The Inseparables (10 page)

“Honestly, Lydia,” her mother said. “I don't want you to think that I'm here saying these sorts of things behind your father's back. He's a good man.” She recalibrated. “Or decent. He's trying. He's trying to try. Okay? He's failing most of the time. But he's attempting, at least, not to fail, which is progress. Kind of. I think. Right?”

He came through the back door then, snow on the shoulders of his camel hair. The room fell quiet.

“Talking about me?” he said, not really joking.

Her mother took a few steps, perhaps involuntarily, away, across the room, toward the hallway.

Against the wall, in boxes, there were stacks of napkins from her parents' wedding reception. Pink, square, embossed with flowers and roses and something that looked like a dancing teddy bear, they might as well have been artifacts from an alien visitation. Her dad peeked in and saw them.

“Look at this,” he said sweetly, holding one up, first to Lydia, and then to her mother, who turned away. “Remember this?”

For a long moment no one spoke or moved much and the discomfort grew so thick that Lydia began absently to flip through her grandmother's book until she got to a diagram of a long-haired man, spittle on his lips, bearing fangs and claws.
Illustration of the hungry gentleman in need of women or property,
it read. She looked up at her dad.

Weeks ago, when the real estate agents came, Henrietta stored most everything in the garage. At first it had not bothered her so much to do this. The new furniture and decorations arrived by truck. Bright colors. Fresh tulips. So much white. She had thought the house would sell quickly, but the paint was too dull, she was told. The creak of the floorboards sounded too much like an effect in a horror movie. And there was an unmistakable smell of mold, one of the agents said. Likely something in the walls. Water gets in, day after day for years. It has no place to go. Can't you smell it? Henrietta walked around for days, inhaling vigorously. Apparently this meant the house would not sell as quickly as she hoped. Apparently all the water in the house and all the mold meant that the bones of the place had all this time been vanishing bit by bit without her knowing. Someone suggested that Henrietta simply advertise the land. People do this all the time, they told her. Sell the acreage. Accentuate the timber alone. Forget the house. Make it easy, they told her, for someone to come in and bulldoze the hell out of the place and build something new and clean and better.

“
People do it all the time
? That's never a good reason for anything,” she said to Spencer, leading him out through the back door and down the small slope behind the house to the garage. On the off chance that she had mistakenly packed away this surprisingly valuable weathervane, she needed to look through all her boxes, or at least have her son-in-law do it for her. He was strong enough, barely, to lift the heaviest ones, compliant enough to deal with the filthiest, and also, he was the easiest member of the family to extract information from.

“You know what else people do all the time?” Henrietta asked. “People also murder other people all the time. Like their real estate agents.”

“You didn't say that out loud, I hope,” Spencer said.

She laughed. “Surprisingly, I do have some impulse control left.”

“They really said it smelled like mold? It's a house! It's not a showroom! Stuff breaks in a house. People actually live here!”

“Apparently we people smell like mold.”

Spencer lifted the garage door. Light snow breathed in across the threshold, mixing with dust and probably toxic mold. She had some of her furniture here, and her crates of books, and her old lecture notes, everything in boxes and draped beneath layers of plastic. This was where she'd packed all of the things she had decided not to show Juliet. The most vital things: Harold's wallet as it was the day he died, the menu from opening night at the Feast. Spencer flipped on the lights. Two incandescent bulbs hung on loose strings that lurched in the wind. “I know they were just trying to be helpful,” she said. “It's an old house. It's practically falling apart. I'm not dumb. I get it.”

“‘Helpful' is probably the wrong word. They're just trying to make money,” said Spencer.

“We're all trying to make money,” she said.

Every few moments, Spencer looked over his shoulder. Henrietta was not naive enough to think that this was exactly kosher, his being here with her and her being friendly and pleasant to him and not otherwise cruel or cold. The separation was new, but still, divorce meant factions. Walls were about to go up. Guidelines for diplomatic contact and official kindnesses had yet to be negotiated. Just last week, Oona had asked, “Do I acknowledge his birthday this year? And if yes, with what? A note? What do you get a man you're divorcing? A savings bond?”

Henrietta had always liked him. Perhaps this was the first sign that he was not right for Oona. It was a good rule that the mother should never like the boyfriend more than the daughter does. The first time they met was at the Feast, at the good table by the window that looked out at the fountains behind the Christian Science Plaza. As a pair he and Oona looked as though they'd been matched by way of a color wheel. Tall, sun-kissed, they looked distressingly good in camel hair. Spencer had come an hour early. He was tall and prematurely gray and full in the shoulders. Over peasant bread and several glasses of good wine he was also speechlessly nervous, until, finally, looking out at the plaza and the church dome, he had turned to her and said, “Christ the scientist? Who knew he had such broad interests?”

In the garage he took out his rolling papers.

“May I?” he asked.

This was the big thing about Spencer. This habit. It was long-standing, as far as she understood it, something Oona had tolerated at first and then, over the years, had stopped tolerating. Henrietta, up until this point, had never seen him get high. His doing it here was maybe a product of the separation, or perhaps an indication of his level of despair. Or, more precisely, his deep desire to get high. She watched as he flicked at a tarnished lighter. The flame momentarily brightened the garage. She had heard Oona these last few months detailing how agonizing it had been to find her husband as stoned as she often found him. Here she was, coming home from the hospital, having just operated on fractured femurs and hips for ten hours, and she needed to contend with whatever Spencer thought was worth talking about: electric-era Miles Davis, theoretical explanations of dark matter. “As you can imagine, this makes having sex almost impossible, physically and emotionally,” Oona said to her recently. Henrietta simultaneously felt embarrassed at hearing too much about her daughter's sex life and also a surge of maternal happiness at hearing too much about her daughter's sex life.

Spencer's hands moved quickly, the small, mindless dance of a habit. She watched to see if anything in him changed when he inhaled, some small shift in character, some silent accumulation of peace or calm, but there was nothing. He inhaled and he exhaled and he was exactly the same.

“What does it feel like?” Henrietta wanted to know.

“Come on,” Spencer said with his eyes closed. “Let's not do this.”

“You're avoiding the question. Tell me,” she said.

“It's nothing.” He shook his head. “At first it's nothing. It's like—” He smiled. “It's like nothing at all.”

“Clouds?”

He laughed. “Clouds?”

“I don't know! It has to be something. If you keep doing it all this time, it must have some sensation.”

“You never did it?” He looked straight at her. One of his eyes was open wider than the other, and she had to look away.

“Nope,” she said. She used to like to drink. For a little while she had really liked to drink. Right after the publication she'd arguably gone a little too deep into the stuff, although she felt embarrassed to connect the two, the scandal of her book and the onset of a temporarily disabling attraction to alcohol.

“How's it possible you never tried it? All that awful music. The bad hair. Everyone looked like a werewolf, or like they were auditioning to be the long lost Allman brother. Everybody had to be on it.”

“Everybody was not on it!” She held a finger in the air, victorious. “Misconception!”

“Honestly?” he said. “I haven't smoked in two months.”

“Until this moment?”

“I was on a streak.”

“Spencer! That's not a streak. That's being sober.”

She had not seen Spencer since the funeral. She wanted to know exactly what and who was responsible for the separation. She was accustomed to the divorces of her friends, Reagan-era splits, in which everything was either about fucking or spending. Who was fucking who? Who was mad about the money? But Oona was vague. They'd grown apart. People drift. Love goes. Oona was, Henrietta saw now, being kind.

“It was the big topic in couples therapy,” he said. “Me being zonked.”

“I feel like I should take it from you and throw it away.”

He looked at the end of the joint. “I don't really feel guilty. I like it. It makes me happy and calm. Do I look zonked?”

“Let's not involve me in couples therapy.”

“It doesn't really even feel like anything anymore. It's just nice.” He looked up at the swinging lightbulbs, momentarily enraptured by them, like a cat with a telephone cord. “You know?”

“So it's a present,” she said. “Is that how you think of it? A nice present to yourself?”

He took a second to think. “It's like a friend,” he said finally. “Is that an odd thing to say?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Yes. I would say that's a problematic way to think of it, Spencer.”

He took another drag from his joint.

“I feel like I need to tell Oona about the fact that you're high,” she said.

“Why would you possibly feel that? She's free of me now. She doesn't care.”

“Oona would—”

“Oona would what?”

“She'd want to know. She loves you.”

He closed his eyes.

“I've had her here all this time. We talk.”

“You do?”

His optimism was extreme and because it was so extreme it was heartbreaking. She hedged. “We sometimes talk. Yes. Occasionally. We have moments.”

“She's made it very clear to me that love is not one of the things that occurs to her when she takes inventory of her feelings.”

Henrietta shook her head. “I don't believe you.”

“What has she told you? Has she said she loves me still?”

Henrietta said nothing.

“See?” he said. “In couples therapy we did this exercise. A free association. Typical Freudian nonsense. When it came to me her list was not positive. It was all, like, ‘pizza,' ‘rolling papers,' ‘body hair.' Not good things.”

“Nothing about Lydia? Nothing about being a father?”

He shrugged. “There was that, too,” Spencer said. “But you know, buried at the end of a long list.”

“She worries about you. That's love.”

“Loving someone and worrying after them are not the same thing.”

“You have a kid. You know how it goes. It's basically the same thing.”

“Are you appealing to me Jewish person to Jewish person?”

She laughed. “Perhaps!”

“She wanted me in rehab. I heard it all the time.
We'll say that you're going to Canyon Ranch to do some tai chi. The guys in the office won't care. You've got eons of sick time. Tell them you're going away to find your inner jungle cat. Roger and Madeline will appreciate that.
Every week I heard this.”

Henrietta nodded. This must have been an old argument. He had not been at the firm with Roger and Madeline for a decade at least.

“Tai chi is good for you,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“In the seventies, everyone was doing it,” she said.

Snowplows passed on the main road, the blades scraping the street.

“I suppose we need to check all of these boxes,” she said. “And then, once we're inside, we need to check all the boxes in there, too.”

“What does this thing look like, exactly?” he asked.

She described it. The flag. The expression. The blue box she had packed it in. She held her hands apart to approximate the length. “It was on the mantel in the house.”

“It was?”

“All this time. Every time you ever came here.”

He shook his head.

“You're high,” she said. “This is a waste.”

“I'm fine.”

“Please. You're as high as Louis Armstrong right now.”

He shook his head. “That's not exactly a reference I totally understand.”

“The statue was actually on the back cover of my book. Behind my shoulder in the picture,” she said. “And unfortunately, it's both missing and worth a lot of money.”

“Oh.” He went red. “That little lady.”

“Please don't,” Henrietta said. Oona had confessed to her that as a teenage boy Spencer had kept his copy of
The Inseparables
hidden under his mattress. “I don't want to know what role I played in corrupting your youth.”

“A very large role,” he said.

She hung her head. “You shouldn't have said that.”

“It's the truth.”

“Well, I'm glad for you. And your mattress.”

He took down the first box and ran a razor across the top. He looked up. “I'm glad, too. But to be honest, the fact that you became my mother-in-law? Kind of complicated, actually.”

She moved a pair of boxes with her feet. He leaned back against the cement wall, one eye larger than the other, smiling. “I'm surprised you're being like this to me,” Spencer said.

“Like what?”

“Not awkward. Decent. Nice.”

She smiled. “It's strategic, honestly.”

“How so?”

“You have something I want,” she said.

He knew.

“When this is all done,” she said, “and you're a stranger, I want you to bring my granddaughter by, or make her come by and see me. Force her, if you need to. Entice her. Corral her. Bribe her if you must.”

He nodded. “I understand.”

“Especially with all this trouble she's into.”

He blinked. “What trouble?”

“She told me.”

“She told you?”

“I actually know things about this,” she said. “
Especially
about this.”

“I understand.”

“She's terrified of me,” Henrietta said.

“That's not the case.”

“I'll rephrase: I terrify her. I know. I had a grandmother once. She was a tiny Russian woman. She spoke nine languages and none of them were English. I barely ever understood anything she said to me. She was always yelling about something. Every person she ever loved as a child was either murdered or kidnapped or died of something ridiculous—like diphtheria. She terrified me. Unfortunately, I think at some point I turned into my grandmother.”

“I'll bring her by,” he said. “Whenever you want.”

“Like the last time she was here,” Henrietta said. “Whenever that was. A few weeks ago. The girl barely spoke to me. She just sat on the couch with her mother, yapping away, all night long. I was just a spectator.”