Results May Vary (10 page)

I shrugged and resumed gazing around his office. He had a group of framed prints arranged on one wall—blown-up images of the exhibition catalog covers we'd done in the last few years. A short but sturdy-looking fig tree glowed green in the light from the window, and there was a small flat-woven kilim rug on top of the ubiquitous gray carpet tile in the area where the guest chairs sat. The whole room had a kind of precarious tidiness to it, as if Neil had only just finished cleaning and there might, in fact, be a couple of piles of crap he simply couldn't deal with stashed behind the closed door of his closet. I liked it.

“Okay. Okay, sounds good. And thank you again. Good morning, Caroline; to what do I owe the pleasure?”

I snapped my attention back to him as I belatedly realized he had ended his phone call. “Oh. Well. I've recently been chatting over email with my new friend Diana Ramirez, and she's invited me to call her.”

“That's excellent!”

“It is! But, um, now I have no idea what I'm going to say to her.”

He shrugged. “Don't try to rehearse it too much in advance. Just be yourself. Explain why you think the museum matters and why you think it should matter to her. I've heard you talk about it before—you're compelling. Try to forget that she's a big scary donor, and talk to her like one person to another.”

“You make it sound so easy,” I said.

“Honestly? It is. Being genuine and passionate is ninety percent of it. And remember, you're not trying to seal the deal right this second. You just want her to be interested to learn more. To come up here for a dinner, a private tour, an event with an artist. It's the first of many steps.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I can do that.”

“You definitely can,” he said. “You got this.”

Braced by his encouragement, I dialed Diana's office as soon as I got back to my desk.

“Hi there. This is Caroline H— ah, Caroline Fairley,” I said, my maiden name an unexpected burst of sound in my mouth. It was nice to hear; nice to say. I hadn't said it in so long. “I'm following up on some emails I exchanged with Diana earlier in the week. She said I could go ahead and call.” Caroline Fairley, clueless petitioner.

A few moments later, someone picked up the line. “Hi, Caroline, this is Diana.”

Shit. Shit! I actually had her! What the hell did I do now? “Oh, hi, Diana; thank you for taking the time to speak with me. How are you?”

“Oh, you know…busy,” she said, a trace of humor in her voice.

“No kidding,” I said. “Just up to a few things here and there, right?”

“Just a few. So, I'm guessing somebody at your museum put you in charge of cultivating me as a donor because we went to school together, right?”

Well, then. Way to get directly to the point.

“Nailed it on the first try,” I said. “I'm assuming I'm far from the only alum you've heard from since the IPO.”

“And you'd be right about that.”

I briefly considered passing along Neil's headlamp comment, but I had no idea if her sense of humor would absorb that or find it appalling. “I'm sure at least half of us got referred over by Ajay. You may want to consider telling that guy you've changed your email.”

Her laugh was a low, rich sound. “No, it's fine. It's a good problem to have. And my assistant only forwards the things he knows I'll want to know more about.”

“I'm excited to have made the cut, then! What makes you want to know more about MASS MoCA?”

“I don't really understand much about art, but I'm interested in things that people make with their hands. My mom is a seamstress, and I used to love to watch her sew, because when she stopped working, she had made something that didn't exist before. Everything I do is so intangible.”

“Oh, I can completely understand that. But there's so much more to artwork than just craft. A good museum exhibit is even more than cool stuff to look at; it has a voice. It makes a point. That's why I think what we do at MASS MoCA is so important. Contemporary art is almost inextricable from the social and political issues of the time, and our work helps deepen people's understanding of those things. As well as offering new ways of seeing the world through the eyes of some of the most creative people out there.”

“Yeah, I can imagine. That's cool—shoot, I'm sorry, I've got another call coming in—ah, and my assistant just messaged me who it is. I've been trying to catch up with this guy for weeks. I'm sorry, Caroline, I'm going to have to call you back. Have a good one, okay?”

And then she was gone. But, but, I'd made contact at least, and she did not detest me. It had even seemed to be going well, before she was summoned away from my call.

Had a good convo with Diana,
I emailed to Neil.
Was going well but she had to jump off the call.

The first of many steps,
he responded.

And wasn't that just true of everything in my life these days?

If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

—John Steinbeck to his son Thom, November 10, 1958

Apparently, the first of my steps back to happiness with Adam was going to take place outdoors. “Wear workout clothes,” he'd said. “And a hat.”

“Adam. I don't want to have an adventure. I want to have a conversation. And that's it.”

“Adventure is overstating it.”

“If you're trying to take me hiking, so help me, I will leave you stranded in the middle of the forest.”

“It's not hiking.”

“Adam…”

“It's an experience. Just an experience. No gimmick. I actually think you'll enjoy this. Just humor me.”

And so, at ten o'clock on a hot Saturday morning in late August, I was pulling into the parking lot of the marina in Saugerties, New York, a small Hudson Valley town about halfway between Williamstown and the city. Despite Adam's refusal to give me any clues about the nature of what he had planned, the meeting location was a dead giveaway. He had chartered a sailboat for us, maybe with a lesson rolled in; but either way, there would certainly be a picnic lunch and some chilled white waiting for us on board.

The marina was located at the back corner of the town, on a deep creek that I assumed fed into the Hudson just a ways out of sight. Docked fishing skiffs and pontoon boats bobbed gently in the water in front of a row of small, colorful houses across the creek, while a group of kayaks sat in a tall rack near the launch ramp, their bright red bellies turned up to the sun. Adam was standing on a patch of lawn that sloped toward the water, deep in conversation with a bearded guy who had to be our captain for this…
experience
. Adam's knobby knees and furry calves protruded from the gray camouflage shorts that were his summer standard, and I swear, if my damn fool heart could have sprung itself out of my chest and galloped over the grass to meet him, it would have.

Instead, I tugged my baseball cap down to try to shade my face, and gave a deliberately lukewarm wave.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Adam said, reaching for my hand as I approached him. He only squeezed it briefly and let it go, though, for which I was grateful. I couldn't have handled it if he had tried to act like everything was normal. “This is Tim,” he said, gesturing at the boat captain. “Tim's sister works in advertising, too, just like Ruby, only we don't think it's the same agency. Tim's sister does those screaming goat ads.”

As rarely as Adam watched TV, I was willing to bet he'd never seen a screaming goat ad in his life; but he'd wanted Tim to feel proud that a stranger knew his sister's work. “Ruby lost her job,” I said quietly.

“Shit, are you serious? When?”

“A couple of weeks ago.” I didn't add that she'd been living with me ever since; apparently it was important to me not to let Tim the sailboat captain know that Adam and I were here trying to repair our broken marriage.

“Damn, that sucks. I'll ask around in case anybody knows someone. Well, all right, buddy, whatcha got for us today?” said Adam, and Tim stepped toward the rack of kayaks. I peered behind it, as if the sailboat might be lurking there, but then Tim pulled forward a larger, double-seated kayak that was resting on the grass.

“Here she is,” he said, patting the front of the big plastic shell. “Now, if you've ever taken out a single kayak before, a tandem is not a whole lot different, but…”

His voice slid into a rumbling drone as my brain belatedly absorbed the situation: There was no sailboat. In spite of myself, I'd sort of been looking forward to the prospect of a nice sail down the river, with the wind tugging my hair and the wake sloshing below my feet as the hull sliced through the sunlit water. Instead, I was going to be trapped inside an oversized plastic kazoo, with only my own arm power and Adam's to propel us along the river. Which, no offense to Adam, was not exactly a V-8 engine. I had been kayaking a couple of times before; it had left me with sore shoulders, a sunburn, and a raw spot on my thumb from the paddle. And this was Adam's wonderful idea?

“So remember,” Tim was saying, “dig in and pull back to go forward; reverse it to stop or back up. And that's about all there is to it. Why don't you guys do a last round of sunscreen, and I'll go grab your life vests.”

“Seems pretty straightforward, right?” said Adam. “I think we can handle this.”

I jabbed a finger at the object resting at my feet. “What is this?”

“This is a tandem kayak. Like Tim just said. Do you want the front or the back?”

“This is not a kayak, it's a metaphor,” I said. “We are literally in it together.”

He beamed with pride that I'd caught on so quickly. “And we have to steer it in cooperation with each other. Completely in sync. A little push, a little pull, fighting the tide to stay on course. Battling the elements. Relying on each other—”

“OH MY GOD,” I yelled. “You are ridiculous.”

“I can keep going; I've got a bunch more lined up.”

“No!”

“Just two little people, bobbing in the middle of a great big river…sure, turn your back so I can't see you laughing, that will work. Also, I love you.”

It had always been an effort to stay mad at Adam, and I was horrified to find him chipping away at me even now. This was a catastrophic thing he'd done, and my anger was my only armor against the pain of it. And yet, wasn't the whole point of this supposed to be repairing the damage?

“I'll sit in the front. I don't trust you to lead. How's that for metaphor?”

“You need me, though. You've only got one paddle.”

“Shut up, Adam.”

Adam's kayaking gambit had been a play of pure diabolical genius. I was trapped with him, reliant on him, and I couldn't carry on a serious conversation with him because I couldn't make eye contact unless I twisted awkwardly around in my seat.

“You're sitting stern?” Tim said to Adam, as he saw us off. “That's good, you're a little bigger. You guys will move best if you're in sync, so watch how she paddles and try to follow her lead.”

“That's the plan,” said the Boy Scout, kicking excitedly at his footpads inside the kayak to draw my attention to Tim's words.

“Did you pay him to say that?” I said, as we set off into the creek.

“No,” said Adam. “This metaphor is actually just that damn good.”

The metaphor was also good—good for Adam, that is—because this was the kind of thing we excelled at. Challenging cooperative tasks had never fazed us. We were a couple that could survive a trip to IKEA without a single cross word. I guess it was a combination of our personalities, the deep reserve of patience we kept toward each other, and Adam's unquenchable compulsion to entertain me; but the fact of it was, we just…got along. So while I was far from ready to forgive him, I wasn't going to make his stupid kayak trip a nightmare purely out of spite.

We followed the creek toward the river, gliding along the water with the only sounds the soft
splish
of our paddles and the occasional bird cry. Reeds swayed along the banks of the creek, and a light breeze pushed some patchy clouds across the sky, barely scattering the heat that hung in the air. As the creek opened up to the river, we passed a beautiful gable-roofed brick lighthouse at the end of a spit of land. Its tall, graceful windows looked like they had seen a thing or two in their time.

“Do you have anything to say about that?” I said, gesturing at the lighthouse with my paddle. “A beacon in the night that warns of danger? To keep sailors from crashing on unseen shoals beneath the waves?”

The kayak wobbled from side to side in the wake from a distant boat. From the stern, there was nothing but silence.

“Yeah, I thought so,” I said, dipping my paddle in again. “So, we're at the river. What now?”

“Let's just explore for a while.”

“All right, Ahab. Tell me where you want to go.”

We paddled across, then down, then back. We had a few moments of excitement when I spotted an approaching motorboat and worried we wouldn't get out of its path in time, but we dug at the water just like Tim had told us, and sped smoothly away.

“It takes more than you to scare the Hammonds!” Adam yelled at the passing boat, brandishing his paddle.

With my back to him, it was safe to smile.

It was pretty wild, floating in the middle of the Hudson. I'd grown up next door to this river, driven over it and under it more times than I could imagine, but I'd never been in it. As much as I hated to admit it, one of Adam's metaphors was right: It made me feel tiny, bobbing in my plastic kazoo amid the waves and the current, with the forested escarpment on the east bank and the blue mounds of the Catskills rising to the west.
We were here so very long before you, Caroline,
they all said.
And we will be here ever after.

“I'm feeling my insignificance in the face of nature's majesty,” I said to Adam. “What is my lesson here?”

“That if it ever gets rough out here, you're going to want somebody else to help you pull,” he said quietly. “I'm good at it.”

Sharp, sudden tears stung my eyes. “But you stopped pulling. You jumped ship. No, fuck that, you fucking capsized me! I need to know you will never do it again.”

“Never, sweetheart. I will never do it again.”

It was a promise, and like any other, it came with a choice for the person who was promised to: Believe it, or not. I dug around inside myself for the trust to believe my husband and came up only with crumbs. But at least they were something.

“I want to go back,” I said, wiping my eyes with my thumbs. “I'm hot and I'm hungry and I'm incredibly tired of metaphors.”

“Rear engine powering up,” said Adam.

When Tim saw us approaching, he ambled across the lawn, waving. “How'd you guys do?” he said, as he caught the bow of the kayak and dragged it onto the launch ramp. “Pretty smooth working together to get around? I didn't want to tell you before you set out, but in kayak circles we like to call tandems divorce boats.”

Never has a jocular wink been so poorly received.

“No divorcing in this here boat,” said Adam. “Not on my watch.”

As it turned out, I hadn't been completely wrong about the elements of Adam's
experience;
there actually was a picnic involved. Back across the creek toward town was a small waterfront park, with a shady slope that eased down to a beach where kids played and splashed. Adam hauled a huge cooler I'd never seen before out of the trunk of his car—not the yellow hatchback this time—and thumped it down on a picnic table with a grunt. From it, he unloaded grapes, dried apricots, a sumptuous array of cheeses and a crusty baguette to go with them, fig spread, apple chutney, a stick of my favorite spicy salami, a crisp green bottle of dry Riesling and, the finishing touch, a small bouquet of dahlias as splashy as a miniature sunset.

“Wow, the deluxe ‘Make My Wife Forgive Me' package from Zabar's, huh?”

He ignored me and focused on unwrapping a wedge of Humboldt Fog. “So how come Ruby lost her job all of a sudden?”

“She lost her two biggest accounts to a competitor firm,” I said. “Two days after her boyfriend dumped her.”

“Oh damn, poor kid. That absolutely blows. How's she holding up?”

“She's great. The boyfriend wasn't the love of her life, and she's doing some freelance work while she looks for something new. She's been staying with me, actually.”

Adam shot me a quick look. He knew perfectly well what Ruby's assessment of him in the present situation would be, and how vocally she would air it. “That's nice that you guys are having some time together. I think you and I are going to need our space once I come home, though.”

“I'm sure she'll be gone by then.”

He offered me a slice of bread with a kingly hunk of cheese. “Have you had any luck finding a counselor?”

“Yeah—Farren gave me the name of the person her son was seeing.”

This time his face came all the way up. “You told
Farren
?”

“She's my friend, so, yes. I wanted to hear what she had to say.”

“Which was what?”

“That divorce is hell and I should do everything I can to stay married, including forgiving you for cheating on me.”

His smile was small, wry, and completely Adam. “Please give me her address so I can send her a few skids of her favorite treat.”

“Just make the Blaster hand-deliver her next paint order in a pair of Calvins, that will do it.”

At the thought of Jonathan, heat flooded my face. I was going to have to tell Adam. I had to, or I was nothing better than a hypocrite. But the problem was, if I told him now, he would turn it into
See? You cheated TOO!
As if my kissing my closest friend out of pain and soul-crushing need that Adam himself had created were equivalent to his carrying on a three-month affair because he was…curious.

Since I had decided to work through this with him, I'd mostly tried to push the specifics out of my mind until we had a neutral third party to help us unpack it all. But there was something that had been bothering me, itching at my mind like a scratchy tag at the back of a shirt.

I took a sip of wine to fortify myself for the question. “So, I have to ask you something.”

“Sure, sweetheart,” he said. Carefree. Like a man who had nothing in the world to withhold.

“I saw Patrick a couple of weeks ago, and—”

Adam's knife skidded sideways and clattered to the table. “You did
what
?”

I set my wine cup down and laced my hands together in my lap with forced calm. “I was desperate to understand this, Adam. You refused to explain it to me even a little bit.”