You Lost Me There Read online

  Joel was Betsy’s only child. As a teenager, he’d run away from boarding school and vanished, drifting with druggie friends through California beach towns. Subsequently, though, he’d surprised everyone by becoming an accomplished chef. He now ran a restaurant on the island where I ate frequently, at least when I could afford to.

  But something sounded wrong about Betsy’s story. I said, “She was hit, you mean. Ginnie hit Sara. That’s what made Sara want to leave home.”

  Betsy put down her coffee. “What are you talking about?”

  “Her mother was the one—”

  “Ginnie was punched straight in the craw, is what happened. Her mouth, Sara’s fist, and she deserved it. If anyone in our family had had an ounce of nerve, she would’ve been locked up in a drunk tank years earlier. Think of the embarrassment, Victor, being sick on the floor at the poor girl’s school play? I don’t blame Sara a smidge.”

  “See, I would swear it was the other way around,” I said.

  “Well, you swear wrong. Check, please.”

  “You don’t want dessert?”

  Betsy leveraged herself to a standing position and unwrapped a toothpick, pinpointing me with her stare.

  “You need to get yourself a girl, Victor.”

  Two months after Sara’s funeral, I was taking the garbage out in the rain when I discovered that someone had left a pile of leaking trash bags in the shed. The place stank. Someone must have unlocked the door and dumped his trash, even made a routine of it, but who would do that?

  I was gathering up coffee grounds with a dustpan, angry and wet and late for work, when I realized the culprit was me. I’d canceled the pick-up service. The week after Sara died, I’d been in the kitchen and remembered her saying how we could save money by driving the trash to the dump ourselves. And right away I’d called the garbage company, canceled service, and promptly forgotten about it. For weeks I didn’t notice the trash piling up.

  The next morning, I couldn’t picture going to work. Lucy and the rest would take care of themselves. Why else did we have lab managers? The news announcer on the radio said it was the president’s birthday, which reminded me I needed to send Russell a thank-you note for the case of wine. No matter that I’d see him over the weekend. While running for office as greatest American housewife, my mother never let a thank-you note go unwritten.

  I was reminded of one of Sara’s jokes about WASPs:

  Why don’t WASPs attend orgies?

  Too many thank-you notes to write.

  My mother never liked Russell. He reminded her of my cousins, the ones who played dice during school. Except Russell was a good math student, a lettered varsity athlete, and a boy scout. Plus, I didn’t have many friends, so she didn’t do more than scold him when he was digging through her refrigerator, or banish him for a week the time he brought over a nudie book. But we’d been joined at the hip. Both the sons of proud and insufferable immigrant tribes, we shared the same dreams: to bat for the Yankees, sleep with Lana Turner, go to Harvard, or at least run away from Long Island, speed as far away as possible in miles and ambition from our thousand respective short-sighted relatives. For college, I went to Chicago, and Russell attended Yale on a wrestling scholarship. But I eventually got to Harvard as a young Ph.D. doing research, and Russell dated a girl who’d once given Don Mattingly a blow job in the Yankees’ parking lot. We decided that we’d done okay.

  Russell had been married eight years to a woman named Suzanne until he discovered her sleeping with a Christmas tree farmer, the man who’d sold them the family Christmas tree that year. Now Russell was single in Manhattan, housing Cornelia, his and Suzanne’s daughter, fresh out of college. Cornelia, whom Russell had raised on the Upper West Side, after she refused to live with her stepfather, the tree farmer—“Fucknut,” according to both Cornelia and Russell. Russell adored his daughter, so did everyone. Cornelia was curious, kind-hearted, and vain, a vegan waif spoiled rotten by her father. Sara used to say she was a lot like herself at that age, and she’d said it when Cornelia was five, ten, and fifteen.

  I sat at my desk and scribbled a quick note, sealed the envelope, and went looking for my address book, but came up empty. I looked around my office, in the kitchen drawers. It was gone. I must have left it at work. Then I remembered Sara’s Rolodex, that it would have Russell’s address, too.

  Only a few times since the accident had I gone into her office. The cleaning lady swept through once a week, but with instructions not to disturb anything. The process had been never-ending, bagging up Sara’s things after she died. I still found old parkas in the attic, moisturizers in baskets in the living room. Small pots of hand cream rolling around the bottom of the sea.

  But here were the framed movie posters above her desk. Sara’s lucky black cowboy boots, like two chimneys by the garden door. Walls covered in corkboards and mementos: posters from her performance-art days and theater years, stills from the set of The Hook-Up and group pictures with the crew. Opposite the door was a green velvet daybed, a set piece from the movie. The director had shipped it to Sara with a matching throw pillow, embroidered, “Write me another.”

  I found the Rolodex sitting on her desk. I scribbled down Russell’s address, and closed the door behind me. A moment later, something pulled me back. The book the Rolodex had been sitting on had a few dozen index cards sticking out, covered with Sara’s handwriting. I read the card on top.

  Well, I scrambled to think of something. “I hit my mother one time. I punched her in the mouth.” After a beat, Victor said, “You might have something there,” and then both of us started laughing, just crazy laughter, and that was that.

  I sat down, my shoes glued to the floor.

  I was back to the marriage counselor’s office in Bar Harbor. The smell from the forsythia bushes in the parking lot. I held the card up to the light and reread the line about Sara hitting her mother.

  How had I gotten that wrong?

  If two people have the same experience, but remember it differently, what does it say about their respective minds? But obviously I hadn’t experienced it. Sara had been in high school at the time, fighting with her drunk mother after she threw up at the school play. For Sara, it was a memory. For me, an anecdote.

  Dazed, I pulled out the other cards and set them aside. I picked up the book, a Dashiell Hammett novel. The price sticker on the back was from a bookstore in Culver City.

  Los Angeles.

  In the fall before her accident, Sara had convinced me to attend a marriage-counseling appointment with her therapist, Dr. Carrellas. It did not go well. Like many neuroscientists, I wasn’t a big fan of psychoanalysis. For me, anything occurring in the brain was biological, a case for pathway analysis. Huntington’s and Parkinson’s had their own neighborhoods; someday we’d discover that mental illness did, too. None of us were the product of blockaded mommy dreams.

  Carrellas gave us a writing assignment at the end of the appointment for homework: to select five changes of direction in our marriage, and describe each one on an index card. I remembered fighting about it afterward in the parking lot: I was shouting at Sara about why our life together should conform to this schoolmarm’s diagram, some diagnostic manual?

  Soon afterward, Sara moved to Los Angeles. A trial separation lasting six weeks, though it never was named as such. Sara simply left. She didn’t call from California, never e-mailed. I thought she was gone forever. I was waiting for divorce papers to arrive. When she returned, she told me about her idea that we’d take a second honeymoon in Italy; then she died in the car accident two weeks later.

  One night after the funeral, I wrote out a letter: Dear Dr. Carrellas, My marriage went in a single direction, and then it stopped.

  I wrote it, but I never sent it.

  Five changes of direction, five cards. I counted: there were fifty-four cards on Sara’s desk.

  Victor and I caught a movie, then we drifted back to my place. But what movie? I stood up, scooped up the cards, took them u
pstairs, dropped them on my bureau, and weighed them down with my keys.

  two

  Change of direction two, and I don’t know where to start. Well, that’s not true. I knew as soon as you proposed this idea what my first three turns would be. But right now I’m parked outside a CVS, I’m sitting in my car, I just bought a package of index cards like they’re Kleenex. Like I’m about to break down.

  Perhaps I am about to break down.

  Victor’s voice is still ringing in my ears from the parking lot outside your office. That was just twenty minutes ago.

  Between this card and the first one, when Victor and I met, there’s a gap of twenty years. Two decades reduced to a thirty-second montage, a flip book of cities, apartments, friends, vacations, birthday parties. Marriage as a product of mass and velocity, traveling in a single direction forward. Of course, though, with peaks and valleys. My mother passed away from cancer. Victor’s father died from a stroke. I miscarried. September 9, 1978. We named her Elizabeth, after my grandmother. Victor and I went to Puerto Rico for a week and decided not to try again. We talked vaguely about adoption, it was something we might do someday, like a safari we’d take when we had the money.

  Twenty years of motion. Each time Victor wrangled a new appointment, we moved. And we were young, we had fun. There were wonderful weekend trips, outdoor concerts, and long city walks. It felt as though society were shifting, but as a team we were grounded. It was the two of us moving across a moving world, both of us striving so hard. I even got Victor to grow out his hair. We went to Paris and to Crete, a romantic week in each, and then came Boston. Victor got the call from Harvard, his big break, and so began the Cambridge period: Victor, in his early thirties, the relentless seeker, hard-charging in the lab, and me taking afternoon strolls with graduate students, who quizzed me for their theses on performance art. Furloughs when Victor had a conference, but he rarely had a conference. There was too much work for that. I never saw him. He was so focused on research and making a name for himself that we were landlocked by his lab schedule, him at sea and me in the window. I tried playing housewife for a year to an empty house. Then I got a grant to start a tiny theater in Somerville, sandwiched between a hardware store and a salon. We ran eight productions in twenty-four months, none of them mine and every one a stinker. By that point, though, I was visibly weakening. I was tired of life, what we called a life. I was exhausted from avoiding putting demands on my husband, the workaholic. I bought a biography of Emma Darwin at one point to please Victor, thinking it could be adapted for the stage, and threw it away after reading ten pages. Honestly, deep down, I was simmering with rage, prepared to light Cambridge on fire, and meanwhile my husband was beaming with success. He was part of the team that helped figure out Alzheimer’s core mechanism. For me, though, every month there was another knuckle in the fist pinning me to the floor.

  Then Victor got an offer. Our fortunes lifted, as if from Fate: associate professorship, support for a lab and in New York no less. I may as well have drunk champagne the whole way down I-95, this glorious spring day. Victor clipped the car over to the Merritt Parkway, and both of us were happy and in love again, laughing, passing glances back and forth, fully knowing we were on our way.

  And knowing I would, I regained my groove. Soon I was writing again, having plays produced. Small productions with meager budgets and students for personnel, but at least I was working. Plays produced, stories published. Yes, yes, yes! Though here in each citation I should note, Victor does deserve billing. For that which I know I’ll write later on, I’ll credit him now, because he did help immensely, he was involved in each stage of everything I wrote. Because Victor’s brain, analytically, even creatively, is a first-class engine, and finely tuned. He has plenty of sensitivity for detection, for seeing patterns and shapes (and yet how specifically it’s applied). And he loved me. It showed. So he deserves credit for his notes down the margins, his nights running out to fetch Chinese food, his patience for reading dialogue in bed some January midnight, and he still sees connections in a text I don’t pick up. Got to the point where on a dark day, alone at noon and not writing, I’d convince myself he was the better writer between us, if only Alzheimer’s didn’t need his gifts more than literature.

  And in some cave inside, some deep heart of hearts he didn’t (doesn’t) see because it wasn’t (isn’t) on paper, he probably agreed (agrees). Oh, Victor believed in me as an artist, but to a point. He was timid. He identified my limitations privately, perhaps unconsciously, but I saw them in his edits, encouraging me to stay safe, to work inside the framework of my capabilities and to avoid regrets.

  Framed by love, but no less belittling.

  Sara Gardner was a late bloomer, one could say. In the spring of ’88, I was teaching theater studies part-time at Hunter, where somehow I wasn’t fired. Once, by anonymous complaint, I was brought up to peer review for presumed “malicious intent” in grading papers, and there wasn’t anything presumed about it. I loathed my students. I resented my colleagues. And of course I thought much worse of myself. I’d become a cartoon of the academic’s wife, a token artiste in silk floral scarves, a dilettante at ethnic dinners I labored to prepare from magazines for Victor’s esteemed colleagues, where here they’d won national medals—a Nobel winner one time—and I was asking who wanted more couscous.

  Then I turned forty. I expected to hate turning forty, but it turned out much worse. Life was all tragedy, no comedy for a year. I thought my existence was finished, and then it wasn’t; there was still room to turn forty-one, and the humiliation became a fever collar around my neck. I couldn’t hide beneath enough black sweaters. I struggled to write anything meaningful, anything reasonably authentic to my life. All the clichés became personal. Did I lose interest in exercise? In sex? I couldn’t see why I’d ever want to use my body again. At one point I was in a salon ordering the stylist to shave off all my precious hair (she wouldn’t do it), and I started crying so intensely I had to be moved to the manager’s office. Eating and napping, however, or staying in the apartment, watching period dramas in the afternoon with a goblet of white wine, programs I’d previously recorded and already seen five times, there I excelled. Hell, I improved by the week.

  And where was Victor? Where was my devoted husband? Still in the lab chipping away at his life’s work, working nine to eight, six days a week, the self-appointed superhero of public health. And when he wasn’t working, he was swimming or reading or insisting we see some chamber music quartet on tour from Budapest.

  Of course there were good days, days we spent motoring up through the Hudson Valley, nights out at the movies, nights in bed with the lights off, just talking. But the bigger picture? How I saw the pattern at that point? Our marriage was a book written by authors in separate houses.

  Then one weekend, six months after my birthday, Victor was away for a conference, and Saturday morning I woke up typing. I’d had an idea in a dream and I wrote a marathon through Sunday night. Like it was a question of stamina: Did I have it in me to go one more page? I kept quiet when Victor returned, I didn’t show him a thing. It felt very naughty and secret, like I was seventeen again, shielding what I’d written from Mother. For a month I got up at three in the morning, wearing my tattered bathrobe at the dining table, writing longhand. Soon, semiconscious, I had a monologue in two acts, Woman Hits Forty.

  And it was good. It was the best thing I’d ever written.

  I showed it to a director friend and she loved it. Her lead actress loved it, she said I’d “stumbled into this big untouched heart” (how I loved the little note card she sent me; I still have it above my desk), the question of when women bloom and toward whose light. Maybe it was the era, but it resounded. Those first two weeks, seventy-five people down on Franklin Street were standing every night. Women were crying on the sidewalk: women my age and their teenage daughters. Then came Cheryl Cheney from The New York Times, stopping by unannounced one Thursday. After Friday morning’s review, investors
seemed to materialize from the air itself.

  “A feminist triumph written by Sara Gardner for women who didn’t know they were feminists.”

  But look at Victor. Roll up the headaches and the excitement involved in trooping up Broadway, and see Victor instead, Victor who hadn’t noticed a thing those weeks in production until the review was in the newspaper, beside his cereal. Why? Because I’d left him out, and because he’d been too busy with a grant to attend the first performances. Because I didn’t want his help, I didn’t need his support. Probably because I was still furious over how easily he’d turned forty the year before, when it didn’t mean anything to him. When, worse, he hadn’t seen why it should be a big deal to me. “It’s a number, not a milestone,” he said at some dinner a few weeks after my birthday; we were out with a couple in their twenties, new employees from the lab. He added, “It’s your boomer self-regard. People last century were lucky to even make forty.”

  This from he who was becoming better-looking with age. Who received daily affirmation of his brilliance, who went on ploddingly succeeding, whereas I could cry a house down. Me of the midlife crisis, sending away for BMW brochures.

  The week before Broadway, I wasn’t sleeping. I was petrified into a permanent waking state. I couldn’t read the newspapers. I was convinced some other new show would exhaust the critics’ applause. Obviously Victor knew by then what I was up to (God, I write that as though I’m still guilty about it) and figured he’d been left out, but he didn’t say a word. He never would. He nursed his exclusion: the moping, the hunched shoulders, the earlier morning exits and later returns at night. In situations where normally he’d lead conversation, he went quiet. Where he’d call me on my shit or want in on whatever I was writing, he turned off, shut down, and went back to the lab.

  But where I want to go here, where I foresaw myself going, sitting here staring at CVS checkout girls through the window, sitting here while Victor drives back to the lab, already forgetting we just fought, is to dinner.