The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  From the back pocket of her uniform-issue slacks, she felt her phone buzzing, and then, a moment later, heard it buzzing against the hard plastic seat.

  Abernathy shook his head. “Look, I’m just trying to help you out. At least silence the thing.”

  The phone was nothing special. It was one of the three or four models of phones everyone else had. A present for her fifteenth birthday, it was titanium and white with a mirror-buffed screen. She was rarely without it. To her parents, it represented a digital lasso, a way to keep tabs on her. The embedded GPS showed as a blip on their computer screen a few hundred miles away. To her it reflected the absolute totality of her previously minuscule social life. She felt an appropriate love for it, or as much love as possible for something that could not love her back. The list of such things was short: her phone, her stuffed animals, Morrissey, the collected works of the Brontë sisters.

  The phone was how Charlie had first come into her life. A tiny New Jersey kid with mild color blindness and Keanu Reeves’s hair, he was preternaturally gifted with computers. On her second day of school he had somehow acquired her number from the school database and sent her a message halfway through a gruelingly bleak lecture on species extinction: Polar bears, blah blah blah: we haven’t met. I’m the other beautiful person in the room.

  The phone was how they always got in touch, how he, at midnight on a Thursday, for instance, would tell her that he was stoned across campus watching Batman on mute, or Superman on mute, or Iron Man on mute, and that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Come over, swim over, run over. Let’s hang, get high, let’s fuck around. Sometimes she would read these aloud to her roommates, but more often than not she simply stewed over them in silence. Turn on the fucking volume, she’d written back once. Or watch a better fucking movie. He was undeterred. Send me a picture of yourself, he had said. She took a picture of herself smiling. You know that’s not what I meant. C’mon. This was the first week of school, and it did not stop until a week ago. A hundred and eighty mornings of predictable bullshit. His commitment to the cause, she was ashamed to admit, flattered her, but not enough to give him what he wanted. Months went on like this. In public, he made kissy faces at her, blew in her ear while they stood in line for food. In chapel, he passed her notes with plagiarized love poems by Petrarch. Still, he would not stop asking.

  The universe of fifteen-year-old boys could be divided into two camps, she had decided: those who were, in their hearts, still boys, and those whose every impulse was sexually sociopathic. Tits, she had written to him once. That’s all your mind can handle. Not even both tits. Just one.

  He was relentless. Send me a picture of yourself.

  Mornings, his was the first message she’d wake to. Send me something, make me happy. It sickened her to remember that for the briefest moment in time—October and November of this past year—she had found him charming. Something about his chin or his vulnerability. He grew flushed in the cheeks while he spoke. She felt something for him that was either pity or sexual attraction. She had not yet learned the difference. Walking between their Intro to Cinema and Intro to Oceanography classes, he took her hand delicately by the wrist and said, stupidly and probably falsely, I think you’re lovely. Against her better judgment she felt alive.

  She had never actually considered sending him the picture, because she knew what would happen. She had no doubt that he would send it around. She sometimes thought she could see the perversion floating through his head, like cumulus clouds passing by a window. Still, she had allowed herself into his bed for some entry-level crap—stolen wine, R. Kelly, some unerotic biting on his part—but the moment he tried to take her top off, she cut it short. His response—Oh, I see how it is—was typical for the boy Charlie Perlmutter turned out to be, which was the boy who, later that night, succeeded in sneaking onto her phone and extracting a picture she’d taken of herself in the shower house at Rosewater, an awful, green, wet photograph. She’d taken it because she felt flattered by him, or at least by the attention, and because she wanted to see what it was he saw. Am I sexy? Am I good to look at? A simple set of questions that had backfired spectacularly. This was a week ago. By now the picture was everywhere.

  She’d tried to fight back, telling people some of the things he’d told her in confidence. He was riddled with phobias. Salt water. Butterflies. He had an inexplicable fear of being touched on his Adam’s apple. For days she and her friends let loose near his bed butterflies that they’d stolen from the science lab, or they came up behind him in the line for the showers to gently touch his throat, saying things like, Hi, Charlie, what a nice Adam’s apple you have. It all went on until this morning, when her roommates were caught depositing even more butterflies into his dorm. In this way, school administrators caught wind of her picture.

  As Abernathy wound the cart up the path, climbing a small hill, Lydia spied the parking lot down below.

  “Did the dean call my parents?” she asked, trying to disguise what had become an obvious panic. She could not imagine what exactly their response would be, what mixture of horror and anger she’d be met by.

  Abernathy nodded. “I think the headmistress called them.”

  “Both of them?” she asked. “Or just one? Because they’re splitting up.”

  This was the first time she’d said it aloud. The sureness of the statement surprised her. Admitting it verbally felt like a test against its reality. She said it a second time. “They’re divorcing. Or something. I don’t even know. It’s shitty. You know?” She saw Abernathy’s head lowering in sympathy. Or maybe she was just imagining this.

  He slowed the cart. They were outside the administration building, which was white and modern and sterile-looking in the bright sun. Abernathy cut the engine. Down below, class was out. Streams of navy and white poured from the library. She was supposed to be in science class. As she began to walk up the front step, she saw, out across the lot, Charlie Perlmutter standing in front of a line of suitcases, waiting to be picked up. Involuntarily, she gripped the folds of her coat together. When he noticed her, he cocked his head, smiled, and blew her a kiss.

  3.

  Oona and Spencer sat silent as their car cut a straight line through the white foothills south of Mount Thumb. This was February in Vermont and the sky was simultaneously white and sunless. They had left right away. She had not slept in almost two days. Every few miles they passed through a small town built against the hillsides. Or cows in a herd huddled at the nose to keep warm. Eventually the road narrowed to one lane and the pavement gave way to dirt. On the driver’s dash the GPS reflected the way ahead as a red line against a blank white field. On and on they went, the blinking, the slow progress, the snow. The daylight moon strung up above the tree line. Woodsmoke in through the vents. Deer print in the snowdrift. Out in the gray thicket, bird’s nests left in the oak tops.

  “We’re close,” Oona said. It was the first thing she’d said in hours.

  She always got these calls; the mother always did. Whole days at the hospital, or in surgery, and if something went wrong, she got the message. Never mind that her soon-to-be ex-husband was almost always stoned and had been jobless for the past fourteen years, and was, because of these facts, home and freely available for parental emergencies: Oona always got the call. The headmistress at Lydia’s school was a German woman with beautiful English, but even so, Oona had needed to ask her to repeat herself. She was, even now, turning the words over in her head. Compromising photograph. Illicit nude photography. The headmistress had said that the picture was circulating around campus. Like a flyer, or influenza. Across the line, something had cracked. Static. Exhaustion. Impatience.

  It was a four-hour ride from Boston. They were in Spencer’s car, an enormous blue Toyota. She’d bought it for him just before the split. It was a foolish car but at the time a wellspring of guilt had compelled her to do something nice for him. Apparently this was the way her marriage fell apart: misplaced guilt and an inappropriately timed a
utomobile purchase. She’d had it delivered to the driveway with a big white bow on it, just as they did in the television commercials. He had thought this meant that their troubles were over, that their twice-a-week couples therapy had succeeded, or that their latest emergency weekend away in the Caribbean had done what they had hoped. She had thought of the car as the first piece of a nice severance package.

  Snow was falling. They were in the mountains. Hawks began to glide overhead.

  “Look, I need your opinion on this,” Spencer said as they crossed beneath a rail truss. He had been a lawyer before Lydia was born, and thought they might need to argue their case with the headmistress, that there was still hope. “You haven’t said anything. I have no idea what you think. You’ve just been silent.”

  “What I think,” she said, speaking slowly.

  “Yes: what you think. Do you think anything?”

  “What else is there to think, Spencer? I’m horrified. I’m nauseated. I’m panicking. I’m very, very worried.”

  They were trying. This was the official story. Once, she had loved him. In the beginning he was strong and full of confidence and so well-read and so convinced of the purpose of his life that just to be around him, in his presence, on his sofa, was to experience the world the way a king must: endowed with clarity and certainty and optimism and convincing opinions on global affairs. Then graduate school ended.

  “We’ll be blamed for this,” Spencer said. It was less of a question and more of a whining protest. “Just to prepare you.”

  “So this is our fault? Our daughter exposes herself and that’s our fault? Somehow that’s on you and me?”

  “Absent parents. Too busy to check in. Too willing to outsource responsibility.” He fluttered his fingers against the steering wheel. “If I had to guess.”

  “She’s at boarding school,” Oona said. “All the parents are absent.”

  Oona worked too much. This was one of Spencer’s numerous complaints. Their couples therapy had devolved into an exchange of grievances. She was never home. She had abdicated too much of the parenting. Lydia missed her. Why else would their daughter beg to go to boarding school unless she felt that the family unit was already degraded? This was his opinion. She saw it a different way. Her daughter was brilliant and independent and sure of herself and had the smart idea to get the hell out of Crestview a few years early. And besides, wasn’t medicine an important and noble calling, worthy enough of the long hours, the privation, the sleeplessness? Weren’t people still drinking too much and then drunkenly driving their Jeeps across highway medians and destroying their bones? And if so, didn’t she need to be there when they were wheeled into orthopedics so that she could hammer the titanium pins into their femurs? She had hoped the therapy would result in some divine solution—the Camp David accord of marital distress. Quickly, their hope proved futile. The woman he fell in love with didn’t exist any longer. He said this after their last session. The Real Oona was gone, he had told her. They were standing in the driveway of their house, beside this car, in full view of the neighbors.

  “If the Real Oona is gone, then who the hell am I?” she demanded.

  They’d met twenty years ago this month at a party in Tribeca, introduced by mutual friends who were so sure that they would find each other irresistible that a photograph actually existed of them shaking hands for the first time. In the picture they were both laughing. He was basically a boy then: twenty years old, gangly still, with a trace of acne on the bridge of his nose. On their first date, he told her that he had just broken up with his girlfriend. And by “just broken up,” he meant to say that he had gone home after meeting Oona and told his girlfriend that they were finished. Hearing this, Oona blushed. They were eating at Veselka on 2nd Avenue. Steamed pierogies. Black coffee. The place where, in the future, they would come to plot out their most important decisions. New York or not New York. Children or no children. A membership to a secular humanistic synagogue or yoga classes. She remembered that at the end of dinner he paid with his mother’s credit card. For the longest time they each carried a copy of this picture in their wallets. His young face, his full head of hair, his long-forgotten pierced ear; her stonewashed denim, her Hillary Clinton headband, the Real Oona. Neither of them could remember what they were laughing at in the picture.

  Oona dug her cell from her purse. Lydia occasionally sent short emails updating her on school. Dissected a cow’s heart today. Equal parts fascinating and vomitous. She swiped hopefully at the screen. This action, this small press and swipe, had become a neuromuscular reflex, as indispensable to her biorhythms as blinking or breathing. Because the hospital could call at any time, and because bones were always breaking, the phone accompanied her when she slept. It was like a faithful pet in this way, or an unshakable case of night terrors. Mostly, though, the phone served to convey how badly she missed her daughter. On the home screen was a picture of Lydia when she was three, when her favorite thing to do was perform the entirety of “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music, complete with move-for-move choreography and admirably fine pitch and, generally, just a heaping shitload of cuteness. These last few weeks Oona had started to transfer all the old pictures onto her phone so that she could do what she was doing now, which was to flip randomly, at light speed, through the first thirty-six months of Lydia’s life. This—three years old, singing, obsessed with Julie Andrews—was as far as Oona had gotten. She thought it was crucial to remember that such a deliriously optimistic time had ever existed. The oblivious years, she called them. Often Oona tried to summon every important fact of that era. Lydia’s first piece of solid food was carrot. Her first tooth came in February. Her first movie was Singin’ in the Rain. Oona marveled at her infant daughter’s enviable fascination with all the things that Oona, to be honest, did not pay attention to anymore. With dogs, with the moon, with grass, with wind, with eyelashes, and with dandelions and with little insects with wings! Her baby had reminded her that the world really was a wonderful and glorious place. This was a welcome revelation. They had very little furniture then. Because who really cares about furniture when you have each other? She and Spencer actually used to say this to each other, she remembered. The oblivious years. In couples therapy, they had agreed that it was the best time of their lives.

  “Nothing?” Spencer asked. “No word from her?”

  Oona put the phone down.

  Spencer grimaced. “You hot?” he asked. “I’m hot.” He reached to fiddle with the mess of buttons on the car’s dash. The car was a toy. There were buttons everywhere. The only people who drove this car were seventeen-year-olds and people who wanted to be seventeen again.

  They’d been apart the past six months. He lived in the house they’d built together in Crestview. Four bedrooms, wall-to-wall walnut flooring imported from China, more than one chandelier—an undeniable McMansion. She had moved in with her mother so that she could look after her, although with Henrietta Olyphant, you couldn’t just say something like that aloud. I worry about you being alone. Or: Your sadness scares the shit out of me. Or even: I love you. Even the most innocent acts of generosity were liable to be misunderstood by her mother as a political statement. They were the sort of family that kept their declarations of affection silent, or at least repressed them and disguised them as the typical ingredients of mother-daughter-granddaughter dysfunction: guilt, conflict, shame, cookies. All of these, you were to understand if you were an Olyphant, were an acceptable stand-in for love.

  “This is all my fault,” Oona said.

  Spencer looked over. “That’s just something to say. You don’t mean that.”

  “I got her the phone. The phone has the camera. It seems pretty obvious that it’s my fault.”

  “We don’t even know if any of this is true,” he said, in a perfectly lawyerly tone. It was always like this with him—his need to see proof and evidence.

  “All of this seems fairly obvious to me,” she said. “We begin to crack, you and me, and then
she begins to crack. It’s textbook.”

  He put a cool hand on the back of her neck. “Just breathe, okay? Close your eyes. Breathe.” Then he seemed to remember that they were no longer touching. He took back his hand. This was the first time they’d seen each other since she’d left. She’d done it on a Tuesday morning, with what was likely the least amount of pyrotechnics ever managed in a separation. “I’m going,” she had said, two suitcases with her, and he merely nodded and said, “I see that.” They’d already exhausted themselves arguing. It was not a coincidence, Oona thought, that they had been separated exactly as long as Lydia had been away at school. Once Lydia was gone, they had no purpose as a “unit.” This was the term he preferred. He used it frequently. They had discovered this, too, in couples therapy.

  Signs on the roadside signaled them to a slow crawl. The Hartwell colors were navy and white, and as they drove, small pennants strung up on telephone wires flapped in the mountain wind. Oona flipped down the mirror to look at herself. She had tried with makeup to make something pop that would never pop. She hadn’t known what to wear to retrieve her suspended, exhibitionist daughter, and so she’d gone with the only nice clothes she had in her closet. She was in scrubs every day of the week, but there was this: the same black dress she’d worn at her father’s funeral eleven months ago.