The Inseparables (23 page)

“This is the end,” she said. It came out wrong, her voice too deep, and Spencer laughed.

“The end of what?” he asked. “Is this the part where you kill me?”

For minutes after he left she stood in the lot, the exhaust of his car dissipating, the water rushing, snow everywhere, all this fucking snow, this admittedly pretty waterfall, and she could not stop looking at her phone, hoping he would call, change his mind, come back, wishing the screen would light up for her.

Her mother was out in the snow when Oona pulled into the driveway. Across the meadow, wind shook the stand of elms. Up the hill her mother didn't look up. Instead, she was on her hands and knees with a garden spade and an ice pick, hacking away at the frozen ground.

“What are you doing?” Oona called out.

From the bottom of the hill, the house looked unsteady on its foundation. In the dim light she saw the missing shingles and the rot at the base of the chimney, and there was, she saw for the first time, a new spiderwebbing of broken glass that had formed in one of the attic windows. The word they kept using all this time was that it was “failing,” which was another way to say that the house was ready to fall in on itself, one big gust of wind or big snowfall away from something caving and people dying inside. The real estate agents used this word. The lawyers, in their appeals to creditors, used this word. The county surveyors brought in to walk the property line had used this word, had put it in their notes:
The structure is in danger of failing.
To say that it was failing implied something worse, Oona couldn't help but think—that the house had suddenly ceased to do its job successfully, a house being a place to keep a family whole and intact.

“There's blood,” her mother said, rising a little when Oona got up the hill. Her mother was out without a jacket, her hair untethered and sopping, mud on the knees of her slacks. She pierced at the ground with the point of the ice pick, trying to dig away at something.

“It can't be blood,” Oona said. “It's been raining and snowing for days.”

Her mother put down the ice pick and took a flashlight to the slope. “Look,” she said. “See?”

Oona crouched.

“Is that not blood?” her mother asked.

“I don't know,” Oona said.

“You're a doctor. You know what blood looks like. That's blood.”

Oona followed the beam of light across the hill to the edge of the driveway and then back, in a loop, to the front steps of the crumbling porch. A snake of a half dozen droplets. All from Paul's head. Beside her mother, a bucket of soapy warm water gave off steam.

“This isn't what you think it is,” Oona said.

Her mother stood. “I saw when I came home. Clear as day. It's blood.”

Oona stood, watching her mother scrub.

“Someone fell,” Oona said. “That's all that happened.”

“I know someone fell,” her mother cried. “I was here! I saw it!”

Oona blanched. “Someone else fell. Trust me, it's someone else.”

Inside, Oona got the fire going. She put her mother on the couch. Beside the fireplace, in place of the kindling, Oona saw, all the remaining copies of
The Inseparables
were stacked up, one after another, in a line. Her mother wanted to burn them.

“We're almost out of firewood,” her mother contended.

“A book burning? Really?”

“Somebody told me once that it might make me feel better,” she said. “So I decided to give it another try.”

Oona picked up a copy, flipped through the pages, and landed on the diagram of Eugenia Davenport throwing the teapot through the front window of Templeton Grace's car.
Just a woman preparing for afternoon tea,
it read. Sometimes Oona allowed herself to fixate on the version of her mother who had made this, who existed only in pictures, the version her father had fallen for, that first Henrietta Horowitz, who was brilliant and brilliantly energetic, and who her father claimed had occasioned in him an instantaneous political awakening during that first lecture. That woman, for the most part, was a ghost. What remained of her emerged in fractions, and Oona always thrilled to recognize a hint of her mother's old confidence, her incisive academic eye, the old radical's energy and outrage. Who she was now was a product of the shame the book had caused her. Oona looked over at her mother, small on the large couch, wrapped in a blanket, warming herself. The book had sent her behind walls here, on this big farm, with all the acres and the animals, and because of it, she had become too much like an indoor cat whose instincts for a hunt have no purpose in a carpeted living room.

“The blood outside,” Oona said. “It's not Daddy's.”

Her mother shook her head. Oona had seen this before, at the hospital. The shock of death made even the most rational people senseless. This was why doctors were trained to talk about it with such cold, clinical logic. The brain has stopped and so he is dead. The heart cannot function any longer and he will die tonight. She hated to see her mother like this again, after eleven months.

“I know it's not his blood,” her mother said finally. “Most of me knows it's not his, anyway.”

“Good,” Oona said.

“But whose goddamned blood is it? It's not mine. Is it yours?”

Oona tried to explain everything about Paul as succinctly as possible. She did not want to say that Paul had fallen on the same spot as her father, or that he'd done so because it was icy, just like her dad, or that she'd seen his head bounce off the frozen ground in the same way that her mother must have seen her father's head crack. Instead, Oona just stated the facts. His name is Paul. At first he was our therapist, mine and Spencer's. Then he was only my therapist. Then we stopped therapy because he liked my necklace and my neck. Then we kissed in my office. Then we made a date. Then he came here, he cut himself, I put him in the attic, he escaped, we got drinks, we went to his house, we made out in his elevator, we fucked on his kitchen floor, I ripped out his chest hair, and I felt deep, deep personal shame. And now this is happening: I'm telling you about it.

Her mother took a moment to process this. “Wait a second,” she said, smiling.

“We don't need to fixate on the details,” said Oona.

“Yes, we certainly do need to fixate on the details,” her mother said.

“Please,” begged Oona.

“So you're saying this man was your therapist?”

Oona cringed.

“And that he came to this house the other night? When we were all here? When Lydia was here, even. When we were eating Chinese food? And that you hid him in the attic like you did with your old high school boyfriend?”

“You're enjoying this far too much,” Oona said.

“And later you slept with this man?” her mother asked.

“Mom,”
Oona protested. “This is actually worse than the sex.”

Her mother appeared unmoved. “And you're saying the sex was bad?”

Oona flipped through a copy of
The Inseparables,
to one of the best diagrams, labeled
Fantasy of the Male Ravishing the Supplicating Female.
The drawing corresponded with the escapade in which Eugenia lures Templeton Grace onto the floor of her solarium. Her mother had drawn the man with wild eyes and wet hair and with fangs and the woman as happily compliant and hungry. A thought bubble rises up above the woman's head:
I'm so hungry for your prick.
This was the picture that her old friends and activists had been most bothered by. Her mother had claimed that everyone needed a better sense of humor. In retrospect, Oona thought it was outrageous that her mother might have assumed people wouldn't be angry with her. Oona held up the picture. “It was like this,” she said. “But worse.”

“How could it be worse than that?” her mother said, laughing loudly.

“If you really need to know, he had more body hair.”

Her mother shrugged.

“And like I said: it was on his kitchen floor.”

Her mother shook her head. “Not even the counter?”

“He wanted the floor.”

“It wasn't one of those nice floors that are heated underneath, was it?”

“Cold kitchen floor.”

“That's a good Freudian case study, right there. Why is it that the kitchen always summons some deep sexual desire in underconfident men?”

“This is not helping me.”

“Do you need help?” her mother asked, prompting in Oona an old, somewhat repressed memory of her mother entertaining the idea of doing this for a living: penning a sex advice column.

“At worst,” Oona said, “I thought, just jumping into bed with someone new might energize me.”

Again, her mother shook her head. “Or onto the kitchen floor.”

“At best, I thought, maybe this is someone new. And maybe someone new is something good. And maybe, miraculously, I would enjoy myself.”

“Sex on the floor? Where the hell would you get a dumb idea like that?”

Oona tapped the edge of the book.

“I love this: you sleep with your psychologist and it's all your mother's fault! How convenient!”

Her mother was on record as thinking that Oona's quasi-religious adherence to her own talk therapy was a simple matter of being addicted to her own voice. Oona was not sure she was wrong. In the New York of her mother's youth, such things were not done. One simply worried with dignity. You lived down the hall from your aunt and your grandmother, and you listened to their stories about mass slaughter and poverty, and then you were alone with your problems. Making such a big deal out of your anxieties, her mother contended, was the most egregious of first-world luxuries. Like hiring a man to shower you. These complaints had not changed much over the last few months. Therapy exacerbated narcissism, or reinforced some upper-middle-class victim syndrome. After all, they weren't talking about Jacques Lacan. Oona wasn't involved in some deep intellectual reconfiguration of her psyche. Modern day, suburban psychotherapy was glorified adult day care. Twice a week for the past six months, Oona had heard her mother's line about hiring a man to shower you. They agreed to disagree, but it was not for nothing that Oona had not told her mother about Paul. How did one ever explain such a thing, anyway? It might have been easier for Oona to have said,
Remember the story I told you about the man whose knees I operated on last week? The man who was hit by the bus? Yes, well, when he woke up from the anesthesia we became lovers.

“What did Spencer say about all of this?”

“Oh,” Oona said, “he was super excited for me. It was a happy family moment for both of us.”

Her mother looked genuinely concerned.

“I just came from asking him to take me back,” Oona said.

Her mother cringed. “You did nothing of the sort, I hope.”

“I thought it was the smart thing to do.”

“How is that possible?”

“Fucking my therapist on his kitchen floor also seemed intelligent.”

Her mother smiled. “Look, I'm not going to make you feel guilty about it,” she said. “Any of it.”

“What if I'm already feeling guilty?”

“I think I can dig out my lecture notes on the nexus between sex and social shame, if you want.” She turned to a big wall of boxes. “It was fairly boring and obvious even in 1974. But there's probably something worthwhile in it.”

“Please no,” Oona said.

“I'll give you the same advice I gave your daughter about her nude picture. Which is that shame is a choice.”

“She said you two talked.”

“Briefly. It's always brief with me and Lydia.”

“What else did you tell her?”

“I didn't tell her much,” her mother said. “Mind you, I wanted to. There are things to tell a girl like that. Lots of things. But I didn't want to step on any toes.”

“What did she tell you?” Oona asked. It occurred to her that perhaps Lydia might have confided in her grandmother, really confided, and this possibility stung Oona.

“She didn't have to tell me anything,” her mother said. “It's fine, honey. Really. She's going to be fine. Everyone's going to be fine.”

Oona was not sure she believed this. Optimism felt impossible. Had her mother still been writing or teaching, she would have likely agreed. This house, all this space, the privacy—all of it had caused her to lose touch. The world was happening far away from here. Oona imagined the fiery lecture she might have given had she been more engaged. The Internet: Radicalizing the Future Misogynists of America. Or: Stay the Fuck Away from My Granddaughter. Her mother, however, let out an exhausted breath.

“Come sit next to me,” she said, and when Oona did, her mother let her head fall slightly onto Oona's shoulder. “There,” her mother said. “This is so much better.”

For a moment they were silent. The fire warmed the room. Overhead the ceiling sagged. Oona put her hand in her mother's hair, which was still wet from the snow. This was the best part of living here again. Being able to do this, to sit quietly with her mother. Outside, lights went by on the main road. Everything was packed already. The room was nothing but boxes. When she moved in here, Oona had imagined herself as a bulwark against her mother's grief. As if she were strong enough on her own.

She held on to her mother.

When the fire went out, Oona got up and went into the back room and looked for some actual firewood to burn in the fireplace. This was where she found the small folded piece of paper, wedged into the back of the cabinet. She knew the handwriting.
To you,
it read,
from me.
She looked in at her mother, on the sofa, wrapped in her father's old big sweater. Her mother had been finding these notes for the better part of the last two years, but Oona knew that her mother had not found one since her dad died. Oona had found her mother countless times opening drawers and emptying out cabinets, looking and looking. She hesitated, the paper in hand. Everything, everywhere, was packed.

Then, quietly, she took her father's suitcase and opened it just enough to slide the note inside.