Fly Away Home (13 page)

“I’ll do it,” she repeated. “They won’t.” And then …
Call Jan for the keys
, her mother’s voice said. It wasn’t a bad idea. She needed to get out of here, and Connecticut was as good a place as any. “Monday morning at nine.”

Already, her mind was working, coming up with a plan. She’d been quick once, in college and law school, smart and organized and never at a loss. She could be quick again; quick in her own service, not his. She’d go to the bedroom, pack a bag, change her clothes, and find a baseball cap—her husband had them from every team in the state—to tuck over her head. She’d slip out the back entrance, say “no comment” if any reporters saw her, and get herself to Ceil’s place.

“I am sorry,” he said, standing across the room from her. Looking at him, she could see the ghost of that barefoot boy in the narrow bed, the one who’d fallen through the ice and who’d wooed her with whiskey and sweet talk, who’d asked her,
Do you trust me?
“I still love you, Sylvie. I never stopped.”

But what did love mean to Richard? That she, too, was helpful? That he wanted her to stay?

Never mind, she thought, as the numbness settled over her, encasing her like a girdle and control-top pantyhose. All of this—the apartment where she’d lived for years, the man she’d shared it with, the work they’d done, the life they’d built together—all of it was denied her, all of it was gone.

“E-mail Clarissa the details,” she said. “And after that, I don’t think I’ll be seeing you again.”

“Cookie!” Ceil had been waiting in the doorway of her Chelsea loft. She threw her arms around her friend as soon as Sylvie got off the elevator, pulling her through the metal door and into the welcome coolness of the high-ceilinged living room. Ceil smelled just the way she had in college, like almond soap and Coco by Chanel—from Paris, she’d told her new roommate, by way of Dillard’s department store. She looked more or less the same, too, pink-cheeked and cheerful, short and solid in bare feet, black leggings, and a tunic that brushed the top of her thighs, even though her short cap of hair was more silver than blond these days, and there were wrinkles around her eyes. Sylvie hugged her friend, leaning against her wordlessly before following her into the kitchen. “What took you so long?”

“I took the subway.”

“You did what?” Ceil stared at her, as if Sylvie had said she’d swum down the Hudson. Sylvie pulled off her Yankees cap and set her duffel bag down by the door. In their bedroom—
her ex-bedroom
, she thought—she had changed into yoga pants and sneakers and a zippered cashmere sweatshirt. She’d taken the elevator down to the lobby, and asked Juan to open the service entrance. The reporters and photographers would be out front, looking for a well-dressed lady getting into a car, or a cab. They wouldn’t be looking for a woman walking, with a baseball cap on her head and a bag over her shoulder, heading toward the subway like she was late to a yoga class.

Ceil’s loft was one giant rectangle, with a kitchen at one end and three bedrooms at the other, with soaring ceilings and bare, glossy floors made of some unpronounceable rare wood from Brazil (a native wood harvested by indigenous people, Ceil’s husband, Larry, an architect, had explained, repeatedly and at length, at their housewarming). The furniture was all oversized, to accommodate Larry, a former defensive end. The white-painted walls were hung with challenging art: there were black squiggles and green blotches on stark-white oversized canvases with titles like
Divorce Song II
and
Truth and Beauty
, and one corner was dominated by a blown-glass sculpture that looked as if it had been squeezed from tubes of Aquafresh.

The loft was all Larry, but the kitchen was Ceil’s, low-ceilinged and cozy, with copper pots and marble counters and a long trestle table that could have come straight out of a New England farmhouse. “Does Larry care that it doesn’t really go with the rest of the place?” Sylvie had asked—this was at the housewarming, where Larry was out in the living room explaining that the indigenous people who harvested the rare Brazilian wood were paid a living wage, and also had health insurance, thanks to the largesse of microlenders. “Well, you know, the kitchen was always going to be mine. Larry doesn’t really eat,” Ceil had said, and Sylvie realized that it was true: Larry somehow maintained his football-player bulk on espresso extruded by the thousand-dollar machine in his study, supplemented by the protein bars he purchased at his gym and the egg-and-bagel sandwiches he grabbed at the deli down the block.

It was the kitchen where Ceil and Sylvie spent most of their time. There was a small couch and a TV set in one corner, along with shelves full of cookbooks and photos of Ceil and Larry and their children and their granddaughter. That night, Sylvie leaned against the counter, battered and numb and breathless, as Ceil put a mixing bowl and beaters into the sink.

“Are you all right?” Ceil asked, her voice as high and sweet and chirpy as (Richard had once observed) a cricket in a Disney film. “What can I get you? Coffee? Chocolate? Carbs? A drink? A gun?” Her eyes glittered. “Listen,” she said. “You don’t have to decide right now, but I looked up hit men on the Internet, and there’s a very active community of men, and possibly some women, and for what I have to say is a surprisingly reasonable amount of money, they’ll take care of whatever problem you’re having, on a permanent basis.”

“Ceil.” Sylvie slumped onto a barstool. “Don’t you think they’d know it was me?”

“Yes, well, I thought of that, and if I was the one making the call, and I was the one spending the money …”

“Then they’d figure out it was my best friend.”

Ceil considered this. “Shoot. Maybe I’ll get Larry to do it. That’s, what, two degrees of separation? That’s plausible deniability right there.” She tilted her round face and gave Sylvie a smile.

Sylvie rested her head on her hands. The kitchen counters were, as usual, glittering with a dusting of bright yellow powder. Ceil was addicted to Crystal Light—she’d called it Crystal Meth until her granddaughter, Lincoln, started saying it, too—but she drank it by the glass, not the pitcher, while refusing to spring for the individual packets, which were, she pointed out, almost twice as expensive by volume as the canisters. Each time she made a serving, she would painstakingly tap powder from the canister into her glass, inevitably leaving a sprinkling of mouth-puckeringly sweet yellow powder on the countertop.

Ceil turned on her bare feet, bent, and opened the oven. A puff of warm, delicious-smelling air filled the kitchen. “Pecan-cinnamon rolls,” she announced, pouring them each a mug of coffee and grabbing cream from the refrigerator.

Sylvie wrapped her hands around the heavy mug. Ceil’s laptop was on the counter. Sylvie eyed it uneasily. The flickering screen saver reminded her of a snake’s tongue, darting lazily in and out. Ceil saw where her eyes were going and snapped the screen shut. “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t even think about it.”

She swallowed hard. “What … what are they saying?”

“The usual nonsense, I’m sure.” Ceil poured the cream into a cow-shaped pitcher—the cow’s tail formed a handle, and the milk came spilling out of its mouth—and used a spatula to slide rolls onto a white-and-blue china plate. She put the plate in front of Sylvie, then took the barstool across the counter. “Just tell me,” she said, “that we get to hurt him. Just a little bit. Nothing permanent.”

Sylvie sipped her coffee, stifling a smile at the thought of four-foot-eleven-inch Ceil hurting anyone. She’d probably do it with her immersion blender. Ceil was a great believer in the restorative powers of soup, and used her blender nonstop from September through May, pummeling a variety of meats and vegetables into liquid submission. She served cappuccino at all her dinner parties, and would offer to refroth them midway through dessert. “I bet the press is doing a pretty good job of that.”

“Okay, but I hate him!”

Sylvie nodded. She expected nothing less from her dramatic friend, and, at that moment, she hated him, too, but it was more complicated than that: hate and love and loyalty and embarrassment and loneliness, loneliness at the thought of a life without Richard, all of it sloshing around in her head and her guts like a toxic stew. She imagined that Ceil, who’d been her maid of honor and had known Richard almost as long as she had, felt the same way. She nibbled a bit of the roll, then asked the question she’d come here to ask, face-to-face: “Did you have any idea? Did you know that this was going on?”

“Absolutely not.” Ceil answered instantly, and her blue eyes were guileless. She poked at her own roll with her fork. “Although, honestly, if I had known I’m not sure I would have told you. It wouldn’t have been my place.”

Sylvie stared at her. “You’re my best friend!”

“But he’s your husband. And marriages are mysteries.” She raised her hands in the air, palms toward the heavens. “It wouldn’t have been my place,” she repeated. “But I’m here for you. However you want to handle this. Whatever you want to do.”

“I can’t stay with him,” Sylvie said, and as soon as she’d spoken the words, she knew that they were true.

Ceil nodded, unsurprised. “Should we call a lawyer?” She tapped her pad. “I made a list.” Ceil flipped the notebook open. “Actually,
People
magazine made a list on its website. There’s the lawyer Charlie Sheen’s wife used, when he went after her with a knife in Colorado, and the one that woman with the eight kids had, when her husband was cheating on her with some girl he met in a bar …”

Sylvie swallowed hard, feeling dizzy. “No lawyer,” she managed, and sipped from her mug again, trying to steady herself. “Right now I just want to not see him.” She took another sip of coffee. “I hit him.”

“You did?” Ceil’s eyes gleamed. “Well, good for you! Closed fist or open?”

“It was most like a slap. Side of his head. His ears …” Her voice trailed off. She was thinking of Richard’s ears, the sweet pink curl of them. He had little-boy ears, she’d thought more than once. The rest of him had grown up, had grayed and wrinkled and slackened and spread, but his ears were as tender as they’d been when she’d met him, as sweet as they must have been when he’d been a boy, and, thank God, they’d never sprouted those nasty tufts of hair so many men his age got. She loved his ears. How could she hate him, when she still felt so tenderly toward his body parts?

She rested her head on the counter, and, after a minute, she felt Ceil’s small hand on her back. “You can stay here for as long as you want.” Sylvie suppressed a shudder as she thought of the guest bedroom, Larry’s showplace. The bed was made of unvarnished birch branches, formed roughly in the shape of a nest. You had to clamber over the sharp sticks that stuck out in every direction to get to the mattress. On the wall was a truly disturbing piece of art, a white-on-white oil-paint oval with a single drop of red at its center, titled
Afterbirth
.

“Maybe for a few nights,” she said. “Then I’m going somewhere else. You can’t tell Richard where.”

“I’m not speaking to Richard unless you tell me it’s okay. At which point I will have a few choice remarks.” She patted Sylvie’s back again. “So where do you think? Canyon Ranch? Lake Austin? Rancho La Puerta? Do you want company? I could pick a fight with Larry and come with you.” She thought, drumming her fingers on the marble. “Wherever you decide, you should have Clarissa call ahead and explain the situation.” More drumming. “Although probably people know the situation by now.”

Sylvie thought of the laptop, its flickering screen. She remembered a Leonard Cohen song that Lizzie used to play, over and over, in the middle of the night, which honestly, in retrospect, should have been a sign: “Everybody Knows,” the song was called. When Eliot Spitzer had had his troubles, out of some mixture of sympathy and schadenfreude, she’d Googled Silda Spitzer’s name, and been horrified (and, a little titillated) by what she’d read.
What Was She Thinking? Silda Joins Democrats’ First Wives Club
. “What’s more disgusting than a lyin’, no good, cheatin, hypocritical, political man?” one indignant blogger had asked. “Their wives who stand by looking dumbfounded as their unfaithful husbands apologize to the public. Do these women have no pride?”

No pride
, she thought. But what was pride compared to a life she’d loved? What would she do now, alone at her age? How could she start again, with no husband, no job, no place in the world? She let Ceil lead her toward the bathroom (more white marble, white towels, and a giant white Jacuzzi), and undressed without looking at her body, because considering her bulges and wrinkles, her stretch marks and scars, would have her, inevitably, comparing herself to Joelle, whose flesh was probably smooth and unblemished as a rose’s petals. With her eyes squeezed shut, she got into the tub, and soaked until the water went cold. Then she wrapped herself in one of Ceil’s bath sheets and padded into the horrible guest room. Ceil had made up the bed with flowered flannel sheets that Sylvie doubted Larry had ever slept on or even knew about. There was a cup of tea steaming on the bedside table, another cinnamon roll beside it, and a stack of well-worn novels, some of them dating back to their college years. She settled herself gingerly on top of the mattress. Her lower back was throbbing, her legs ached. So did her chest, like she’d been punched there over and over. She crossed her hands, age-spotted, the nails neatly kept, over her heart, and pushed down, trying to ease the pain, lying motionless on her back until her friend slipped into the room to turn out the lights.

DIANA

Gary had been late. Trust her husband to be late on a night like this, to leave her sitting alone in her little black dress and strappy, high-heeled sandals, staring through the windows that had been flung open to the soft summer night and feeling, or imagining that she could feel, every eye in the room upon her.

If you’d asked her friends and neighbors—not that anyone had, or ever would—Diana assumed they would have said she and Gary appeared reasonably happy. True, over their seven years together, their sex life never got past perfunctory, but the neighbors wouldn’t know about that, and Diana could deal with perfunctory, telling herself that maybe she just didn’t have a very strong sex drive, and that the hot stuff faded away for everyone else anyhow.

She loved the day-to-dayness of her life, the balance she’d struck between work in the ER and days at home with her boy. Milo had been an easy baby, placid and good-natured, always happy to go down for a nap in the sunny nursery Diana had furnished and painted herself, always delighted to see her when she lifted him out of his crib. She adored their cozy brick row house, even if it was still mostly empty. She worked twelve-hour shifts, three days a week, and on her days off she would take Milo to the playground, to music class and tumbling class and on errands to the dry cleaner’s or the grocery store. After lunch, she would sing him to sleep and spend a few hours cleaning the house, paying the bills, or folding the laundry while he napped. Then, just as boredom set in, just when she was sure she couldn’t read
Red Fish Blue Fish
one more time, or sing “Tingalayo” again, or play another game of Sorry, it was time to go to work, back to the frenzy and demands and adrenaline rush of a big-city emergency room, where you never knew what was going to come through the door. It all suited Diana just fine.

They lived in a wonderful neighborhood—it wasn’t New York, but it had plenty to offer. Within a twelve-block walk there were bars and French cafés and Vietnamese noodle shops, bakeries and gelaterias, the requisite coffee shop on each corner, plus a craft brewery that served the best veggie burgers she’d ever tasted. On Sundays she and Gary would try different places for brunch, sampling the breakfast pizza at Café Estelle and the stuffed French toast at Sabrina’s, pushing Milo in his stroller or, when he got older, holding his hands, walking along and admiring the windowboxes, peeking through people’s blinds to see how they’d decorated their living rooms, and stopping at the little neighborhood park for a few trips down the slide on the way home. With neighbors calling hellos and a pleasant afternoon awaiting her—Milo would nap, or read, or play with his Legos, and Gary would zone out in front of the television set with his laptop, leaving Diana with a few hours for a long run and a soak in the tub—she would think, happily, even a little smugly, that she’d gotten exactly the life she’d wanted: the husband, the child, the nest that she was in the process of feathering. On the best days, it would be enough to quiet the teasing, drawling voice in her head, the voice that sounded a lot like her sister saying that Gary was the tiniest bit stupid and boring to boot, that Gary, with his love for video games and YouTube videos, wasn’t the right man for her; that he was maybe not much of a man at all.

When Diana was in college she’d read about arranged marriages, and how they lasted longer than so-called love marriages did, because the people who were in them knew they wouldn’t have romance or passion to carry them along. They went in knowing that their marriage was a thing they’d have to create from scratch and work hard to maintain. That sounded sensible to Diana, who, in deciding on Gary, had in effect arranged her own marriage, choosing a man who was acceptable on every front and then building a marriage with the same will and concentration she’d once brought to her college papers and grade-school dioramas. But the older she got, the more she worried that passion, chemistry, attraction, whatever you wanted to call it, was like a kind of frosting that could be smoothed over the cracks and lumps of a badly baked cake. Passion mattered … and she’d never really had much with Gary.

The sex, which had never been great, had gotten worse, and much more sporadic, in the post-Milo years. Even if she wasn’t constantly exhausted, even if she came home from the hospital or a day at the playground to find the bed made, the laundry folded, a tasty and nutritious dinner prepared and the table set, even if there’d been someone there to spirit Milo away to a playground or the library or the children’s museum for an edifying hour or two, Diana just wasn’t interested. Most nights she’d lie beside Gary until he fell asleep, fretting over how close she’d come to resembling the women’s-magazine cliché, the wife who no longer wanted her husband. When she was with Hal, she’d read those articles with a lofty sense of superiority, thinking how silly those new mommies sounded. How hard was it to endure a few kisses, to spread your legs and offer up a few token moans for the five (or three) minutes it would take the man to finish his business?

The truth she learned when she became a mother herself was that she found the kind of sex her friend Lynette called the “charity ball” unendurable. After a day of tending to her patients, who’d show up at the ER with everything from a splinter to a rare and hard-to-diagnose parasite, and a night spent minding her son, she couldn’t stand another set of hands or lips on her, another set of demands.

Still, she tried. On Saturday night she would shave her legs, brush and floss with extra care, and if Gary smiled at her from the depths of the couch, if he folded up his laptop and asked, in his good-natured teasing tone, whether she was prepared to fulfill her marital obligations, she’d make herself smile back at him, and let him take her hand and lead her to the bedroom. Sometimes it would be over almost immediately. (“Sorry,” her husband would gasp, spent and wilting against the side of her thigh. “Sorry, Diana, but it’s been a while.”) That, sadly, was the best-case scenario. The worst times were when it took forever. Diana would lie underneath her husband, hands on his scrawny shoulders, face buried in his neck, while he’d pump and huff and pant and sweat. Sometimes she’d give a few tentative moans to speed things along, and sometimes, that would work … but sometimes Gary would roll off her without having finished.

“You’re so wet,” he’d say, in a tone just short of accusatory. He’d sigh up at the ceiling, then take his slick penis in his hand and start pumping, with the burdened expression of a man who’d been forced to shovel the driveway just when the game was getting interesting. Diana would lie beside him, wondering about the etiquette: Should she help? If so, how? She’d roll onto her side and rest her cheek on his chest, feeling the rapid rise and fall of his breath, waiting for his final gasp and shudder and the explosion of bleach-smelling sticky stuff.

“Grab me a towel, would you?” he’d ask, still breathing hard, and she’d hurry out of bed, glad for the excuse to leave his side.

He was a good guy, pleasant enough, but the things he enjoyed and wanted to talk about—professional sports, the mash-ups he made on his computer, the various online role-playing games that he found more engrossing than real life—were not things that interested her. But what could she do? She’d made a promise, she’d taken vows, she’d had a baby. She’d gone into marriage as an adult, with her eyes wide open. She had, as the saying went, made her bed, and if she found it hard or lumpy, it was no one’s fault but her own. Love was a choice. She’d read that once, in a novel one of the patients had discarded in the waiting room. Love was a choice, and she was determined to make it, determined to make her marriage work, determined not to fail.

Tell him
. For months, for years, in spite of her resolve, the words beat like a drum in Diana’s head.
Tell him
, she would think, checking her e-mail, folding her husband’s underpants while a police procedural blared on the TV.
Tell him how you feel. It isn’t fair to stay married to him, just going along, pretending everything’s fine, pretending you’re feeling something you’re not
.

In the shower, brushing her teeth, retrieving the paper from the front step, she’d rehearse it in her head.
Gary, there’s something we need to talk about. Something I need to tell you. I’ve been feeling …
And this was where she stopped. What were the words for what she needed to say? The ones that came to mind were
I’m just not that into you
, but that wouldn’t work. No way could she dismiss her husband, take the first steps toward ending their marriage, breaking up their family, breaking his heart and maybe her son’s, with something that glib. But what was better?

She sat in the restaurant, staring out into the darkness, legs crossed beneath her black dress, sipping her wine, until finally her husband appeared, sweaty and disheveled, with the tiniest bit of shirttail sticking out through his fly.

“Hi, honey,” he’d said, reaching for her hand. “Sorry I’m late. Bad traffic.” Her heart sank as he touched her. There was no spark, no connection, nothing but annoyance and a wish to be left alone or, better yet, to be back home, counting out Milo’s chocolate chips, talking about where he’d sat at lunch and whether he’d ever get picked to be Pet Helper at school. (“I’m always snack cleanup!” he complained. “It just isn’t right!”)

Sensing her discomfort, Gary peered at her across the candlelit table. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and emptied her glass. The waiter approached, pad and pen in hand, prompting Gary to begin his typical dining-out process of talking to the menu.

“You, or you?” he asked, pointing at the various items. “Who’s it gonna be? Cassoulet? Coq au vin? You? You?”

“Gary,” Diana said softly but firmly. “It’s been a long day. Please just pick something.” Left alone long enough, he’d spend ten minutes interrogating the entrées in his Al Pacino voice, demanding that one of them speak up.

“Well, I told you we didn’t have to go out,” he said. Diana closed her eyes and waited until Gary finally settled on the steak frites. Diana asked for broiled sole, sauce on the side, and more wine. Then Gary got to his feet. “Gotta go drain the dragon,” he said. This was another one of her husband’s quirks. He was incapable of going to the bathroom without announcing his destination, in addition to what he intended to do once he was there.
Gotta bleed the lizard. Gotta break the seal. Gotta air out the snake
.

She sat at the table, a basket of bread and a crock of butter and her empty wineglass before her.
This is it
, she thought. She would never leave him for her lover—not that Doug would ever want her to. Which left her with Gary, draining the dragon, Gary, with his mash-ups, Gary and his nasty Kleenexes next to the bottle of hand lotion by the computer that he left for Diana to pick up and put away; Gary for the rest of her life.

Before she knew it she was on her feet, her wrap around her shoulders, moving quickly toward the host stand, and the tall oak-and-glass doors beyond it. She was almost there when the waiter, who looked to be all of eighteen, hurried over. “Ma’am? Is everything all right?”

“Just getting a little fresh air.” Diana’s voice sounded as if it was coming from outer space. She hooked her purse over her shoulder and stepped out into the night.

She walked around Rittenhouse Square park, then down Chestnut Street all the way to Independence Mall, when her ankles that had chafed from the sandals’ skinny straps wouldn’t let her go any farther. She sat on a wooden bench with her purse in her lap. When she found herself crying, she wasn’t sure whom her tears were for—her father, who’d cheated, her mother, who’d been betrayed, or herself, a cheater and a betrayer who was stuck, stuck with a man she did not love.

This cannot go on
, she thought. In her purse, her telephone buzzed. Doug. U OK? She smiled. She couldn’t help herself. How could she resist him? OK, she typed back. Seconds later, her screen flashed. COME OVER?

She jumped to her feet and hailed a cab.
I deserve this
, she told herself. Just for an hour. Sixty minutes of something sweet after this awful, awful day. Ten minutes later, her shoes in her hand, she stood on a stoop on a narrow street in South Philadelphia, knocking on her lover’s door.

She and Doug Vance actually had met in the emergency room. “What’ve we got?” Diana had asked her intern that rainy Friday morning. Already the waiting room was filling with the lame, the halt, and the blind, the diabetic, the old folks with congestive heart failure, the kids with fevers who would sit for hours staring at the television set bolted to the ceiling or leafing through limp, six-month-old magazines.

“Eddie Taylor’s back,” said Karen, who was brisk and efficient and reminded Diana of herself, if she’d been five feet tall and Asian. She handed Diana his chart. Diana glanced at it, rolling her eyes. Under “reason for visit,” Eddie, a well-known denizen of the ER, had written “dick is driping.” The spelling mistake wouldn’t have been so galling, Diana thought, if Eddie hadn’t visited the ER the month before for precisely the same dripe. She flipped through a half-dozen folders: an old dude with diarrhea, a teenager who’d been vomiting all night long, an earache, a headache, and …

Diana peered at the chart. “Foot run over by Mummers?”

“He’s a surgical intern,” Karen said tartly. “Out partying last night. Probably slept it off and didn’t remember until he woke up and saw the damage.”

Diana picked up the charts, pushed through the door of Exam Room Three, and found Doug Vance, a muscular, ruddy-cheeked, thick-shouldered fellow with a halo of dark curls, sitting on the exam table. He wore a dark-blue sweatshirt and exercise pants with snaps running up the sides of the legs. One foot was clad in a white sock and a running shoe. The other was bare, propped on a bag of ice.

He grinned at her ruefully. “Morning, Doc.”

“Good morning yourself.” She stared at his ankle, spectacularly discolored, grotesquely swollen. “Yowza.”

“Is that a medical term?”

“From the Latin.” Doug Vance looked familiar. She looked at his face—the round cheeks, the broad features, the nose that was squashed slightly sideways—then back down at his ankle, which was a riot of purple and yellow and black. She pulled on gloves and touched the skin gently, watching for a flinch, listening for a hissed intake of breath. Doug Vance smelled, not unpleasantly, of sweat and beer, which meant that his reactions were, perhaps, not to be trusted. “You’re an intern?”