“‘Helpful’ is probably the wrong word. They’re just trying to make money,” said Spencer.
“We’re all trying to make money,” she said.
Every few moments, Spencer looked over his shoulder. Henrietta was not naive enough to think that this was exactly kosher, his being here with her and her being friendly and pleasant to him and not otherwise cruel or cold. The separation was new, but still, divorce meant factions. Walls were about to go up. Guidelines for diplomatic contact and official kindnesses had yet to be negotiated. Just last week, Oona had asked, “Do I acknowledge his birthday this year? And if yes, with what? A note? What do you get a man you’re divorcing? A savings bond?”
Henrietta had always liked him. Perhaps this was the first sign that he was not right for Oona. It was a good rule that the mother should never like the boyfriend more than the daughter does. The first time they met was at the Feast, at the good table by the window that looked out at the fountains behind the Christian Science Plaza. As a pair he and Oona looked as though they’d been matched by way of a color wheel. Tall, sun-kissed, they looked distressingly good in camel hair. Spencer had come an hour early. He was tall and prematurely gray and full in the shoulders. Over peasant bread and several glasses of good wine he was also speechlessly nervous, until, finally, looking out at the plaza and the church dome, he had turned to her and said, “Christ the scientist? Who knew he had such broad interests?”
In the garage he took out his rolling papers.
“May I?” he asked.
This was the big thing about Spencer. This habit. It was long-standing, as far as she understood it, something Oona had tolerated at first and then, over the years, had stopped tolerating. Henrietta, up until this point, had never seen him get high. His doing it here was maybe a product of the separation, or perhaps an indication of his level of despair. Or, more precisely, his deep desire to get high. She watched as he flicked at a tarnished lighter. The flame momentarily brightened the garage. She had heard Oona these last few months detailing how agonizing it had been to find her husband as stoned as she often found him. Here she was, coming home from the hospital, having just operated on fractured femurs and hips for ten hours, and she needed to contend with whatever Spencer thought was worth talking about: electric-era Miles Davis, theoretical explanations of dark matter. “As you can imagine, this makes having sex almost impossible, physically and emotionally,” Oona said to her recently. Henrietta simultaneously felt embarrassed at hearing too much about her daughter’s sex life and also a surge of maternal happiness at hearing too much about her daughter’s sex life.
Spencer’s hands moved quickly, the small, mindless dance of a habit. She watched to see if anything in him changed when he inhaled, some small shift in character, some silent accumulation of peace or calm, but there was nothing. He inhaled and he exhaled and he was exactly the same.
“What does it feel like?” Henrietta wanted to know.
“Come on,” Spencer said with his eyes closed. “Let’s not do this.”
“You’re avoiding the question. Tell me,” she said.
“It’s nothing.” He shook his head. “At first it’s nothing. It’s like—” He smiled. “It’s like nothing at all.”
“Clouds?”
He laughed. “Clouds?”
“I don’t know! It has to be something. If you keep doing it all this time, it must have some sensation.”
“You never did it?” He looked straight at her. One of his eyes was open wider than the other, and she had to look away.
“Nope,” she said. She used to like to drink. For a little while she had really liked to drink. Right after the publication she’d arguably gone a little too deep into the stuff, although she felt embarrassed to connect the two, the scandal of her book and the onset of a temporarily disabling attraction to alcohol.
“How’s it possible you never tried it? All that awful music. The bad hair. Everyone looked like a werewolf, or like they were auditioning to be the long lost Allman brother. Everybody had to be on it.”
“Everybody was not on it!” She held a finger in the air, victorious. “Misconception!”
“Honestly?” he said. “I haven’t smoked in two months.”
“Until this moment?”
“I was on a streak.”
“Spencer! That’s not a streak. That’s being sober.”
She had not seen Spencer since the funeral. She wanted to know exactly what and who was responsible for the separation. She was accustomed to the divorces of her friends, Reagan-era splits, in which everything was either about fucking or spending. Who was fucking who? Who was mad about the money? But Oona was vague. They’d grown apart. People drift. Love goes. Oona was, Henrietta saw now, being kind.
“It was the big topic in couples therapy,” he said. “Me being zonked.”
“I feel like I should take it from you and throw it away.”
He looked at the end of the joint. “I don’t really feel guilty. I like it. It makes me happy and calm. Do I look zonked?”
“Let’s not involve me in couples therapy.”
“It doesn’t really even feel like anything anymore. It’s just nice.” He looked up at the swinging lightbulbs, momentarily enraptured by them, like a cat with a telephone cord. “You know?”
“So it’s a present,” she said. “Is that how you think of it? A nice present to yourself?”
He took a second to think. “It’s like a friend,” he said finally. “Is that an odd thing to say?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Yes. I would say that’s a problematic way to think of it, Spencer.”
He took another drag from his joint.
“I feel like I need to tell Oona about the fact that you’re high,” she said.
“Why would you possibly feel that? She’s free of me now. She doesn’t care.”
“Oona would—”
“Oona would what?”
“She’d want to know. She loves you.”
He closed his eyes.
“I’ve had her here all this time. We talk.”
“You do?”
His optimism was extreme and because it was so extreme it was heartbreaking. She hedged. “We sometimes talk. Yes. Occasionally. We have moments.”
“She’s made it very clear to me that love is not one of the things that occurs to her when she takes inventory of her feelings.”
Henrietta shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
“What has she told you? Has she said she loves me still?”
Henrietta said nothing.
“See?” he said. “In couples therapy we did this exercise. A free association. Typical Freudian nonsense. When it came to me her list was not positive. It was all, like, ‘pizza,’ ‘rolling papers,’ ‘body hair.’ Not good things.”
“Nothing about Lydia? Nothing about being a father?”
He shrugged. “There was that, too,” Spencer said. “But you know, buried at the end of a long list.”
“She worries about you. That’s love.”
“Loving someone and worrying after them are not the same thing.”
“You have a kid. You know how it goes. It’s basically the same thing.”
“Are you appealing to me Jewish person to Jewish person?”
She laughed. “Perhaps!”
“She wanted me in rehab. I heard it all the time. We’ll say that you’re going to Canyon Ranch to do some tai chi. The guys in the office won’t care. You’ve got eons of sick time. Tell them you’re going away to find your inner jungle cat. Roger and Madeline will appreciate that. Every week I heard this.”
Henrietta nodded. This must have been an old argument. He had not been at the firm with Roger and Madeline for a decade at least.
“Tai chi is good for you,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“In the seventies, everyone was doing it,” she said.
Snowplows passed on the main road, the blades scraping the street.
“I suppose we need to check all of these boxes,” she said. “And then, once we’re inside, we need to check all the boxes in there, too.”
“What does this thing look like, exactly?” he asked.
She described it. The flag. The expression. The blue box she had packed it in. She held her hands apart to approximate the length. “It was on the mantel in the house.”
“It was?”
“All this time. Every time you ever came here.”
He shook his head.
“You’re high,” she said. “This is a waste.”
“I’m fine.”
“Please. You’re as high as Louis Armstrong right now.”
He shook his head. “That’s not exactly a reference I totally understand.”
“The statue was actually on the back cover of my book. Behind my shoulder in the picture,” she said. “And unfortunately, it’s both missing and worth a lot of money.”
“Oh.” He went red. “That little lady.”
“Please don’t,” Henrietta said. Oona had confessed to her that as a teenage boy Spencer had kept his copy of The Inseparables hidden under his mattress. “I don’t want to know what role I played in corrupting your youth.”
“A very large role,” he said.
She hung her head. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Well, I’m glad for you. And your mattress.”
He took down the first box and ran a razor across the top. He looked up. “I’m glad, too. But to be honest, the fact that you became my mother-in-law? Kind of complicated, actually.”
She moved a pair of boxes with her feet. He leaned back against the cement wall, one eye larger than the other, smiling. “I’m surprised you’re being like this to me,” Spencer said.
“Like what?”
“Not awkward. Decent. Nice.”
She smiled. “It’s strategic, honestly.”
“How so?”
“You have something I want,” she said.
He knew.
“When this is all done,” she said, “and you’re a stranger, I want you to bring my granddaughter by, or make her come by and see me. Force her, if you need to. Entice her. Corral her. Bribe her if you must.”
He nodded. “I understand.”
“Especially with all this trouble she’s into.”
He blinked. “What trouble?”
“She told me.”
“She told you?”
“I actually know things about this,” she said. “Especially about this.”
“I understand.”
“She’s terrified of me,” Henrietta said.
“That’s not the case.”
“I’ll rephrase: I terrify her. I know. I had a grandmother once. She was a tiny Russian woman. She spoke nine languages and none of them were English. I barely ever understood anything she said to me. She was always yelling about something. Every person she ever loved as a child was either murdered or kidnapped or died of something ridiculous—like diphtheria. She terrified me. Unfortunately, I think at some point I turned into my grandmother.”
“I’ll bring her by,” he said. “Whenever you want.”
“Like the last time she was here,” Henrietta said. “Whenever that was. A few weeks ago. The girl barely spoke to me. She just sat on the couch with her mother, yapping away, all night long. I was just a spectator.”
Spencer’s eyes shot open in surprise.
She tried to save the moment. “Not weeks. Did I say weeks? I meant months. She came at Christmas. Right? Months.”
His shoulders fell. “She came home a few weeks ago and she didn’t tell me?”
10.
When they were alone together finally, Oona pantomimed a picture frame with her hands. “We’ll probably need to address the elephant in the room at some point,” she said.
Outside, snow peeled off the roof. Wind made the lights flicker. They were in the bathroom on the third floor. It was a large room with a claw-foot tub and a window that looked out on the icy driveway. Above the faucet hung a tiny red print of her child-size hand, preserved all this time like the cave paintings at Lascaux.
“I think calling them elephants is probably a bit generous, Mom.”
“Not funny, Lydia.”
“Baby elephants, then.”
“Still not humorous. Not even remotely.”
This thing with the picture was among her worst fears. Had Oona enumerated the things she worried most about as a mother, she would have put it near the top of the list. A fatal car accident. An abduction. A swift-moving tumor. Then this. At night lately she had found herself bargaining with God about Lydia’s safety. She did this even though she was fairly sure she did not believe that anyone or anything was listening. “I will gladly suffer a car accident,” she thought some nights, “or a terrifying abduction or a tumor if you just keep her safe.” Alone in the bathroom, she watched her daughter. It was a simple thing, yet she could not say it aloud anymore: All I want to do is keep you safe. When Lydia was younger, Oona could say this without risk of earning her daughter’s disdain. Stay with me. Come hold my hand. Be where I can see you. Stay close to Mommy. So often lately, Oona felt actual fear about what she could and could not say around Lydia. Nothing obliterated her confidence as a mother or, moreover, as a human as much as her daughter’s withering contempt. Lydia’s new teenage intellect operated like a heat-seeking gas, filling every available space with its energy. Out of nowhere, she had a full, facile command of ridicule. And it had happened so fast! Five years ago Lydia was a child! A girl in the fourth grade, learning about frogs, sleeping with a stuffed hippopotamus, crawling into bed with her on Sunday mornings to say the most preposterously kind things. You are the best person that has ever lived. Now Oona worried that anything she said would be the wrong thing to say. Do you need help? Because I will help you. Here’s a thought: how about you just stay here with me, every second, all the time, forever? Oona had read so much about this—about being a mother to a teenager—and she had found nothing in her books to give her any optimism. Instead, she had found that parenting a fifteen-year-old daughter was not so different than the way her colleagues at the hospital treated cancer. By the end, every cell in your body will be destroyed. You may or may not live. Above all else, you will need a positive attitude, you will need resilience, but prepare yourself for failure.
“I can’t talk about it,” Lydia said. “I can’t. That’s not ideal, I know. You like to talk things out.”
“I do,” Oona said. “Talking is healthy. Talking is therapeutic.”
“But therapy is so bourgeois, Mom.”
At first Oona wanted to let the comment go. This was the sort of thing she struggled with. Your child says ridiculous things and you need to answer. For fifteen years this was how it had gone, but not anymore. What Oona wanted to say was, “Bourgeois? That’s actually genuinely very funny, since, you know, you chose to go to a boarding school that offers a class on the history of the BMW sedan.” But what Oona actually said to Lydia was, “I’m here if you want to talk. I’m here right now.”
“I already spoke to a therapist today,” Lydia said. “Several, actually. Sorry to say, it was not therapeutic.”
While Lydia sat on the bathroom vanity, Oona sat on the rim of the bathtub. Lydia avoided eye contact. At this, she was inordinately gifted.
“Are you okay, at least?” Oona asked.
“Am I okay?”
“Yes!” Oona cried. “Are you? Because I’m not. Not at all.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Can I hug you?” Oona asked.
Oona suspected that Lydia was readying something caustic, but she merely offered a shy, almost childish nod of her head. “Sure,” she said, walking across the room and grabbing on to her.
“I’m worried about you,” Oona said, trying out the words tentatively. “I know this is hard for you to talk about. But this is worrying. All of this.” She let go but then, changing her min
d, hugged Lydia once more, even though Lydia began to squirm in her arms. This, too, was something that had been easier when Lydia was younger: the permission to hold her child. Lydia used to allow herself to be hugged close for the longest time. In a crowded aisle at the Natick Mall, Oona could scoop Lydia into her arms, hold her for hours. At Fenway Park, when Lydia was five or six, she would gladly sit in Oona’s lap for the entire game. Lately, though, Oona had found herself growing nervous about whether she could still do this—hug her daughter—or whether she needed to ask ahead of time.
“I’m trying to keep perspective,” Lydia said. “I don’t have tuberculosis. I’m not starving. My village hasn’t just been firebombed. I’m just humiliated. I realize that is a very low bar.”
“People have been awful at school?” Oona said. “I thought these were the best students in America.”
“I showed you the phone,” Lydia said. “They’re all princes and gentlemen.”
“How many of those messages have you gotten?”
“Enough,” said Lydia, crossing the room. “We’re talking about it. I told you I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“But why would you even take the picture in the first place?” Oona asked. “Did somebody make you? Or was it your idea?”
“This sounds suspiciously like you’re about to say it’s my fault,” Lydia said.
Oona felt her shoulders tightening. She hadn’t seen the picture, but she imagined it as best as she could: the dingy bathroom tile, lime scale on the hot-water knob, evidence of blond hair dye on her daughter’s roots, probably a string of pimples across her chest, even more probably a knowing glare on her face borrowed from a porn actress. At the least she hoped for a terrifying lack of life in her daughter’s eyes. Those eyes, which were her own eyes, and her father’s eyes. Those eyes—she needed to imagine that there was nothing in the expression. She needed to think that there was a deep vacancy of the soul evident in the photograph, because that was the only way Oona could understand its existence to be true.
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