The Divorce Party (2 page)

When he walked in, she was by the front door. She was wearing a long, purple sweater. She had her hair in a bun. She reached for him, and he buried into her neck, smelled her.

“How was town?” she asked, her hand still on his chest. “I tried to pick up news on the radio, but there was no reception. Is there a town left?”

He didn’t answer her, but he was looking at her strangely. And he knew that she knew he was looking at her strangely. It was as simple as this: he could see her. For the first time in a year, there was nowhere else he was trying to be.

Which brought him to his own questions: Why did it take fear to move him? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?

He wanted to ask her his questions, but he wasn’t sure she would have good answers, and then he would change his mind, and he didn’t want to change his mind. He wanted to stay this sure.

Later, only thirty hours since he had last been lying there, they were lying on the floor together, facing each other. And in that strange way that we make decisions, the important decisions that ultimately make us, Champ decided that they were going to stay in Montauk full time. No more New York City. This had become their home.

He turned and looked outside at the slowly recovering world. At the backlit colors in the sky, on his lawn. And he knew the truth. The main truth, at least. This house had saved them. This big, beautiful cottage, which stayed big and beautiful despite the destruction all around. Its stern banisters and wood ceilings and determined rafters. The house had saved him, and he wasn’t going to forget it.

He was going to build his life here, right here, in the name of love and honor and whatever else he was feeling, even if he couldn’t name it for what it was: exhaustion.

He was, finally, exhausted.

He looked Anna right in the eye. “Things are going to be different,” he said.

She nodded.

“I’m staying,” he said, because they’d talked about the opposite, earlier, before—his leaving her, and here.

“Why?” she said.

“I want to,” he said.

She got quiet. “You’re going to disappoint me,” she said.

“Probably.” He was trying to make a joke, but it didn’t come out that way. He tried again. “I think it’s going to turn out okay,” he said.

“Starting when?” she asked. “Ending when?”

Then, as if it were an answer, he pulled her in close to him, without reluctance, without anything like fear. “This house,” he said, “will see love. This house will see everything.”

Part one

regrets only

Brooklyn, New York, 69 years later

Maggie

This is the truth, as far as she can see it: there are some things you should never talk about, and money is definitely one of them. Maggie is starting to understand this, in the way she often comes to understand the things that she wrongly believed she already had a handle on. No one wants to talk about money— whether you have very little or have a lot and feel slightly guilty about your lot in life, especially when it has been handed down to you, like bright red hair or childbearing hips, or the awful midnight disease that keeps its inheritors up all hours thinking about money and love and every other thing we, as human people, have never really meant to get to the bottom of.

Here’s the point. Maggie doesn’t sleep. Not since she and Nate moved to Red Hook, not since they plopped down every penny they have (and many that they don’t have) into this fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartment, and—more critically— the two thousand square feet beneath it. The two thousand square feet that will be the home of their restaurant. She has never done anything like this—never made such a commitment to staying in one place. It isn’t her strong suit. She knows this about herself—knows that a stranger would know this about her—just from looking at how she has organized her life: becoming a journalist, a food writer, straight out of college, living in eight cities in the eight years since. Spending time in well over thirty.

And while she really wants to open this restaurant—has dreamed of having a restaurant the entire time she has been writing about other people’s—they don’t go away all at once: money fears, fears of sitting still. She has thirty years of experience keeping those fears close to her. And now, in spite of herself, they are fighting to stay close, every time she tries to close her eyes.

So what does she do instead? She stares out the window. She plays her guitar. She reads Mediterranean cookbooks and waters the plants on the fire escape. She hums. She cleans. She imagines.

She thinks about Nate, lets the image of him in her mind wash over her, calm her. And though she has significant proof that her fiancé doesn’t share her proclivity for sleeplessness— or endless worrying—she never suspected that he was so far on the other end of the money spectrum from her until now, when she comes across a pile of envelopes marked CHAMP NATHANIEL HUNTINGTON, in the middle of tonight’s extensive, very unsatisfying cleaning spree.

Gross. It’s gross to talk about money. But try to imagine. Maggie is sitting cross-legged in a white tank top and her Hello Kitty underwear in the middle of the living room floor surrounded by every paper and newspaper and old file and receipt and tax return that she could get her hands on. She is throwing it out, all of it out, and listening to Neil Young’s
Harvest
on the record player and feeling like she is getting somewhere with her life. She is learning this is another side effect of her newfound insomnia: you often feel like you are getting somewhere with your life, until you rub your eyes, force yourself to focus, and realize you aren’t at all far from where you started.

Maggie takes a deep stretch and reaches two feet in front of her, and there they are: a pile of envelopes with the CITIGROUP SMITH BARNEY logo on the front addressed to Champ Nathaniel Huntington. She removes the rubber band holding them together, and gets ready to open the first envelope. It doesn’t occur to her to do otherwise. She isn’t looking for information. She is looking for the opposite of information. She wants to find out that the Citigroup stuff is junk mail, and add the envelopes to her third filled garbage bag of recycling. And then she wants to take those bags and toss them into the alley behind Pioneer Street, into the hippo-sized trash cans waiting there for the New York City Department of Sanitation to take away.

This is the goal—to have their apartment in something like working order before they leave for Nate’s parents’ place out in Montauk later today, before they leave for his parents’ for a reason she doesn’t even want to think about, one she has been trying to avoid thinking about.

Nate’s parents’ divorce party.

Over the last several weeks—since she found out that they were going home to see Nate’s family, since she found out
why
they were going—she’s been tripping up, referring to it in her own head as an anniversary party. How could she not? A divorce party? What does this even mean?

Back in North Carolina, the closest she came to a divorce party was Loretta Pitt throwing Henry Pitt’s things out of their third-floor bedroom window. Clothes and hats and dress shoes falling like snowflakes, like bricks. To music. Madonna, if Maggie’s remembering.
The Immaculate Collection.

But according to the tasteful green and white invitation her future in-laws sent them—according to the half dozen books that Nate’s mom, Gwyn, sent along with it, named things like
A Graceful Divorce
—a divorce party is an important and necessary rite of passage, an important and necessary way to celebrate
a peaceful end to a valued union.
Her future in-laws just happen to be peacefully ending theirs on the very day Maggie is meeting them for the first time.

Fabulous.

The only good news is that knowing this is what she is headed to puts a new fire in her belly to get her own house in order. (Who is she kidding? Not wanting to come back to an apartment that is even messier than it was
before
she started cleaning it is putting a new fire in her belly.) But just as she is tearing open the first Champ Nathaniel Huntington envelope, she turns to see Nate standing in the living room doorway.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

He is wearing a pair of boxer shorts, no T-shirt. Dark hair standing on top of his head. Green eyes shining at her. Yawning. It is only 8 A.M., and Nate was downstairs breaking apart walls with the contractor—Johnson the Contractor, as they call him, as Johnson calls himself—until well after 5 A.M.

“What am I doing?” she asks. “What are
you
doing? Why are you up already?”

He shrugs, starting to stretch. “I can’t sleep, I guess,” he says.

Can’t sleep? Nate can never
not
sleep. But here he is: walking barefoot across the floor, like proof that she is wrong, until he is standing directly above her. She follows his gaze as he checks out her endless piles of papers and newspapers, wrapped glasses and packs of wire hangers. She points to the open Fantastic bottle by her feet. She hadn’t used it yet, but it is there.

“What?” she says. “I’m cleaning.”

“I can tell,” he says. He smiles his smile, the one that goes all the way to each ear, opening up his whole face, making him look younger and older at once. The first time she saw it, he was across the table from her at a farmer’s market in San Francisco. They were both searching through a pile of heirloom tomatoes. Dozens of tomatoes. He picked up a large yellow one with thin black ridges, smiled, and tossed it across the table to her. Somehow, she managed to catch it.
That’s the best one there is,
he said.

And what were you going to say if I’ d dropped it?
she asked.

He looked down at the table, looked at all the tomatoes left.
I had about forty-nine more chances,
he said,
for things to go my way.

“Maggie,” he says, now gingerly pushing her piles out of the way, as if they were truly piles, and sitting down across from her, so that their knees are touching, so that his hands are holding her bare thighs.

“What?”

“Please tell me you haven’t been doing this all night,” he says.

“Why? Someone has to.”

“Yes, but . . .” He wipes something off her face, maybe newspaper markings, maybe ink or dirt. “Hopefully someone who is actually getting somewhere with it.”

Maggie looks away from him, tries to stop her face from turning red. He isn’t making fun of her—or he is, but only because he wants her to make fun of herself. She can’t, though, not exactly. She still harbors this idea, in the small place inside of herself that justifies her
Real Simple
subscription and the $250.00-plus tax she paid for her Bissel Healthy Home super-vacuum, that one day she will become the type of woman who is good at making things neat, beautiful, brand new.

She is good at other things—has already organized the entire computer and accounting system for the restaurant; feels more than confident about her ability to manage the front room once they open, her ability to run the bar.

But as fate would have it, she is marrying a man who has in him more of the woman she wants to be than she ever will. Nate is the best cook she has ever known, a natural cleaner, a builder. He keeps jars of fresh herbs on the kitchen counter. He carved their ratty rafters into a dining room table. He makes everything he touches beautiful. Even—though Maggie never imagined she’d feel this way—her.

She moves onto Nate’s lap, wrapping her legs around his waist, her hand reaching around to rub his back. He is sticky, sticky from sleep and last night’s sweat. She doesn’t care. She could live like this. She smiles, and kisses him—his soft bottom lip, meeting hers, holding her there.

“What were you thinking about that you couldn’t sleep?” she asks him. “How you don’t want to marry me because I can’t clean?”

“I want to marry you more because you can’t clean.”

“Terrible liar,” she says.

“Terrible cleaner,” he says.

He buries into her neck until she feels his smile press against her, his hands making his way under her panties—which is when she looks down at the floor, and her eyes catch them again. The pile of CITIGROUP SMITH BARNEY envelopes. The ones addressed to Champ Nathaniel Huntington.

“Hey, Nate,” she says, over his shoulder. “Who is Champ Huntington, by the way?”

As soon as the words are out, she feels his body stiffen. And when he pulls back from her, slightly, she sees a bad look—one she doesn’t recognize—come over his face.

“What did you just ask me?”

She reaches for the envelopes and hands them to him. “I just found these. Are they yours? Are they bank statements or something? I didn’t know we had a bank account there. Do we?”

He looks down at the envelopes, flips them over in his hand, and nods. “Kind of.”

This makes sense to her. They have “kind of” accounts open all over the city now, different accounts from many different institutions—lending them too little money at too high interest, all for the restaurant. Eight out of ten restaurants fail within the first year. Six out of ten marriages fail sometime after that. They are playing with some dangerous odds, if she lets herself think of any of this as playing. She tries not to.

“But who’s Champ?”

He looks from the envelopes, up at Maggie’s face. “I am,” he says.

She starts to laugh, assuming that he is kidding. “Okay. Something you forgot to tell me about, Sport? I mean
Champ
?”

He smiles, but it is a nervous smile, and he doesn’t say anything. He puts the envelopes down.

“Wait, you’re serious? Your name is Champ?”

“No, my grandfather’s name is Champ. Or was Champ. And I was named after him, but I’ve never used his name a day in my life. No one’s ever called me Champ, but it is my official birth name. Champ Nathaniel Huntington.”

Maggie knew that Nate was named after his grandfather, the one on his father’s side, but she assumed that his name was Nate. She assumed it because Nate never told her otherwise.