The Inseparables (4 page)

“I'm not high right now,” he said. He widened his eyes to show off the whites. “That's a fact.”

She started to clap. “Good for you.”

“I haven't been high in two months.” He looked at his watch. “Three, almost.”

He was supposed to have been a great lawyer. People used to tell her this all the time: his former coworkers, his various underlings, even the men who'd been his rivals, their voices choked with the appropriate reverence. She took their word for it sometimes; how could she ever know the truth? It was not unusual to find him parked in their garage, weeping at the wheel. He missed her, he used to say. Stuck at his desk nights on end, ironing out obscure legal disagreements between huge multinational corporations, he wanted more than anything to be at home with his family. For months he talked about this openly. What did she think of him staying home full-time with the baby? This marked the end of
the oblivious years.

“How do you feel?” she asked. “Now that you're sober? Is it good?”

“I feel like you're mocking me.”

“I'm being serious,” she said. “Do you feel better? I bet you do. Clearer. Smarter, probably. Healthier, certainly.”

He shrugged and cracked his knuckles. “I feel less high,” he said. “Generally speaking.”

“That's it?”

“Less high,” he said. “Which doesn't exactly mean better. Or clearer.”

A bell chimed. Far off down the hill the students rushed out of the library in a big blue wave. All this time without her daughter, Oona felt consumed with worry for her, and then, alternately, ashamed for worrying. She didn't want to become the kind of mother who was sure that everywhere her daughter went danger lurked, even if she was positive that danger was indeed lurking everywhere. She worked in a city hospital, after all. On a weekly basis she saw things that made it impossible to view the world as a kind and benevolent place. She sat up in her seat. Boys in neckties crossed a footbridge over a stream, bouncing on it viciously, trying, probably, to wreck it. She had not exactly been excited about Lydia studying here. Her daughter had begged, had left the brochures everywhere in the house, had deluged Oona's inbox with Hartwell-related propaganda. There was something in the air, Oona thought, or in the exacting side parts in the boys' hair that had felt threatening—as had the idea that she wouldn't be here to protect her daughter.

She turned to Spencer. He could not button his cuffs. She reached out. He was like a boy when it came to this. His skin was cold. Quickly she fastened the buttons.

“I've missed you,” he said quietly.

She knew. He had written her painfully embarrassing love letters after she moved out. They were the most outrageous things.
What is a heart, anyway?
he'd asked in one of them.
Every day without you I am being buried by the world.
She had all of them hidden away in a low dresser drawer. She had not known what to do with his feelings.

“Have you been okay, at least?” she asked.

Spencer had on the cologne she liked. A French brand she could not pronounce. She had given it to him for their last Christmas. Every tiny choice of his was a small volley in his attempt to ingratiate himself to her.

“Lonely,” he said. “Especially in the house. It's too big for one person. It misses you.”

“The house misses me?”

“You know what I mean, Oona.”

She had no idea what she was doing. She had no clue how to act, what tone to take, whether they would be friendly in the future, whether he would become a stranger. The morning she left for good she made it only to the end of her block before she wanted to turn back. It had rained that day. The town school bus was on the street, picking up the children, and all the parents were out, all her neighbors, the whole collected good cheer of their community. She started to back up her car then. She may or may not have been weeping. She had the picture—the original picture of their meeting, Day 1, Moment 1—folded away in her glove box, positioned conveniently beside a pack of tissues. The Real Oona. She had not anticipated feeling this doubt. She had planned on leaving for weeks. She had already forwarded her mail to her mother's. Backing up, she figured she would just go back in and pretend it had not happened, but then the school bus was in her way, the lights flashing, the horn honking. It was a narrow road, room enough for only a single lane of traffic. “What are you doing?” one of her neighbors said, knocking at her car window. “You can't back up. You can't. There's no space for you.”

Widowhood had made sleep impossible. At first it was the obvious things. Plainly put, the bed felt strange. She would reach out and feel nothing, and when she felt nothing, the horror returned. She had, at least, expected this, even as she had difficulty remembering to speak in the past tense. She
had
known him. He
was
here. We
were
in love.

Then the worry set in. Worry was the great constant of her life. She had worried as a girl, over the simplest things. Would they have enough food to eat? Would the landlord raise the rent too high? Would her mother hurt herself in the factory where she worked? When she became a mother herself the worry grew exponentially: Oona breathing, Oona swallowing, Oona on the school bus, Oona encountering cruelty in the world, or strange men, or violence, or encountering the simplest disappointments. Lately Henrietta worried about the elemental things: money and shelter. Her anxiety at this point was another limb. At the airport in New York recently, flying home to Boston after days of prepublication business for
The Inseparables,
she had half expected to see physical evidence of this when she crossed through the X-ray machine. Some hidden weight, some new stealth growth, a uniformed man stopping her with his hands up.
You don't expect to fly with that thing, do you?
Nothing worked to alleviate the sensation. At night she had counted in her head everything one was told to count to help get to sleep, every species of adorable farm creature, but she had lived all these years on this farm, and had seen Harold break down these animals into meat, and when she made the attempt, for example, to count rabbits, she saw them becoming dismembered, bone by bone, breast after breast, just before everything was dropped into a sizzling sauté pan and then smothered in white wine and butter. She was told to rub her feet together, that it would work to calm her. She was told to take long deep breaths, to time her respiration, to fool her own body into thinking it was already asleep. She tried the simple homeopathic remedies—warm milk, chamomile, New Age music, Scotch whisky—but she had always believed homeopathic remedies were bullshit. A pair of foam earplugs jammed in deep only made her heartbeat that much louder. She could feel and hear the path her blood took, in through each ventricle and chamber and then out and then in again, but the simple noise of her being alive proved too distracting.

Sleeping pills did the trick, but often getting to sleep only brought more trouble. She had two types of dreams. In one, he was dead already, and the task of burying him, of actually, physically shoveling the dirt onto his casket, had fallen to her. She had this dream most nights. If she was lucky enough to not have this dream, she dreamed instead that he was alive, here with her, that she was reliving their last minutes together, and that she knew what was about to happen to him, knew the exact time, even, but could not get the words out to warn him.
What is it?
he kept asking.
What is it?
When she woke, the misery was compounded. She was sure that she could feel the sensation of his hand on her hand. Her own cheek felt brushed by the stubble on his beard, a beard that did not exist, because he was not alive. Often, she'd discover that in a fit of dream-induced mourning she'd torn off all the sheets and blankets and sometimes the pillows as well. Which was what she had done last night. She thought of this shortly after Oona had left. She was in the bedroom cleaning because a visitor was coming from Sotheby's, of all places, and because Henrietta needed at least to try to make the house look presentable. This was a matter of making money.

Money had dictated so much of the eleven months. Money was why she had become an expert at all the substandard condominium complexes in the Greater Boston area, why she had lately taken to playing the lottery so often, and money, her absolute lack of it, her distressing need for more of it, was why she was selling the house and moving, and money was the reason why she had finally allowed
The Inseparables
to be republished. The editors at Hubbard had wanted to do this for the twenty-fifth anniversary, and then for the thirtieth, but she had refused, arming herself with attorneys, protesting even the slightest movement that might allow
That Motherfucking Thing
back into the world. She imagined the book sometimes as a hot-pink swarm of bees, trapped inside and banging against a windowpane, dying to get out. Now she had no choice.

All of this started a few weeks ago. Potential buyers were making their way through Henrietta's house on a tour when a young man had stopped at her mantel. He stared intently at a small copper statue of a woman in a hat and skirt holding the American flag in one hand and looking out with purpose and dignity at something impressive and far off in the distance. It had been part of the weathervane on the house when Henrietta and Harold first moved here, but after a storm knocked it off the roof one of the first winters, she had kept it on the ledge, damaged and dinged, a tiny chip missing from the top of the flagpole. The young man put on a pair of gloves and then asked if he could hold the statue. “Do you mind?” He turned it over in his hand. Then: “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Henrietta had laughed. “I'm pretty sure it's part of my roof that blew off.”

The man worked not far from Aveline, he explained, and taught Early American art history at one of the local universities. His specialty was things like this, he said. She felt an instant kinship: Henrietta had a particular affection for academic disciplines with no market value.

“I used to teach women's studies,” she explained, to no real response. This was why she liked the statue. Something about the expression on the woman's face. An early symbol of dignity and power. Evidence of the continuing struggle. She was trying to make conversation.

The man offered two thousand for it. He took out his wallet. “We can drive to an ATM right now.”

As much as she could have used $2,000, Henrietta refused. The next day she spent the morning emailing photographs of the weathervane to the various auction houses and specialists in Boston. Right away, a woman from Sotheby's named Juliet Lippincourt wrote to say that she was interested. “Depending on the condition,” Juliet had answered, “these can be surprisingly valuable.”

Henrietta had written back immediately. “What exactly do you mean by ‘surprisingly'?”

To which Juliet had responded, “I mean that you could do much, much better than two thousand.”

In preparation for Juliet Lippincourt's visit this afternoon, Henrietta had gathered a half dozen other items from the house that she thought might also be worth money. Suddenly, she wondered if there was more here that was surprisingly valuable. Perhaps her whole house contained valuable surprises. She had arranged everything on the dining room table. A tiny cedar box, carried over on the passage from the family house in Odessa, inscribed with the first name of her grandfather. Jewelry inherited from her aunt Essie. A pistol given to Harold alleged to have once belonged to John Dillinger. The autographed picture of Frank Sinatra that Frank had given Harold the last time he ate at the restaurant. Also, the silver teapot from the back of her book.

It was important to note that these were things she could bear to lose. There were other things, valuable things, holy and crucial things that she had considered selling, that she had arranged here on the table alongside the cedar box and the picture of Frank Sinatra and Dillinger's pistol, and for the past three nights she had lingered over the whole collection, trying to decide. Sell or keep? Junk or save? All night she had been adding to and subtracting from the collection. One of Harold's wristwatches. His favorite chef's knife. This was all a part of death, she knew. The packing away, the discarding, the irrational sentimentalizing of inanimate objects. Or, in Henrietta's case, the realization that maybe she had nothing here worth anything at all. It was a cheap watch. A normal chef's knife. Room after room of clutter and tchotchkes. Drawers full of things that were once probably indispensable to her husband: a dog's leash, a candy thermometer, cartridges of super 8 film on which they were young and their daughter was young and everyone was alive and vital and ignorant of the future. Could she realistically envision herself selling Harold's watch? Or his knives? In the event that there was an afterlife, wouldn't he expect her to come bounding into heaven carrying these things?

Alone among all these packed boxes these last few nights, she felt sometimes as if she were present at her own death. Artifacts of Harold's life were also artifacts of her life. She had done this for her mother and father in their apartment on Orchard Street. They had lived in the same small place all of their adult lives. Henrietta was born in the bigger of the two bedrooms, a room outfitted with an oak furniture set, the same room in which both her mother (heart attack) and her father (stroke) died, a few weeks apart. She had spent ten days there after her dad's funeral. They were ten days when she'd done exactly what she was doing now: alternating between labeling everything as waste and feeling the pressing urge to inspect every last item. This, she had reasoned, was how one bears witness to a life. By physically holding each thing: keys to forgotten locks; a hairbrush with her mother's hair left in it; letters from her grandmother to her grandfather dated 1906, when they were both teenagers, sent after they had left one of the innumerable pogroms they had survived.
Are you alive out there, Franz?
one began. When Henrietta finished, she had to turn over the key to the landlord, who was the son of the original landlord, a man she had known when he was a boy. He lived still in the same apartment where he had lived in 1954, two floors down from her parents. He was a larger, grayer version of the boy she'd known, and for an instant in his kitchen, which was a mirror of her own former kitchen, she had thought about whether or not it would be a comforting thing to stay in one place for a lifetime. Maybe everything would be easier here in these same hot rooms, in this same squalid building. She had the key in her hand and she thought to herself,
I could do this. I could just stay here. Another Horowitz woman in this same tiny apartment.
She cried when she turned it over. She was sixty years old then. She had always had a key to this door.

Juliet arrived shortly after Oona left. Henrietta watched from her bedroom window. A picket-thin woman about her age, with an impressively hard shell of immaculately white hair, Juliet tottered quickly up the snowy walkway. Greeting her by the front door, Henrietta suffered a moment of panicked anxiety. This happened whenever she met a person who appeared older than fifty and who looked vaguely bookish. Did Juliet know who she was? Had she gotten off the phone last month and then immediately Googled Henrietta's name to discover all the miserable reviews and all the countless pornographic diagrams she'd drawn? This was the old story, the old worry, which receded every year as more people forgot about her and her book and the scandal and those diagrams, leaving her here on her own. Everything, so quickly, was changing.

They shook hands. Juliet had come dressed all in black aside from a pair of white gloves, which Henrietta guessed she wore because she anticipated handling something precious and valuable. This made Henrietta smile. For years the weathervane had sat here above the fireplace, periodically encased in creosote, occasionally festooned with tiny Christmas garlands or, worse, used as a toy for the dogs to chew. If this thing held any intrinsic value after all this time, it was because she had used the image of the woman as an inspiration for the heroine in her book. Her family knew this, but no one else. It had not turned out to be the sort of book that elicited obvious allusions to Early American folk art. She'd settled on the name Eugenia because Oona, when she was very young, had rubbed her hand against the woman's belly as if she were a magic genie. This was how Genie became Eugenia.

“Excuse the mess,” Henrietta said preemptively. “I'm moving.”

“I see that,” Juliet said, with a noticeable look of concern on her face.

“I take it from your expression that you don't often collect works of art in places as messy as this,” Henrietta said.

“Not frequently,” Juliet said. “No.”

“It's safe here,” Henrietta said. “The weathervane, I meant. Not you. Although you are also safe here. I assure you.”

Juliet offered a nervous smile. “That's good.”

Henrietta took her into the living room. She felt keenly aware of the mess, the dirt, the general disorder. The old housewifely instincts rose up—instincts she detested, but instincts nonetheless hammered into her by her mother and grandmother. She felt herself on the verge of apologies—a subject she had lectured on years ago: the gendered propensity for needless justification—when she remembered,
This is a business transaction. I need money.

They had spoken earlier in the week by phone. Juliet wanted Henrietta to send pictures so that she could generate a general ballpark figure. Henrietta had managed inexpertly, using the camera on her phone. “If the market is right, there's no telling what one of these can fetch,” Juliet told her.

This surprised Henrietta. “Is there really a market for weathervanes?”

“There's a market for everything,” Juliet had told her, before emailing Henrietta photographs of weathervanes that looked vaguely similar to hers, and which had fetched nearly a half million dollars at auction.

The numbers astonished her. “You're sure we're talking about the same thing? Those things on your house that go round and round in the wind? I thought they were junk.”

“Those very same things,” Juliet said. “They're not junk. They're considered works of art.” Instantly Henrietta did the math in her head. A half million dollars, even with the penalty for tax and commission, could sustain her for at least fifteen more years if she lived frugally. That would get her to age eighty-five. A good age. A full life. A life extended miraculously by the discovery of a weathervane. Then Juliet issued a caveat after looking over the images Henrietta had sent: “Mind you, the examples I emailed over, those were in terrific condition. Far more so than yours looks to be.”