CHAPTER TWO

I should explain something before I go too much further. I’ve worked on hundreds of books, and I know that you don’t generally get far with readers without giving them a sympathetic viewpoint character. While I’m not so foolish as to think that my actions will actually elicit sympathy, if I’m going to be that character, I should at least provide enough context to establish understanding, and from there, perhaps, among more generous readers, sympathy might grow. My goal here is not to convince anyone that I made good choices, just that, at the time that I made them, my choices were neither unreasonable nor particularly perverse. To the extent, of course, that any of us make any choices at all.

Now, I know this isn’t something one normally talks about—it is in fact something one is actively discouraged from talking about—but for my story to make sense, I am going to have to mention that I am unusually good-looking.

I don’t want to overstate this. I’m not one of those people who is so good-looking that it is in effect a superpower; voices don’t hush when I walk into a room. But while I’m not movie-star handsome, I wouldn’t be out of place as the movie star’s less wholesome rival, the one he wins the girl away from. When I walk into a room, women tend to notice; they continue their conversations, but their eyes follow me, and they’re usually receptive when I say hello later. I started out with extra credit in the bank, is the thing. I’ve always been able to cut corners that someone shorter, fatter, less square-jawed, would be required to negotiate in full. The downside, of course, is that with age, I’ve had more to lose.

I understand that this sounds vain, but if I’m vain, it’s a vanity without pride; it is no more an achievement than the color of my hair (graying slightly, but still a rich, dark brown, and thick as ever) or the size of my feet (on the large side), but there it is, and it did not seem unusual to me when, a few nights after running into Lisa at the gym, I set out walking from my mother’s house to meet her for dinner, nor did it occur to me that Lisa’s reasons for getting together might be anything other than what they seemed.

My reasons, on the other hand, were plain, at least to me. Since I’d run into Lisa, I’d found myself drifting off into daydreams of when we were young, when my life was less complicated and most of it wasn’t already behind me. Lisa—not as she was, but as she existed in my memory—embodied that time for me, and it felt like I was being offered an opportunity to revisit it. In contrast to my fraught relationship with Sarah, it felt like a chance to take a vacation from my life. Of course, I knew Lisa would have her own fraught and complicated history. She would no more be the same person she had been thirty years ago than I was, but if daydreams were logical and stuck to the facts, we’d all just get back to work.

THE VILLA Maria Restaurant and Lounge, where we’d decided to meet, was a family place; my parents had brought me here when I was a kid. Red tablecloths, Chianti-bottle candles. There were older couples at half a dozen tables, most of them not talking to each other as they ate their piccatas and fra diavolos. A young couple at one table looked like they might be high school kids out on their first formal date together, playing grown-up. Or maybe they were thirty and had just sold their startup, and were here to celebrate their retirement. It’s harder to judge age the further away you get.

Cold wind blew in with Lisa when she came through the door. She walked straight to me where I waited at the bar sipping a scotch, said “Hi!” and leaned in to give me a quick kiss on the cheek, bringing a cloud of floral perfume with her. She took off her long, fur-trimmed, camel hair coat and held it out to me. “Here. Get us a table while I go to the bathroom, and then we can talk about what it’s like to be a famous writer. I have to tinkle,” she said girlishly, and tinkled off toward the restrooms in back.

If this were another kind of book, a showily postmodern novel from twenty or thirty years ago, I might insert a footnote here, with a clever title like “A Note on the Type.” Instead, I’ll just explain that what Lisa had said to me actually sounded more like “He-ah. Get us a table while I go to the beah-throom, and then we can tawk about what it’s like to be a famous writ-a.”

Lisa’s speech was characteristic of this part of Long Island, the result of parents who had brought their thick New York accents with them when they moved up in the world, from tenements and two-family houses in the boroughs to their own homes in the suburbs. But no matter where you go, theah you ah.

I was not a fan of the accent—I’d begun the work of losing mine as soon as I arrived at college and discovered I had one—but I had grown up with it, and unless I was listening critically, it didn’t leap out at me, so I will skip any further tortured phonetic renderings.

“So,” she said, after we were seated and she’d ordered a chocolate martini, “are you writing a new book? I want to hear all about it.”

“I am, but I don’t like to talk about them at this stage,” I said, which was sort of true, or, if you were going to get technical, not true. It was more that I didn’t want to talk about my third novel at all, the book I was nominally writing, because while I’d never entirely given up on it, I’d completely lost any momentum. It was right now an amorphous and disconnected assemblage of truncated openings and notes and outlines that I had continued to plug away at half-heartedly, without ever developing any sense of where it was headed or what shape it might assume. And since the series of crises that led to my new suburban lifestyle, I hadn’t even been doing that, and was instead scrambling to keep money coming in. I was now occupied with editing A Bewilderment of Echoes, a 250,000-word novel that was going to be self-published on Amazon, a job I’d found on craigslist.

“Okay,” Lisa said. “Then tell me what it’s like to be a famous writer.”

“If by famous writer you mean I published a couple of books, sure. Actual famous writers would laugh at that, though.” This was neither rhetoric nor conjecture.

“Well, I don’t know anybody else that published a novel, so you’re a famous writer as far as I’m concerned.”

“Good enough for me. That shall be my identity for the evening. Roger Olivetti, famous writer,” I said in an orotund, self-mocking voice, but it was an identity I had once hoped to inhabit. At this late stage, of course, it had become vanishingly unlikely. My wife’s application for the position, however, had been accepted. Sarah Scott, famous writer, no voice effects necessary.

Lisa laughed delightedly, reached out and touched my arm.

“You always were so clever,” she said. “My mother was so proud when she saw your first novel. She ordered two copies and kept one on display on her desk. She told everyone to read it.” Lisa’s mother was a librarian, had worked at the library near my house. I’d known her since junior high, and first knew Lisa when she was a little kid playing behind her mother’s desk while I checked out books.

“You know, I wouldn’t mind saying hello to her while I’m out here,” I said, and Lisa’s mood abruptly fell.

“Oh, Roger, you wouldn’t want to. It’s so terrible now.”

“What’s wrong? Is she sick?”

“It’s awful, Roger. She has dementia, and it keeps getting worse. Sometimes she doesn’t even recognize me.”

Until that moment, Mrs. Capitano had existed in the back of my mind as I’d last seen her: smart, vital, always ready to discuss what I’d been reading or recommend something new; probably younger then than I am now. I was thrown by the abrupt erasure of that image and its replacement with this new one. “That’s terrible. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She’s been in a nursing home for a while now. They take good care of her, but it’s so expensive! Sometimes I don’t know how I’m going to keep her there.” She picked up her glass, found it empty, pouted her lips.

I waved the waiter over and ordered us another round. I thought about my friend Stacy, an editor at Penguin. She visited her mother’s Upper East Side apartment most days after work, where the cost of round-the-clock home-health aides had drained her mother’s savings and the life-insurance money from her father, and was now eating into what Stacy had managed to put away. She was regularly called away from meetings to rush to the hospital, where modern medicine managed to put her mother’s death off a little while longer.

After a minute, I said, “If it ever looks like I’m going that way, I’ll pull the plug myself.”

“Really? You would do that?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “If it got grim enough. I’m not going to go gentle into that good night, but I’m not much for raging to no purpose either. I choose Option C.”

“What?” She looked lost.

“I’m saying I would want some control. It’s a final way to exercise free will.”

She stared at me for a few seconds, blinked a couple of times. “That was deep, Roger, but I was just asking if you really think it’s okay to do that.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I do. I think it’s okay, if you’re suffering. And if I couldn’t do it myself, I’d hope somebody would do it for me.”

We looked at each other for a moment, then she put her arms around herself and shivered in an exaggerated way. “How did we ever get to talking about this? Let’s talk about something else, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s your story? Do you like selling real estate? How did you get started?”

She brightened instantly. “Well, around ten years ago, we needed some extra money to send Kathy to college, so I took the exam, and it turned out I was pretty good at it. When Steven and I split up, I went full-time.”

“What makes you good at it?”

“I know people, Roger, and I know a lot of the families around here. Nobody buys or sells a house because they’re content with their life. Houses don’t turn over because people are happy. The market around here, it’s people buying or selling because things are looking bad, or they think they’ll get better. Sometimes, nothing even really changes. You just have to know the right time to talk to them, and then give them a little push. That’s what I’m good at, knowing when to give them that little push.” She gave me a sly look, and for just a moment, she looked like the teenage girl who used to cut classes to run off and get high with me. “You want to know a secret, Roger? Sometimes it feels like if I gave someone a little push at just the right time, I could make them do anything.” She laughed and took another sip of her drink.

“Wow. Maybe I should write a novel about you.”

“I’m a pretty interesting person, Roger.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

We ordered another drink, then ordered dinner when the waiter brought them.

“So, what about you?” she said. “I heard a while ago that you were married.”

“I’m not surprised. My mother probably went door to door to announce it.”

“And everything’s going okay?”

I lifted my eyebrows, gave her a pointedly sheepish look. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“We don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to.”

I would actually have appreciated the opportunity to talk it through with someone, but with the second drink, the evening was taking on a buzzy glow, and the more expansive and randy I felt, the more distant all that seemed. Besides, talking about cheating on my wife wasn’t going to put me in the best of lights.

So we drank our drinks and ate our food and flirted a bit more, and managed to stick to inconsequential topics, nothing unpleasant or too close to home. Before I knew it, another hour had slipped by, and Lisa announced that she had to show a house in the morning.

She insisted on splitting the bill, for which I was silently grateful; until something changed, funds would be an increasingly pressing issue. I put it on a card and took her cash, and then we walked out to the parking lot. When we reached her car, she got in and I stood there holding the door, but before I could shut it for her, she glanced around at the nearly empty parking lot. “Did you walk here?”

“I did,” I admitted. Not having a car on Long Island was highly inconvenient, and also faintly ridiculous, like you were the only person living on a Polynesian atoll who didn’t have a boat.

“Get in, I’ll drive you home.”

It was tempting, but I could already see us parked in the driveway, making out in the car, first-date stuff, and I was trying not to alert the neighbors to the fact that I was pitching my tent at my mother’s house. My mother was still as firmly a part of the local gossip network as ever, regularly catching me up on the doings of people I only dimly remembered or had never known. Someone might reach out to tell her there had been a car sitting in her driveway, and a strange man—or more alarmingly, her son—lurking about.

She would immediately uproot herself, I knew, and migrate prematurely north, where she would get permanently underfoot making sure I was looked after. Further, I did not look forward to her disappointment at hearing my marriage had failed, and even less to the advice she was sure to offer—she was an enthusiastic forwarder of multiply nested emails and links to articles and inspirational stories about people who had either bounced back or kept plugging away, or simple, positive aphorisms misattributed variously to Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein, or Marilyn Monroe.

“That’s okay,” I told Lisa. “It’s not far, and I can use the exercise.”

Your loss, her smile seemed to say as she pulled the door closed and started the car. “I know exactly how far it is. I was talking to your mother about selling just a few months ago.”

“You were? She’s selling the house?”

“Nope. That’s a woman who is content with her life. Call me soon, okay?” she said, and drove off, both of us looking forward to next time, and, I assumed, for the same reason.