The Island (36 page)

India put Band-Aids on the cuts and ice packs on the bruises; she made pots of spaghetti and meatballs to feed the voracious appetites; she played classical music and took baths and read Jane Austen novels and refused to get involved. She could see the whole thing headed for disaster, but she followed a policy of nonintervention.
Why?
she wondered now. Anyone in the world could see that Bill was sick, that he needed a shrink and meds, and that the whole family needed counseling. What was keeping India from getting help? It was the Main Line, things were genteel and lovely—dogwoods flowering and croquet on close-cut lawns—but despite appearances, India knew other families who had hit rough patches. She could easily have found support. Was it inertia? Eternal optimism? Fear? Looking back, India believed that what she was suffering from in those days was apathy. She didn’t care enough to step in. She wasn’t motivated to save her husband. Was this possible? India had loved Bill with ridiculous ardor. He was her sun, her first thought in the morning, her last at night. But it was safe to say that by 1993 or 1994, she was worn down. The kids were giant, alien creatures who drank milk straight from the container and masturbated all over the sheets without bothering to hide it or clean it up; they watched horror movies and played lacrosse and fielded long, secret phone calls from girls they met while prowling the punk shops on South Street. And rather than get caught up in the who, where, when, how, and why, India took a step back.

In the fall of 1994, Bill had an affair with Teddy’s math teacher, Adrienne Devine. From practically the beginning of the school year, Teddy had been failing trigonometry. The notices came home, and India addressed them with Teddy. Teddy said trig was stupid, it was nothing he would ever need to know, he had tried to drop the class but was told he needed it to graduate. India pointed out that not only did he need it to graduate but if he wanted to go to a good college, then he needed to get a decent grade, an A or a B.

He claimed he couldn’t do it. India passed the buck to Bill.

You handle this,
she said. Personally, she agreed with Teddy: trigonometry was stupid and useless.

Bill went in to meet the math teacher, Adrienne Devine, a hundred-pound, dark-haired twenty-four-year-old beauty, right out of the graduate teaching program at Columbia. When Bill came home and India asked how it went, Bill said, “I can’t believe they have someone like her teaching those boys.”

India didn’t ask what Bill meant by this; she assumed the problem was dealt with, and indeed, Teddy’s marks in math improved.

The affair, as it was later explained to India, started shortly after the parent-teacher conference, with Bill calling Adrienne Devine at home and telling her he would like to come to her apartment to make love to her. Adrienne Devine, without hesitation, said yes. There had been a spark between them at the conference. She was intrigued by the fact that Bill was a sculptor.

(Intrigued by the fact that Bill was a sculptor? Surely she could do better than that? But no. She was so young, she didn’t know any of his work.)

The affair continued, as many afternoons as they could manage, through the fall, through the holidays, into the new year.

Bill told India about the affair in January during a trip to Sweden. The City of Stockholm had offered Bill a commission for a series of pieces. It was the largest and most lucrative commission Bill had received in years. India knew he was bothered by the fact that from now on, most of his new work would be installed overseas, but that was how it was shaking out. His popularity was waning at home; he should have been grateful it was burgeoning in nations like Dubai and Thailand and Sweden, where having a Bill Bishop was considered a sign of American prestige (albeit one that Americans would find outdated—like a gold Rolex or a Cadillac).

On that trip to Sweden, Bill should have been energized and driven, but instead he seemed listless and sad. India asked him, innocently, what was wrong, and he told her about the affair.

India took the news quietly at first. She was curious about the details, and Bill was happy to provide them, though they weren’t interesting because Adrienne Devine wasn’t interesting—she was a twenty-four-year-old math teacher. The affair was about youth and sex; it was about anger against India and anger against Teddy. Bill was showing Teddy who was boss by screwing his math teacher. Were men really so stupid and shallow? India supposed they were. India realized that although she loved Bill, she had lost respect for him. It had been happening for years.

Indeed, the most upsetting thing about the affair was that Teddy hadn’t learned any math; Adrienne Devine was giving him passing grades because of Bill.

Clearly, Bill expected a bigger reaction from his wife, and not getting a big reaction—or any reaction at all, really—embittered him. What could India say? She wasn’t surprised. When she married Bill Bishop, she had expected that he would have affairs. He was a man with enormous appetites. That he had not had affairs before this was something that pleasantly surprised her. That he was having an affair now only made him predictable. She told him as much as they waited on the subway platform. He slapped her. She stared at him, and the Swedes stared at him, though no one intervened.

She whispered, “You’re a coward, Bill.” And she walked away.

She found her own hotel room for that night, and when she returned to their original hotel the next day, she found Bill in bed, naked, drunk, weeping. She realized, when she walked into the room, that this was exactly what she had expected.

In October, when Bill went to Bangkok to discuss a commission for the king of Thailand’s summer palace, India stayed home. The affair with the math teacher had ended months before, but the aftereffects were toxic. The marriage was a shambles; India had basically moved into the guest room, her “sanctuary,” and Bill often slept in his studio, and their bed became a surface where they stacked laundry and books and magazines and newspapers. They had gone to Tuckernuck that summer and they had been happy in the way that they were always happy on Tuckernuck—but when they returned to Pennsylvania, it was as if a storm cloud settled over their house. In September, Billy left for Princeton, and while India missed him, having him out of the house was a relief. Teddy and Ethan were both playing football, and they got home so whupped and exhausted they didn’t have the energy to beat up on each other. The house was eerily quiet. There was no conversation.

When Bill told India about the Thai commission, she was happy for him, but she said she would not go along. He begged her please; he wasn’t doing well. Right, she knew he wasn’t doing well. He had gained twenty pounds, he wasn’t exercising, he was drinking too much. He had missed all of the football games without so much as an apology to the kids. India knew it was time for an ultimatum. Either he went to a shrink, or she was moving out. She needed to do something to galvanize the man, make him snap out of his funk, respond, act like a human being. But India didn’t issue an ultimatum. She let him be. After all, she wasn’t depressed. She had friends and lunches, and the boys to look after; she had her me-myself time, and plenty of personal space. She would not go to Bangkok because, quite simply, she didn’t want to. She was sick and tired of being Bill Bishop’s wife; she couldn’t stomach a week in a hotel room alone with Bill; she couldn’t stand to be that close to his mood swings. She was looking forward to Bill being gone. She was throwing a catered dinner for twelve women friends one night, and on a different night she was hosting a bonfire and pig roast for the entire Malvern Prep football team. India was looking forward to both events and the serene evenings that would surround them. She was looking forward to living in her house without fearing Bill, stalking the premises like a tiger.

He came into the guest room the night before he was to leave. It was late; India was asleep. She was frightened when she opened her eyes and saw his form looming over her like an intruder.

She said, “Bill?”

He didn’t speak.

She said, “Bill, what’s wrong?”

He climbed into bed with her and took her from behind. India and Bill had made love only a few times since returning from Tuckernuck, and a couple of those times, Bill had suffered from impotence. India remembered the sex that night as being thrilling in a twisted way; it had felt like sex with a stranger. She had lain in bed afterward, breathless and sweating, thinking,
My God.

Bill, however, had started weeping. For such a big, powerful man, he cried like a child.

She said, “What’s wrong?”

He said, “Come to Bangkok with me, please, India. I’m not going to make it on my own.”

She shushed him, cradled his head, stroked his mane of hair. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Just fine.” She didn’t voice any other thoughts—for example, that it would be good for them to have some time apart—because she didn’t want to patronize him. She felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t wait for him to go.

She took him to the airport. She waited with him at the gate. She kissed him good-bye as they used to kiss good-bye when they were younger—slowly, with tongue. He didn’t seem to want to separate. She had to push him away; she remembered giving him a little shove. He handed the flight attendant his ticket; he disappeared into the mouth of the Jetway.

She remembered feeling free.

He waited until the final day. Quite possibly—India had to take this into account—it was the prospect of returning home that set him off. His trip, after all, had been a success: He had met the king of Thailand, he’d discussed his sketches with a team of the king’s landscape architects and his cultural attaché, he had been paid in full and given the royal treatment—a dinner cruise down the Chao Phraya River on the king’s yacht, a private tour of Wat Po, Wat Arun, and the palace that contained the Emerald Buddha. He had been given a suite at the Oriental Hotel, where so many distinguished men had stayed before him: Kipling, Maugham, Joseph Conrad. Bill had also found time to venture into the underbelly of the Patpong neighborhood, where he found a prostitute and bought a handgun. The prostitute may have been his for the whole week, but the gun he saved for the last day. He paid the girl, dismissed her, and then shot himself in the head.

The butlers stationed outside of his suite heard the noise and knocked for entrance. They knocked and knocked and knocked, then entered with their own key.

A secretary of the king’s called India at home. It was three o’clock in the morning. The catered dinner party for twelve women had ended only a couple of hours earlier. It had been a tremendous success, one of the most enjoyable evenings of India’s life: the food had been delicious, the table had looked beautiful bathed in candlelight and swathed in linen, there had been good music—Carole King, Paul Simon, old Beatles—and too much wine—champagne, Meursault, syrah. The women had departed reluctantly, with hugs, vowing it was the best dinner party they had ever attended. India had cleaned up alone with loud Van Morrison playing. She had finished the wine and smoked cigarettes.

When the phone rang, she knew it was tragedy. She thought maybe one of the boys—both of whom were at sleepovers—had drunk himself into a coma. Or one of the women from the party had lost control of her car and killed herself or someone else. India didn’t understand the heavily accented voice on the other line at first, but eventually she got it. She got it: Bill was dead. He’d shot himself.

*   *   *

It had been like falling into a well. Dark, cold, wet, scary, hopeless. Bill was dead. He’d killed himself. India remembered rising from bed, taking a handful of Advil, making a pot of coffee. Calling Birdie in Connecticut and sounding calm.
Bill is dead.
Birdie said she was on her way. She would stay and take care of the boys. India would go to Bangkok.

She didn’t remember the flight; she didn’t remember the cab from the airport to the hotel or what Bangkok had looked like out the window. She did, ridiculously, remember the outfits the bellmen at the Oriental Hotel wore—blue pantaloons with the crotches hanging down to their knees. Funny hats. Was it embarrassing for them to dress this way? she wondered. No sooner had India stepped from the taxi into the soupy heat than an official from the hotel—a Thai man in a pale beige linen suit—was upon her, bowing to her in the traditional
wai,
taking her hands. She looked at the man and could see that he expected her to cry or fall apart the way Americans did in the movies, and yet all India felt at that moment was contrition. Bill had, after all, killed himself in their fine hotel. It would have been a horrific mess and upsetting to the butlers who found him. (How had they gone home to their families and eaten their evening meal with the memory of Bill’s brains splattered all over the plush carpeting?) India was as mortified as she would have been if the boys had thrown a raucous party and broken furniture or put holes in the walls. And beyond these surface concerns was a deeper shame.

The administration of the hotel and the representatives sent to the hotel by the king were somber and sympathetic. They didn’t place blame; they didn’t wonder what went so horribly wrong. They exuded acceptance, as if somehow they’d expected this might happen. The Thai people hailed Bill as a genius along the lines of Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock, and geniuses were eccentric. Crazy. They cut off their ears; they overdosed; they blew their brains out.

India identified the body. She didn’t remember doing this, but she did remember Bill in the casket. He was her charge; she had to get him home. She thought of the body in the casket as “Bill,” though he was cargo now, he was luggage. And yet he was dearly familiar. She was a woman traveling home with her husband’s corpse. It was surreal, she couldn’t believe it was happening, and yet what choice did she have? She couldn’t leave him in Thailand.

The boys and Birdie were all at the Philadelphia airport when India and “Bill” landed. The boys looked years younger; they looked like mere children, and they cried easily. Billy was the strongest, ever the leader, and he gathered India up in a hug, and Teddy and Ethan followed suit, and in the middle of Concourse C, the four of them became one rocking, sobbing mass.