren asked.
“You know how it is.” I tried to brush off the question. “There’s not a lot of time.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Suddenly, before I could stop myself, the words poured out, coming from that dark place of self-pity the brain only goes into when it’s coming down from something that was so delicious only eight hours earlier. “I feel like I’m running in place while my girls grow up and start to become these magnificent human beings. I want them to be proud of me, to see me do something real with my life, and I’m not even proud of myself. I just feel like I don’t even recognize my life—or myself sometimes.”
Lauren lay down and stretched her long willowy frame next to me.
“Does Karl know you feel like this?”
“Of course not. He’s busy. All the time. Busier than ever. Since his dad passed, you know he took over everything. And publishing is a hard business. E-books, Amazon, nonexistent attention spans, self-publishing. He’s reinventing Paradigm every week. It’s hard for him.”
“I get that. Maybe you could see someone together. That’s what Beth and I did. Did you meet her last night? Our therapist? The one with the bright red hair and the strange mole on her chin that looks like Ronald Reagan. We invited our therapist to our wedding because without her we wouldn’t have walked down that aisle.”
Karl and I talked about seeing someone after Isabel was born, when the lack of sleep drove each of us to the brink of our sanity and, for the first time in our relationship, we began to argue, really argue. Everyone we knew had a therapist, sometimes even three of them—his, hers, and theirs. But we never went to anyone.
Forget couples counseling, I should have gone to someone by myself after Isabel was born. I’d never felt as alone as I did those first few months with a newborn. It was a time when I should have been surrounded by family and friends, when I needed a tribe of women to help me figure out how the hell to be a mother, but I had no one. Lauren and Beth had already packed up their small family and moved to the West Coast. My mother had been dead for almost five years by then and my older sister was busy with her own teenaged children back in Milwaukee. Karl went right back to work two days after we came home from the hospital. There’s no paternity leave when you’re the boss. My body ached so badly I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. The baby wouldn’t stop screaming and then she wouldn’t eat. When she finally latched it felt as though my nipples were being sliced open with glass every time my milk came in.
Not too long after that Karl and I started trying for another, and then I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t pregnant anymore, and we should have seen a therapist then, but soon I got pregnant again with Tilly and we began the cycle all over again and I never took the time to mourn or heal. The babies turned into toddlers and I began the lengthy process of enrolling them in the right preschool so they’d go to the right elementary school so they’d eventually attend Harvard and get to go to Davos and rule the world. We renovated our town house, then the place in Connecticut, then the place in East Hampton. I knew full well how it sounded to say that overseeing the renovations on three properties became a full-time job, one I didn’t even particularly enjoy, but it was the truth. I became an ace troubleshooter and project manager, sometimes even a general contractor, all work I could never put on a résumé, not that anyone would ever hire an MFA with no work experience save waitressing, bartending, and teaching English as a foreign language.
And now, somehow Karl and I had gotten to a point where we mostly spoke about and through the girls. I couldn’t pinpoint the last time we were alone for more than an hour when both of us were awake. It had become our new normal, and I’d become almost numb to the fact that it wasn’t normal at all. I’d been hoping we’d talk while we were here—really talk.
“Maybe we’ll see someone when I get home.”
I rubbed the tip of my index finger along the cover of the notebook and flicked it open.
“I haven’t written a word in a five years.”
Lauren put her hand on top of mine and squeezed. She understood everything I was trying to tell her. We were writers. Writing was what fed our souls. To admit that you had stopped was like saying you no longer breathed.
“I meant it when I said you could stay as long as you’d like. Stay all week. Keep this room or move into one of the bigger suites downstairs. You still have that chubby au pair, right? The girls will be fine. Karl can fend for himself. Trust me, I know what it looks like to need a break. And you need a break . . . even if you did do all of the drugs last night . . . actually especially if you did all of the drugs last night.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Why not?
The truth was that I had everything at my disposal to be able to stay. I knew plenty of women who built “me spa-cations,” where everyone eats activated charcoal and grass and lets bees sting their ass on purp
ose, into their gospel of self-care routines, jetting off to Canyon Ranch or the Greenbrier for a long weekend. I’d never felt like I deserved that kind of break—even planning for this trip, where I would be away from home for less than forty-eight hours, left me feeling guilty and on edge. Maybe it was because I had committed myself to being a stay-at-home mom and secretly didn’t believe I was doing real and worthy work beyond that. If I were a corporate lawyer or even an actual full-time writer, I would allow myself downtime once in a while. But everyone deserved a break and some downtime, and the offer was incredibly tempting. Surely Karl and the girls could survive another day without me. Imagining the peace and quiet, the luxury of time completely to myself in this paradise, made my heart quicken with a giddy anticipation—like knowing your favorite dessert was coming after dinner.
“Actually, maybe I could stay an extra few nights.” I began to run the logistics in my head. The airline would charge me a $250 change fee, the rental car would be another couple hundred, but that’s what money was for, right? Buying convenience. After a childhood and early adulthood of pinching every penny, I still flinched when it came to spending on myself. “Is Nina still here?”
“She left early this morning. Said she needed to drive down to L.A. for some meetings with Jennifer Lawrence? Something about multiple orgasms? Said to tell you she’d text you.”
My first thought was surprise that Nina was in any shape to do anything, but for all I knew she did molly every night and could bounce back like she’d popped a couple Advil and a melatonin. Then there was a fuzzy memory of the last thing Nina had said to me before she left my room. She’d kissed me square on the lips, pulled back, and stared into my eyes like she could see my soul. “We’re going to fucking Thailand!!! This is going to be so much fun!”
The memories rushed back then in broken fragments—Expedia, American Airlines, Nina screaming “YOLO” off the balcony. Me wondering what YOLO meant. Her explaining it to me. Oh God, what did I do?
Marriage Vacation Page 3