How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (28 page)

“Confession,” Jason said. “That's what I've always envied about Catholicism. The idea that you can go into a little booth and cleanse your soul.”

“I don't think I could go and tell some stranger my sins.”

“Oh come on. We Jews have that, too. It's called psychoanalysis.”

“But it doesn't help. I've talked to my shrink twice this week. What can he tell me? That I have every right to feel bad? That I have survivor's guilt? That I should refill my Paxil?”

Norman looked at Liam. “Did it help?”

“I suppose so,” Liam said. He didn't feel he could go into it with this group. It would be like discussing sex with his parents.

Lora took his cheek in her fingers, putting her face close to his and smiling sweetly, or so it appeared, though he'd come to suspect the sincerity of this particular gesture. “We love you, honey,” she said.

As soon as he could, he retreated to a neutral distance; at that moment his phone rang and he answered it, happy for the interruption.

“Liam, it's me,” Sasha said. “Don't hang up. I'm so miserable. I need to see you.”

He shouldn't have looked to see if Lora was watching him, because she was. “I'm sorry, but you've got the wrong number,” he said, feeling the heat in his cheeks. He turned off the ringer before slipping the phone back in his pocket.

“The phones are still completely screwed up,” Jason said.

11.

“So you've become a believer?” she asked, smiling brightly. It was the second Sunday of the new era and he'd just asked her if she wanted to join him at Mass. He shrugged. “I just … at this particular moment in time, I'm feeling a sense of, I don't know, spiritual yearning. Is that so surprising, really?”

“If that's what you need, then I think you should by all means go to Mass.”

“Look, I know you feel differently, but I don't want to argue about this.”

“Who's arguing?” She reached over and stroked his cheek, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. “I love you.”

“Maybe I'm weak, maybe I'm being hypocritical, but just indulge me in this, okay? If you don't want to go, I'll understand.”

Lora assumed Liam's recrudescence of faith would fade along with the initial shock of that terrifying day. She was kind of assuming the same thing about her own Xanax consumption; she'd cut back again once things returned to normal, but right now it seemed impossible to get through the day without forty or fifty milligrams.

After Liam left, she turned on the TV again, another escalating addiction that would surely subside in the weeks to come. She was watching the Taliban spokesman, defiant in his black beard and black robes, when she heard Liam's phone vibrating on the coffee table. She noticed that he'd turned off the ringer days ago, but now it was buzzing like a big flat beetle on the glass. She picked it up. “Hello?”

There was silence on the other end.

“Did he tell you I'm pregnant?” Lora said, then snapped the phone shut and went to the bathroom and took two more Xanax.

For some reason, she remembered the conversation at Norman's loft. She'd almost forgotten about the whole confession thing, but suddenly she wondered if that had been the point of Liam's new faith: to clear his soul of mortal sin before the next plane hit.

12.

Liam's office was inside the restricted zone south of Canal, and for the first week or so he didn't even think about going to work, but then a friend invited him to use his space in Chelsea. He went back to work the second Monday, not that he foresaw a big demand anytime soon for the kind of edgy independent films he produced. When he got home that night, he could tell that something was wrong. His first thought, on seeing her stony expression, was that somehow she'd learned about Sasha.

“Any thoughts about dinner?” he asked.

“I'm not hungry.”

“Shall I cook something?”

“I told you: I'm not hungry.”

“I brought some DVDs from the office.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
and
Riding in Cars with Boys
.”

“I don't think so,” she said. Tears were pooling in her eyes, though she looked more angry than sad.

“What's wrong?”

“The baby's gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

The tears were coursing down her cheeks, but her manner was defiant. When he tried to embrace her, she pushed him away and said, “I ended it.”

13.

Eventually, in his mind, it seemed, the abortion became subsumed into the narrative of the collective trauma. Liam went out and got drunk that night, but in the succeeding days he seemed unwilling to confront her about her motives, as if he was afraid their marriage couldn't survive the revelation of certain facts. At some point, after telling her that he believed in the sanctity of life from the moment of conception, he made the decision to forgive her, just as she, in turn, forgave him, though neither of them ever acknowledged his transgression. But he had presumably confessed his sin, and she sometimes wondered how he squared his own faith with her action, and her own unshriven state. Apparently, in his mind, she had committed murder. But divorce, too, was a mortal sin. As much as she despised his faith, she kind of liked the idea that Catholicism protected her matrimonial monopoly.

Most of the noble resolutions of that period gradually faded away, but Liam continued to attend Mass, without making a big deal of it. The fact that he stopped talking about it had convinced her of his seriousness. For her part, she tried not to give him a hard time.

The following spring, Lora was pregnant again. The days between the morning the stick on the home pregnancy test turned blue and the evening their son was delivered in December were among the happiest of their marriage. After a long period of apartment hunting and soul-searching—both of them of an age to have used the phrase “bridge and tunnel” to denote those living in the hinterlands—they bought a town house in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill. Like most converts, they became strident proselytizers, declaiming the virtues of the restaurants on Smith Street and insisting that it was only ten minutes by subway to the Village. They loved telling not only their friends but also each other how much they didn't miss Manhattan, though eventually this became something of a moot point when Liam started spending half his time in Los Angeles after one of his scripts was picked up by HBO shortly after Jeremy's second birthday. Lora couldn't pretend that it wasn't hard on her, being left behind to take care of the baby. And she couldn't help wondering what he was doing when he wasn't working, despite his declarations that every waking moment was consumed by the show. But he was an attentive father and lover during his sojourns in Brooklyn, and one morning she woke him at his hotel in Los Angeles to tell him that she was pregnant.

“That's fantastic,” he said.

“You're happy?”

“I couldn't be happier. Aren't you?”

“I don't know. I'd be happier if you were here right now.”

“I'll be home the day after tomorrow. We'll celebrate.”

Unpacking his suitcase two mornings later while he slept in, she found, mixed in with his shirts, a baby blue silk teddy trimmed with black lace.

14.

When Liam woke up that morning, he was alone. Sitting up in bed, he saw his suitcase, propped open on the floor, and recognized the light blue undergarment on top as belonging to his production assistant. For years he'd behaved himself and remained faithful to Lora, but recently he and Lanie had been working late, and one night she'd kissed him and he'd been unable to resist. He'd gone to confession the next afternoon, but it had happened again several times since. He didn't know how her nightie had gotten into his suitcase, but the more troubling question was why it was so flagrantly displayed, when he was ninety percent certain he hadn't opened the bag when he came in the previous night. What the hell was he supposed to do now? He finally decided to bury it beneath his shirts and hope that it never surfaced again.

He descended the stairs with trepidation, but he couldn't read anything unusual in Lora's demeanor when he found her in the kitchen with Jeremy in her arms, attached to her breast. That she was still breast-feeding Jeremy at two and a half was a point of contention, but he wasn't about to get into it now. Lora seemed delighted to see him. “Here's Daddy,” she said. “And we love Daddy, don't we? Yes, we do.” She shuffled across the floor in her slippers, clutching Jeremy to her chest, and took Liam's left cheek in her fingers, pinching and pulling his face close to hers. “We love you so much, Daddy.”

All weekend he waited for the accusation, but it never came. After two days at home, he would almost have welcomed a confrontation, but Lora seemed to have finely calibrated her chilliness to a degree or two above the freezing point, and when they had another couple over for dinner on Saturday, she was overly effusive, gratuitously declaring her love on several occasions. Before the Robertsons arrived, he'd suggested they tell them about the pregnancy, feeling that the announcement would make it more real, might lodge the fetus more firmly in Lora's uterus, but Lora said it was way too early for that.

While Liam was mixing the margaritas, Lora told her new joke: “What's the biggest drawback to being an atheist? Give up? No one to talk to during orgasm.”

Shortly after she put dessert on the table, she stabbed him with a fork. She was talking to Donna about private schools when suddenly she brought her clenched fist, clutching her fork, down on his thigh, impaling him through his jeans.

If Liam, in his surprise, had been able to suppress a shriek of pain, it's possible the attack would have passed unnoticed. As it was, Lora made the whole thing seem like an unfortunate accident, an absentminded gesture.

“Oh my God. Oh, Liam honey. You know how I'm always grabbing your thigh. It's like, shit, I forgot I had a goddamn fork in my hand. Poor baby, you're bleeding. I'm so sorry.” She showered him with apologies and first aid, and even after the Robertsons had left, she maintained an air of concern and contrition. For his part, Liam was too frightened to confront her. He only hoped that she'd gotten it all out of her system at once. Maybe now they could go on as if nothing had happened.

Back in L.A., he told Lanie that it was over between them, citing the pregnancy, and she seemed to understand. In retrospect, he found it remarkable that communication between a man and woman with a sexual history could be so straightforward.

A few nights later, they were crashing a script, four of them working in the office till midnight, when they decided to move to his hotel suite, where they could order up a room-service supper. Liam was in the bathroom when the phone rang, and he rushed out in a panic. He knew who was calling.

Lanie was still holding the receiver. “Hello?”

He grabbed the phone away from her and heard only the dial tone. It was three-ten in the morning; it wasn't hard to guess what Lora, if it had been Lora, was thinking. There was no way of verifying the incoming number on the hotel phone.

“What's the matter?” Brodie asked.

He dialed his home number in Brooklyn. After a half dozen rings, he heard his own voice explaining that no one could come to the phone right now. “Honey, it's Liam. Listen, I thought you might have called just now and I wanted to make sure everything's okay out there. We're all here just finishing up on the script for tomorrow, me and Brodie and Issac and Lanie. I guess you're asleep. Just wanted to make sure everything was okay. Big kiss.”

He called throughout the day, but Lora never answered. When he still couldn't reach her the following afternoon, he told his colleagues he had an emergency and caught the red-eye to New York.

15.

She was in bed with Jeremy when he came in at seven. She said she wasn't feeling well, that she had cramps and was bleeding.

“Are you all right?” he said, breathlessly.

“Not really,” she said.

“The baby?”

“There is no baby.”

“You had a miscarriage?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not a miscarriage.”

Having arrived all tense and alert, he seemed to deflate before her eyes, slumping to the foot of the bed. “How could you do this?”

“It's just a procedure,” she said. Of course, she knew it was more than that to him. To him, it was a mortal sin.

“It's a life,” he said. “Is this what happened the last time, too? You were punishing me?”

“Punishing you for what, my love?” Despite the pain, she managed a bright smile. “I just wasn't ready for another child. I didn't think
we
were ready.”

“But you know how I feel about this,” he said. “How am I supposed to live with you after this?”

“Of course you'll live with me. With us—your wife and son. What else would you do? You know I love you, honey.”

2008

Sleeping with Pigs

“Wait a minute,” my shrink says. “Stop. Go back. Did you say
in the bed?”

I nod cautiously. Actually, my mind was drifting off on a tangent. Even as I was droning on about my failed marriage, I was wondering, not for the first time, why she had a picture of John Lennon in her office and whether it was an Annie Leibovitz. You know, the one where he's in a sleeveless New York City T-shirt with his arms crossed.

“The pig was sleeping in the bed. With you. In the marital bed. With you and your wife.”

“Well, yes,” I say.

“You've been coming to me for more than a year, trying to come to terms with your guilt about the breakup of your marriage, and this is the first time it's occurred to you to mention that the pig was sleeping with you in the bed?”

I can see her point. I don't know why I didn't mention it before. It was actually a big point of contention at the time. On the other hand, I was behaving so badly by then that I didn't really feel I was in a position to make demands. Blythe used to have all kinds of jokes about sleeping with two pigs. No, actually, it was the same joke over and over. Plus, McSweeney's my surname and she liked to call me McSwine.

“Was this a nightly occurrence? How long did it go on?”

“Pretty much every night for a year or so. Two years maybe. Mostly at the end.”

“And where did the pig sleep?”

“Between us.”

“Between you.
In the bed
.” Apparently, she wants to make sure she's clear on this point.

“Sometimes it would burrow under the covers and sleep down at the foot.”

“Didn't you think this was relevant to our enterprise here? To the whole question of the fate of the marriage? That you were being asked to sleep with a pig between you. Am I safe in assuming this wasn't your idea?”

“Of course not.” About this at least, I can be emphatic. “It was hers.”

“And you didn't object?”

“Well, yeah, sometimes. In the beginning.”

“And then?”

“Well, you get used to things.”

She sighs and shakes her head. “I think we need to talk about this.”

I can see her point. In retrospect, here, on the Upper West Side of New York, sitting in this book-lined office across from my shrink, who is literally and figuratively framed within a constellation of diplomas and portraits of Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, I can imagine how bizarre this sounds. Now that it's come up, I'm kind of amazed myself that I let my ex-wife talk me into sharing the bed with her potbellied pig. Over time almost anything can come to seem normal in the course of a marriage: food fetishes, sexual kinks, even in-laws. First you get talked into a pet pig, and the next thing you know it's sleeping with you.

“How did it get up on the bed?”

“She built a ramp. With carpeted steps.”

“And you didn't think this was … unusual? And, in terms of your marriage, unhealthy? How did you manage to have sexual relations with a—How big was the pig?”

“By then? Hard to say, really. Too big to lift anyway. I threw my back out the last time I tried. Hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy pounds. About my weight. Plus, the shape's kind of awkward and it's not like they're going to hold still and stay quiet when you try to pick them up.” Normally, her expression is pretty imperturbable, but for the first time in our association I get the impression that she's looking at me like I'm a crazy person. “They're actually very clean,” I add. “And they're smarter than dogs.” I realize I'm quoting my ex. I can anticipate my shrink saying something to the effect that we were enabling each other in our respective fantasy worlds.

She nods slowly, drinking this in, and regarding me with what seems to me an air of wonder mixed with disappointment, as if she now has to reevaluate our relationship and start again from the beginning. It's the kind of expression that leads me to wonder whether psychiatrists ever fire their patients. I want to point out, in my defense, that her cat's purring away in my lap and she didn't seem to think there was anything weird about that.

“Well,” she says. “We certainly have a lot to talk about next week, don't we?”

Having thought I was marrying a southern belle, I hadn't counted on getting Ellie May Clampitt in the bargain. I met her at one of the most fashionable watering holes in Manhattan, where she made an unconsciously grand, fashionably late entrance on the arm of a movie star. It was a birthday dinner for my friend Jackson Peavey, and the chair next to mine had been empty for half an hour. When I asked someone about my absent dinner partner and was told the seat belonged to Blythe, Jackson's aunt, I imagined a blue-haired southern dowager. I certainly wasn't prepared for the leggy, luminous blonde who finally alighted beside me with the ease of someone effortlessly mounting a horse. Though she has since denied it, I could've sworn the movie star leaned over and whispered, “See you later” as he took his leave. She should have been thoroughly daunting, except that somehow she wasn't.

“Hey there, Blythe Peavey, delighted to meet you. If I'd known what an excellent seat I had, I would've absolutely come sooner. That's a beautiful shirt. Is it linen? I love that color with your eyes. Have I missed any bon mots or bad behavior?”

She dispensed compliments with a liberality that would have seemed insincere in anyone I found less attractive and made me feel as if we were dining alone, tête-à-tête. She seemed to know quite a bit about me, which I found gratifying, considering how little there was to know at that early moment in my life, and what she didn't know, she seemed to be in a desperate hurry to learn. Eventually I admitted that I'd been expecting someone much older.

“My brother Johnson, Jackson's dad, is almost twenty years older than I am,” she explained. “Jackson loves calling me ‘Aunt Blythe,’ which seemed funny when he was ten and I was twelve, but now that he's followed me to New York, I'm thinking of offering him lots of money to quit it.”

Later she told a self-deprecating story about having lunch, in her early days in the city, with Leo Castelli and an artist named John something—she hadn't caught his entire name. She found him rather attractive and confessed to possibly flirting with him a bit, frequently repeating his name and touching his arm. The artist became more and more remote, until he finally said, “My dear, I've been called a john before, but never by a woman.” Castelli later told her that she'd been flirting with Jasper Johns. “You can imagine,” she said, “that I've never been able to show my face at a Castelli opening again, for fear of running into him.”

I thought her story was a kind of wonderful spoof of the name-dropping that passed for anecdote in the world I was then aspiring to enter.

She slipped away around midnight, whispering that she hoped to see me again and disappearing at a raucous moment, so that I was the only one to actually observe her departure. I would learn later that this was her habitual strategy, that she didn't believe in saying good-bye.

After that, I followed her career as a girl about town, watching for her at parties and in the gossip columns. She was one of those women who conquered Manhattan for a few years, who seemed to be everywhere and to know everyone interesting, although even the most brilliant and articulate among her admirers had a hard time defining the qualities that made her so popular, in part because her greatest gift was the ability to reflect and magnify the attributes of those around her, particularly with men, a talent that was much rarer in New York than it was in Tennessee. She had a way of identifying and admiring the traits you liked most in yourself, no matter how recessive, so that as long as you were with her, you could imagine you were the person you most wanted to be. “Tony is the most extraordinarily talented tax accountant.” “Roger has the most exquisite taste of any heterosexual in the city.” “Collin was without a doubt the most popular man in Savannah before he chose to break a thousand hearts and move up north.” She added to the collective sense of self-esteem. And though it wasn't obvious at the time, it became clear after she left that she wasn't terribly invested in the whole scene—and that was another aspect of her charm. Unlike the rest of us, her lack of vaulting ambition gave her an aura of grace. As it turned out, she was just visiting from another world. Several admirers tried to get her to stay. I knew of three spurned marriage proposals—from a publishing mogul, a playwright and a tennis player—and two book dedications.

One theory about Blythe's elusiveness, propounded by her nephew, was that she would never marry anyone while her father—a former Tennessee governor and doting domestic tyrant—was alive. I never met the man, but he left a big footprint on his native soil. In Nashville, a street and two buildings, including the tallest skyscraper, were named for him. As the president of the chamber of commerce, he'd gone up against the prohibitionist lobby to legalize restaurant alcohol sales, reaping a whirlwind of calumny and death threats; for more than a year, Blythe had been attended by full-time bodyguards. He had not approved of any of Blythe's suitors, Jackson told me, not even the English lord who'd brought him a present of matched Purdey shotguns. And he certainly wouldn't have approved of me. Another of her expatriate kinsmen speculated it was the death of her beloved brother in Vietnam that had made her so skittish about long-term attachments. At any rate, she left the city before anybody had a chance to get tired of her, and before she became coarsened by it or embittered by watching younger women take her place.

Blythe went home to Tennessee to care for her ailing parents, but she kept her apartment in the city and returned for brief visits every couple of months. I saw her at parties with a poet or a CEO, or, once, with a ridiculously good-looking guy who, she said, was a carpenter from Tennessee. One night, at a cocktail party in an Upper East Side penthouse, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and found Blythe standing alone, her blond hair billowing in the breeze from the river. Against the backdrop of the downtown skyline—with her head slightly tilted to the right, it looked as if she were leaning up against the Chrysler Building—she seemed like the embodiment of all my cosmopolitan fantasies.

“Well,” she said, “you've certainly made good since I last saw you.”

It was true. My first book had been a success and I was currently adapting it for the screen. Perhaps this emboldened me enough to ask her out, something I would have been too intimidated to do a few years earlier. I couldn't believe my good fortune, and not long after finding myself in her bed at the end of our third date, I proposed. Why she accepted me, having turned down so many others, I can't really say. Maybe it was because her father had died the year before, or maybe she'd just gotten tired of fleeing. Sometimes I think she agreed to my proposal on a whim, marriage being one of the few adventures she hadn't essayed. Or it's possible I was just at the right place at the right moment. At the time, I never really asked the question, being more than a little full of myself and my own success, but in retrospect, I have to wonder. Better-looking, more successful, richer and funnier men than I had failed to drag her to the altar.

A childhood friend of Blythe once dropped a clue that I didn't initially pay much attention to, saying that I reminded her of Blythe's deceased older brother. “I don't know what it is, something about your smile, the way you carry yourself. But damn if you didn't make me think of Jimmy just now. They were really close. Blythe was just devastated.” Later, I cautiously tested this theory on my wife. We were in bed, flipping through the on-screen cable guide, looking for movies.
Platoon
was coming up on HBO.

“I never really thought about it,” she said in response to my question. “I suppose it's possible. Maybe, subconsciously, you do remind me of Jimmy.”

“Do you think about him often?” I asked.

“No, not very,” she said.

“Really?”

“You know, one of the things I hate about the South is the backward-looking aspect, the obsessive dwelling on the past. Nostalgia is like our regional disease. All that longing for the lost cause, lost plantations, Dixie. All those odes to the Confederate dead. That was one of the things I wanted to get away from when I went north. I try not to look back. Ever.”

After our city hall wedding, we split our time between Manhattan, where I taught a spring semester workshop at Columbia, and Tennessee, where we bought an antebellum farmhouse outside Nashville with sagging wide-board floors, tilting barns and ragged pastures. Early on it became clear that she was happier on the farm than she was on Park Avenue. I came to think of her as Persephone, who stoically suffered her six months in Hades in exchange for another six in the sunlight of the surface world. Which would make me the king of the underworld.

For a long time I was happy enough with the contrast between our two worlds. After a decade in the city, I was ready for a change—and I was in love. Honestly, I would have followed her anywhere, although there was something particularly romantic for me, student of Faulkner and Welty that I was, about seeing her in her natural environment. For me, the South was mysterious and exotic, and the sense of nostalgia for a lost Eden, the deeply ingrained social hierarchies and the polite insincerity of public discourse were all endlessly intriguing. I studied the local population with the detachment of an anthropologist and the passionate intensity of a man attempting to decode the mysteries of his wife.

In those early days, Blythe's menagerie consisted of six cats, one of which deposited a dead bird on my chest the first morning I woke up in her bed. “A welcome offering,” she said. “You should feel very honored.” But once we moved to the farm, the animal population exploded, starting with goats, eventually five of them. Blythe left the table in the middle of a dinner party to check on the pregnant goat that was confined in the laundry room and returned forty minutes later, her white peasant blouse thoroughly stained with blood. “We have a new member of the household,” she said, sitting down to resume her meal as if she'd just stepped out to go to the bathroom. “Topsy just gave birth to a fine young billy goat. What did I miss?”