The Castaways (14 page)

So today would be his day with Tess.

“I’d love it,” he said.

They went to the fitness center, which was down the hill, at the base of the condo complex. Addison signed them in under Jack’s name. The place was deserted except for a very fit-looking older gentleman on the elliptical and a muscle-bound kid of about twenty-five who was wearing a complicated knee brace and pumping iron. Both the older man and the kid eyed Tess in the mirror as she stripped down to her workout clothes—a pair of incredibly flattering yoga pants and a jog bra that left the pale, toned plane of her abdomen bare. Addison wore gym shorts and the tattered gray Princeton T-shirt that he’d ordered ten years earlier from the back of the alumni magazine. It was a revolting spectacle, according to Phoebe, but it was the T-shirt he liked to work out in.

He got on the treadmill. Forty minutes, level 7 with hills, just as he did six days a week at the gym. Why did he feel like a stranger to this machine? Why did he feel self-conscious and uncoordinated? Tess was on the mat in front of the mirror, stretching. Or doing yoga—Addison couldn’t tell. She was incredibly flexible. The young guy was watching her, too; Addison was surreptitiously watching him watching her. Okay, it was impossible to exercise this way. Addison put on his headphones and tried to keep up with the pace he’d set.

He gave it more than usual. He gave it too much. He was running at a 9 with hills, he was sweating like a wild boar, the Princeton T-shirt was dark and sopping. Addison’s face was red, and he was forced to remove his glasses because they kept slipping down his nose. He set them on the tray next to the
Newsweek
he was too pumped up even to open, but without his glasses, he couldn’t see Tess. Or rather, he could see her—first on the exercise bike, then doing sit-ups on the inclined bench, then lifting weights and chatting with the young stud in between sets. But Addison’s eyes were very bad (everyone told him to get Lasik surgery, but he could not abide the thought of a laser or anything else touching his eye), and hence he could not see Tess’s facial expression, he could not see the muscles in her stomach tense and release with the sit-ups, and he could not hear clearly what she was saying to the young stud. Blind people, apparently, had a keen sense of hearing to compensate for not being able to see, but without his eyeglasses, Addison felt completely adrift. He might as well have been up on the mountain, buried in a snowbank. He heard Tess laugh, heard her say “Nantucket,” heard her say, “Oh, that’s too bad. Such bad luck.” Maybe this guy was telling her the reason for the knee brace. (Ski accident, Addison guessed. Torn
ACL
.) It was as if Tess and the guy were speaking a foreign language, and not one of the three Addison was fluent in.

Had Tess noticed him? Did she see how fast he was flying up one electronic hill after another?

He realized simultaneously that he was trying to impress Tess and that he was jealous of the kid with biceps the size of grapefruits and a sympathy-evoking knee injury. Jealous! But no, not possible. He asked himself: if some blond, hulking Adonis on the cross-country trail decided to accompany Phoebe and then later join her for lunch, would Addison be jealous? The answer was no. Men hit on Phoebe regularly because she was so beautiful, and Addison’s prevailing emotion for these men was pity.

She doesn’t see you. And even if she does see you, she won’t let you in. She lives in a chamber where there is only enough oxygen for one.

Addison got off the treadmill shakily. He was going to have a heart attack. He staggered around on the AstroTurf carpet, disoriented for a second about which way was up. He collapsed onto the floor and put his head between his knees. His vision was blurred. Then he realized he needed his glasses! But he didn’t have the energy to stand up and retrieve them.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see the older gentleman.

“Are you okay?” the gentleman asked.

There was an audible gasp in the gym. Tess set her weights down on the bench.

“Addison!” she said. “What’s wrong?”

Well, he had trumped the kid in the knee brace. But Addison wasn’t after Tess’s sympathy; he had wanted to be impressive. He had wanted Tess to see that although he wasn’t careening down the side of a mountain at thirty miles per hour with two Popsicle sticks strapped to his feet, he was still an athlete.

“I’m fine,” he said, smiling. He could not see her expression, though she was standing right over him. “Never better. That was a great workout!”

Tess said, “You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. I’m just cooling down.”

“Okay,” she said. “Great! I have three sets left. Bill is helping me with my form. He was on the ski patrol here, but he hurt his knee jumping from the lift. He was trying to rescue a little boy.”

Sounded like a load of shit to Addison, but he said, “Wow! Okay, I’m going to do some stretching and we’ll leave when you’re ready.”

No doubt about it: Addison was jealous.

Tess giggled. “It was so cute. Bill thought you were my
husband
.”

They walked out of the fitness center into a light snow. With the fir trees and the condo units looking like Alpine chalets, and the snow coming down so softly that the flakes seemed suspended in the air, it was so lovely and peaceful that when Addison spoke, he whispered so as not to disturb the silence.

“Do you want to go back to the condo to shower, or should we just go for our walk?”

“Let’s walk,” Tess said.

There was a path that led out of the condo complex and headed down, parallel to the mountain road. The path was in the woods, and there were small footbridges that delivered them over tiny streams.

“It will lead us into town eventually,” Addison said. “And you can call your kids and we can get some lunch.”

Tess linked her arm through his. “You are such a prince.”

“I aim to please.”

They walked along ten steps, and then twenty, with Tess’s arm twined through his.

This, for Addison anyway, was when it began. Because this was when he started to feel like he was fourteen years old. Tess’s arm through his was a distraction, but he realized he would be crushed if she separated from him. But then he worried: did she
want
to separate from him?

This was also when Tess asked, “How is Phoebe doing?” in a grave way, as though Phoebe had cancer. And instead of giving his usual sunshine-and-butterfly answer of
She’s fine, great, really great,
Addison expelled what felt like all the air from his lungs and said, “I just don’t know.” It was the honesty of his answer that opened the floodgates between them. They were going to talk, really talk, really open up, really share things about their respective marriages that they would never think of sharing with the rest of the group. He told Tess everything as they walked. It was easy, the words flowed out of him; he told her everything he would have told a therapist, but both he and Phoebe had given up hope in therapists. Addison and Tess crossed bridges and left matching sets of footprints in the snow. Addison found he couldn’t talk fast enough.

Addison told the truth. He said things like
Phoebe is not the woman I married. She’s changed. But that doesn’t do it justice. She emigrated. She’s a refugee of her grief. It has colonized her, reorganized her. She’s different down to her cells, her molecules. And it’s eight years later. So it’s not grief anymore, it’s the drugs. The so-called medication, the substances applied to her pain. They are her captor now, and she suffers from Stockholm syndrome. She loves the drugs. They are more important to her than Reed ever was.

Tess knew how to listen (perhaps this was a result of having a classroom full of five-year-olds vie for her attention one hundred and eighty days a year). She did not automatically take Phoebe’s side, as Addison had expected (“Let me play devil’s advocate here…”). She was hearing Addison’s side; she was—still!—holding on to Addison’s arm.

Addison said,
Our sex life is a shambles. Once, twice a year, and only when she’s been drinking.

Tess said,
That must be difficult. To have this gorgeous woman right there in your bed and not be able to touch her.

I’m used to it,
Addison said.
That is the screwed-up thing. I am used to a crippled marriage.

They reached town—a charming covered bridge, a steepled church. Because it was a heavy-lidded, gray day, all of the twinkling Christmas lights were on. Snow-dusted wreaths hung from lampposts. They strolled past shops with cheese and chutney, maple syrup, nutcrackers, wind chimes, pottery, wine and spirits, specialty kitchen equipment, woolen hats, gloves, scarves, sweaters.

“Anywhere you want to go in?” Addison asked.

“Maybe later,” she said.

“Want to call your kids?” he asked.

“Yes!” she said. She decided to call from the middle of the covered bridge, leaning on the railing, overlooking the river. “It is so liberating to be here with you. Every time I call the kids around Greg, I feel guilty, like I’m sneaking a cigarette. Ridiculous, right? Because if anyone should feel guilty, it’s Greg.”

Addison let that comment hang for a second. Were they going to talk about it?

But at that second the baby-sitter answered, and Tess said, “Cassidy? Hi, it’s Tess! How is everything?”

She was visibly lighter when she got off the phone. “It’s snowing at home! Cassidy is taking them to sled at Dead Horse Valley, and then home to have hot chocolate and change into dry clothes. Then she’s taking them for dinner and a movie at the Starlight. They’ll be in bed at eight-thirty, which is very late, but what the heck, it’s vacation!” She grinned at Addison. She was wearing a red cashmere hat, and the curled ends of her dark hair poked out beneath it. She was lovely. Addison was overcome with the desire to kiss her. Kiss Tess MacAvoy! He was sure he would be struck by lightning or the railing he was leaning on (indeed, depending on for support—after the treadmill and three miles of walking, his legs were shot) would give way, dumping him into the icy river.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked.

“Lunch!” she said.

It was, they agreed afterward, the lunch of a lifetime. They went to a small French cafe called Nous Deux (We Two) that had a blackboard menu and banquettes that used to be church pews and were now upholstered in bright Provencal fabrics. The woman who seated them was the owner, Sandrine, a Quebecoise, Addison discovered, as he and Sandrine chatted for a moment in French. Sandrine was visibly delighted by Addison’s French. He asked for a table in the corner. He and Tess each slid onto a pew and Sandrine left them with the menus and the wine list.

Tess said, “You speak French so beautifully.”

“Six strict years with Madame Vergenot and two and a half years in Paris working for Coldwell. Would you like wine?”

“Wine?” she said, as if he were suggesting an all-night rave at an underground club on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He remembered suddenly that this was
Tess,
who during the course of a normal week drank milk at lunch, out of one of the small cartons they gave the kids. But then she said, “Sure. Why not?” with a wicked little grin on her face.

So, really,
really really,
it had started then, with Tess’s renegade decision to throw caution to the wind and drink wine at lunch with Addison. Addison ordered the most expensive bottle on the menu, a Mersault he positively adored but that one could rarely find on a wine list. Ordering this wine and then praising Sandrine for the fine selections on her list incurred even more favor with this woman than speaking French had. She loved Addison and Tess! She brought them the wine, she poured it lavishly. Then she whisked away their menus and said to Addison, “Allow me.”

A succession of marvels came out of the kitchen—duck confit on a gaufrette, endive stuffed with aged chevre and a balsamic fig, a platter of petits croque-monsieurs, an asparagus salad topped with a quivering poached egg. Tiny ramekins of the most decadent onion soup gratinee Addison had ever tasted. Sandrine, Quebecoise goddess, treated Addison and Tess not like husband and wife but like lovers. She set plates down, she gave a sly smile or a wink, she disappeared.

Tess, defying all precedent, was an accomplished student of such debauchery. She not only drank the wine, she savored it the way it was meant to be savored—mouthful by mouthful, over the tongue, eyes fluttering. (Addison could not help drawing a comparison. Phoebe drank wine the way she took pills: she threw it back with purpose rather than joy, then waited for the numbness to take effect.) Tess ate her food in tiny, delicate tastes. She had a child’s hands; he had always been aware of this, but what he hadn’t realized was how deft her hands were. Addison fumbled with his food (he was nervous, despite the loosening effect of the Mersault), but Tess cut little bites and popped them into her mouth quickly and neatly.

During all this time—the wine being savored (Addison bravely ordered a second bottle), the courses devoured, Sandrine appearing, then disappearing—Tess was talking. She talked about the problems she’d had getting pregnant—the two miscarriages, the baby lost at twenty-one weeks. Then she talked about the twins. She loved the twins too much, maybe, and this was what had caused her problems with Greg.

Again Addison held his breath. Were they going to talk about it? Sandrine popped the cork on the second bottle of Mersault and Tess reached for her glass and drank. And then she started to talk about It, that Sunday Night, April Peck, What April Said, What Greg Said, Holes in April’s Story, Holes in Greg’s Story. How Tess Knew Greg Was Lying. How She Begged Him to Tell the Truth, How He Stupidly Stuck by the Asinine Lies He Concocted.

Addison nodded; he tried to mirror Tess’s own listening techniques. He did not defend Greg’s side of the story. Instead, it felt like he had been looking through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. Only now, when hearing the story from Tess, did it all make sense.

“We’ve been married eleven and a half years,” Tess said. “Andrea tells me not to let one measly night ruin so many years of hard work and devotion. But what Andrea doesn’t understand is that the ‘one measly night’ was representative of so many underlying problems in our marriage. The fact that I can’t get the truth. Greg won’t come clean! What Andrea doesn’t understand is that the hard work and devotion have been one-sided. Me giving to him.” She carefully constructed a masterpiece bite out of farmhouse bread, Roquefort, apricot preserves, and a candied pecan. Sandrine had just dropped off a cheese plate worthy of Auguste Renoir. Tess eyed the morsel thoughtfully, then looked at Addison. She had tears in her eyes.