The Divide (27 page)

I
t was the dawn of the new millennium and the whole world was brimming with hopes of happiness and peace and goodwill to all mankind. And all that bullshit. The century was a week old and already Sarah didn’t like it. She was sitting at her desk in the little back office of the bookstore, trying to keep her mind on what she was reading on the computer screen, which was almost as depressing as everything else in her life at the moment. Including the weather, which was cold and damp and gray and foggy, the kind Jeffrey called slit-your-wrists weather, though he hadn’t called it that today, probably because he feared she might actually do it.

The sales figures for the holiday season were even more dismal than she had feared, thanks to the chain stores and a certain online bookseller, whose name, like
Macbeth
in any theater, was not to be mentioned within these walls, thank you very much. Their prices were so ridiculous, they might as well give the damn books away. Through the open door she could hear Jeffrey patiently trying to charm a customer, the only one they’d had in the past hour and a half, a woman who was after a book but didn’t seem to be able to remember the title or the author or even what it was about.

“Any idea of the publisher?” Jeffrey asked helpfully.

“The what?”

“God help us all,” Sarah muttered.

Jeffrey had been fabulous. He had run the place virtually single-handed during the run-up to Christmas. Sarah had come in most days, because she couldn’t stand being home alone, but she knew she had often been more of a hindrance than a help. During that first unreal week after Benjamin left and the kids had gone back to school, Jeffrey had called her two or three times every day and had always stopped by on his way home, with food or flowers or a bottle of wine. It had turned into a kind of rolling house party or wake. As soon as her mother went home, Iris came to stay and friends kept dropping in to cheer her up, with the result that on some evenings there were half a dozen or more people in the kitchen, cooking and talking and eating and drinking and crying and laughing, none of them letting Sarah lift a finger, not even to stack the dishwasher. She talked and cried and laughed so much that in the end she was so exhausted she had to call a halt and come back to work for a rest.

“So it’s a novel, but nonfiction,” Jeffrey was saying. “A nonfiction novel. Hmm. Oh, you mean, something like Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
?”

“Like
what
?”

Sarah and the kids had dreaded the thought of staying home for Christmas and the New Year, especially with all that dawn-of-a-new-age nonsense going on. Then, out of the blue, Karen Bradstock called and invited them to the Caribbean. Karen knew about Benjamin, it emerged, because Josh had e-mailed Katie. Some fabulously rich tax-dodger client of Tom’s had a house on the island of Mustique, she said, and had offered it to them—for
free
—for two whole weeks. Some other friends would be there, but the place had a zillion rooms, so why didn’t they come too? Sarah jumped at it.

The island was beautiful if strangely antiseptic, having nothing even vaguely resembling a local culture. According to Karen, it had years ago been bought by an eccentric aristocrat who preferred the place empty so that he could throw long and lavish parties for bored members of the British royal family. Nowadays, it was owned by a company and rigorously run as a refuge for the extremely rich.

The Bradstocks had invited two other couples from Chicago, neither of whom Sarah much took to. One of the women treated her like an invalid and kept offering to do things for her and asking with an infuriatingly caring look in her eyes how she was
feeling.
It made Sarah want to scream. It was funny how some people just didn’t seem to get it. Being treated normally was best, kindness was fine, but unctuous sympathy made her feel almost homicidal.

Fortunately, Karen got it exactly right. The two of them had a lot to catch up on and, despite the other guests, found time for some good private chats. Nor was the subject inevitably Benjamin. In fact some days, even when she was walking on her own along the beach or sitting by the pool reading, Sarah often managed to go a full half hour without thinking about him.

Young Will, who had grown about two feet taller since she had last seen him, was now obsessed with sports and most days disappeared with his dad to play tennis or golf. Josh didn’t mind. He was too infatuated with Katie and it seemed mutual. The only one who palpably didn’t enjoy herself was Abbie.

She announced after just one day that she detested the place. She said it was full of fascist bankers and their bulimic, Botoxed wives and that if she saw another C-list wannabe or wrinkled has-been rock star she would throw up. It would have been more embarrassing had Karen not said she absolutely agreed and spiritedly taken her side in the debates that raged across the dinner table, with Tom and Will inevitably cast as “neo-imperialists” or “crypto-colonial dinosaurs,” whatever that meant. Tom handled these skirmishes brilliantly, giving as good as he got, but always with humor. But Abbie sometimes went too far.

“God, she’s so angry,” Sarah said quietly to Karen after one particularly ferocious bout.

“Of course she is. Hell hath no fury. You’re not the only woman scorned. However much you and Ben tell her that it’s not about her and that it’s just about what went wrong between you and him, she probably can’t see it that way. You should have her go talk to somebody.”

“A shrink?”

“Why not? Aren’t you seeing someone?”

“I’m not the type.”

“What’s the type? You get sick, you see a doctor, right?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps. Sometime.”

“Whatever. It’s none of my business. But maybe you should think about it for Abbie.”

Sarah already had, but didn’t feel like discussing it, partly out of loyalty to Abbie and partly because she felt she had bungled the whole thing. She had mentioned Abbie’s anger to their doctor only the previous week when she went to see him for some more sleeping pills. He said therapy would be a good idea and that he’d be happy to put them in touch with someone. Abbie should drop by and see him, he said. But when Sarah told Abbie, she almost got her head bitten off.

“What, you mean you think I’m crazy?”

“No, sweetheart, of course not. It’s just—”

“If that’s what you think, just get me committed.”

“Abbie, come on—”

“Mom! Okay, so I’m mad at him. But isn’t it about time somebody got mad around here? I mean, it’s allowed, isn’t it? You’re so goddamn controlled, anyone would think you didn’t care.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I’ll handle it how I want. Just leave me alone.”

They celebrated the new millennium at a beach bar and restaurant that protruded on wooden stilts over the water and was run by a soulful West Indian called Basil, whom Abbie had adjudged the only real human being on the entire island. Sarah had promised herself that she wasn’t going to get emotional but when midnight struck and the fireworks went up and everybody was hugging and kissing and wishing each other happy new year and Abbie and Josh came to find her and the three of them stood there, clinging on to one another like three lost souls, she just couldn’t help herself. They all cried, even Josh, bless him. But that was the only time Sarah allowed it to happen.

Back at the house, on the answering machine, Benjamin, calling from his mother’s in Abilene (or so he claimed), had left a nervous message for them, sending his love and wishing them all a happy new year. Yeah, right, Sarah thought.

He had phoned her a lot at first, and almost every time, despite herself, she had ended up crying and screaming at him. And sometimes he cried too and called her sweetheart and told her he loved her, which made her so mad she wanted to smash the phone. Because if he loved her, if he really damn well loved her, why the hell had he left? In the end, she told him not to keep saying this and asked him not to call for a while.

Then Beth Ingram dropped her little bombshell. Whether it was on purpose or not, Sarah couldn’t be sure. Probably. But one day they were talking and Beth was being really sweet and consoling and then, quite casually, said something about how Sarah must have felt that other time. Sarah said sorry, hang on a minute, what did she mean
other
time? And Beth ummed and ahhed and blushed a little and then reluctantly told her she had been talking with the wife of an ICA associate at a party a while back and this woman had let slip that Benjamin had been having an affair with a young real estate lawyer who occasionally did their conveyancing. Apparently, at work, absolutely everybody knew. Beth said she had just assumed Sarah did too.

Sarah hit the stratosphere and that very night, after too many glasses of wine, she called him at his mother’s and the bastard wasn’t there. Margaret said she didn’t know where he was, that he was away on business somewhere. Oh, sure. In Santa Fe, no doubt, fucking that little painter whore. Fucking The Catalyst. Sarah called his cell phone and left a blistering, drunken, accusatory howl of a message, which she regretted almost as soon as she hung up and even more so in the sober light of the next morning.

The nights were the worst. When the pills didn’t work and she lay alone in that vast bed with a leaden writhing in her gut, waiting for the dawn. Sometimes she would stretch a leg across and feel the creaseless cold space that howled of her husband’s absence. After the first few weeks, to assert herself, she tried moving into the middle. But it felt wrong, somehow too final, as if by doing so she was admitting that he would never come back. Because he would come back, she knew he would. He couldn’t just have left her like that, left his home and his children, could he? Could he?

He flew up from Kansas the week before Christmas to see the kids and bring their presents. He bought each of them a cell phone, so they could always call him, he said, which prompted a scornful laugh from Abbie. Like hell, she said. As if.

He stayed with a friend in the city and took the kids out for dinner. He wanted Sarah to come too but she wouldn’t and it was all she could do to persuade Abbie to go. The poor kid came home afterward in a flood of tears and ran straight to her room. Joshie sat wearily at the kitchen table and told Sarah that Abbie hadn’t spoken a civil word the whole evening, just sat there spitting venom at her father across the table and making sarcastic remarks.

Out in the store now, she could hear Jeffrey saying good-bye to his customer and a few moments later he appeared in the office doorway, holding his hands to his head in disbelief.

“Did you hear that?”

“You were wonderful.”

“I think we should give this up and open a record store.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Then at least when people came in who didn’t know the title or the artist or publisher, they could at least try
humming
the damn thing.”

Sarah laughed. He nodded at the computer screen.

“How’s it looking, boss?”

“Dismal. Let’s sell records instead.”

“That’s not the right answer. You’re supposed to say,

‘Well, Jeffrey, in the circumstances, bearing in mind the state of the industry, the intensive competition, the proliferation of alternative media and other leisure entertainment opportunities or, in plainer English, the fact that nobody under thirty gives a damn about books anymore or wants to do anything that might require more than the attention span of your average hyperactive gnat, bearing all that in mind, we’ve done pretty goddamn well, thank you, Jeffrey.’”

“Bravo.”

He bent toward her and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

“Let’s close and go have a nice lunch someplace,” he said.

“Good idea. And I’ll have one of your cigarettes.”

The theme of the day was “Express Your Humanness.” At least, that’s what Ben thought the woman in the leotard and red sarong had said, right at the beginning, when they were standing in that big circle, all barefooted and holding hands. He hadn’t been able to hear too well because he was standing in front of a big electric fan that was blowing his hair all over the place. It might have been “Express Your Humorousness.” But that wasn’t, as far as he was aware, a proper word, so he was settling for “Humanness.” Not that what some of those around him were doing wasn’t humorous. Particularly the old guy with the gray beard, who was dressed up in purple robes and a turban, like some spaced-out elder of the Taliban, spinning all over the room with his eyes closed and pressing a bell pepper to his chest. Maybe he hadn’t heard the woman’s instruction, either, and was hedging his bets.

It was called “Body Choir.” And Eve and Lori came here every Sunday afternoon, along with fifty or sixty like-minded souls, to express in dance and movement whatever was on the menu. The venue was a big hall with a high ceiling and a sprung wooden floor. It was right beside the railroad, so close that even when the music was playing loudly, the whole place shuddered when the trains went by.