The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  The Perlmutters’ neighborhood eclipsed anything Lydia knew from home. Nine-foot privet; hand-laid Belgian block; serious, probably dynastic wealth. When they got to the house, she was not surprised to find that it was the largest on the street, nicer, bigger, less gaudy, less tacky, less spooky than she’d expected. It was white and stone and sprawling, the hedgerows out front better than the neighbors’. Twin ornamental lions bookmarked the end of the driveway. She had heard stories about Charlie’s parents, about how each of them was a tycoon, his mother the CFO of a biotech company that manufactured experimental vaccines for pandemic-worthy pathogenic viruses, and his father a television executive, neither of them, by Charlie’s own description, around very much. He told her this once, during the brief moment in which she thought he was charming. “My dad,” he said. “He treats me like one of his underperforming stocks. Instead of selling, he just dumps me here, at this place.” He sounded sincere and vulnerable and real. But then again he was trying to fuck her.

  They stopped out front. In a small window above one of the many garage doors, a ceramic cat statue looked out onto the street.

  “I’m not ready,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  “I’m not talking to him,” Lydia said. “Or seeing him.”

  “He won’t be there,” her father said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because I called them.”

  This had not occurred to her. “You called his parents?”

  “I called everyone,” he said. “Every single person I could think of. Everybody.”

  They were out in the street. She had the paralytic sensation of her body moving independent of her brain. Neighborhood kids in thick winter jackets rode by on sleek bicycles. Juncos and waxwings perched on a cypress. She knew their names from her class.

  Two people moved in the window of the house.

  At the front gate, she stopped. “And what if he’s there?”

  “I made them promise he wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Especially if you were coming.”

  “But what if he is?”

  Her dad put his hand on her shoulder. “If he’s there, I’ll beat him to death with my own fists,” he said.

  She did not know whether he was joking. The gates opened.

  28.

  At night sometimes, sleepless, dwarfed by Harold’s absence, Henrietta tried to chart the progress of her grief. I’m no longer certain that his ghost is beside me in bed, she sometimes thought. Or, I no longer have nightmares about being buried alive. Or of caskets. Or of the Kaddish being chanted above my body. Or, I don’t find myself lingering so much on the very last moments: light on his forehead in his hospital room, or the cracked-glass smack of his head on the flagstone. Lately, she was stuck on the brief moment before, when he was in the kitchen, and she was, too, and he was putting on his boots, that brief moment in which she could have said, No, stay, don’t, wait until it’s warmer, there’s ice, be here.

  Oona had asked. It was morning. The questions were always innocent and yet impossible to answer. How are you? They were in Oona’s car, parked outside Witherspoon’s. Icicles hung like fangs from the wrought iron joints holding up the shop’s awning. Up on the avenue the trolley tracks were slick with ice. This morning the store had called to say that someone had come in offering to sell what she was looking for. The vagueness had not deterred her from coming right away. The shop was closed. They had come early.

  “What do you think happened?” Oona asked.

  They had not spoken on the ride home the night before. Oona had wanted to buy back everything, every item.

  “Money makes people foolish,” Henrietta said. “That’s what happened.”

  Oona shook her head. “You did the bills, though. Wouldn’t you know if Daddy owed people all this money?”

  “You’d think I would, wouldn’t you?” Henrietta was tired. None of this made sense. All of her husband’s things, scattered. This new sudden deficit of trust and money. The whole narrative of her marriage felt skewed now. Apparently you could live with a man and sleep beside that man and still have no idea about that man’s desperation.

  She had dreamed last night that everywhere she walked she saw more of Harold’s stuff—his clothes, his boots, knives from his chef’s kit. She had followed the bread crumb trail by foot all the way to New York, two hundred miles south, to her mother’s apartment door. She had knocked and knocked, calling out for her mother, dead for ten years, knocking and knocking, louder and louder, Mom! Mom!, until Henrietta finally woke up with her hands wringing. How good of her mother to stop in at a time like this.

  “He was impossible at the end,” Henrietta said. “The restaurant failing was so public. An empty dining room? A night’s worth of meat? Even his friends wouldn’t come. People were writing the worst things on the Internet. I told him not to look. But he looked. How can you help but look? His confidence vanished. It made him angry. I see now that it also made him stupid.” Henrietta reached to turn on the car’s heat. “He could have borrowed money from anybody, really. Any odd person he knew growing up here. Any Boston scumbag charging exorbitant interest rates in exchange for cash and free dinner. I did all the bills. I paid for everything. I always said that he couldn’t have what he wanted. I was the bad cop. That’s what I’m figuring out.”

  “I don’t want to believe that. I think that’s crap.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  She had already spent the night trying to find out what it was exactly that he’d borrowed for. Another month of rent, right under her nose? A crate of fresh Maine lobster. Heritage turkeys that they had smoked together out behind the house and which were delicious and left her smelling like meat for days and which, also, no one, not one person, bothered to order. She had dug out from the garage the box containing the Feast’s accounting records. She spread them across the kitchen table. She’d never been able to find any good answers, though, in a page of numbers.

  “Are you mad at him?” Oona asked. Old snow blew off the shop’s awning and onto the street.

  Henrietta thought about it.

  When their money troubles first became glaringly apparent, she figured she would try to write another book. By then she knew she would need cash. She kept phrases in a notebook. The new quiet. The infinite quiet. The miserable quiet. She strained to hear ghosts in the woodwork. She bought books on astrology and Kübler-Ross and the possibility of reincarnation. It had gone on like this for months.

  “He’s dead,” Henrietta said. “If I’m mad at him for anything, it’s for dying.”

  She saw out the window an intrepid cross-country skier cutting across Commonwealth Avenue and cresting the small berm to the frozen reservoir. He wore white superhero spandex. She watched as the man stopped at a traffic light. The car windows were closed and so she couldn’t hear what he was yelling, only that he was doing so, his hands cupped to his mouth. He waved toward someone, and then, after a minute, another skier in a white suit came around the block, clearly exhausted. For the longest time she’d been noticing things like this. The mated species: swans, geese, skiers in spandex. One mate leading, the other failing. Considering the relative uselessness of astrology and Kübler-Ross and the possibility of reincarnation, she reasoned that there might need to be an entirely new set of stages of grief. The mate stage: seeing pairs of everything. The ghost stage: feeling the severed limb.

  The skiers glided out across the ice.

  “Twits,” Oona said. “They’re going to fall in.”

  “Oh, I would love to do that,” Henrietta said, surprising herself.

  “Fall through the ice?”

  “Look at them,” she said, watching their easy rhythm, the pushing wind. “Just being in the elements like that. It looks nice.”

  “It looks life-threatening.”

  Henrietta shook her head.

  “I have a fear.” Oona pointed. “The ice. You go down. It freezes up over you.”

  “Not h
ere,” she said. “When Harold first moved me here, he tried to keep me entertained because he thought I was so bored, and he brought me to these hockey games in town. As if that’s what I wanted to do. Watch the police versus the fire department. Everyone would come, the whole town. And they’d park all the cars wherever they could fit on the ice. They’d even park the fire engine out on the ice.”

  “Ice isn’t what it used to be,” said Oona. “Think about it. Today it’s snowing, and it’s freezing. Three days from now, it’ll be sixty.”

  Henrietta sighed. “Global warming is so boring.”

  Oona produced her phone, displaying the week’s weather to come: a string of icons representing a sunny day or a windy day or a snow squall. It was weather the way a five-year-old thought of weather.

  “See? Three days out, sixty.”

  Henrietta pointed to the lake. “I used to have this idea that we would get skis and you and I would go across Aveline from one corner to the other.”

  “When was this?”

  “When you were young.”

  “Did you ever ask me?”

  “All the time.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You were small. And you said no to everything I ever asked you. Museums. Concerts. Sports. Everything. As soon as you could speak, you were disagreeing with me.”

  “Well, individuation is healthy,” said Oona.

  Across the street, the store clerk from Witherspoon’s made a slow, lumbering effort down the block.

  Oona pointed. “Is that him?”

  Henrietta leaned forward. “That’s the one.”

  On the phone that morning, the man had sounded delighted to be able to help. “So you have this?” she’d asked him, almost breathless. “I’m holding it,” he told her. “Could you describe it for me, please?” “There’s a woman,” he said. “And a flag.”

  The lights in the shop flickered on. The security grate went up. Sunlight on the knockoff Cézanne.

  “Does he think he’s just going to sell this thing back to you?” Oona asked.

  “Perhaps,” said Henrietta.

  “Even though it’s stolen?”

  “He doesn’t know it’s stolen.”

  “And you’re going to buy it?”

  “I’m completely broke. So, no. That’s obviously not an option. I can’t buy anything.”

  “So I’m going to buy it?”

  They’d been through this already. Oona wanted police here. Someone had stolen this, they couldn’t forget. Perhaps, having been married to a lawyer all this time, Oona was more predisposed to focus on what was legal and illegal, rather than leading with what Henrietta thought was important: do you have this thing I need or do you not?

  “I don’t even know if it’s the right one. Why don’t we just see?”

  “I’m not buying stolen property,” Oona said. “I’m not getting arrested.”

  Henrietta turned, smiling. “You’re panicking. Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  Oona laughed. “Listen to you! A lifetime of anxiety and Jewish worrying and psychic angst and now—now!—you’re talking about crossing bridges and patience!”

  Henrietta got out of the car. She had become less bothered with the winter as she aged, even as there was less of her, year by year. The thin air invigorated her. A big dry breath of courage. She went across the street with purpose. In another life—the life in which she did not hunt down possibly stolen artifacts—this would have been an impossibility. Oona was right. Surprisingly, though, Henrietta was not worried. Grief vanishes and then you are still here, breathing. She had learned this.

  Out on the ice, the skiers were circling and laughing. The city from here flickered on the horizon, gray and large. Evergreens dotted northward.

  “I want to come in with you,” Oona called out.

  This new protective urge of Oona’s made Henrietta happy, but she tried not to show it. This, probably, was not healthy, or what other families did, this suppression of joy. Such a simple thing—your daughter doing this.

  “Why do you want to come in?” she asked.

  “To shadow you. Guard you.”

  “That’s not necessary, Oona.”

  “Tell him I’m your bodyguard,” Oona said. She yelled, “Tell him I’m watching your back.”

  Henrietta put up her hand.

  29.

  The first floor of the Perlmutters’ house was spare and white and titanically, oceanically large. Lydia resisted the urge to be impressed. A man in a suit who may have been the family’s butler asked them to remove their shoes. A faint whiff of chlorine hinted at an indoor pool somewhere. Maids or assistants scurried. The moment Lydia saw his parents, saw the hard, exhausted, pissed expressions on their faces, she knew this was a waste of time. How could it ever have been any different? They were dressed for business—his father in a gray suit, his mother in a black suit. Each clutched a telephone. The urgent noise of their heels on the tile in the hallway as they led her and her father into a sitting room indicated that they, too, considered this a waste.

  For a moment, as she sat there, she was certain that they had already seen the pictures of her online. This feeling, she knew, would follow her for years, this initial sudden prick of distrust. A man’s eyes on her in a certain way. A scolding narrowness in the expression of a bank clerk, an airline steward, a university professor. At job interviews later in life, she would worry over whether her secret was visible on her. Olyphant humiliation, she thought, an inherited disposition, easily accessible by way of any computer. She fought the urge to cover up. She would not wear a V-neck in public until she was fifty years old.

  A buzz began somewhere in the room—a heating vent, a vacuum, a secret recorder.

  They exchanged mindless pleasantries.

  Yes, the weather. Yes, traffic. Yes, the Internet, it seemed, was a repository for bile and danger.

  Lydia kept her coat zipped up to her neck. The room was brown with cowhide and hung mounted moose and decanted brandy.

  His father’s name was also Charlie, which meant that every infraction of the son reflected doubly on the father, and that when, in the future, Charlie’s name found its way, as it would, into the crime blotter, his father would suffer twice. He turned to her. His eyes were closely set and his hair was inexpertly dyed. Even rich men felt shame about getting old.

  “Lydia, would you mind if I spoke to your father outside for a minute or two?” he asked.

  She looked at her father. He had warned her about this on the sidewalk before going in, the probability of their being separated by gender. Something about the gate out front or the neighborhood or perhaps the stern expressions on the stone lions had given him a hunch. For the first time she hoped the rumor of his courthouse acumen was real and not a myth.

  She looked at Charlie’s dad. “If that’s what you feel you need to do,” she said.

  “We’ll work this out, you and me,” Charlie’s father said to her father.

  Charlie’s mother’s name was Evelyn. She wore a thin necklace with a letter E hanging and embossed with a blizzard of tiny diamonds. She was a small woman, which did not surprise Lydia, given Charlie’s frame. She had some of his compacted energy, his wrists, his mouth when it was nervous. “We can talk. You and me. Woman to woman.”

  Lydia watched her father go. He turned as he left, looking back at her apologetically, mouthing, Don’t worry. I got this.

  The house smelled the way Charlie smelled. She had gotten close enough to him, to his skin, to know this. In the moment it had been thrilling. Her hand on the actual chest of a real human boy. Conversely, the hand of a real human boy on her actual chest. Thinking about Charlie this way, she wondered sometimes whether she’d had her first sexual experiences with Pinocchio. Even still, her heart had been going crazy and she had wondered whether he would notice, and then, to her credit, she realized that he wouldn’t notice or care to notice anything except what her skin felt like to him.

  Alone
with his mother, she fell silent.

  She searched the room for pictures, photographs of the family, evidence of a decent home life. Charlie’s ever having been a child seemed impossible.

  “Would you like me to put on the fire?” Evelyn asked.

  “That’s not necessary,” Lydia said.

  “I would like the fire,” Evelyn said, picking up a remote control and pointing it at the fireplace. A false-looking and small fire appeared on command.

  Lydia pretended to be enraptured by the flames.

  “In the winter it gets cold and a good fire is nourishing for the body,” Evelyn informed her.

  Lydia had her father’s phone between her palms. She could feel her sweat gathering on the glass. She had bought into her dad’s risible notion that she would show the Perlmutters what their son had done and they would care and they would then make a phone call to Charlie, who would quickly wipe it from the Internet. She felt wildly embarrassed at having ever thought this might happen.

  A painting over the mantel showed a woman cresting a ridge in the midst of hunting a black bear with a rifle. Evelyn saw Lydia looking and cleared her throat. “I find it an inspiring picture,” she said.

  Lydia nodded because, really, what else were you supposed to do in a situation like this?

  “It’s a metaphor, you see.”

  “Right,” said Lydia.

  “It’s a tough world out there, basically, is what it says.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Sometimes a lady just needs to kill the bear, also, is what it’s saying.”

  In the other room she could hear her father’s voice, low and insistent.

  Charlie had told her stories about being a child in this place. Maids tucking him in at night. Late-night parties at which he wandered down in his pajamas after nightmares to find stereos blaring and stoned television executives and pharma-millionaires devouring shrimp cocktail. Personal assistants one year out of Princeton and hoping for professional connections, he told Lydia, drove him to playdates, cooked his meals. My parents, he had said, see me as an employee of theirs. And not even an especially important one.