The Surfing Lesson (Digital Original) (3 page)

Drum and Hadley, Hadley and Colin, Drum and Margot, Drum and Hadley, Hadley and Colin, Hadley and Jan Jaap, Colin in Hawaii hiking the ridges of active volcanoes and drinking mai tais with the descendants of Princess Kaiulani, Hadley and the Private Equity Guy who shopped for her at Hermès, Margot who had spent the past eighteen months wondering where love went when it left, where could she find it, how could she get it back?

In bed, she said, “I’m glad you’re giving Curtis a surfing lesson tomorrow.”

Drum said, “I’m not.”

Their life in New York had been enviable from the outside, she supposed. Drum’s parents had bought them an apartment on East Seventy-Third Street, a spacious three-bedroom in a prewar building with good water pressure and crown molding and a responsive superintendent. Margot worked at Miller, Sawtooth, and Drum cared for the kids practically the same day she popped them out. Margot expressed milk in her office between meetings, and Drum would wait in the lobby of her building for Margot’s assistant to run the bottles down to him. Drum changed the diapers, he hand-puréed baby food, he took the boys to the playground and to their baby classes in Spanish and classical music. He did the shopping and all of the cooking and the laundry. On his downtime, he smoked weed and watched Warren Miller films. Once the kids were in school, he took up running; he dropped fifteen pounds. He spent time on the Internet planning their vacations to Costa Rica and Park City to surf and ski. On these vacations, Margot cared for the kids while Drum did his thing—eight to ten hours a day on the water or the slopes. Margot wanted to complain, but she knew that, for Drum, this was working. It was professional fulfillment.

Meanwhile, Margot toiled and strove and accomplished at Miller, Sawtooth. She appreciated the foot rubs and the glass of chardonnay when she got home, and the hot mushroom strudel with arugula salad at her place at the dinner table, but sometimes she looked at Drum and thought, Why are you slaving over me this way? Why don’t you get something for yourself?

They became friends with a couple named Teresa and Avery Benedict, the parents of Maurice, who was Drum Jr.’s best buddy at preschool. Teresa and Drum Sr. had forged the friendship; they started going for coffee after dropping off the kids. Sometimes they hung out together all morning—shopping, going for lunch. Teresa bought Drum Sr. a gift subscription to
Bon Appétit;
the two of them shared recipes. The two of them—Margot was sure—complained about their spouses and the obscene hours they worked and how grouchy they were when they came home. Margot wondered if Teresa and Drum Sr. were having an affair. And then one day she realized she
wanted
them to have an affair—she wanted them to drop the kids off at school and go back to one apartment or the other and fuck until they were sweaty and seeing stars.

Margot once said, “So, what do you think of Teresa?”

Drum said, “What do you mean, what do I
think?
”

“You like her, right?”

“Yes, I like her. Of course I like her. She’s cool.”

“Do you ever…”

“Do I ever
what,
Margot?”

“Do you ever…”

“No,” Drum said. “I don’t.”

There were other tense conversations, whispered late at night, after the boys were asleep.

Margot said:
It’s exhausting, you know, being the only one who brings home a paycheck.

Drum said:
You don’t have to work as hard as you do, Margot. The apartment is paid for. You could make half of what you do and we’d be fine.

This infuriated Margot, mostly because he was correct.

Margot said:
I like working hard. I love my job. I want to make partner.

Drum said:
Okay, so then why are you complaining?

Why
was
she complaining? Drum was taking care of the home front so she didn’t have to. He was a classic 1950s housewife, but better because he was handsome and sexy and everyone loved him. He wore flip-flops and Ron Jon T-shirts, even in December. Margot wasn’t sure what the problem was. If pressed, she might say it was Drum’s lack of ambition. He seemed to expect nothing from his days but smiles on his kids’ faces and a good dinner. Wasn’t a grown man, a man thirty-five and then forty, supposed to want more?

She said to him one night, “It’s like you don’t have dreams.”

“Dreams?” he said.

Then Margot’s mother, Beth Carmichael, was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, and Margot’s world was thrown into a tailspin.

In one of the last conversations with her mother, Beth had grasped Margot’s hand and said, “All a mother wants, Margot, is for her children to be happy. And that may take different forms at different times.”

“I am happy, Mom,” Margot said.

Beth had seemed unconvinced. But that could have been the morphine at work. Margot said, “You don’t have to worry about me.”

Beth said, “Ever since you were a little girl, you’ve been too hard on yourself. It’s the curse of the firstborn. You need to cut yourself some slack, allow for your imperfect moments. You need to be your own best friend.”

Margot had squeezed her mother’s hand. “I have a best friend,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Oh honey, I know,” Beth said, and her eyes fluttered closed. “Just listen to me.”

When her mother died, Margot cleaved to Drum. She couldn’t get him close enough; she wanted to inhabit his body. She wanted him to absorb her pain, to sop it up like a spill on the counter.

During this period of grief and renewed closeness, Margot got pregnant again—with Ellie. To have a daughter and not have her mother to share it with? God, the pain! When the doctor placed Ellie in Margot’s arms, Margot gazed up at Drum and burst into tears. And he had wept right along with her and said, “I know, babe. I know. She should be here.”

A week after Ellie’s first birthday, Margot made partner at Miller, Sawtooth. There was a party and, of course, a large pay raise. This was when things drastically slid downhill. Margot had had her tubes tied after her C-section with Ellie, and at first she thought the shift was hormonal. She was impatient, bitchy, entitled; she said things she regretted. She was mean to Drum; she accused him of wasting his life. Instead of growing angry at her, instead of telling her to go jump in a big pool of fuck you, which was what he should have done, he kowtowed to her even more. He texted her forty or fifty times a day, he told her he loved her, he filled their apartment with fresh flowers, he threw her a surprise birthday party at Bill’s Bar and Burger, he planned a family trip to Japan. No skiing, no surfing, he said. We can do whatever you want to do—the cities, the gardens, the pagodas. You’ve always said you wanted to go to Japan.

Margot made him cancel the trip immediately. She had told him she wanted to see Japan because that was where he had grown up. She had wanted to see it for Drum’s sake. But that desire had faded as well.

She started going to a therapist, even though she didn’t really have time. She admitted to the therapist that she didn’t think she loved Drum anymore.

If you could change five things about him, the therapist asked, would that make a difference?

Would it? Margot wondered. What if he landed a job as a TV anchorperson and he was on the news every night at six o’clock? What if he became a Japanese professor at NYU? What if he invented something, started a company, made millions? What if he wore Robert Graham shirts and Ferragamo loafers? What if he took up golf and followed the stock market? What if he read Tolstoy, Dashiell Hammett, Norman Mailer? What if he listened to opera, subscribed to the
Wall Street Journal,
smoked a pipe?

But Drum didn’t need to change; Drum was happy the way he was. Drum was, in fact, the happiest person Margot knew. Margot wanted to change one thing about herself. She wanted to be a woman who loved the way Drum was.

What do you do when the love is gone? Margot asked the therapist. She was in tears. She wanted it back. She wanted to feel.

Where does it go?

In the morning, Margot’s father, Doug Carmichael, piled her three children into the backseat of his Jaguar. He was taking them to the Downyflake for doughnuts and pancakes and hot chocolate. Doug Carmichael was a prominent divorce attorney in Manhattan, but Margot hadn’t told her father how close she was to jumping off the cliff of marriage into the churning sea of divorce. She didn’t want to be work to him. When the time came, she knew, he would give her a colleague’s name; she would be in the very best hands.

Margot said, “Okay, I’m going for a run. Enjoy the sugar!”

Drum had left a few minutes before, with his surfboard strapped to their Land Rover. Margot had kissed him good-bye as though for the last time. He was going to meet Hadley Axelram and her son at the beach. Hadley Axelram, Hadley Axelram, Hadley Axelram. Nothing, Margot felt nothing. How was this possible?

On her run, Margot imagined a scene between Drum and Hadley Axelram. Hadley would be in her bikini, her bones jutting out. She would give Drum the big-brown-eye stare because she was so grateful he had showed up to teach Curtis to surf. Curtis needed a father figure; everyone else had failed her, but not Drum, never Drum, he was the one she still thought about, he was the one she had wanted all along. If Curtis hadn’t shown up in Aspen threatening a gun, she and Drum would be married by now; Drum hadn’t ever been serious about pursuing the other girl in New York. How could he, when he was permanently under Hadley’s spell? They would have given birth to a whole passel of little surfers. Hadley still thought about him every time she had an orgasm. Did he know that?

What would he say? Margot wondered. How would he respond? He would buckle, right? He would kiss Hadley, the kiss would ignite a spark, he would see the whole world differently, he would see it the way he used to see it when he was in love with Hadley. He would remember what it had felt like when he dropped her off at Terminal E at Logan, when she was flying to Florence for an entire year of studying Giotto. She had taken his heart along for the ride, nestled among her cashmere sweaters inside her steamer trunk. But now she had been returned to him. He had finally, finally gotten her back.

Margot thought about all of this, but felt nothing. How was this possible?

She decided to run to the beach to see for herself. If she saw Drum and Hadley together with her own eyes, if she spied on their private moments, she would feel something, she would be jealous, she would be heartsick, and the marriage would be saved.

Nobody
wanted
to be divorced—this was something Margot’s father had always said. People
needed
to get divorced.

Margot ran up Main Street to the monument, past the lovely historic homes on Milk Street. Hydrangea bushes, weathered fences, brick sidewalks, leafy trees. She was moving and she felt great, healthy, she loved being out of the city, she loved being on Nantucket. She had thought that maybe being on Nantucket would do the trick with her and Drum, maybe they needed a change of scenery. This was where they’d met, fallen in love, conceived their first child.
Help me, Nantucket!

Margot hadn’t run in months, there was absolutely no time. She spent all her time at the office, and then when she got home, she wanted to be with her children. They had grown masterful at the guilt trip.
We never see you, you’re never home, and when you’re home you’re always on your phone. We want you. We can’t stop wanting you.
Margot was running hard, she was in the sun now, headed up the hill by the Maria Mitchell Observatory. She didn’t feel winded at all, because that was the kind of person she was, when she said she was going to do something, she did it and she did it well. She didn’t quit things. Was getting a divorce quitting? Her therapist said no, but Margot felt the answer was yes. Yes, getting a divorce was quitting, she should do what countless others before her had done and stay for the sake of the children, stay until Ellie graduated from Fieldston, only fifteen years from now. Could she stay for fifteen more years?

Nope, no way. She needed to follow her mother’s advice and allow for her imperfect moments. The past year and a half had been a study in imperfection. But now, maybe, Hadley Axelram could help.
Help me, Hadley!

Margot was sweating buckets by the time she got to the dirt road that led to the antenna beach. This was the newly popular beach for serious surfers—Cisco had been overrun by college kids with cases of Budweiser. Margot saw their Land Rover parked at the beach entrance, and next to it, a turquoise blue Mini. Of course that would be what Hadley drove.

Margot stopped to stretch behind the cars. Some water would be nice; she was hot now and she still had to run all the way back. She surreptitiously opened the passenger door of the Land Rover, hoping that Drum had brought cold water—of course he had, he was a Boy Scout that way, always prepared—and she lifted it out of the console. Nice and cold.

She walked around the dune so that she could see the action on the beach without being seen herself. Drum was in the water waist deep and Curtis was on the board next to him. Hadley was standing at the shoreline, watching. She wore a long sheer white cover-up over her bathing suit. When a wave came in, Drum positioned Curtis’s board and yelled, “GO!” and Curtis paddled like crazy, then got into his crouch, then he stood. He stood! He rode the wave to shore, and Hadley cheered madly. Drum said, “Let’s do it again!”

Margot watched as a few more sets rolled in. She marveled at how Curtis’s body moved just like his father’s. He gritted his teeth in determination; his eyes bulged. He stood time after time after time; he had it down. Drum had taught him, or had been able to coax out Curtis’s natural ability. Hadley clapped and danced; she got the hem of her cover-up wet in the froth of the waves.

Drum came in, and Hadley handed him a towel. He wiped at his face and pointed at Curtis. Curtis was going to try it by himself. This was good, this was great. Margot focused on Drum and Hadley, standing side-by-side on the beach. If Drum turned and saw her, he would realize she was spying on him, but he would think it was for a different reason. He would think she wanted to catch him at something; he would think she had come out here to confirm her worst fears. He would never guess that she was wishing for something to happen; he would never predict her hunger to feel jealous.