“Termites mate for life,” he said, dazed. “Think about that shit.”
Earlier they had sat through a lecture on the biology of thought. Images of the brain, adult and teenage, were broadcast to their laptops. Notice, the teacher had said, how incompletely formed so much of the teenage brain is. An animation of the prefrontal cortex lit up in indigo on their screens. The lack of development here indicated, among other things, an increased tendency toward risky behavior. She and Charlie had messaged through this. Fuck this, my brain is beautiful, she had written. Fuck this doctor and her stupid slide show of brains. The blinking indigo was supposed to explain everything about her teenage personality. The foolish impulsivity. The poor choice in hiking partners. The ingesting of unknown pills when your father was very clearly a drug addict. I want to fuck your dumb brain, Lydia, Charlie wrote. The answers to everything about herself were medical, physical, concretely real. How about you just give me a picture of your hot naked brain? This was the reason for all these end-time feelings. No invasion of privacy had ever been this bad. No betrayal of trust had ever been this severe. Her head was a wastebin filled with the stuff. The surfeit of dopamine. The equal measures of heartbreak and blood lust.
On the white rock he had put his hand in her hair and then kissed her, and this was her very first kiss.
One last chime: Come to New Jersey. Your offer expires at the end of the day.
Lydia remembered a lecture her mother had given her before her first day at Hartwell. They were in the car, waiting outside her dormitory, and all the girls were coming out and going in, everyone looking supremely confident and acne-free and blond. People make mistakes, her mother had said, out of the blue, anticipating, it was clear, everything that was about to happen, perhaps for both of them. People get lonely. People act foolish. People sometimes find other people attractive physically even if they don’t find them particularly attractive personally. People are occasionally capable of extreme cruelty. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t capable of good deeds and trust and redemption. All of this had been a poorly articulated way to tell Lydia not to sleep around, and Lydia, ever shrewd, had leaned against the car door and said, When you say “people,” you really just mean you, right? She hadn’t meant anything by that at the time. It was just a way to fight back. One learned the language of insults before learning exactly what they meant. Looking back, her mother’s speech, and the insistent don’t-fuck-with-me look she had given Lydia, suddenly took on an entirely new dimension.
The face of the Intercontinental shimmered, the glass reflecting back the sky above the harbor, sun-white for the instant. She tried to imagine her mother up there, fifty stories high, having embarked on this sudden new life with this strange new man, months of therapy and weeping into aloe-infused tissues having evolved into this—whatever this was. A new coupling, a spate of self-sabotage, a needlessly cruel way to sever a marriage. It was a fine building, Lydia could see, a combined hotel and condominium complex, with doormen dressed like sentry, and bellhop carts loaded high with monogrammed Italian luggage. Outside the front doors, a stream of wealthy-looking people lingered without any obvious purpose—people smoking, people reading the Financial Times, people looking blankly out at the ocean.
She saw her father across the street, waiting to cross at a stoplight, wind bothering his hair, coffee and a bag of donuts and a newspaper balanced precariously in his hands. He wore his camel hair unbuttoned in the sea breeze, open to an untucked dress shirt and a pair of jeans torn at the knee. He looked up at the building with some mixture of distress and resolve and envy at its obvious sleekness, its imposition on the skyline, its militant blackness, as if the building itself had come and taken his wife away.
In the bright light he looked healthier and younger and, for an instant, unlike a father. Just a guy on the street balancing coffee, donuts, and a newspaper. Earlier they had argued about the picture. He needed to do his due diligence as a father, she knew. But still: “How am I supposed to react to this?”
“With compassion, maybe.”
“I have compassion, I do, but I also have feelings. And anger. And worry. And anxiety. And enormous concern. And you’re my kid. My little kid. You don’t remember that person, but I do. You don’t realize that. Ten minutes ago we were getting lunch in the restaurant across the street. You gave names and detailed family histories to all your stuffed animals. I still remember all of that stuff. How the hippo’s best friend was the owl. How the owl’s brother was somehow a lion. You get that, right? I will never not remember that stuff. The genealogy of your stuffed animals is imprinted in me. It was, like, ten minutes ago to me.”
“You’re high all the time,” she had said. “That affects your sense of time passing.”
He’d put his face in his hands. She was hurting him. “Please say something to reassure me,” he said.
She touched his arm. “I’m fine.”
“Say something else.”
“Don’t worry, Daddy.”
Paul Pomerantz stepped out from the front revolving door of the Intercontinental. Watching her father watch this man, Lydia felt a stab of guilt for having helped hide Paul away in the attic last night, and a deeper stab of guilt, maybe a lifetime’s worth of guilt, for everything she had ever done to him. Her poor dad. Her fucked-up stoner father. Paul wore a knee-length herringbone trench with a red scarf coiled tight around him like a fashionable neck brace. The valet had pulled around the same sleek, polished Audi that Lydia had sat in last night. For a moment they both watched him, she and her father, each probably thinking the same thing: nice coat, nice luxury condo tower, nice car. In a way, Lydia could see the appeal. He was not terrible-looking. He had a decent smile, a dignified nose. The kind of face you saw on a foreign coin. He made a joke with the valet and the valet laughed. The same yellow gull went by and Paul stopped to watch it. Look, Lydia wanted to say. He’s alert to nature, he likes birds, he makes jokes with the valet, he’s probably nice! Take some notes!
Her father had realized his chance. He headed toward Paul.
From inside the car Lydia cried out, “Dad, no.”
Her father rushed forward with purpose. Foolish, idiotic purpose. Paul, meanwhile, had one foot inside his Audi. He kept talking to the valet. Maybe an impromptu therapy session. Lydia got out of the car. Family didn’t let family do shit like this. Her father began shouting something. Lydia was too far away to hear. This clearly was not the confrontation her dad had imagined. Paul nodded and smiled. His graciousness looked studied, entirely fake. She had seen this in Charlie Perlmutter after everything turned. Weaponized warmheartedness.
Her father became startled by something. Paul took a step toward him, his hands up, as if to say, Let’s talk it out, buddy. Let’s you and me work it out, pal. Lydia escaped back to the car. She had a preternatural sense for someone’s inevitable embarrassment. She let out a small moan. Come back, she said aloud, inside the Toyota. Come back, Dad. Let it go.
Paul came closer. Her father stood on the corner of Atlantic Avenue. The ocean lay behind him. He looked dignified, she thought, in his camel hair. Snow fell lightly. This was when her mother appeared. She pushed through the revolving door, onto the sidewalk, her hand already up for a taxi. Lydia saw her a moment before her father did. Her mom’s coat was open to the same clothes from last night. Even from across the street, Lydia could see her mother’s exhaustion, the wear on her face. She had sunglasses on, crooked across her nose. When her dad saw her, he froze. From inside the car, Lydia thought she saw her father say the word Honey? or Sweetie? Right then, he dropped everything. The paper. The dozen sticky donuts. The cups of coffee. All of it ran down the front of his coat.
19.
From the outside, Witherspoon’s did not seem like the kind of place that might accept stolen things or fence them or attract the kind of buyer interested in getting a deal on a pilfered piece of damaged folk art. Henrietta had expected a pawnshop. Instead, Witherspoon’s gave off a kind of shabby Francop
hone glamour, with its gray-and-navy-striped awning and its window boxes planted with ice-hued cabbage. This was miles from home, in a shop on the edge of the city. In the window a Cézanne rip-off and a baroque brass candelabra shared space with a studded orange-sherbet-colored settee. Henrietta was no expert, but in her experience this was the exact store window of every antique store everywhere. She’d come here because Jerry Stern had told her to. His message was brief: Try Witherspoon’s. I can’t promise anything.
A big man, looking somewhat close to her in age, met her at the door wearing white suspenders and a huge untamed mustache.
“I’m wondering if you can help me,” she said. She approximated the size of the weathervane with her mittens. “I’m looking for a little woman—”
Before she could finish, the man’s mustache rose, a sly grin underneath. “That makes two of us.”
“No,” she said, laughing. “It’s a statue. Sixteen inches. Made of copper.”
He put a hand to his face, absently or nervously scratching. His mustache looked capable of swallowing his fingers up to the knuckle.
“It was part of a weathervane,” she explained. “Not the whole thing. Just the top part. The ornament. It looks like a very small statue.”
The man shook his head, which she expected. She did not know exactly how to go about doing this. Had someone in fact come to her house and taken this thing, and then sold it here, to this stuffy place, with its awning and its reams of dust and its mustachioed clerk? Would it just be on the shelves? Was there some secret patois that thieves used?
“We have a few roosters in the back,” he said, smiling. “Maybe a lady got in without me noticing.”
“Can I look?”
The air inside was musty: damp library books and potpourri and the latent hanging reminder of a morning cigarette. On a bar cart inlaid with cracked mirrored trays, a Lalique decanter needed to be washed. Overhead, a Neil Diamond song played in French. There were two rooms, Henrietta saw: one with rings and watches and gold earrings, and another with furniture and pastoral paintings, most of them pictures of fat peasant girls hoisting hay bales or milking goats on their knees. She paused for a long moment in front of the best one of these: a river scene, with a farmhand jamming his pitchfork deep into the earth while surveying, or admiring, or planning to sexually menace a young woman washing her laundry in the water. Henrietta would have lectured for ninety minutes on this picture back in New York. The pitchfork as a substitute for a cock. The artist’s insistence on making the woman’s skirt dirty and, by way of this choice, reinforcing the inherent filthiness of female sexual desire. Ideas like this came to her all the time. Some better than others. When the money finally evaporated, she’d tried to get a class or two. In Boston, she thought, this wouldn’t be too hard to do. There were more places here to study than there were to get a decent chicken taco. But she’d been turned down everywhere. Her ideas might have become commonplace now, but the crucial fact remained that her book was still an embarrassment.
“Here are our weathervanes,” the man said, opening a small cabinet to two roosters, one codfish, and a wooden racehorse with a crack through the middle. He quite obviously took great pleasure in this small menagerie. Finally, he took the codfish into his hands.
“They’re charming little things,” he said, petting the fish across its scales. “And valuable, too.”
The fish’s dead metal eye glared at her. “No women?”
“You sound just like my mother,” he said.
“I had this on my house, you see,” she said. “A storm blew it off.”
“And so you’ve lost it,” he said.
“In a sense.”
“And then how would it end up here?” he asked.
She tried to keep herself from flushing with color. She used to be a skilled liar, but it was an old talent, rarely used now. “I moved houses,” she said, trying. “And I’ve always liked that thing. And I’ve been searching all the antique stores in the city, hoping.”
“Well, the codfish could work,” he said, bouncing it in his hands. “This guy seems capable, don’t you think?”
Against the back wall, a humidifier buzzed. A fat gray cat emerged, waddling through the room. On the shelves behind her were tiny wooden curios ready for sale. Birdhouses, walking canes, clockfaces, everything tagged.
“There’s no back room?” she asked.
“No back room.”
“No basement?”
“Not with anything good in it,” he said.
She followed the man back to the front of the shop. The dust made her sneeze. More French Neil Diamond played. The cat ran out in front of both of them.
Up front, a small television balanced on a wooden stool. On the screen, Henrietta saw a family out in the sunshine flying kites as part of a pharmaceuticals ad. She always noticed families on television these days, families looking healthy and lovely and engaged moment to moment with the world and doing obsolete things like flying kites.
“I feel like I know you,” the man said.
Henrietta was wearing a long winter coat, which was black and wool and old, and she had sunglasses pushed up through her hair like a headband. Oona called this her look of intentional anonymity.
“Do you live in the neighborhood?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said.
“Are you famous, then?”
“Most definitely not.”
“No, I’ve seen you. I’m sure. Maybe on the news?”
She shook her head. “My rule is that if I’m on the news then something horrible has happened.”
This charade had always bothered her. As with all things related to that semipublic part of her, Henrietta maintained a gnawing ambivalence toward whatever remained of her fame. She always underestimated it, or overestimated it, or denied it. What was she supposed to say? You may have heard of me: I’m the woman behind the diagram with the pubic hair. Or: Your mother read my book in the bathtub with the door locked.
They walked to the front counter, which was a glass cabinet full of engagement rings and pocket watches. She left her name in the event that something close to what she’d described came into the shop. Standing near the door, she could hear the electric hustle of the Green Line trolley as it ran up into the city and then back out toward the reservoir in Chestnut Hill. She took a moment to look. It was midday. This was the way she’d come, on the train from Aveline that ran aboveground for miles, through the white forests and the frozen school ball fields and into the city. During their first week living in Aveline, Harold had taken her on the train for the first time. She was eight months pregnant. He wanted to show her how easy it was to get into town. He wanted her to know that he had not marooned her. They went from their house all the way to the beach, she remembered. Think of that, he said: country, city, ocean. All of it is so close.
In the corner of the top shelf, Henrietta saw a black velvet box displaying two silver pens.
She did not need to look very closely to know that these had been Harold’s. His name was printed on the front of the box in white lettering. She’d paid extra for this. She had bought them for his thirty-fifth birthday, thinking foolishly that he might use them to write recipes. Not just one overpriced pen, but two. It became a joke between them, these kinds of gifts. Monogramming, personalizing—the strident attempts at ascending social class. He claimed to love the pens but had never, not once, ever used them.
“Could I see those?” she asked.
He gave her the box happily. A white tag hung from the corner. Five hundred dollars, it read, which was four hundred more than she had paid for it.
She opened her purse to buy the pens, but she knew she could not. There were credit cards, but they were maxed, and there were checks, if anyone still took checks, but those would bounce. There was Oona’s credit card, slipped in there a few weeks back, without mention, as a kind of prompt: Quit being so proud and use me. But she could not.
He always wanted something like knives
for his birthday. Knives or trips to New York to eat at Jean-Georges, and she always did this instead—silver pens and tie clips and driving gloves.
“Can you tell me who brought this in?” she asked.
The man shook his head. “I don’t keep names. I’m sorry.”
“Could you tell me at least how long ago you got this?” She thought of Jerry, cleaning out everything in Harold’s closet, in his office, in the series of shoe boxes he kept stacked in the basement and in which he stored all the letters his parents had sent him at summer camp, their postcards from Europe, their birth and death certificates. She hadn’t checked over anything.
“Oh, well, I’ve had those for a while,” he said.
“A while,” she said. “Is that a month? A week?”
“Oh no,” he said. “At least a year. Eighteen months, even. I know because they’re right here where I sit. I see them every day. You’re the first person who’s ever even asked to see them.”
20.
Lydia and her father drove home wordlessly. The same path, gunmetal-gray sky, the river black and mud-clogged, and the street white with road salt. His humiliation was a third person in the car. What could you say to anyone after this, let alone a man like your father, previously proud, maybe a little too addicted to weed, but still, generally mostly decent? Was there anything to say? Lydia drove too timidly, too slowly, traffic accumulating behind her, the car’s weight and force and power increasingly threatening. Her father held a wad of napkins to the stain on his coat as if he were applying pressure to a bullet wound. She put A Love Supreme on the disc player. He preferred jazz, intricate rhythms, the kind of music that made no sense to her. She let it play, hoping it might rouse something in him. Also, it occupied the silence. A hockey game in town made the trip slow. At each stoplight she searched the faces that filled up the crosswalks. Every man, she guessed, was better than Charlie Perlmutter or Paul Pomerantz. Each of them. All of them. Dozens of them moving in packs across Commonwealth, Beacon, Huntington, Congress, Atlantic. Why did men move in such huge groups?
The Inseparables Page 18