The Divorce Party (7 page)

She never saw Moses again. She did what she had to do. She threw herself back into her house, her home, back into Thomas in the ways she still could. She threw out the shorts. She only let herself cry for Moses once. This doesn’t make her anyone’s hero. This is just what you do. When you put a marriage first. When you remember what you promised. When you want to remember and make it count.

“Have you seen my cell phone, by the way?” Thomas turns toward her, putting his hand on the back of her seat. “I was sure I packed it, but I got to California and couldn’t find it anywhere.”

Gwyn squeezes the steering wheel. “No, I haven’t seen it.”

“Are you sure? I don’t think I brought it with me.”

“Are you expecting me to change my mind if you ask enough times?” she asks, harsher than she means to. She tries to think of a way to dial back, make it less aggressive. But this is how she feels toward Thomas—aggressive. This is what she is learning, how things shift inside when you hide the truth. They shift irreconcilably. She takes a deep breath in, forces herself to stay calm. “Maybe it will just show up.”

“How do you figure?”

She shrugs. “Lose something else, throw your keys out the window, and look for them instead. And, right then, when you really start looking for your keys, like under the bed, or in the backyard. Bam.”

“Bam?”

“There the cell phone will be.”

He smiles at her, really smiles at her, because he likes it when he thinks she is being weird, quirky. He finds it endearing, and she knows it reminds him of who he thinks she used to be, who he thinks she isn’t exactly anymore. But before she can enjoy it, the small return of affection, her cell phone starts to ring, PRIVATE coming up on the caller ID.

She motions for him to give her a minute, and picks it up. “This is Gwyn.”

“Ms. Lancaster?”

Lancaster. Her maiden name. So she knows immediately who it is. Eve. Eve, the Caterer. Finally. She has her on the phone. This is what she needed to make sure everything is on track for tonight.

Gwyn covers the receiver, sneaks a look at her husband. He is looking out the window, paying no attention to the conversation whatsoever.

“I just got your messages from this morning,” Eve says. “I’m sorry about that. I was surfing, and we had no cell phone coverage to speak of, but . . .”

But
. Gwyn stops listening, wants to hear the rest of what her husband is saying instead. “You know,” she says. “I’m going to have to call you back, okay?”

She flips the phone shut, turns back to her husband.

“Sorry, what were you saying?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I was just thinking . . . it must be something about the way we were talking . . . but I was thinking about those Saturday rides we used to take, those long rides. Something about this road, maybe. Something about the way you’re taking us home is making me think of it.”

She is silent.
Me too,
she could have said. Because she was thinking it too. She got there even before he did. But she doesn’t want to give him this. She doesn’t want to say anything.

“Do you remember the first time I taught you to drive a stick shift? We went out to McCully’s old vineyard. What ever happened to McCully? Do you think he’s still around? My God, you were so scared. Why were you so scared? You were such a natural at it. Well, once you could figure out the difference between first and third.”

And he laughs. She tries not to. She bites the inside of her lip and tries not to laugh too. This is the painful part. Love doesn’t leave you. Not all at once. It creeps back in, making you think it can be another way, that it can still be another way, and you have to remind yourself of the reasons that it probably won’t be.

“Thomas,” she says. “That was forever ago.”

“So you don’t remember?”

Third and fifth. The ones that she had trouble with were third and fifth. He had tried to talk to her about making an
H
—but she couldn’t seem to do it. And they had to pull over because they were laughing so loud. They couldn’t seem to communicate, but that was funny then.

“Gwyn?”

She hates him now. She actually may hate him. “I don’t want to,” she says.

Maggie

They are the very last stop.

It comes at almost three hours exactly. It comes after too many towns, too many abrupt stops and starts, too many tennis courts and Olympic-size swimming pools and horse farms named things like Happy Meadows or Spring Blossoms. It isn’t crowded, this late in September. But still, Maggie has been looking intently out the window and is able to gauge it in quick bursts, the weirdness of the Hamptons, beyond these obvious excesses: the daughter-and-mom duo in their matching yellow Juicy sweatsuits, a caravan of antique convertibles driven by teenage boys, an ice cream parlor for dogs.

But then, after the East Hampton stop, something seems to change—the universe course-correcting itself. Suddenly the roads and towns become more like beach towns that Maggie remembers from growing up: fewer fancy SUVs, more swaying trees and empty spaces.

Clapboard houses that look lived in.

By the time they pull into Montauk’s town center, into the bus station, Maggie is looking forward to checking out Nate’s hometown, wants to breathe in the sea air, breathe in the beach. But the windows won’t open. It isn’t an option. So she closes her eyes and waits.

Nate leans in and kisses her cheek, then kisses her right below the jaw. “We’re here,” he says.

“That’s something,” she says.

He smiles. “That is something.”

She takes his hand, squeezes. She is trying. She is really trying to let the day start again, right here, when she needs it the most.

And by the time they step off the bus, Murph is already out of sight. Maggie decides to take this as the first good sign. The second one is that, as soon as Maggie is on solid ground and gets a look around, she feels intrigued by the town around her.

Montauk isn’t what she expected—it feels less like she’s walked into a beach town and more like she’s walked into a ghost town: an empty police station and a closed-down restaurant, a sign for the Memory Motel out ahead of them, and in the distance, just a peek of ocean.

“You ready for this?” Nate says, as she looks around. “Because, if not, this thing turns itself around in about twenty minutes. We’ll head back to New York City. Be home in time to watch the sun go down.”

“Be home in time to watch
Weeds
?” she says.

“Even be home in time to buy a television to watch it on,” he says. “Just tell me when you’re ready to get out of here.”

She steps on his tiptoes, and whispers softly into his ear. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

And he reaches for her, because he thinks she is flirting a little. And part of her is—the part of her that is trying to overpower the other part, the part that wants to scream:
I am ready now! Because it is all starting to feel manageable again between
us, to feel something like normal, and just when that happens today,I seem to get struck down worse. I hear about you having sex in mansion/high schools with padded bathtubs.

But she takes a deep breath, and follows him across the street to the small parking lot next to John’s Pancake House, where they are supposed to meet his sister. There is a small taffy stand outside the restaurant, a group of teenagers in matching green Windbreakers with S.H.S. WEATHER CLUB written on the back, standing around sipping sodas and eating taffy. Maybe they are on a class trip. Maggie doesn’t know, but she feels a longing to be among them, to have access to the day ahead of them: sticky candy, and conversations about water currents, and a bus ride back to wherever they’re coming from.

Only before she can think too much about it, one of the girls, who Maggie assumes is with them, steps out from behind the hood of a dirty gray Volvo wagon, revealing the pregnant bulge in her belly.

Her stomach is a dead giveaway, even if she weren’t identical to the most recent photo on their refrigerator: same pink streaks running through her blond hair, wearing an X-large NOFX tank top and faded jeans, wearing Nate’s eyes.

Georgia. In the photograph, she was cradling her stomach. Now, she is cradling a three-pound plastic sand bucket of saltwater taffy in both of her hands. And when she looks up, she is sucking on one of the pinkish-green strands, like it is a cigarette, like it is the last cigarette on earth.

“Nathaniel,” she says. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” he says.

Which is when she turns to Maggie.

“And you’re here!”

Maggie waves hip-side—small, shy—and Nate drops his bag, letting go of her hand and moving toward his sister.

He bends down to give her a hug, an overly gentle hug, as though he’ll break her. Maggie laughs, knowing this is what he is worried about, and because it is so nice to watch him with Georgia. Even with her huge stomach, even holding on to that huge taffy tub, she looks so small next to Nate. She looks like she belongs to him.

When Georgia pulls away, she holds out her hand for Maggie, who takes it.

“I’m glad to meet you,” Maggie says.

“I’m glad to meet you too,” she says. “You don’t smoke by chance, do you?”

“No, she doesn’t, Georgia,” Nate says.

“Was I talking to you? I was asking
Maggie
.”

“And I am telling you that Maggie doesn’t.”

Georgia turns back to Maggie. “No one is asking anyone to give me one. But someone’s going to have to smoke a cigarette for me. Sometime soon. And I thought maybe you looked up to the task?”

Maggie smiles at her. “I’m not sure if that is a compliment, but I can do that.”

“Excellent.”

“Can you not attempt to kill my girlfriend as soon as you meet her?” Nate says.

Georgia rolls her eyes, and she rolls them again in case he missed it. Then she hands Nate the keys, and opens the backseat door for herself. “You can drive. I’m lying down in the back with my tub o’ candy.” She pauses, points her finger at him. “But I feel the need to warn you that if you tell me I’m huge, or that I’m growing, or that I look anything but like the most gorgeous pregnant person you’ve ever seen, I’m going to toss this candy at you. Even if it runs us off the road.”

Nate opens the passenger side door for Maggie, winking at her. “So maybe this isn’t the best time to say that you look like a house?”

Georgia slams Nate in the arm with the taffy, and Maggie starts to laugh. “Any brothers?” Georgia asks.

Maggie shakes her head. “I wish.”

Georgia pulls on her taffy, throws a piece at her brother, hitting him on the arm. “Really? Even now?”

“Less so,” she says, and they all get in the car: Nate and Maggie up front. But instead of lying down like she said she was going to, Georgia wraps her hand around the back of the driver’s seat, and sticks her head between the two front seats.

“So we need to talk, Nate,” she says.

“You don’t waste any time,” he says.

He is just pulling out of the parking space, and down the main street of town: restaurants and surfing stores appearing on Maggie’s left, the beach and ocean getting larger on her right until she can hear the water, feel its breeze.

“Well, if you ever called back your
pregnant
sister, I wouldn’t be so anxious. But you need to be prepared. You need to be prepared before we get back to the house. It’s like the twilight zone around here.”

Maggie immediately feels uncomfortable, like she shouldn’t be present for this. So she rolls down the window, tries to listen to whatever is happening outside.

But Georgia taps her on the shoulder. “Can you close that? I need you to hear me. Because I’m going to need you for backup.”

“For what?” Maggie asks.

“For when Nate pretends this isn’t a big deal, and you’re going to have to help me convince him that it is.”

Nate looks at her in the rearview mirror. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, for one thing, Dad is like a huge Buddhist.”

“A huge Buddhist?” Nate laughs. “I don’t think you can be a huge Buddhist.”

“It has become his
whole
life, Nate. There is nothing else he wants to talk about. Like when I miss Denis or something, he keeps telling me to live in the present moment. To let myself be present. It’s all I can do to not say, ‘
Presently
you are being a total ass.’ ”

“Georgia . . .” Nate says.

“Mom is not acting like herself either,” she continues. “They say this divorce is amicable, but they both seem like they swallowed a box of pills to get there.”

Nate is quiet, as they drive out of town and up into the hills. He points to a structure no bigger than a dot, far out in the distance. “We used to jump off that bridge when we were kids. You can’t see it clearly from here, but there’s this great roof on the top—”

“Nate! Come on, man!” Georgia says. “You’re not even listening to me. Please listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” he says. “But this is what Dad
and
Mom want, remember? Don’t you want that for them? We’re not kids anymore. And they’re definitely not. Maybe you should be focusing on your own . . . situation.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Because I’m not married, Denis and I could fall apart at any minute?” She drills Nate with a dirty look, as if he is missing everything, and turns to Maggie. “You understand what I’m saying, right, Maggie? You understand this isn’t good?”

“Which part?” Maggie asks.

“How fucked up things are about to get,” she says.

Maggie watches Nate turn on the blinker, fights her urge to ask him why he is not chiming in—why he seems to have no opinion about any of this? Why he seems not only calm, but, also, unbelievably . . . removed.

But before she can say a thing, Nate takes another right into an area called Ditch Plains: small cabana houses, a low-rise condominium, the beach and ocean out before them. And then they are heading toward it, heading to a street marked PRIVATE: a threat of prosecution if they drive through. Nate does anyway, driving all the way down the road—past several long driveways and high gates—until he has arrived at the farthest one, a small rock in front of the drive with white paint on it, reading: HUNTINGTON HALL.