The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  She looked around. They were in a half-empty coffee shop in suburban Massachusetts. Did this feel like an ending?

  “Yesterday was a disaster,” she said. “I want you to know that I think it was a disaster.”

  “You have to admit,” Spencer said, “it’s a really good racket. Advising couples about how best to break up. Weakening the marriage. All the while preying on vulnerable women. In an immoral, psychopathic way, he’s actually kind of brilliant.”

  “It’s not like you were completely innocent yesterday yourself,” she said. “Showing up there with our daughter! What were you thinking?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes, honestly.”

  “I was on drugs,” he said. “So that’s my excuse. I was on drugs in front of our kid. I’m basically the greatest father in the history of fatherhood. What’s your excuse?”

  “What do you want me to say? That I wanted to screw another person?”

  “Do I want you to say that to my face? That you wanted to fuck our marriage counselor and eventually you did in fact fuck our marriage counselor? No. I don’t think I need to hear that.”

  Slumping back in her chair, no longer hiding how dejected this made her feel, Oona saw Spencer’s expression change. He leaned forward. He reached out to touch the sleeve on her coat. She could see that his instinct was to help her. This had become his role in their marriage. He came when she called. Any bad experience, and he came running. This, she realized, was exactly why she had called him. Because their marriage had become a habit, a series of faithful patterns. She hadn’t called because she wanted to come home, but because she needed him to make her feel better. He checked the time on his watch. She felt a new distance opening. What did she honestly expect him to say that she didn’t know already? Yes, casual sex could be fantastically and distressingly weird. Even with a stranger, someone you met in a bar, someone who was not your therapist, it was almost always a bad experience. Yes, you could find yourself on your back on a cold kitchen floor, pulling out a man’s chest hair with your fingers. Or hearing about that man’s redheaded ex-wife having an epiphany in the Himalayas. It was not like in her mother’s book, she knew. Dependency happens. Good sex was not enough. Guilt was inevitable and useless. Occasionally you needed someone to make you feel better. Across the table, Spencer wore a confused expression. Half pity, half anger. An expression that appeared to say, I don’t have anything good to tell you about this. In fact, I need someone to make me feel better about it. She felt unreasonably close to weeping and hated herself for it. He was her person. What were you supposed to do when you lost that?

  “This isn’t how I thought this would go,” she said finally.

  “How did you imagine it?”

  “Amicable.”

  “That I’d just welcome you back home?”

  She shrugged. “More or less. I mean, that’s what you asked for two days ago. And in the letters, right?”

  “I thought you didn’t read the letters.”

  She smiled. “I think I read most of them. Or at least half. There were a lot of letters. Like, many, many letters. Thousands of words.”

  “I had a lot of feelings, I guess,” he said.

  He laughed and then she laughed, and for a minute they let this moment exist between them, and when it was over there was silence. The coffee left in their cups rippled in the mugs. Her smile lasted longer than his. She felt as if they had just watched a lunar module fall into the sea. A rare occasion tinged with the possibility of impending doom or sadness.

  “I won’t write anymore,” he said.

  “You can write if you want,” she said.

  “I’ve clearly embarrassed myself.”

  “You’re very good at it, though. It’s one of your best skills.”

  “Or call. I won’t call.”

  “You can call, too,” she said.

  “I just don’t think that this is the part of the process that’s amicable,” he said.

  “Then what part of the process are we in?”

  “The part of the process where one of us starts sleeping with other people before the other one does.”

  She shredded a napkin. “I thought we were about to transition into the part of the process where we get along.”

  “Fine,” he said. “This is the part of the process filled with bitterness and jealousy and maybe one of us standing on a city block with binoculars.”

  “So, madness, you mean.”

  “Fine. Madness,” he agreed.

  “When does the peaceful part of the process happen?”

  He sighed. “After both of us find someone new.”

  “What if we don’t find someone new?”

  “I didn’t finish reading all the divorce books,” he said. “I don’t know how it ends.”

  “I don’t know either.”

  Outside, a hydroelectric waterfall sent mist into the air that froze into a slurry on the street. This was the ugly season, they had always called it. In Massachusetts they had football season, the color season, the drinking season, the Christmas season, and finally this. Mud everywhere, stubborn winter, forests of gray. Still, there were ducks. She watched them waddling from the river to the land and back to the river. Wood ducks, their green heads wet and shimmering, a magnificent line of them. This corner of wet earth, with its gentleman’s farms, its resplendent waterfowl, its meticulous landscaping, the seat of the American Revolution with café parking lots full of luxury Bavarian engineering—maybe they should have never left New York. She said this to him.

  “Don’t you think the end would be the same, though?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Geography doesn’t affect fate.”

  “That sounds like stoner teenage talk,” she said.

  “Love is a teenage emotion,” he said.

  “Your pessimism is inspiring.”

  “All the songs on the radio, the love songs—they’re for teenagers. They don’t write love songs for actual adults. They would be too depressing.”

  “Songs about divorce attorneys and couples counseling. That sounds like a lost Merle Haggard record.”

  “If we had stayed,” he said, “we’d just be arguing in a coffee shop in Manhattan.”

  “Maybe.”

  “A more expensive coffee shop.”

  “You were happier there, at least.”

  “I was twenty years old. My brain hadn’t fully formed yet. I was happy and stupid. I didn’t know anything about anything.”

  When they were finished, he walked with her out to her car, over the covered bridge that spanned the river, slick with ice, past the ducks, gulls from the sea overhead, and she remembered how, when they came to Aveline the first time, she had explained to Spencer that love was a chemical reaction, how a surfeit of hormones prompted a bond with another person, something as easy as a light switch flicking on and off. She had learned this in her endocrinology class. She remembered how angry this had made him. Such a cold, clinical explanation for something he considered vast and unknowable and beautiful.

  At the end of the bridge she took his hand as they walked, and for a moment before they got to the cars he held on to her and squeezed very hard until her fingers went white, as if he was an injured man about to have a limb cut off without anesthesia, all the while saying nothing, looking out at the river, at the ducks and the ice. A part of her understood. She had felt this way about him when things were better, that she wanted to grab him so tight because she was afraid he would vanish. Before he unlocked his door and drove away, she said to him, “You know the picture of us at the party? The one where we met?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Do you still have it?”

  He nodded.

  “I think I lost mine,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe when I was packing up.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was looking for it,” she said, not knowing whether this was something she could say anymore. “A
nd I realized I must have misplaced it.”

  “I can make you a copy,” he said. “If you want.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

  She had watched too much television and she expected then that he would kiss her. A last moment. A parting thing. Fucking snow falling around them. Goddamned stupid waterfall nearby spraying up stupid sentimental mist. She waited for it, even. She would think of this later and cringe and make promises to herself not to expect unreasonable things from the people closest to her. Instead, they lingered in the parking lot in silence, not even really looking at each other, even though this was what she wanted to do. Another foolish impulse. To really look at his face. To remember it better.

  “This is the end,” she said. It came out wrong, her voice too deep, and Spencer laughed.

  “The end of what?” he asked. “Is this the part where you kill me?”

  For minutes after he left she stood in the lot, the exhaust of his car dissipating, the water rushing, snow everywhere, all this fucking snow, this admittedly pretty waterfall, and she could not stop looking at her phone, hoping he would call, change his mind, come back, wishing the screen would light up for her.

  25.

  Her mother was out in the snow when Oona pulled into the driveway. Across the meadow, wind shook the stand of elms. Up the hill her mother didn’t look up. Instead, she was on her hands and knees with a garden spade and an ice pick, hacking away at the frozen ground.

  “What are you doing?” Oona called out.

  From the bottom of the hill, the house looked unsteady on its foundation. In the dim light she saw the missing shingles and the rot at the base of the chimney, and there was, she saw for the first time, a new spiderwebbing of broken glass that had formed in one of the attic windows. The word they kept using all this time was that it was “failing,” which was another way to say that the house was ready to fall in on itself, one big gust of wind or big snowfall away from something caving and people dying inside. The real estate agents used this word. The lawyers, in their appeals to creditors, used this word. The county surveyors brought in to walk the property line had used this word, had put it in their notes: The structure is in danger of failing. To say that it was failing implied something worse, Oona couldn’t help but think—that the house had suddenly ceased to do its job successfully, a house being a place to keep a family whole and intact.

  “There’s blood,” her mother said, rising a little when Oona got up the hill. Her mother was out without a jacket, her hair untethered and sopping, mud on the knees of her slacks. She pierced at the ground with the point of the ice pick, trying to dig away at something.

  “It can’t be blood,” Oona said. “It’s been raining and snowing for days.”

  Her mother put down the ice pick and took a flashlight to the slope. “Look,” she said. “See?”

  Oona crouched.

  “Is that not blood?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t know,” Oona said.

  “You’re a doctor. You know what blood looks like. That’s blood.”

  Oona followed the beam of light across the hill to the edge of the driveway and then back, in a loop, to the front steps of the crumbling porch. A snake of a half dozen droplets. All from Paul’s head. Beside her mother, a bucket of soapy warm water gave off steam.

  “This isn’t what you think it is,” Oona said.

  Her mother stood. “I saw when I came home. Clear as day. It’s blood.”

  Oona stood, watching her mother scrub.

  “Someone fell,” Oona said. “That’s all that happened.”

  “I know someone fell,” her mother cried. “I was here! I saw it!”

  Oona blanched. “Someone else fell. Trust me, it’s someone else.”

  Inside, Oona got the fire going. She put her mother on the couch. Beside the fireplace, in place of the kindling, Oona saw, all the remaining copies of The Inseparables were stacked up, one after another, in a line. Her mother wanted to burn them.

  “We’re almost out of firewood,” her mother contended.

  “A book burning? Really?”

  “Somebody told me once that it might make me feel better,” she said. “So I decided to give it another try.”

  Oona picked up a copy, flipped through the pages, and landed on the diagram of Eugenia Davenport throwing the teapot through the front window of Templeton Grace’s car. Just a woman preparing for afternoon tea, it read. Sometimes Oona allowed herself to fixate on the version of her mother who had made this, who existed only in pictures, the version her father had fallen for, that first Henrietta Horowitz, who was brilliant and brilliantly energetic, and who her father claimed had occasioned in him an instantaneous political awakening during that first lecture. That woman, for the most part, was a ghost. What remained of her emerged in fractions, and Oona always thrilled to recognize a hint of her mother’s old confidence, her incisive academic eye, the old radical’s energy and outrage. Who she was now was a product of the shame the book had caused her. Oona looked over at her mother, small on the large couch, wrapped in a blanket, warming herself. The book had sent her behind walls here, on this big farm, with all the acres and the animals, and because of it, she had become too much like an indoor cat whose instincts for a hunt have no purpose in a carpeted living room.

  “The blood outside,” Oona said. “It’s not Daddy’s.”

  Her mother shook her head. Oona had seen this before, at the hospital. The shock of death made even the most rational people senseless. This was why doctors were trained to talk about it with such cold, clinical logic. The brain has stopped and so he is dead. The heart cannot function any longer and he will die tonight. She hated to see her mother like this again, after eleven months.

  “I know it’s not his blood,” her mother said finally. “Most of me knows it’s not his, anyway.”

  “Good,” Oona said.

  “But whose goddamned blood is it? It’s not mine. Is it yours?”

  Oona tried to explain everything about Paul as succinctly as possible. She did not want to say that Paul had fallen on the same spot as her father, or that he’d done so because it was icy, just like her dad, or that she’d seen his head bounce off the frozen ground in the same way that her mother must have seen her father’s head crack. Instead, Oona just stated the facts. His name is Paul. At first he was our therapist, mine and Spencer’s. Then he was only my therapist. Then we stopped therapy because he liked my necklace and my neck. Then we kissed in my office. Then we made a date. Then he came here, he cut himself, I put him in the attic, he escaped, we got drinks, we went to his house, we made out in his elevator, we fucked on his kitchen floor, I ripped out his chest hair, and I felt deep, deep personal shame. And now this is happening: I’m telling you about it.

  Her mother took a moment to process this. “Wait a second,” she said, smiling.

  “We don’t need to fixate on the details,” said Oona.

  “Yes, we certainly do need to fixate on the details,” her mother said.

  “Please,” begged Oona.

  “So you’re saying this man was your therapist?”

  Oona cringed.

  “And that he came to this house the other night? When we were all here? When Lydia was here, even. When we were eating Chinese food? And that you hid him in the attic like you did with your old high school boyfriend?”

  “You’re enjoying this far too much,” Oona said.

  “And later you slept with this man?” her mother asked.

  “Mom,” Oona protested. “This is actually worse than the sex.”

  Her mother appeared unmoved. “And you’re saying the sex was bad?”

  Oona flipped through a copy of The Inseparables, to one of the best diagrams, labeled Fantasy of the Male Ravishing the Supplicating Female. The drawing corresponded with the escapade in which Eugenia lures Templeton Grace onto the floor of her solarium. Her mother had drawn the man with wild eyes and wet hair and with fangs and the woman as happily compliant and h
ungry. A thought bubble rises up above the woman’s head: I’m so hungry for your prick. This was the picture that her old friends and activists had been most bothered by. Her mother had claimed that everyone needed a better sense of humor. In retrospect, Oona thought it was outrageous that her mother might have assumed people wouldn’t be angry with her. Oona held up the picture. “It was like this,” she said. “But worse.”

  “How could it be worse than that?” her mother said, laughing loudly.

  “If you really need to know, he had more body hair.”

  Her mother shrugged.

  “And like I said: it was on his kitchen floor.”

  Her mother shook her head. “Not even the counter?”

  “He wanted the floor.”

  “It wasn’t one of those nice floors that are heated underneath, was it?”

  “Cold kitchen floor.”

  “That’s a good Freudian case study, right there. Why is it that the kitchen always summons some deep sexual desire in underconfident men?”

  “This is not helping me.”

  “Do you need help?” her mother asked, prompting in Oona an old, somewhat repressed memory of her mother entertaining the idea of doing this for a living: penning a sex advice column.

  “At worst,” Oona said, “I thought, just jumping into bed with someone new might energize me.”

  Again, her mother shook her head. “Or onto the kitchen floor.”

  “At best, I thought, maybe this is someone new. And maybe someone new is something good. And maybe, miraculously, I would enjoy myself.”

  “Sex on the floor? Where the hell would you get a dumb idea like that?”

  Oona tapped the edge of the book.