After You (13 page)

She wasn’t surprised. Apparently the fact that he wore cuff links had already given him away.

“So you’re in love with a capitalist,” she’d said, and shrugged it off. “I knew you were bound to rebel at some point.” And when my rebellion turned into a marriage, she’d shrugged again. “I never said bland was a bad thing in a partner.”

“Yeah, not so sure I’m ready to spring my parents on her after one date. But she’s already been thoroughly vetted by Ellie, so don’t worry.”

“We’re not worried, honey,” my mother says, and my brother and I exchange glances at the fact that my parents are once again united as a we. “Just excited.”

“I can’t remember the last time it was just the four of us sitting at a table together,” my father says.

“It’s almost never been just the four of us. Even when you guys were little. Lucy was always around, or one of Michael’s friends.”

Everyone goes silent for a moment, in honor of Lucy, and I start half choking, half sobbing, which is ridiculous, given that the mention of her name is nothing new: I live in her house and look at her things and Sophie talks about her fifteen times a day. I should be habituated by now.
Lucy, Lucy, Lucy
.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“How’s the arm?” Mikey asks, changing the subject with such ease that I want to kiss him.

“Unbelievably itchy. I’ve done everything I can to scratch it, even stuck a letter opener up the cast, but it doesn’t work. No relief whatsoever.”

“Well, we have news,” my mother says, unconcerned and uninterested in the state of my arm. My mother does not believe in the art of indulgence.

“You’re pregnant,” Mikey says.

“Twins!” I say, feeling like we are kids again, in cahoots.

“You’re not funny.”

“It’s kind of funny, Jane,” my dad says, and smirks. “A sixty-seven-year-old woman gave birth to twins last year. Granted, she used fertility treatments, but who knows what you get up to in your free time? You’re only sixty.”

“And you are looking a little heavy, Mom,” Mikey says.

“And that glow,” I say.

“I am looking quite svelte, thank you very much. And that glow is because your father and I … well … we’re getting married again.”

“Are you serious? I mean seriously? You’re serious,” I say, once I regain a limited capacity for speech. “You really think this is a good idea?”

“Of course we’re serious. We couldn’t be happier.” My mother turns to my father, and a look of such naked longing passes between them that I find I’m the one blushing.

“But … but, Dad,” Mikey says. “What about what happened last time?”

“You don’t get it. We’re getting married. You guys should be happy for us.”

“What if she changes her mind? It will kill you,” I say.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not changing my mind. And, if I do, he’s in the hands of a qualified mental-health professional.”

“That’s exactly what we’re afraid of,” Mikey says.

“My beautiful Jane, I don’t get it.” My dad shakes his head sadly at my mother, his ex-wife, now his fiancée. “Why are our children so damn cynical about love?”

The next morning, before my parents head to Paris on an early-evening train, my mother and I set off to explore the city on our own. Mikey and my father are at the new British Library, where they have secured their reading-room passes long in advance, so they can happily geek out together among the fourteen million books and archival collections. My mother and I have what we consider a more ambitious agenda. Tate Modern, Borough Market, London Bridge—perhaps the ideal summer morning on a holiday in London. At the Tate, the artwork becomes an afterthought. We are taken with the sheer bulk of the place, with the cool, grim steel-and-warehouse feel of the entrance, Turbine Hall, where you have no choice but to look six flights up at the ceiling. Your neck stretches back, the same way little kids examine the stars.

Afterward, we walk along the Embankment until we reach Borough Market, where the immediate smells, which hit hard and rich, ignite our appetites. We cobble together brunch from the vast array of indoor stands—stinky cheeses, and dried meats, and a soufflé. Some of the finest food and produce in all of Europe under one slanted glass roof; a strange combination of the sophisticated and the primal—gourmands shop for the perfect slab or slice or pick from stuff freshly dug up or recently slaughtered.

“I forgot what a great traveler you are,” I tell my mother, as we sip fresh organic apple cider because, though it’s summer, the air still has that crisp British bite. “You should be a professional vacationer.”

“The pursuit of pleasure is a skill like any other,” my mother says, and then laughs at her own haughtiness. “Kidding aside, it’s nice to just revel every once in a while, isn’t it? I do this in New York all the time. Just play tourist.”

After we stuff ourselves silly and even pick up a few things to take along with us—I buy an eggplant, which in all likelihood will never get cooked but is still something small and beautiful that I want to be mine—we continue on to London Bridge, to cross back over to the north side of the Thames.

“I love that bridge. I think it’s the most beautiful bridge in all of London, maybe the whole world,” my mother says, stopping to point down the river at the elaborate Tower Bridge, which is parallel to the one we are standing on. It’s glorious in the sunlight, almost Disneyesque, with its golden spires, blue ropes, and Victorian towers shooting up from the water.

“Let’s walk across it, if you like that one better,” I say, eager to please after having been so ill-behaved last night. The morning feels stolen and luxurious and a balm for my raw feelings, a rare gift from my mother, whose presence, more often than not, has the tendency to chafe.

“Nah, you can’t see how beautiful it is while you’re on it. It’s one of those things that you can only appreciate from far away.”

We take a few pictures with my mother’s digital camera, first my mother posing, then me, and then us together, taken with my own outstretched hand.

“Hey, Jane, did you used to love
The Secret Garden
when you were growing up too?”

“No, not at all. Frankly, I’ve always thought that book was overrated. I never understood why you and your father liked it so much. All that garden stuff seemed a bit hokey to me.”

“But you read it to me when Nan died, to help me, you know, deal with it.”

“I didn’t read it to help you. I read it to help your dad.”

“What?”

“He was absolutely distraught when his mother died. And I knew it was his favorite book when he was a kid, even though his sisters used to tease him that it was ‘girlie.’ Poor guy had to hide it under his mattress like it was a
Playboy
or something. Anyhow, I thought seeing me read it to you would make him feel better. Remind him of the circle of life and all that.”

“So I was a stage prop?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Did it work? Dad seeing you read it to me?”

“I don’t think he even noticed, to be honest. He was too out of it.”

“I assumed it was a great book for children dealing with grief. I’ve been reading it with Sophie because I thought that’s why you read it to me.”

My mother looks at her bridge for a while, taking in its gleam from afar.

“Who knows? Maybe it is.”

Oh! The things which happened in that garden!
If you have never had a garden, you cannot understand
,
and if you have had a garden, you will know that it
would take a whole book to describe all that
came to pass there
.

—THE SECRET GARDEN

23

P
hillip left me once, about ten months after we lost Oliver. He left me—walked out, said,
sayonara; adios, amiga
—via magnetic poetry on our refrigerator door, no less. Even worse, it was a Wednesday, an average, midweek Wednesday.

I was given one line, ten words, if you count the ampersand, as a consolation prize, after well more than a thousand days of matrimony—of sharing a home, kissing each other good night, comparing workdays, cuddling up, body to body, to face the long, dark stretch of night. Of saying I love you—making sure to say it just once in case it was the last—before boarding a plane.

Phillip’s message in its entirety:
U Don’t C Me So I Go Now & Leave
.

I would have been angry, then, if I knew how long he’d been gone. At the time, I didn’t know, I really didn’t. Two days, maybe three? So I couldn’t blame him, could I? Maybe he had left me on a Monday, after all. Instead, I felt sorry and sad and distant, like I was watching someone else get left on television.

Phillip was right to walk out at that point. I had stopped paying attention to him for a while, so much so that I didn’t notice fewer shirts hanging in the closet, his keys not left on the counter, the toilet seat down. I noticed that his body didn’t take up half the bed, I did notice that, but I figured he told me he was going on a business trip and I’d forgotten. Or I hadn’t listened in the first place.

For that year after Oliver, I admit, I stopped listening. Phillip tried to be there for me, tried everything, and nothing stuck.

“Why didn’t you tell me Scott’s wife has cancer?” I asked, not two weeks before the Magnetic Incident, as we came to call it and eventually, at least once, to laugh about it. “I never would have told her she looked like she lost weight.”

“I did tell you, Ellie,” he said. “You just never listen.”

“I would have heard cancer, Phillip. I mean, I know I don’t know her that well, but I would have heard cancer.”

“You would have,” he said. “But you didn’t.”

Now, a year later, after we reunited with surprising ease just twenty-four hours after I saw the writing on the fridge—one session of marital counseling, and promises by both of us to make the other feel visible and important—I still wonder about what I missed. A year’s worth of his words, maybe, piled high into a heap somewhere when they went unabsorbed by me.

And now it’s Phillip turn to block. For four full weeks, he has screened the voice mails, the e-mails, the faxes I have zipped home, never answering, likely never even listening to or reading them. My thoughts treated as spam. Phillip has said that I will break his heart, and now he’s doing it for me. This is heartbreak checkmate.

Maybe his radio silence begs me for a grand gesture, but I need to be here for Sophie. I still need to tuck her in, each and every night, to soothe her with images of secret gardens and refuge among thick rose-covered walls. And there is the glass of water I have to leave by her bedside, every night.

Perhaps these are the most frightening moments of married life: when you turn to your partner and realize you have promised to spend the rest of your life with someone you no longer recognize. Someone you can no longer even see.

I think about the Magnetic Incident while I snoop in Lucy’s office again, this time looking for evidence of her marital unraveling. If I had bothered to ask Lucy to pinpoint her home spot while she was alive, I wonder if this would have been it: this chair, this view, a scrappy oasis.

My alibi is established. If Greg or Sophie asks why I’m up here, I am preparing a lecture on microcredit. No matter that I’ve already made my calls to the dean and taken a sabbatical; I have bought six months to figure my life out, to make my grand continental choices.

I power up Lucy’s laptop and crack her e-mail password in two attempts. She would have picked something more challenging, I figure, had she really not wanted me to peek. Password attempt number one:
Sophie
. Number two gets me through:
Lulu
, her father’s nickname for her when she was little.

I scroll through her in-box, which, except for the e-mails to and from René Devereaux interspersed, looks exactly like mine. Stuffed with the thousands of back and forths between us. I open one at random from about three weeks before she died.

To: Ellie Lerner, [email protected]
From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
Subject: Feeling tight, tight, tight
Hey, do you do Kegel exercises? Please advise.

To: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
From: Ellie Lerner, [email protected]
Subject: Re: Feeling tight, tight, tight
Nope. Being loose has never been my problem. Why?

From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
To: Ellie Lerner, [email protected]
Subject: Re: Feeling tight, tight, tight
Just read a magazine article that says that we should. Instead, I think we should go find this Dr. Kegel and kick his ass. We women already have enough to deal with.
By the way, did I tell you I’m getting laser hair removal? It hurts like hell, but can you imagine for the rest of your life never having to shave again? Absolute heaven.

My heart starts to beat fast, too much blood pumping at once, and I begin to sweat right through the chill in the room. Lucy is alive, she must be, there are all these e-mails here. She can’t be dead, not when I look around this room. Dead people don’t have e-mail drafts. But there it is, Lucy is gone, and her words are left behind, a pile of them right here on the screen, some of them unfinished, reluctantly speaking for her.

I pick a René e-mail at random from her in-box.

From: René Devereaux, [email protected]
To: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
Subject: ILU
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
To: René Devereaux, [email protected]
Subject: Re: ILU
Me too, baby. See you after work? Same place as usual?

From: René Devereaux, [email protected]
To: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
Subject: Re: ILU
Oui. Oui.

From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
To: René Devereaux, [email protected]
Subject: Re: ILU
I love your oui-oui.

From: René Devereaux, [email protected]
To: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
Subject: Re: ILU
Enfant terrible. What am I going to do with you?

From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
To: René Devereaux, [email protected]
Subject: Re: ILU
You’re going to marry me.

From: René Devereaux, [email protected]
To: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
Subject: Re: ILU
Name time and place.

From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
To: Greg Stafford, [email protected]
Subject: Dinner
Hey. Won’t be home for dinner. It’s going to be a late one at work. Kiss Sophie for me, will you? xx, Lu

I feel the shame of the voyeur. I should not be here, sitting in Lucy’s chair, reading her most private e-mails with her lover, her false excuses to her husband. Still, I can’t seem to stop. There are hundreds of love letters, and each one gives me a new angle, a toe dip into her other life.

From the early hours of the morning, just three days before Lucy died:

From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
To: René Devereaux, [email protected]
Subject: what are we doing?
Are we doing the right thing? I’ve always believed we are each entitled to grab up as much happiness as we can in this world, but do you think we’re going too far? Taking more than we deserve? Xoxo, Lu
PS—I am so happy with you sometimes it actually hurts.

From: René Devereaux, [email protected]
To: Lucy Stafford, [email protected] Subject: Re: what are we doing?
Yes, we’re doing the right thing. Anyway, I don’t think we have any other choice. Can you imagine ever going back now? I can’t.
Je t’aime.
Now go practice your French.
Xoxo, R
PS—Have you told Ellie yet? I bet you’ll feel better when you do.

From: Lucy Stafford, [email protected]
To: René Devereaux, [email protected]
Subject: Re: what are we doing?
No. But I will. Soon. Promise. I just know she’s going to hate me forever.

Here is where I finally stop; the mention of my name, probably what I was hunting for all along, now feels like a line I shouldn’t cross. Lucy was still figuring out how to tell me when the man stepped out on the mews and ended things, once and for all. The man who I saw today in Pret A Manger, when Sophie and I were there to pick up lunch now that school has finally broken for summer; the man who followed us up Portobello Road when we went to see Simon; the man who stands behind me right now; I feel his heavy, coated breath on my neck. The man who my rational mind knows is in jail, who will likely stay there forever if the family liaison officer is right, and yet I feel him here, too, I feel him everywhere, following and infiltrating Lucy’s office, her home spot. Robbing us of this moment even—Lucy wanted to tell me, she was going to tell me, and of course I wouldn’t have hated her forever.

I think back seven months to the last time I saw Lucy, New Year’s in Boston, and she accused me of having an early midlife crisis.

“L, stop your whining,” Lucy had said. “What’s wrong with you? I feel like one of these days you’re going to just walk out on Phillip, buy yourself a Porsche, and sleep with that sexy kid in your class, you know, that kid John or Jack or whatever that you had the dream about. Be happy with what you’ve got. You have the real thing, you know? You are married to the man you love. What more can you ask for?”

“I’m just saying I’m itchy, that’s all. This can’t be it, can it? Is this my adult life? Because if this is it, if this is what it’s going to be from now on, then that’s just depressing.”

“Come on, maybe you guys should start trying again.”

“You don’t understand, Luce. You don’t understand what it’s like to want something and not get it. You’ve always had everything.” I was thinking about Sophie and her brown plastic glasses and soft, snaggled hair. I was thinking about shopping for little-people clothing and the indentation of a round head against my collarbone. After Oliver, we did make some halfhearted attempts to “try again,” and then we didn’t, and the whole time I was vibrating naked fear. Wanting may be the worst feeling of all, next to hope. But hope is the worst. Hope is the moment before peeing on the negative stick. Hope is the moment before they tell you they can’t find a heartbeat. Hope is a setup, a bait and switch, an illusion.

Lucy didn’t say anything back, and I realize now, from this bizarre time-travel perch, that she knew exactly what I meant. She knew what it meant to want, to feel stuck and lost, all at once. One of those inhumane mousetraps: Your feet are glued down, and yet you can still look around, horrified to find that you can’t break free. That it’s not as simple as just taking a couple of steps away.