The Daylight Marriage (6 page)

Chapter 8

I
t occurred to Hannah that Lovell must have been her first male friend who did not immediately try for more. When she told him this a month or so later, after one too many martinis at the Oak Bar, he replied, “Oh.” He appeared relieved but then confused. “Should I apologize for not making a move?”

She smiled. “Not at all.”

They began to meet at a greenhouse on Beacon Street, where sprays hissed with warm steam. Tropical plants stretched from each corner and hung from the low ceiling. A small café with just three tables was nestled in the corner. Lovell brought homework and she books of poetry
,
and they read and talked over tomato and mozzarella panini and cups of cappuccino. She told him about her father, originally from Ireland, a sailboat manufacturer who could be at once boisterous and aloof, her mother who had modeled as a child and had recently retired as an agent for child models. Lovell listened to everything with genuine interest. He asked to hear more about the sailboats and her mother, those child models.
What was that like for a kid?
Did you ever want to do that yourself?
He looked relieved when she shook her head. Hannah eventually told him about her engagement to Doug Bowen, their summers at his parents' house at the beach outside Santa Cruz, their road trips up to Victoria and camping in Glacier, their plans to live in San Francisco after graduation and have four kids and work for Doug's uncle, who ran a liberal independent press in Oakland—and how naive she had been in the end. She told him that Doug had been seen at a Del Fuegos show with his hand down some girl's leather shorts and later in the ladies' room with some other girl who had a dog collar around her neck. Other friends came forward to Hannah with other stories, and Doug hardly tried to deny any of what he had done. “I'm so sorry, Han. I really am. But I guess it's better that you find out now than after we're married, right?” She twisted off her engagement ring and pitched it at his face.

Lovell said, “If I ever meet him, I'll pummel his ass. Seriously, I'll flatten him if you want.”

“You get in a lot of fights?”

“Not really,” he said. “I guess I've never even thrown a punch. Maybe I could inflict pain in some other way. Do you know anything about voodoo?” He appeared to be only partly joking.

“He's probably impervious to voodoo.” She sighed. Doug was at once impervious and wide open to nearly everything in the world. His wonder, his infallibility and childlike mischief, whether in their poetry seminar or her dorm room, or on the T late at night or the Esplanade at sunrise, his insisting on reading from
Howl
while standing on a table before the students, his giving her a piggyback ride while singing “Sugar Magnolia” along the bank of the Charles—all of it was irresistible and all of it was now gone.

She and Doug used to walk by this greenhouse regularly. His apartment was a block from it, and she once suggested they stop in for a mocha. “I've got a better idea,” he said, sliding his arm through hers and leading her past the café and toward his place. He whispered, “Come catch me,” and moved ahead of her, walking fast and then running to his apartment building, where he let the door close behind him. She raced after him, but the building was locked and he had disappeared inside. When she rang his apartment, he did not answer. “Asshole,” she said to herself, laughing. She buzzed a few other apartments until a weary-sounding woman answered. Hannah said, “I'm so sorry, but I'm here to see a friend and it seems that their buzzer might be broken.” The sound of the lock releasing, the four floors of dim, creaking stairs, the pounding on Doug's door until he opened it wearing nothing but a pair of Scooby-Doo boxers, a container of ice cream in one hand. “Hannah Banana Munroe!” he said. “What brings you to this neighborhood?”

“You're an idiot,” she said.

“A cute idiot.”

“A cute jerk. Some poor woman in your building who sounded like she was sleeping had to buzz me in.”

He shrugged and looked at her. “You've got something in your hair.” He reached forward and pulled off a leaf. “You know what? I think I might love you. No, I know I do.”

It was so unlike him to say this. Everything else fell away.

HANNAH THOUGHT OFTEN
now about her time with Lovell in the greenhouse, the comfort of sitting across from a person with whom you could be and say anything at all. The relief of talking to a grown-up instead of a child. She was so grateful for Lovell Hall. She could come back to life now. He was a gift to her, a real ally. Those afternoons may have been their most romantic, when they were friends, before they even kissed, long before they spoke the word “love.”

As she started up the car outside Ethan's school, she decided that Lovell was a decent enough person—imperfect, of course, prone to preoccupation, occasionally less than empathetic, socially clumsy. He only wanted his wife to love him.

But he nearly went at her last night. He had come close, closer than he ever had before. She had seen it, the itch just beneath his skin. A part of her could hardly blame him. She had brushed it away and made light of it in her mind later, but in the moment, she had shrunk from him, she remembered. She had been panic-stricken. And to think how safe and comfortable she had felt with him once upon a time in that greenhouse.

Chapter 9

L
ovell had been planning to attend a conference in Los Angeles since long before Hannah's disappearance, but now that it approached, he figured he should bow out. Over the phone, his mother said, “You should go, even if it's just for a day or two. You've been prepping for that intensity seminar for how long?”

“All year. And last year too.” The seminar would have been what he hoped was his most persuasive statement yet that as global warming intensified, so did dangerous storms. A correlation between power dissipation and sea surface temperatures was at best difficult to prove. Deterministic factors (greenhouse gases, changing natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors—chance—made weather events almost always appear random. Still, it was not so difficult to prove the
probability
of increased hurricane intensity in the coming years at least, owing to a spike in available energy from higher tropical SSTs. Of course the goal was to convince people that global warming had
X
effect on the earth—that if humans didn't commit to reducing greenhouse gases by
X
percent
today
,
X
cities would be destroyed,
X
houses would be torn apart,
X
people killed. Lovell had developed a new power index that could—within a reasonable margin of error—become the first tool to help quantify these things. There were few highs for him like the high of making what was assumed to be unknowable and impossible to predict considerably less so.

“You have your cell phone,” his mother said. “Give the detective our number and we'll call you the minute we hear anything. You can't put your career in jeopardy, Lovell.”

He protested—he would be across the country. “It's too far. It wouldn't be right. This would be the definition of leaving you and the kids in the lurch.” Hannah too, wherever she was.

“Go. You have to.”

In the end he changed his flight by a day so that he would be gone for only two, typed up for his mother a list of where the kids needed to be and when, and set out to call Detective Duncan. Lovell stood before the phone and considered what he was about to say: that he had chosen to leave his children and his missing wife—whose wallet had just been found, who was either walking around in Southie with no money or ID or . . . or he did not want to think of what else—in favor of his work. He set the receiver down without making the call.

HE WATCHED THE
country pass beneath him on the plane: Buffalo, Cleveland, the browned mosaic of land in Iowa, while the tiny icon of an airplane inched across the screen on the back of the seat before him. The man seated next to him listened to music turned up loud in his headphones, Duke Ellington, Lovell thought—
Blues in Orbit,
was it? One of his father's favorites. He had played it the first time Lovell brought Hannah home to meet them. “Jazz orchestra,” Jim Hall had declared as he went to find a certain Ellington CD, “is the only m-music that can help me unwind. There are proven c-c-correlations between a love of jazz and intelligence, a level of sophistication, that sort of thing. Did you know that Lovell used to be able to play parts of this on the p-piano when he was a kid? He was so good at the piano—I never understood when he started on the b-b-banjo later.” Lovell had shrugged, embarrassed by his stuttering, usually reticent father's attempts to impress Hannah. As Jim went on, Lovell was suddenly aware of the empty walls, the bare floor, the total lack of warmth or personality around them; his parents' matching plaid love seats, which had been scratched and torn by Walter, their hairless cat; the way they nattered on angrily about the condo board in their building; Hannah's hidden smile when his mother set a bowl of pea soup with an obscenely large ham hock at the center before her.

Soon after, he would wheel their suitcases onto a ferry and watch seagulls dip toward them beside the boat; he would for the first time step foot on Martha's Vineyard and take note of the wash of light reflected nearly everywhere from the ocean, the bustling, happy towns, the number of bicyclists riding alongside the cars; he would walk down a brick path lined with wildflowers toward her parents' seaside home, trying not to gawk at the vaulted wood-beam ceilings, the wall of glass that overlooked crowded Edgartown Harbor from the living room, the person—a cook? a servant?—who set plates of buttered lobster tail and pomegranate crab salad in front of them for lunch.

The man beside Lovell turned up the volume. Yes, it was Ellington.

Later, Hannah admitted that she had never much liked jazz. “It makes me physically uncomfortable,” she said, and he had chided her for summarily dismissing a genre of music. “Pardon me for having an opinion,” she had said. Before then, she had been the one to judge him.

THE CONFERENCE CENTER,
a drafty hall bright with fluorescent lighting, smelled of insect repellent and glue. A hum of beeps and static and chatter filled the place. Lovell met up with colleagues who attended each year, and as always, they tried not to broach what they were about to discuss in detail for the next several days, but inevitably their talk about their kids and houses—as well as tentative questions about how he was holding up in the face of Hannah's disappearance—drifted to time constants and interglacials, the record heat that year, the snowfall in South Africa.

He headed across the hall to a talk about El Niño. Thirty or so people were getting settled in their seats, thirty researchers, thirty people concerned about recent anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific, where the waters ran warmer.

In the seminar room, the lights dimmed and a map of the equatorial Pacific appeared on the large white screen at the front. The presenter began to speak, and he flicked to the next map, air-flow patterns over the western Pacific, a beautiful swirl of pressure, temperature and rainfall rendered in a blotted rainbow of colors, and the next, the Atlantic, much smaller and so less capable of oscillation.

Lovell thought of Hannah's going to Carson Beach. If Lovell pictured it—if he tried to imagine that morning through her eyes, if he imagined her replaying the things that he had said to her, if he thought about her watching the kids head off for school and her facing the empty house for those few hours before she was due at the flower store, if he tried to inhabit what her thoughts might have been—then a drive to this place from her past was not implausible.

The presentation turned to the thermocline, the precise place where warm surface water met cooler, deeper water, and the changing interplay between the two.

Santa Cruz. The idea came to Lovell as if from nowhere. When was the next time he would be on the West Coast? The conference was in a different city each year. Santa Cruz had to be a reasonable drive from here.

When the seminar was finished, Lovell returned to his hotel room and found Doug Bowen's contact information through Shadow Noize. He sent off an e-mail introducing himself and suggesting they meet, as he was “in the area.” Doug soon replied and agreed.

Lovell called his mother and she agreed to stay at his house an extra night. “Good luck with the seminar this afternoon,” she said.

He had forgotten that it was just an hour from now. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Have you seen Dot Schlage there yet?” Dot Schlage taught undergrad planetary science at MIT. She had grown up in the town next to Lovell's, and before he met Hannah, his mother used to suggest that he ask her out. Dot was nice enough and not unattractive, but she spoke so quietly he could hardly hear her most of the time. She seemed unable to look him in the eye; rather, she held her gaze at his forehead whenever the two spoke. “She's at the conference, you know.”

“Mom.” It felt perverse, his mother even mentioning Dot's name right now.

“I see her all the time at MIT. We have lunch sometimes. Just tell her I say hi, would you?”

THE NEXT MORNING,
he checked out of his hotel and left Los Angeles as the sun rose, coral and golden, over the buildings and hills. He took a window seat near the back of the Greyhound, and as he had hardly slept the night before, he drifted off into a dreamless sleep until the stop at Santa Barbara.

The bus filled and he shifted toward the window to make room for a suntanned college-age girl who wore a bandanna over her head and carried only a ratty copy of
On the Road.
Lovell found his laptop, plugged in his headphones, and clicked on the website for Shadow Noize Records. He reread the short paragraph describing the company's early days: “We set up in the basement of the Clover Club and we just recorded live records at first. That was our thing, capturing the raw energy of live music.” Beneath the words were covers of new albums released by the small label. He listened to samples of a few singles. The lyrics were stunningly violent and misogynist and materialistic. He felt old and prudish. He hoped his kids never heard this crap. He wondered if Hannah ever had.

He took off his headphones and set his head against the window. He closed his eyes and tried in vain to fall asleep again. The suntanned girl made little noises of delight as she read.

He thought back to a nor'easter years earlier. A plow had shoved an immovable wall of snow against Hannah's car outside his apartment building and the storm had shut down the nearby subway system. They walked several miles from Cleveland Circle, where they had seen
The Doors,
and now, covered in wet snow themselves, they stood outside the door of his building, trying to spot where her car had once been and assessing the possibility of her going anywhere right then.

He offered his couch and she suggested his futon. “Less chance to hear Paul's trombone from your bedroom.”

Maybe there is a God,
he had thought.

In his room, as they changed with their backs to each other, Hannah into a shirt and sweatpants that he gave her, Lovell's face burned: what must she have thought of his
Star Wars
pillowcase, the stench from the open bag of Doritos on the floor beside his bed? She herself mentioned a rubber night guard just prescribed for bruxism—“Be glad you don't have to see me wearing it,” she said generously as she fluffed Yoda and Obi-Wan beneath her head.

Lovell and Hannah soon lay on their backs, and he watched the white dust sink and dance past the streetlights outside.

She finally broke the silence: “We are in bed together. I'm wearing your old undershirt. Say something.”

I love you,
he thought. “Something.”

“Ask me a question. Anything you want.”

He scrambled to think of something daring, the sort of question that she might ask. “What is your biggest regret in life?” he thought to say. “What are you the most proud of?”

She answered and then countered easily: “Describe your first time having sex.” “What's the angriest you've ever been?” “Have you ever been arrested?” His answers were embarrassingly tame next to hers. She regretted turning down a romantic advance from “a very well-known actor who shall remain nameless” when he was in Boston a few years ago. She was proud that she and Doug had surfed some deathly wave in Oahu. She had lost her virginity on her father's boat when she was fourteen to a twenty-year-old neighbor, home from college at the time; she'd had a threesome on a beach in North Carolina. In turn, Lovell regretted never having known his mother's parents, who had her when they were older and died before Lovell was born. He was proud that he was on his way to a PhD. He had made love with three women before now, each one in his dorm room. The angriest? “Probably when you told me about Doug.”

“That was
your
angriest?” She smiled and brushed a spot of lint from his cheek. “You're sweet. You're just
you,
” she said. She held her finger against his face for a brief moment before pulling back.

He made himself edge forward and say, “Can I?”

She nodded. He took her face in his hands—the face he had pined for all these months. Hannah Munroe's face. He pushed his lips against hers, and spinning inside, weightless, he kissed her. They kissed each other.

After, she buried her face in her hands.

“You all right?” he asked.

She shrugged and wiped her eyes. “I'm fine. This is good—you are good.”

Was he her first since Doug? “Should we stop? Did I do something that you didn't want to?”

“No, no. Please, you're fine. This is fine. Just don't go anywhere.”

“I won't,” he said, reaching for a hair that clung to her eyelashes. “I'm right here.”

OVER NINE HOURS
after he had left Los Angeles, the bus pulled into the station in Santa Cruz. Lovell hauled his bags from the metal rack above him, stepped down the cramped aisle and steep stairs, and stood blinking in the hazy sunlight of the afternoon. A few others disembarked behind him, and he moved to the side and glanced at his watch—he had just enough time to check into the motel, a block away from here, and walk to meet Doug.

Rocco's Diner, a place Doug had suggested, was a steel double-wide with a scene of a nearly 3-D psychedelic goddess Roller Derby air-painted across its front. Lovell realized he had been standing in the parking lot, staring at the tacky mural for minutes now, the buxom, winged women gliding toward him through a purple rainbow and haloed black sun.

The diner was nearly empty. A couple of teenagers sat chattering loudly in a booth. And there at another torn booth, by the restroom, facing Lovell, sat a bald man with a black-and-gray goatee and a pierced eyebrow, a mug in his hands as he chatted with a waitress who had a short Mohawk. “Doug?” Lovell said from behind the waitress.

“My brother,” Doug said, standing to hug him as if he had known him for years. He muscled Lovell past the waitress and into his arms for a powerful hug. “How you holding up?” he said.