The Inseparables (18 page)

“
This
is the most important thing about you? Your ex-wife? Fucking Mount Everest?”

Across the room, an alarm clock read an ungodly early hour. She had not slept in three days.

“This was obviously a mistake,” she said.

“I don't think it was,” he said.

“Well, thankfully, we don't need to agree on this for it to be true,” she said.

“Maybe I can make some coffee and we can hash it out.”

He lived on the penthouse floor of the Intercontinental, in a corner unit with a view of the harbor. The collective mania and marital troubles of the city had clearly provided Paul with a luxurious life. The inside of the apartment was generous and sleek, and there were books everywhere: in lines, on shelves, in stacks, by the toilet, on the big Persian rug, and in the kitchen by the bowl of decorative kiwis. Out the window the water was gray-green, flecked with birds and boats and tourists, the beached-whale glimmer on the silver hide of the Aquarium throwing light in spangles onto the boat hulls bobbing. Paul had bought the place three years ago, after his own marriage had come apart. This was the way he talked about divorce in therapy, as if some couples were a poorly knit angora sweater that had fallen mistakenly into a washing machine. Initially Oona had thought that this was a profound metaphor for marriage, and she felt bonded to him over this fact. His sadness, her sadness: their conjoined loneliness and misery was like a mutually discovered taste for Lebanese food. Not entirely rare or special, but good enough for now. She mentioned this to Spencer at some point, having begun to think of their own marriage in these terms, the two of them a ball of yarn, raveling and unraveling.

“It's hard to get the yarn back into a ball,” she told him. “It's just loose and messy. That's us. That's you and me. We're yarn.”

At which Spencer scoffed. “It's not hard at all. You just roll the fucking yarn back up into a ball! It's easy. It makes a perfectly fine ball of yarn.”

Out in the kitchen, Paul made coffee with a sleek Italian machine embedded in his cabinetry.

“Maybe this happened too soon,” he said. “Maybe we needed to wait another month for the feelings to evolve.”

She noticed a small file folder across the room on the kitchen table. “Is that my patient file?”

He flinched.

Later that same morning, Lydia and her dad parked outside a sleek, black-glass high-rise near the harbor. She guessed at the building's significance without asking.

“This doesn't seem like a good idea,” Lydia said.

“No, it does not,” he agreed.

The city this early was bright and cheerless. It was Tuesday. He'd let her drive a second time, having punched the address into the GPS. They were close to the ocean, and from here the city unfurled behind them, hills of buildings, hills of houses, hills and hills. Gulls loitered. A water taxi with a shark's mouth painted on the hull carved out a path to the islands. Traffic helicopters hovered in the sky over the channel like robotic dragonflies.

“How long have you known?” she asked.

He collapsed deeper into his seat. “Six days,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Or, I guess, now that it's morning, seven days.”

“That's a fairly exact number.”

“I have very little else to do but count,” he said.

“How did you find out?”

“I wish I had a good story.”

She turned and picked up a pair of binoculars on the backseat. “You're stalking her, aren't you?”

“Is there a difference between following and stalking?”

She tossed the binoculars back. “You asking that question is probably not a good sign.”

“Probably not, no.”

“You must have seen signs, at least,” she said. “Hints that this might happen. I mean, maybe not with your therapist. But you
are
divorced.”

“We're separated.”

“Which, by definition, means that you're not together.”

“What's a sign, and what's a normal moment of your wife being annoyed with you?”

“The frequency of those moments, maybe,” Lydia said.

“Fine,” he said. “There were years of moments.”

“So there were signs.”

Her father lit a small, already burnt joint that he'd stashed in the change tray. He blew a stream of smoke that drifted and itched at her eyes. She tried not to show her disapproval, but this was not something she was particularly good at doing. His lack of shame about getting high right in front of her felt like a new low. He hadn't always been so hooked. Lydia knew full well that the escalation of his habit coincided exactly with her growing up and needing less of him. There were pictures in the living room in Crestview that attested to an earlier, optimistic, more motivated era of his life. Good hair, good shoes, cuff links, clarity behind the eyes. His present wounds were, she knew, largely self-inflicted. The narrative of his needing to quit working in order to raise her, which he sometimes cravenly pulled out during a fight with her mother, was easily debunked. Fatherhood fit him better than lawyering ever had. It struck her that her mother had probably loved him more then, despite his misery as an attorney. Occasionally she thought that the existence of these facts (miserable lawyer = love; happy househusband = divorce) made her mother a bad person, but most of the time Lydia seconded the opinion that maybe it was not such a terrible thing to want your husband to be sober and have ambitions and maybe a place to go in the morning. She felt confused about it all. On one hand, her father was her best friend. This was undeniably true. On the other hand, it was not the most encouraging thing to realize about yourself—that your very best friend was a middle-aged unemployed stoner.

“I'm medicating,” her father said when he saw her frowning. “It's medical.”

“If it's medical, then what's the disease?” she asked.

He inhaled, held it in his lungs. “What's it called,” he said, “when your wife starts going to bed with her therapist?”

“Professional malfeasance,” she said. “Criminal misappropriation of power. Dereliction of psychological duty. Any of those things would do.”

“You're smart, but I'm being serious,” he said.

“Heartbreak,” she said. “It's called heartbreak.”

He shook his head. “Heartbreak. Isn't that convenient that a doctor would be the exact person you'd want to see in the event of your heart breaking.”

“But that's a metaphor,” Lydia said. “It's not real. And she doesn't cure heartbreak. She fixes bones. You're high. There's a difference. Actually
and
metaphorically.”

“Look,” he said. “I'm trying to express my feelings, given the circumstances.”

“What are the circumstances, exactly?”

He raised his voice and was almost yelling. “That we're here, downtown, stalking her lover—”

“Oh God, please don't say ‘lover.'”

“—and that I'm really high at the moment, as you said, like, very high, and you know, maybe I'm underestimating the difference between heartbreak and cardiac arrest, but to me, Lydia, they're kind of the same thing right now.”

A yellow-footed gull landed on a curbstone ahead of the car and shook rain from its feathers. They were beautiful birds, she thought. Remarkably resilient. She had taken two weekend seminars on ornithology at Hartwell, if for no other reason than to have something to talk about with her grandmother, who liked birds. The gull spread its wings but did not take off. It was stretching, she guessed. It was looking right at them. Then it flew away. Her father ignored it.

“What are we doing here, exactly?” she asked. “What's the plan?”

“A confrontation,” he said. “Obviously.”

“You're stoned out of your mind. What kind of confrontation are you envisioning? A very slow confrontation?”

“Her going for a walk around the hospital garden with this creep is one thing. Her being here is another thing altogether. I'm going to tell him to back off. One man to another man.”

“I don't think that happens in real life, Dad. I think that's just on television. I think in real life, when that happens, you know, someone ends up murdering someone else.”

“Murder?” her father said, laughing. “I smoke pot. Pot smokers don't murder people.”

“But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that
he
might murder
you.
”

“Blah blah blah,” her father said, frustrated, senseless. “That shrink stole my wife.”

“You guys are getting divorced!”

Her father turned to her, his face a wreck of despair and pain. “It was supposed to be a
trial
separation! We were in couples therapy!”

“With who?” she asked, pointing up at the black face of the Intercontinental. “With that guy? That guy up there with the nice view?”

“Fuck,” her father said, leaning back against the seat. “This is depressing.”

After a while she told him, “She's not a six-pack of beer. He can't steal her. She went willingly.”

“Willingly,” he repeated. “Willingly.”

There was a seafood restaurant across the road from the Aquarium concourse. This fact seemed unnecessarily cruel to Lydia. Her father used to take her to eat there when she was young. The dining room was built into the underside of a series of fresh- and saltwater fish tanks, the whole place done up as an aquarium in miniature. They came here when her mother worked late, to this blue room with the fish swimming up above their table. The vastness of the place, the huge blueness, had thrilled her. Her dad liked to tell her that this place was actually under the sea, that they had, when they went through the front door, gone underground. She was five—six, maybe—and perhaps he thought he could fool her. But really, she knew: they were just eating inside a fish tank, waiting for the same person to get off work.

“You want me to take you across the street?” she said. “Cheer you up?”

“Funny, Lydia.”

“I don't think I ever really connected the idea of seeing pretty fish and then going across the street and eating those same pretty fish.”

“You always wanted to go,” he said. “You were always very confident with your opinions. I was reading a lot of books on fatherhood back then. The books said that I should listen.”

“See? That's where you went wrong,” she said. “You should ignore me always.”

“That was what the marriage counselor told me about your mother,” he said.

Lydia fell silent. The separation was only half a year old, but the dissolution of her parents' marriage felt as substantial in her own small world as the disbanding of something enormous, like Europe. A breakup had always been possible, if not plainly obvious, but the reality of their being apart, her mom and dad, and in separate houses, and their occasionally falling in love with their therapists, and getting high pre-sunrise and smoking Cheech and Chong volumes of weed and freely stalking each other—it was too sudden and new for Lydia to laugh about.

“I shouldn't make a joke like that,” her father said. “That's inappropriate.”

“Of all the inappropriate things you've done today,” she said.

He put his seat back all the way, until it lay flat, and he closed his eyes.

After a while she spoke up. “You read books on fatherhood?” she asked.

He smiled at her. His voice came out low. “Quite a few,” he said.

“Did you learn anything?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “You tell me.”

It wasn't as if Oona went home with Paul without deliberation. Last night they'd been at the bar, talking about death, and he'd said it plainly enough, with no subterfuge involved, no mystery as to what they were agreeing to. “I think it would be nice if you came home with me to my condo,” he said. She hadn't answered right away. Instead, she'd gotten up and walked to the back of the bar, pretending at first to wait in line for the restroom, and then she snuck off through the rear door, into the parking lot, where, through the thicket, she could see the rim of the lake that connected to the river that ran behind her house, and where, gathered in the shelter of the derelict bank of pay phones, there were young people, not much older than Lydia, all of them smoking cigarettes. She begged for one and smoked it alone by the side of the building, standing on a pile of soggy leaves, in full view of one of the bar's windows. She hadn't smoked a cigarette since the first George Bush was president, and she wanted to vomit. She spied on Paul inside. She didn't know what she was looking for. Maybe some kind of oracular divination. A hint as to what to do. He finished his diet soda. He checked his email. He made the bartender laugh. These were good things, weren't they? Did all people suffer these deliberations? The ancient questions rose up. To screw or not to screw? Go inside or flee? A woman passing behind Paul's barstool tripped slightly, or stumbled, and Paul caught her elbow and helped her upright and made her laugh as well, and while Oona watched, he got up from his seat and walked her to the door. This tiny act of kindness had done it. Twenty years of immaculate fidelity. She had not so much as kissed or touched or corresponded inappropriately with another man since her first date with Spencer. She walked inside.

Now, standing barefoot in Paul's kitchen, she noticed that there were fingernail marks across the skin of her belly. Also, her sweater lay in a humiliating pile by the oven door, just where she'd had it torn off her body.

Paul walked quickly to the file folder on the kitchen table, picking it up and stashing it on a bookcase.

“So before our first date you read up on me?” she asked.

“I wouldn't have done that,” he said.

“Just so, what, you could remember more clearly what exactly makes me vulnerable?”

“You're putting the darkest possible spin on this,” he said.

“Just so we could discuss…what was the phrase you used about my father dying?
The transfer of energy between the living and the dead
?”

“It was a nice conversation between two people. There was nothing creepy about it.”

“What is this, then? The transfer of fluids between the pursuer and the pursued?”

“That, again, is a sinister way to think about what happened with us.”

“There is something deeply creepy about this, Paul. First the long story about your wise, sage, gorgeous ex-wife with her red curls and her jade necklaces. Then this, the dossier to my emotional life?”

“I can't tell you whose file it is,” he said. “You know that. You know the rules.”

“It's clearly my file.”

“I can't say.”

“Then give it to me. Let me see.”

“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” he said.

“I'm a doctor. Maybe I need to consult on the patient's medical history.”

“Oona, these are the rules.”

“So now you like rules. Is that so? I'm in my underwear. Which is more than I was wearing ten minutes ago. How does that fit in with your rules?”

They passed into the living room. She stood alone at the window. Buoys in the harbor rocked, wave-thrown. Boats in the channel passed, horns blowing. For a few minutes, helium balloons brushed by the glass, a stream of them released by children or peace protesters or perhaps a balloon vendor with a very poor grip. His office was on the ground floor of the building across the way. She could see the revolving door that she and Spencer had passed through, twice a week for months, listening all that time to Paul as he urged them to practice patience, because, as he told them, this is a process, life and love and fidelity and marriage, all of it a long, tough process. She wondered now where in the process fucking her therapist fell.

“We waited the recommended length of time,” Paul said.

“Who's doing the recommending here: the doctor or the patient?”

“Where is this aggression coming from? A half hour ago you were so lovely.”

“Oh here we go. Unhinged woman acting so nuts and crazy! You tell me, doctor. Where is this aggression coming from? How long have I been in therapy with you? You must have the answer by now.”

“You can't use my therapy against me as a weapon. DeeDee had the hardest time with that.”

“DeeDee.”

“Yes,” he said, realizing perhaps that mentioning DeeDee was not a good thing to have done in this particular circumstance. “DeeDee had some difficulty with the rules.”

Oona looked around. Pictures of DeeDee littered the place. Oona knew how it was. Leaving a marriage was like scraping plaque from a bad artery. You could never get rid of all of it. It was not as if she had not kept pictures of Spencer in her phone, or on the dresser in her bedroom in Aveline, but hers was a newer separation, everything still fresh. Apparently, in between catalog shoots DeeDee worked as a personal trainer at a gym in Concord not far from where the minutemen and the royalists began the Revolution. This was a fact that Paul believed was symbolic of some larger personal struggle within her. Oona had heard all of this in bed. Sovereignty rebelling against tyranny, or liberty overcoming the crush of imperialism, or some crap like that. DeeDee was the freedom fighter; he was the monarchic oppressor. None of this did anything to calm Oona's concerns. If Paul was a tyrant, then who had she just slept with? And if DeeDee was too good for Paul, then where did that leave her?

She said this to him. “Don't you get it? Don't you see? It's like a math equation.”

He acted confused. “What is this? A test? If A is bigger than B? I was never good at this kind of thing.”

Finally Paul slunk into the seat of a leather sofa.

“I thought we had a great time,” he said.

“It was a decent time.”

“In bed, I meant.”

“Like I said.”

He shook his head. “Earlier, you were so excited.”

“I was excited for someone new,” she said.

“But I
am
someone new.”