See You in Paradise (28 page)

“I know.” She sighed. “Damn.”

“That’s enough damns,” Margaret said wearily.

“Your mother’s right.”

I could hear Rae’s lips smack. “Sorry, Mags,” she said.

Margaret opened her mouth, then closed it without speaking.

“I saw you making love with him,” Bob Dylan said. “You forgot to close the garage door.”

A new alertness overcame us as we crested the mountain pass; everyone sat straight in their seats, on the lookout for minor changes in the landscape. The next fifteen minutes would set the tone for the days to come: was the bait and tackle stand still open? Was the
Adirondack Backpacker’s Gazette
still in print? Would the water-stained map still be safely bolted behind cracked plexiglas in front of the defunct post office, as always? Yes, yes, and yes. Tentative good cheer reigned as we bumped and shuddered our way down the gravel road to the water. I glanced over at Margaret and saw the corners of her mouth twitching, as though in pleasure. The final test of our journey’s success, however, still lay ahead: the Grimy Fisherman’s Bass Shack, our favorite restaurant anywhere in the world. Its owner, Belinda, had become a good friend over the past decade; and though we wondered how many other “good friends” she had, among the many vacationers who wished, as we did, to feel like locals for one week a year, we nevertheless were certain her friendship with us was something special. Furthermore, the food at her Shack was fantastic, and Margaret had stolen, with Belinda’s permission, many a fine dish from its modest menu.

It was to Margaret that Belinda’s place was most important, and it was her sharp eye that noticed it first, set back in the pines at a bend in the road. “Thank God,” she said, and I honked the horn as we passed. The place looked pretty empty, though—it didn’t open until eleven.

Our cabin was not far beyond. We pulled into the gravel drive and leaped out with a collective cheer, the girls hugging one another the way they used to all the time when Rae was seven and Lyn was five. Margaret inhaled deeply. “Seems the same,” she said.

“It’ll be like always,” I assured her.

To this, she had no response.

The key was under the stump behind the trash hutch, as usual, though it was a new stump: I had noticed the old one going rotten last year. We crowded around the door as I unlocked it, and tumbled in like a pack of stray cats.

The cabin was of rough-hewn, unpainted logs, and consisted of one large common room and two bedrooms, each containing a bunk bed. The four of us fanned out, sniffing around our favorite objects and areas, making sure they were as we left them. Dozens of visitors occupied this place every year, but we always got the impression, upon returning, that it had been empty since our last visit. There were always small differences—certain decades-old magazines missing, sheets that bore the scent of a new detergent, a favored dishrag retired from service—but rarely any of substance. One year there was a new refrigerator, which we all stared at in shock for some seconds. Another year, a woodstove appeared in the corner, presumably in order to draw late-season customers.

But this year, nothing much. The lightbulbs had been replaced by energy-saving compact fluorescents, and the bathroom was filled with new towels and washcloths—overall, though, our cabin was the same. GUESTS PLEASE PROVIDE BALANCE OF RENT AND DEPOSIT AT OFFICE THANKS, read the familiar manila envelope, twice-laminated with packing tape, that was affixed to the fridge by a (surprisingly powerful) Mount Rushmore magnet. The sight of it loosened something in my chest, and I went off to the kitchen window to gather myself.

When I came to, the girls had run down to the lake in their swim-suits, and Margaret was out on the path, taking her annual Inaugural Stroll. I went to the bedroom. Her backpack, suitcase, and straw hat lay on the lower bunk, staking their claim. My own suitcase had been heaved onto the top, along with my plastic grocery sack of rock and roll biographies. She was a small woman, Margaret, and it had probably taken a lot of effort to get that stuff up there. I climbed the wooden ladder and lay facedown beside it.

Margaret was the owner and head chef of Chez Maggie, a popular bistro in Nestor, the college town where we lived. She was extremely popular there, and was featured in the restaurant’s print and TV ads, flashing her trademark wink and “waggling OK” hand gesture. She wrote the “Feedbag” column for the local paper, a kind of half-recipes, half-entertaining-philosophy thing, which she was in the process of trying to get into syndication. Indeed, after nine years of running Chez Maggie, Margaret had acquired ambitions. She was prone to making snarky comments about Nestor and its smug hippie attitude, and had been doing a lot of research on up-and-coming American cities (Portland, Denver, Salt Lake) for reasons she declined to provide. She attempted to enthuse me about these places but never explained why I ought to be enthused, and seemed annoyed and unsurprised when I failed to follow her lead.

I say this to establish that I did know that something was coming: some theatrical reveal of the whole plan; some kind of prim, professional report that I would receive one night, over wine and an elaborately simple knockout dessert. And so I can say with confidence that I was not entirely surprised by the moment when it came. But there was no wine, and there was no dessert, and the girls weren’t just in bed, they were in bed forty miles away at Margaret’s mother’s place, where she had dispatched them under the pretense that we would get to have an “intimate” “time alone,” which I thought meant wild nude abandon, but which actually meant something else.

“I’m leaving you,” she said.

“Nooo,” I replied, automatically, in a kind of friendly/skeptical tone, as if she’d gotten something slightly wrong.

“I’m in love with Allan. He’s leaving his wife. We’re going to live at his lake place, and he will be investing in the expansion of my business.”

I don’t know how I must have looked, staring at her like that across the brilliantly lit dining room table. After a time I was able to say, “I don’t understand this.”

“Of course you knew, David. You’re just too simple and straight-forward to know what you know.” She made a face. “I mean that as a compliment. The fact is, you don’t need me. What you need is sex, music, and food. I need more than that. I need somebody with a vision. Allan understands what I want, and he wants to help me get it. He admires my ambition.”

There was so much to digest and refute in that little speech, so much that, on one hand, made no sense whatsoever, and on another explained so terribly, terribly much of Margaret’s behavior around me since we married, that I could only sit there, staring, with my mouth agape. Allan, I should add, was one of her investors—the big one, I guess. I’d met him—he was just some rich guy. Or so he seemed to me. I must have missed something.

“I do need you.” It was hardly the most important of her assertions to refute, but it was the thing I managed to blurt.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, no.”

“I’m ambitious!”

This drew a sigh. “David, what have you done for the past decade?”

“Raised our daughters,” I said.

“Yes.” She nodded, as though conceding the point. “Yes, and good job. But look at what’s happened to you. What about your music—you could have been great. But you gave it up.”

She was referring to the guitars and amplifiers, the tape machines and synthesizers and drums, which once I had used to record albums of instrumental music for independent films and television shows, and which I had gradually sold off, until all I had left was my trusty Gibson acoustic, the one I had found in a pawnshop in Nebraska during a road trip with an old girlfriend in 1982. It was true that I had sacrificed my ambitions. I had done this so that Margaret could go to cooking school, and then to open a restaurant, then run the restaurant while I raised Lyn and Rae. The money I got for selling those things, I gave to her.

Of course she was right that I might have continued to write and record. I might someday have achieved considerable fame and fortune, won an Emmy, an Oscar. What I had managed to achieve instead was happiness—at home, with our girls, bringing them up while Margaret labored in the trenches. I know, I know, it sounds like cold comfort, and at times I had wondered if that was how I should see it myself. But I didn’t miss what I used to do. My work, the trappings of it, had become a burden to me. It stood in the way of the simplicity that, however annoying it was to hear Margaret ascribe it to me, I nevertheless strove for. Lack of ambition had become my ambition.

In any event, ever since the I’m-leaving-you conversation, she had been going on a lot of “little trips,” the destination and purpose of which she refused to say. And then she would come home and stay with me and the girls for a couple of nights, and then she would leave again. And each time I figured she wouldn’t be back, and each time she returned as though she’d done nothing more scandalous than run down to the supermarket.

After two weeks of this, I asked her, Hey, what are you doing here? Are you staying with me? Or are you leaving me? And she wouldn’t answer, only stare over my shoulder, blinking. I continued to ask her every few days for another two weeks, and every time got the stare, until at last, a week before our vacation, she turned to me and said, in much the way she had the first time, “Okay, I’m leaving you.”

“Okay.”

“If you’re demanding I decide, that’s my decision.”

“Oh,” I said. We were back at the dining room table, with the girls in bed upstairs. Margaret looked thinner and more tired. “So you’re leaving me now because I keep asking you if you’re leaving me?”

She covered her face with her hands. I was angry. And at the same time I felt bad for her, really bad. “I’m leaving you,” she said, “for the reasons I previously stated.”

It was then that we agreed the lake trip would be the end, and when we got home, we would tell the girls. Or I would tell them. Or something.

We spent the afternoon in separate spheres, Margaret on the porch with her BlackBerry, me on the lakeshore tossing stones, the girls out in the middle of the lake lying on inner tubes in the bikinis their mother had bought them and I wished to hell they had held off a few years before wearing. Their names had been Margaret’s idea, which, like most things, I went along with. But the nicknames were my innovation—Lyn and Rae—and those were the names they seemed most comfortable with. I was aware that Margaret resented me for this, but resentment fueled a lot of her most productive activity, and I was happy to provide it. Not that I had ever striven to do so—Margaret would have found something to resent regardless of what I did—but I figured that, like other bad habits, it was best kept in the home.

Listen to me—trash-talking my wife. She was not all bad, Margaret. There were good times, moments of profound sweetness and fun. We were a team: us versus the fools. Nothing had changed, really, except that I wasn’t on the team anymore.

That night we went to eat at the Grimy Fisherman’s. Though we hadn’t yet seen another soul down at the lakeside, the place was packed. Belinda was heavy but agile, with a round fleshy face, lively eyes, and cascading piles of gold hair. Honestly she was pretty hot, and I loved her place, the pleasure of her patrons, her pleasure in them, the dim brown light and deafening noise. She kissed the girls, called them by name (my versions, of course), told them they were absolute heartbreakers, brought them special treats they hadn’t ordered and which wouldn’t show up on the bill.