The Divorce Party (25 page)

It’s also possible she’ll forget it. It doesn’t feel possible now, but that is the thing when you are still in the middle of something. You can’t believe the gods or the universe or all the incontrovertible proof to the contrary. This too shall pass. This, too, doesn’t get to count for everything.

Gwyn takes a deep breath, standing in the middle of the driveway, looking around herself, listening to all the noise. This is one of the other things she loves about Montauk—one of her small, forgotten things—how loud it gets here after a storm. She can hear the ocean from where she is standing, she can hear people on the street, and she can hear cars all the way down on Old Montauk Highway.

It is enough, in its way, to make her question her instinct. Her gut instinct to go back into her house and take just a few of her things with her. Right now. To pick up a few of her own things that may be getting damaged, things that she needs and loves, and that one day will remind her what she had in this house. To get them now, before it is too late.

But she makes a decision. It isn’t the most important decision she’ll ever make, maybe even that night, but she decides to ignore what her heart is telling her to do, and not to go back into her house. Not now. Not when she’ll find other proof for herself, as if she needs other proof, that there was a family here. That, soon, they will be gone.

Instead, she reaches into her bag, and finds her keys, and takes them out, and goes to get into her car. She gets into the car and turns on the ignition and quickly turns out of her driveway.

She is going to drop off these clothes for her daughter, and she is going to stay with Thomas, for tonight, at the inn on Second House Road, and she is going back to the hospital tomorrow and she is going to do what is needed. For her daughter. But she isn’t going into her house tonight. She isn’t even going to look at it in her rearview mirror, or consider it at all.

Call it what you want. But soon enough, less than a year from now, or a little more than a year from now—in the brief space of time where it looks like Thomas may actually marry Eve; in the brief space of time right before they sell their house to a young couple from western Massachusetts, the ones who were willing to go into debt to buy it, the ones who want to turn it back into a full-time home—Gwyn takes this car on a road trip out to Oregon, to stay for a while with her sister and the journalist. At least that is her plan, originally. But she stops along the way in a northern Arizona city, where she walks into a hotel barroom and finds a man sitting there, yellow socks peeking out from beneath his dress shoes. She recognizes him in the way we get to recognize the people we are supposed to meet, the ones we have been waiting our whole lives to meet. Does that mean that Gwyn turns out okay, just because she’s found someone else, someone who wants to see her? No, not as far as she is concerned. As far as she is concerned, it means she turns out okay because she believes—in that hotel barroom, for the first time in such a long time—that she should be seen. It is a bonus, of course—an immeasurable bonus,
the
immeasurable bonus of her life—that the man with the yellow socks has been the one to do it.

And for tonight, at least, she is done. With this house, this piece of her life, the whole damn thing.

She isn’t angry. She isn’t hopeful. She is simply done. For tonight, Gwyn is done trying to pick up what cannot be saved.

Maggie

Maggie is trying to pick up what can be saved. She is sitting on the living room floor, the half-filled wine box by her side, books and picture frames and candlesticks and vases surrounding her. She has grabbed newspapers from the kitchen, from the recycling bin there, and is beginning to spread them around her—beginning to get ready to wrap everything around her up—when she looks up and sees him standing there in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed across his chest.

Nate. He looks like he has been standing there for a while, watching her. He is still holding his car keys in his hands, between his fingers.

“You’re back?” she says.

“I’m back.”

“And what are you doing standing there?”

“I’m pretending.”

“Pretending what?”

“That when you’d look up, you’d still be as happy as you usually are to see me. That your face would light up how it does, you know . . .” He uncrosses his arms, motions with the keys in his hands to his own face. “That I’d get to watch you get a little happy.”

She takes a closer look at him. “Did I?”

“Half,” he says.

She smiles, looking down at her piles, reaching for more newspaper, trying to decide what to use it for. “That’s not so good.”

“It’s not so bad,” he says. “I thought I’d be starting at less than that. So maybe we’re doing okay.”

The newspaper is turning her hands black and yellow, and she turns it over, away from herself, which is when she catches the headline on the top of the page, the headline announcing that today is the anniversary of the hurricane. Sixty-nine years ago today. Sixty-nine years ago. What was happening in this room then, she wonders? How did they come out the other side of it?

Nate walks deeper into the room, toward her, so that he is just a few feet away from her. He doesn’t sit down, though. He waits. He waits for her to give him a sign that she wants that.

“Murph told me what she said to you on the bus. It’s not true. We never slept together. We never even kissed. Except during some stupid spin-the-bottle round in the fourth grade.”

She looks up at him. “Then why did she say it?”

“Because she could.”

“She picked a bad day.”

“Yes, she picked a bad day,” he says. “Maybe that’s not the real problem, though.”

“What is?”

He shrugs. “Why were we playing spin-the-bottle in fourth grade?”

She starts to laugh, and feels something come loose in herself, or loose enough that she does it, the first thing: she moves some of the books out of the way, so he can sit across from her.

She moves some bad paperback novels, a small hardback, and an aquatic dictionary, the largest book, out of the way. He sits down, cautiously, leaning backward on his hands, looking at her, really looking at her.

“Thank you,” he says.

She nods. “You’re welcome . . .”

“What are you thinking?” he says.

She looks at him. “Nothing.”

“No, not nothing. Tell me.”

“Well, right now I’m thinking that you rarely ask me what I’m thinking.” She pauses. “And I’m feeling grateful for that. It’s a terrible question. There is nowhere good to go from there.”

He smiles, and turns briefly toward the window, looking outside, at the night—the outline of the ocean in the distance. “He asked me something today which I keep thinking about. He asked me a question when we were walking back from surfing earlier.”

“Your dad?”

He nods his head, turning back to her, a look passing over his face. “It was strange because he didn’t sound like himself exactly. He asked if when I look at you I feel rational. He said I shouldn’t,” he says. “I shouldn’t feel rational about you.”

“Rational? What does that mean, even?” she says. “Like I should still be a fantasy?”

“I don’t know. That’s my point.” He pauses. “It sounded like he was talking to himself more than to me.”

She is quiet. Part of her wants to ask what Nate says now when he is talking to himself, to ask herself the same thing. Somehow that feels like too big a question. Somehow that feels like everything. Besides, who are we to tell ourselves anything about our lives? Who are we to be brave enough to figure out a new way to live them?

“I’m thinking that with enough practice, you can talk yourself into or out of anything,” Maggie says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you should be careful what you say,” she says. “I think we should both be careful what we say next.”

He leans forward, putting his hand over her chest, clutching her there, his fingers digging in. She is aware of his fingers, and that feels upsetting. His touch unsettles her right now, almost as much as it soothes her. But she has to think that it isn’t always going to be like this. As he moves closer to her, she knows she doesn’t want it to be like this, and he doesn’t want that. She knows that he is going to try to do whatever he can do to fix it. And for the first time, so will she.

It might seem that they haven’t moved far from where they started—Maggie started her day with Nate, and she is ending it with him. She is staying in the same place. But she is staying in a new way, a deeper one, which she is starting to understand might be the most important move she ever makes.

He starts to speak, his voice catching. He clears it, and takes a second try. “Maggie, I’m not going to disappoint you again,” he says.

She looks at him, right into his eyes. They are endless. And she can see that he believes it. She can see that he believes the impossible, which can be a recipe for disappointment, but is also the first step—the absolutely necessary step—to working toward anything that is possible. And stable. And true.

“You will disappoint me.”

“No. Not like this.”

“How can you know that?”

He shakes his head, and keeps talking. “Look, Maggie, it doesn’t matter in the end.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Even if this feels fairly awful for a while, I’m going to tell you everything. And I’m not going away unless you ask me to.” He pauses. “I’m not sure I’m going even then.”

“Are restraining order jokes ever funny?” she says.

“No, not usually.”

“Okay,” she says. “So I won’t make one.”

Then she rests her forehead against his, can feel him there, his heart beating there, right where he is touching her. It often feels like that, wherever they are touching, that she is reaching something inside of him. Especially now, when she needs it the most, that feels something like its own kind of promise.

“Nate,” she says, “I keep thinking about that swing outside. I keep thinking a swing like that would be great in front of our restaurant.”

“It would be. It would be perfect.” He is talking slow. “How about we ask my parents if we can use theirs?”

Maggie looks at him. “You think they’ll say yes?” she says.

“I think we’ve got a good chance, yes,” he says. Then he moves closer, putting his mouth against her ear. And he waits. He waits for just a second, before he says it, real low. “Can I tell you something I’ve never told you before?”

Maggie closes her eyes, a tear falling out, which she brushes away so he doesn’t see it, and so she won’t miss it, any of it, all of it, the good part, the hard and real part, that may be coming next.

epilogue

Montauk, New York, 1972

Champ

He is working on the swing.

Anna is sitting on the ground close to the edge of the cliff, pretending to look back in the direction of the house, but she is watching Champ out of the corner of her eye. He knows that she thinks he is too old to be lying on his back working on this swing.

He
is
too old. They live in New York City now, for more than a year now, where things are easier on them. They miss the house, though, miss being out here, in a way they don’t like to talk about even to each other.

They are back only for a few days for Thomas’s wedding. To the woman Gwyn. The woman that Anna thinks is too pretty.

“He doesn’t have to look hard enough to find it,” she says. “Her beauty.”

“So?”

“It’s harder to appreciate what you don’t have to look hard to find.”

They have had this conversation before. Champ focuses on polishing the underside of the swing. It is almost done. It is their wedding present to Thomas and Gwyn. It is their offering.

He rubs his hand along the wood. “They’ll be fine, Anna,” he says.

“You don’t know that.”

“No. I guess you can never know that. But I do like her.”

“What could be more beside the point?” She turns and looks at him straight on. She is better at this now, saying exactly what she thinks.

And he doesn’t say what he thinks because he is better at knowing what she isn’t ready to hear: that he has no idea whether it will last for his son and his wife, the way it lasted for him and Anna. It could go either way. It always can go either way, can’t it? You can stay together for the wrong reasons as much as for the right ones and who is to say you’ll be more or less happy either way? Because of a storm, because her arms were outstretched . . . Champ only knows that the important part is to decide to stay. Again and again. And, on the days you can’t, to resist deciding anything else.

“Read the lyrics to me.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

The lyrics are engraved on a blue plate beneath the seat. The lyrics to their song—Anna’s and his. It hadn’t been their wedding song. What had been? A Cole Porter tune, if he’s remembering right. “Begin the Beguine.” It had been so many people’s wedding song that year. But this song became the one they played the most in recent years. It is the song that Champ would put on the record player on the cold winter nights out here, toward the end, when they needed a reminder that they wanted to spend the cold winter nights out here.

Hopefully, it would help hold Thomas and Gwyn during their beginning.

He’s screwed the plate to the innermost plank of wood, somewhere you have to look close, somewhere you have to be lucky just to find it. And he doesn’t skip any of it this time when he reads the words to her: