Want Not (44 page)

None of that was yet apparent that evening on the train, however, when the man beside her got off at Kingsland and Dave slipped into his seat. What attracted her then, strangely, was his rage. Somehow he’d fished her history from her: the stunted acting career, marriage and motherhood, and then 9/11 though not its tangled aftermath. The way he’d responded was, in retrospect, almost absurdly overwrought. With tears in his eyes he’d hailed the bravery of the cops and firefighters who’d died that morning, and also what he’d personally do to Osama bin Laden when “they catch that motherfucker,” pounding the seat in front of him so hard that its occupant turned around to protest but reconsidered after seeing this burly six-foot-three man with wet feral eyes. Nothing about his behavior would have been unusual in the weeks or months after 9/11, but by this time the wound was three years old; even Brian’s dad could discuss it dispassionately. Yet something about that rage, however unearned and jingoistic it might have been, instead of repelling Sara drew her in. She’d dealt with Brian’s death so coldly, she realized—her flash-frozen grief having been reconstituted as hatred for Jane L. Becker, Brian’s mistress—that she’d failed to absorb the wider tragedy, all the anguish that wasn’t exclusively hers. Dave’s unhinged wrath felt cathartic, and spoke to a fury that she hadn’t even known occupied a place within her. In that moment it’d felt as if they shared a mutually murderous heat. She gave him her number. She married him.

Had it been a mistake? Possibly. But then she had to be candid about her motives. Part of the reason she’d married Dave—a significant proportion, for sure, though she refused to quantify it as the majority part—was financial. No one was ever supposed to admit this, though she legitimized it to herself by noting this motive was the unacknowledged bedrock of most Victorian marriages—even the fictional ones she’d swooned over in college, like Jane and Rochester’s in
Jane Eyre
or that of Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley in
Pride and Prejudice.
Not that poverty was a risk for her. Not
real
poverty, anyway—the fear of tomorrow versus the fear of next year. Between Brian’s life insurance and the payout from the Victim Compensation Fund, Sara had been able to clear the mortgage on their former house and still hand over to an investment advisor what had seemed then like a tremendous sum—until the stock market went chipping away at it, and, if she was honest with herself, until she’d done some chipping of her own. The finiteness of the number, as it appeared in her monthly SmithBarney statements, disturbed her—this was it, for life? With anxious dread she’d imagined herself at eighty, opening those envelopes and gaping at a much-dwindled figure. And then came Dave, gaping (he claimed) at her backside on that packed NJ Transit train, and somehow wooing her by venting all that patriotic steam from his ears. After their fourth date she’d searched online for the market cap of his Acquisitions and Asset Recovery Corp., which she was unable to find because the company was privately held. The futile inquiry left her feeling seamy and pathetic but she stood by its chilled necessity. She’d married for love the first time, and look how that had turned out. Idealism was something you outgrew, like miniskirts and over-the-knee boots.

At the Ridgewood stop a man boarded the train and claimed the seat beside her. He was handsome, in a starchy, lean-limbed, gray-templed, senior-bank-vice-president way, and she found herself consciously averting her gaze from him, as though mere eye contact might somehow endanger her. On this train line, after all, it had been known to happen. Peering out the window, as the train went curving through a gritty narrow trough, she saw trash scattered along the sloped trackside: shopping carts and bent chairs and rusted bicycles and even a sofa and then, as the train crossed the access road to an abandoned-looking industrial park, a tragic-looking teddy bear, of the oversized Day-Glo variety they awarded at carnival games, with poofs of white stuffing oozing from its neck—a throat-slashing victim for sure. She thought it would make a fine subject for an arty photographer, a William Eggleston type whose photo would raise the ominous question: Who would cut the throat of a teddy bear, and why? But then how had it ended up here, she wondered, broadening the question to include all the garbage she saw streaming by. It looked as though it had been hurled from the train, but of course that wasn’t the case. She didn’t see any houses up at the top of the slopes, to account for transient renters plowing all their unwanteds down the hill to get their deposits back. Perhaps a flood had left it in its mucky wake, though she couldn’t recall one occurring here—down in Passaic, maybe, but not up this way. She was jogged from this investigative reverie, however, by the man beside her clearing his throat, and soon she found her eyes drawn down to his hands—long slender concert-pianist hands, like those of Timmy Westrick back in high school, whose hand she’d placed directly on her crotch one night during a make-out session because she knew he was too afraid to place it there himself. (Knew wrongly, as she learned years later: He’d actually been too
gay
to put his hand down there.) As she studied the man’s hands, with their elegant topography of bluish veins and tanned creases and glossy, perhaps too preciously maintained nails, while almost but not quite connecting the mental dots between them and Timmy Westrick’s and therefore her crotch, the thought occurred to her: What if it was that easy? If she spoke, if he spoke, if something he said found unexpected traction within her. What if you could change your life as easily as changing trains?

Well you
could,
she supposed—wasn’t that the gist of
Eat Pray Love,
which everyone but Sara seemed to be reading that spring? Unless you had kids, that is. With a drawn-out sigh she shifted her gaze back out the window where a river had replaced the garbage-strewn slopesides: a clear and perfect-looking stream that beneath a sumptuous canopy of bending tree limbs went gurgling over smooth round stones, like a scene from the cover of an ambient music CD. It looked almost fake, in fact: the work of a civic-minded volunteer group that’d painted it onto a curtain to conceal the debris behind it. Here was something else she couldn’t ever admit publicly, not seriously anyway: She’d never wanted children. A family—that had been Brian’s idea, and when you got down to it his imperial command. Perhaps she should’ve known what to expect, marrying into an Irish family: the ancestral desire for strength in numbers. As one of six kids Brian couldn’t imagine life outside an unruly freckled mob. As for the Tetwicks, Liz had apparently sopped up all the maternal genes in utero, before Sara’d ever had the chance to claim some. Liz excelled at mothering—Sara sometimes agreed with Dave that Aidan’s autism was less a medical condition than an excuse for Liz to exercise her mommy muscles, to escalate the marathon of motherhood into some sort of an ultradistance Ironman race—whereas for Sara it’d never come naturally. Breastfeeding appalled her, and though she’d given it a valiant effort, because you were considered some sort of monster if you didn’t, that harsh grabby clamping on her nipples, the leaky alien sensation of her body being drained—it’d just made her nauseated, and she’d abandoned it as swiftly as social censure allowed. The same with potting Alexis in front of the television, which she understood to be detrimental to child brain development and all that other highminded highmoraled Liz stuff, but what else was she supposed to do? Alexis just dribbled and banged. Sara had never learned to speak baby, not the way Brian did—with his perfect fluency he’d been able to withstand goo-goo time almost indefinitely, seeming to actually
enjoy
his second or third hour of lying on a blanket poking Alexis’s belly to make her kick. Though Alexis had come squirming out of Sara’s body she’d been Brian’s from the start.

If not motherhood, then, what had she been meant for? In her formative years she’d dreamt of fame—as less of an actuality, she supposed, than a loosely defined concept. Sara Tetwick: star. That was it. Probably every girl fantasized about tossled romances with the movie-star idols smoldering down at her from posters tacked to bedroom walls: in Sara’s case Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise and Don Johnson and Corey Haim and Patrick Swayze and River Phoenix. (Liz’s bedroom, in contrast, had been lined with posters of endangered whales.) But not every girl, she thought, had constructed a lifeplan built around achieving them; from the age of thirteen she’d started lobbying her parents for acting classes, and by the end of high school she’d been voted Most Likely to Make it Big in Hollywood. Had that been the crest of her idealism? Maybe. Back then she’d been almost hypersexual, if you could call it that—oversexed (in her estimation) to the point of dismaying self-concern, to the frequent degree of self-loathing. On the night of her junior prom she’d masturbated while showering for the dance, had unfulfilling sex with Mark Rinehart in the back of his dad’s Suburban, and then, at 3
A.M.
, in the dim yellow nightlight glow of her bedroom beneath the unblinking audience of all those wallpapered movie stars, masturbated one more time, immediately dissolving into muffled sobs afterwards because something had to be wrong with her, this much wanting couldn’t be normal. It was like what Liz had just said about Aidan at lunch, about mapping that divide between what was hormones and what was disease. An undiagnosed disease was what it’d felt like, then: a cancer of desire. The polymorphous liberties of college had straightened her out, of course, as had New York City, where her acting classes often felt like sexually teeming petri dishes, everyone rubbing their future stardoms against one another, grinding into iridescent powder the pixie dust that seemed to coat them as young talents in the city. She’d made peace with herself by making another kind of peace with others, and then with Brian who for all his public loutishness (he was always the one chanting
chug chug chug
in a barroom, the one whose buddies christened him a verb, i.e., to “brian” was to ogle a woman with such shameless vigor that your body rotated 360 degrees) had been an endlessly giving and tender lover—but
no,
she stopped herself cold. Let’s not go there, as she’d said to Liz. Let’s never ever go there again.

The kill or the cure: That’s what Jane L. Becker had been. In those tormented days after Brian’s death and Sara’s discovery of his affair she’d felt something go dead inside her, felt something shrivel and dry as a grape becomes a raisin. Or maybe that wasn’t right—it was more accurate to say she felt something disappear, as though Jane L. Becker had reached inside her and snatched it away. Precisely what
it
was she couldn’t quite say: her dignity, she sometimes thought; her faith in the idea of love, which as a child of the sixties was the only faith she’d ever had; not her future (the terrorists stole that) but her past; her trust in appearances, so that even the sight of a river from a train window was suspect; but her sexuality, too, snarled amidst all those other things and robbed from her just the same. That raunchy, delirious desire whose strength she’d once mistaken for malignancy.

She’d faked it with Dave. Not the orgasms, which were genuine but hollow, the Muzak version of a song she’d once adored, but her interest, her willingness, the shivers she issued at his touch. As an actress she’d thought she could sustain it, akin to the way she’d played Anya night after night in
The Cherry Orchard
(and would’ve kept playing her forever, with jubilance, had the investors not pulled out of the show): “Why is it that I no longer love the cherry orchard as I did?” she used to say, the resonance of her voice almost otherworldly inside that dingy little third-floor theatre on West 46th Street, feeling the smattering of an audience clinging hard to her pauses. “I used to love it so tenderly. I thought there was no better place on earth than our garden.” Yet there were limits, she’d learned, to playing another kind of character—one you didn’t understand or didn’t want to play. In bed with Dave she was the Coast shampoo girl all over again, cooing, “Oooooh, that scent!”: a single note, strained and artificial. Sustaining that note had proven as difficult as sustaining any note, the reason opera singers earned ovations for their
tenuto
holds—eventually you give out. And she had. About a year ago, give or take a few isolated and wine-driven exceptions, which had left Dave discontented and tetchy, a black cloud of frustration trailing him from room to room. She’d misgauged the narrowness of his affections, she guessed; maybe, as he’d joked (or not-joked, she had to assume), the shape of her butt had been enough for him that evening on the train. He’d spoken to her as to the broker for her body, negotiating the terms. Would it be different with someone else? She looked at the man beside her again—ogled him, really, if ogling meant imagining what sex would be like (Brian always claimed otherwise, noting that he ogled sportscars too but didn’t, in his words, “want to stick my dick in one”). No, she decided, as the train slowed toward her stop. It was her. It was all her. All the posters from her teenaged bedroom coming to life wouldn’t make a difference.

She found Dave at the kitchen table when she got home. He was gnawing a crust of pizza and glowering at some paperwork that was so thoroughly disarranged across the table it appeared he’d shoveled it there. She fetched a bottle of chenin blanc from the refrigerator, but only after she’d banged its base onto the table did he half acknowledge her, without glancing up. “How was lunch?” he muttered, a spitball curve on the last word.

She twirled a corkscrew into the bottle, sneaking a glimpse at the paperwork which looked legal: those telltale fourteen-inch sheets. “What’s up?”

“This shit?” he said, with a shoo-fly wave at the messy tabletop. “Nothing. We’re being sued again.”

She paused, the cork halfway out. “We?”

“The company. Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Section 15, yadda yadda bing-bang.”

“Oh.” With a wet pop the cork sprang loose. “You’re always being sued for that.”

“Yeah, but this time the freakin lawyers are all wetting their pants. It’s the social networking shit.”