The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (227 page)

It would be too painful to break up with him in person, so I do it over the phone. At first, he doesn’t say anything. Has he hung up on me? No, because I can hear his breathing. “I just don’t get it,” he finally says. “Have I been missing something? Because if I have, let’s talk about it. Work through it.” Like he’s my psychologist, which he
isn’t
. I tell him I can’t talk about it. He goes, “Why not?” Because if we did, I might start telling him everything. That I snooped around in his apartment and found those pictures. That his mother doesn’t think I’m good enough for him. I might keep going until I told him every single thing I’ve kept from him. “I thought things were going so well for us. Jesus Christ, Annie, the least you can do is give me an explanation.”

“It’s just that . . . we’re a mismatch. And it’s better we face it now than later. I have to go now. Bye.” I hang up on him and start to cry. And when he calls right back, I don’t answer the phone. I don’t answer it the next two times either. Or the next day. Or the one after that. Then the phone stops ringing.

He usually comes in with his shirts on Tuesdays, my late day, except the following Tuesday, he’s a no show. I’ve been dreading seeing him all afternoon, but now that it’s closing time, I’m disappointed. When Mrs. Skiba asks me what’s wrong, I tell her I don’t want to talk about it and she backs off. I miss him so badly that it’s like I hurt physically. And hey, I
do
hurt physically: headaches, stomachaches, diarrhea. I keep thinking about calling him and telling him I was being a dolt, but I don’t. Better that
I
ended it before he could have. Or that he didn’t end it but wished he had. He’s probably already reconnected with Thea by now, his
real
girlfriend. Which is probably why he’s stopped calling me and started going to a different dry cleaner’s. Every day when I go into work, I check the slips to see if he’s brought his shirts in and I just missed him, but I haven’t. He’s probably getting them done at the Troy Laundry now.

The night he shows up at my door, he looks awful and his breath smells boozy. “Have you been drinking?” I ask him.

“Yeah, every fuckin’ night since you lowered the boom,” he says. He’s got the same mad face he had in my dream and says he needs to come in. When I ask him why, he says because I owe him a better explanation than that we’re a mismatch.
Why
did I just cut and run like that?
How
are we such a mismatch? He pushes the door open and barges past me, makes a beeline for one of the beanbag chairs, and sinks down into it. It sighs under his weight; it’s weird how they do that, these chairs. I sit down on the other one.

“It just wasn’t going to work,” I tell him.

He shrugs. “Why not?”

“Because I’m me and you’re you, that’s why.”

He shrugs again. “What the fuck does that even
mean
?”

“It means you’re a psychologist and I never even went to college. And I’m not
going
to go either. I just said that to make your mother like me.”

“She
does
like you,” he says. “And I don’t give a shit whether you went to college or not. I love you, Annie, not your freakin’ curriculum vita.” My what? “So come on. Don’t leave me in the dark like this. What else?”

There were a million other reasons. Where should I start? “Because . . . because you have nice furniture and I don’t even have a bed frame yet. Because I buy my clothes on clearance and you wear fancy monogrammed shirts.” He laughs. “It’s not funny! I just don’t deserve you, Orion. Thea deserves you. I bet you any amount of money she’s sorry she broke up with you. And that if you picked up the phone right now and called her, she’d—”

He kicks over my coffee table. First he fixed it for me, now he’s trying to wreck it. “What the fuck does Thea have to do with anything?” he wants to know. “And for the record,
she
didn’t break it off.
I
did.”

“Oh,” I say. “You did? Why?”

“Because she was a narcissistic bitch! A spoiled little trust fund baby! And because I could feel the noose tightening around my neck! Annie,
she and I
were the mismatch, not you and me. I want to be with you. Take
care
of you. Was I just deluding myself? Because I thought you wanted that, too.”

“I did,” I say. “I do.”

“Then what the fuck is the
problem
?”

We end up on my mattress, and the makeup sex is pretty intense. When Orion comes, he says, “I love you . . . love you . . . love.” And I burst into sobs of joy and relief. Hold on to him so tight that it’s like he’s saving me from drowning.

He proposes to me two days later. Instead of saying yes, I ask him if he’s told his mother yet. He looks at me like I’m weird. Wants to know why he’d do that. “No reason,” I say, “Uh . . . when are you thinking you’d like to—”

“Soon. As soon as possible. I don’t want to wait unless you do. Do you want to wait?” I shake my head.

We go ring shopping and I pick out one of the smaller diamonds. “Really?” he says. “Because I kind of like the one three down from that one.” He means the one that’s my real favorite but looks like it costs way too much.

“Yeah, that one’s gorgeous.”

“Exquisite,” the jeweler says. I try on both of the rings, but I stick to my guns and say the other one’s fine. Then I get my finger sized and we leave the store and go to town hall to apply for our marriage license. I blush a little when the clerk tells us we’re a cute couple.

The next night, Orion comes over with a pizza. And while we’re eating it, he reaches into his pocket, takes out the little blue velvet box, and hands it to me. I open it and there it is: the beautiful, more expensive ring. “Don’t give me any arguments,” he says. “I know which one you really wanted. Try it on. I want to see how it looks.” And when I do, he looks up from my hand to my eyes and smiles. Takes me in his arms and kisses me. “I love you so much,” I tell him. And I do, whether I deserve him or not. While he’s holding me, I look at my ring finger resting against his shoulder and sparkling in the overhead light. Am I still plain old Annie O’Day from foster care who almost got trapped into marrying Albie Wignall? Because I don’t feel like that girl right now. I feel more like Cinderella. Who, come to think of it, had a shitty life, too, until she went to that ball. And who almost blew it like I did until they put that glass slipper on her and it fit.

C
inderella and her glass slipper? Happily ever after? No, I’ve long since stopped believing in fairy tale endings. But if what I have now with Viveca isn’t perfect, it’s still special and real, despite my misgivings. I love her. She loves me. I walk over to her desk, sit down, grab a pen. Flip the prenup to the places that need my signature and scrawl my name. There. It’s done. So much for that.

Chapter Six

Orion Oh

T
hat Sunday afternoon when Annie lowered the boom? Told me she would always love me but that she was in love with Viveca? After she left—took a cab because I refused to drive her back to the train station—I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me. But after a month or so of silence, I e-mailed her to let her know I was going to be in New York for a three-day psych conference the following week, and that I wanted to see her. Talk to her. Since she was the one who’d left, it was she who was calling the shots. Was reconciliation on the table or should I get a lawyer? We needed to talk because I needed to know.

She e-mailed back to say she wanted to see me, too. Suggested we meet for dinner at Milos, a Greek restaurant in Midtown. Eight
P.M.,
say? If I’d let her know, she’d make a reservation. I clicked on “reply.”
Sounds good. I’ll be there. Love you, Orion.
I stared at that “Love you” for several seconds. Replaced it with
See you soon
and sent it into cyberspace.

I arrived at the restaurant twenty minutes early and, to calm myself, ordered a Grey Goose and tonic at the bar. Jesus, we’d been married for almost twenty-seven years. Why was I feeling first-date nervous? I was on my second drink when they arrived, twenty minutes late—Annie
and
Viveca. My anger was visceral, but I tried hard to swallow it back. Apparently, Viveca still didn’t remember having already met me that time at the Whitney because her opening shot was that I looked nothing like what she had pictured. “No?” I’d said. “What had you pictured?”

“For some reason, I thought you’d be more . . .
psychologist
-looking.”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Balding with an earring and a little ponytail, maybe. Shorter.” She laughed as if what she’d just said was funny, and I felt like saying that she looked nothing like what I had pictured, either: that other Greek monster, Medusa. Annie told Viveca that I was six foot three, which was no longer true. At my most recent physical, my height had been recorded as six one and a half. I’d shrunk.

We made it through drinks and dolmades with lemon sauce cordially enough, and I managed not to wince whenever Viveca referred to Annie as Anna, twisting the knife a little more by pronouncing it pretentiously:
Ahna
. But halfway through our entrées—and, for me, a
third
vodka and tonic—Viveca asked me if she could ask me something.

“Shoot,” I said.

She wanted to know if I was accepting of Ahna’s and her relationship.

I tensed. Sipped my drink. “Define ‘accepting,’ ” I finally said.

Viveca said she wasn’t trying to be “fractious,” but that for the past hour I had had very little eye contact with her, had directed almost all of my remarks to Annie, and it made her feel invisible. “Maybe I’m just misreading things,” she said. “But it feels like I’m getting a passive-aggressive vibe from you.”

“Sweetie, please,” Annie said, reaching across the table. She placed her hand on top of Viveca’s hand. Comforted her, not me.
She
was Sweetie now.

“Passive-aggressive?” I said. She wanted eye contact? Okay then. I’d give her eye contact. I stared at her in silence until she looked away. Then I downed my drink, stood, and tossed my napkin onto the table. “Gotta go,” I said and started for the door.

“Orion?” Annie called. “Orion, come back.” Without turning around, I raised my hand and waved her a backward good-bye.

Annie’s handwritten letter of apology arrived in Monday’s mail. She had thought, mistakenly she realized now,
stupidly
, that it might be easier for me to meet Viveca if I didn’t have to anticipate it beforehand. “But I can see now that it put you in a really awkward position, Orion. I’m so sorry.”

I e-mailed her, not to say that I accepted her apology but to tell her I’d made an appointment with a lawyer to see about a legal separation, and that she might want to do the same. And that if she hadn’t already done so, she should let Ariane, Andrew, and Marissa know about her decision to end our marriage in favor of her new lesbian lifestyle. “I think it should come from you, not me. Just don’t expect them to be thrilled.”

I
pass the signs for Eastham, North Eastham. The T-shirt and lawn ornament shops. Both the Blue Dolphin Inn and the Four Points Motel have their
NO VACANCY
sign up, probably because it’s Labor Day weekend, the last hurrah of summer. But the traffic’s much better, finally; I’m going forty now, pretty much. I’m gaining on it. I just hope I get to that rental office in time to pick up the key. . . .

All three kids checked in with me soon after she told them, which she did when they came home for Christmas, but not until just before each of them was about to leave. Marissa, who lives in New York and had met Viveca, was totally accepting of her mother’s decision. Ariane wasn’t happy with Annie, but she was sweetly sympathetic to me. “Daddy, why don’t you take some time off and come out here for a visit? I’ll show you around San Francisco.” Andrew was furious. He’d leapt to my defense when Annie told him, he said—had yelled at her, stormed out of the house. I was the one who drove him back to the airport. His mother had wanted to come, too, but he told her he didn’t want her to.

“I mean, Dad, how long have you guys been married?” Andrew said, outraged on my behalf. “Twenty-something years, right?”

“Going on twenty-seven,” I said.

“And she just wakes up one day and decides she’s
gay
?”

I told him I thought it was a little more complicated than that. That
two
people were responsible for a marriage’s survival, not just one. He didn’t seem to be listening. . . .

My second meeting with Annie and Viveca occurred just about a year ago. By then, our divorce was in the works but had yet to be finalized.

“The San Gennaro festival starts this weekend,” Annie told me over the phone. “We were wondering if you’d like to come into the city and join us. Walk down there together. The weather’s supposed to be beautiful.” We? I remember thinking. Really?

I’d become resigned to the dissolution of our marriage by then, but I wasn’t exactly relishing the idea of seeing Viveca again. I
did
want to see Annie. “I won’t have to dance the tarantella with Lady Bountiful, will I?” I joked.

Annie laughed a little. “Be nice,” she said. “What do you say?”

“Yeah, okay. Why not?”

From Penn Station, I took a cab down to Elizabeth Street. Viveca’s apartment building had a doorman. He buzzed them for me. “She said to go on up,” he said. I shook my head. Asked him to tell them I’d wait down there in the lobby. I’d been there once before, back when I was still in the dark about their affair, and I wasn’t eager to see Viveca’s place with fresh eyes now that I knew the full extent of their “cohabitation.” Didn’t want to have to go home and picture it. So while I waited, the doorman and I talked baseball. Yankees versus Red Sox, that kind of thing. It might not have been New York’s year, he said, but if Boston thought they were going to kick Tampa Bay’s ass in the playoffs, they were dreaming.

When they came downstairs, I took both of Annie’s hands in mine and kissed her on the cheek. Viveca, too, leaned in for a kiss—or, specifically, a pair of those New Yorky air kisses that don’t quite land on either cheek. “It’s good to see you again,” she said. All I could manage in response was a nod, a smile.

We headed over to the festival, Viveca noting while we walked that as Chinatown had expanded, it had taken over Little Italy, which had pretty much shrunk to a couple of streets, Mulberry and Mott.
Taken over
, I remember thinking: interesting choice of words.

But at the street fair, sharing a bottle of chianti at an outdoor café and watching the crowds stroll past the calzone and cannoli stands, we three were on our best behavior. Annie and I were telling Viveca stories about the kids when they were small. How, the longer Ariane, our type A, had lasted in the third grade spelling bee, the farther south her tights kept drifting and how, when she won, she jumped up and down and they fell to her ankles. How, on a dare from his cousin, Andrew had swallowed a dime that, luckily, he’d pooped out the next day. “But the twins were a piece of cake compared to their little sister,” I said. Annie nodded in agreement but added that Andrew had had his moments, too.

Telling the stories was fun and, on my part, satisfying. A little facetious, I guess. It reminded Viveca that Annie and I had shared a life. Had raised a son and two daughters together. Whatever she had with Annie now, she would never have that. But when Viveca said she was looking forward to getting to know her other two “future step-children,” I felt myself clench. My smile didn’t waver, though. I picked up the wine bottle and replenished our glasses.

They both looked lovely that afternoon, Viveca’s glossy dark hair and long tanned neck contrasting opulently with her blindingly white blouse, Annie’s porcelain complexion and strawberry blond hair aglow in the early autumn sunshine, the small, delicate fingers of her left hand curved around the bowl of her wineglass. For twenty-seven years, she had worn her wedding and engagement rings on one of those fingers. Now, instead, she was wearing a gold band etched with the Greek key pattern—those interlocking right angles and vertical lines, rendered in Aegean blue. Viveca wore a matching ring.

Our conversation turned from the kids to our respective ethnicities, and the extent to which family heritage had influenced our lives. Viveca volunteered that, despite having become a successful businesswoman, she had never quite won the approval of her father, an Athens-born banker with ties to Chase Manhattan. “He was very patriarchal. Expected me to get my college degree and then become a good Greek wife like my mother. Raise children, cook and keep house, and limit my outside activities to the
Philoptochos
.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A charity. The Friends of the Poor. That’s what good Greek wives did: helped the downtrodden and left the serious stuff—business, politics—to their husbands. My father was none too happy when I opted for a master’s degree in art history instead of what he had planned. He’d even hand-picked a nice Greek husband for me: a cousin of a cousin who owned a chain of drugstores in Long Island and New Jersey. Don’t get me wrong. Papa was proud of my accomplishments. But he was disappointed, too. Abe and I held off getting married until after he died. A career was one thing, but an Arab husband? A town hall ceremony instead of a big Greek Orthodox church wedding? It would have been too much.” Annie had told me in a prior conversation that Abe had been Dr. Abdul Shabbas, a prominent Manhattan oncologist who’d been on Ronald Reagan’s short list for surgeon general. Nixed by Nancy, according to Viveca, for astrological reasons. Viveca had inherited her wealth from both Dr. Shabbas and Papa Christophoulos.

“Well, at least you’re not Irish,” Annie said. “All that Catholic guilt and good-natured blarney to hide our real feelings.”

Viveca turned to me. “And how about
you
? Half Italian and half Chinese, right? Now
that
must have been interesting.”

I smiled. “Interesting? Oh, yeah.” I took another sip of my chianti without saying anything else. Maybe Annie had told her about how my father had abandoned me and maybe she hadn’t. But
I
sure as hell wasn’t going to go into it with her. To shift the subject a little—to spare me, maybe—Annie noted that if we walked south down Mulberry Street and came to Canal, the bustling main artery through Chinatown, we’d be at the intersection of both my mother’s and father’s heritage.

“That’s right,” I said. “Add a little green beer into the mix and we’ve got our kids’ heritage, too.”

She and I were looking at each other, sharing a smile, when Viveca said, “Ah, here they come.” My eyes followed hers to the approaching procession. And for the next several minutes, we drank our wine and watched with bemused interest as the faithful rushed and jockeyed to pin dollar bills to Saint Gennaro’s passing effigy in hopes of warding off the misfortunes that God or fate or others might deliver. Bodily harm, say. Or vengeance. Or betrayal. . . .

I
drive past the old, familiar sights: the Wellfleet Drive-In, the Box Lunch, Moby Dick’s. There’s the minigolf place where Ariane once got two holes in one and beat her brother, reducing him to angry tears. There’s Outer Cape Health, where we had to bring Marissa for stitches after she cut her foot on that razor clam shell. Passing the sign for Paine’s Campground, I recall the fun we had there when the kids were young: toasting marshmallows, playing war and slapjack at the picnic table, walking down the pine needle path to that crystal clear pond. I smile, seeing once again, Andrew and Marissa chasing after all those pale green frogs and Annie, sitting at the water’s edge, braiding Ariane’s hair. Ari didn’t make it home for the holidays last December, so I haven’t seen her in almost two years now. If I drive down for the wedding, at least I’ll be able to spend some time with her. Or if I don’t, maybe she can come up here and see me. I miss her. Miss all three of them. Next time I talk to them, I’ll have to ask if they remember that camping trip. Annie had already started turning those junk store finds into art by then, but her work hadn’t yet begun to consume her the way it did later. The way it swallowed her whole.

My third close encounter with Annie and Viveca was on home turf this past April. I was in the middle of the sexual harassment mess and battling insomnia over Seamus’s suicide when Viveca called me out of the blue. She and Annie were en route to Boston to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “The Gardner is one of Annie’s favorites,” she said. Did she think I didn’t know that when I’d been the one to take her there that first time? The one who had driven Annie to the Gardner all those other Aprils, when the nasturtium vines hanging from the museum’s indoor courtyard balconies were in full saffron bloom? Since Three Rivers was on the way, Viveca said, she was wondering if they might stop by and say hello. “Anna would love for me to see the house where you all lived when the children were growing up and she was starting out as an artist. And we’d both love to see you, too, of course.”