He woke a little past noon. I heard him stirring in his room and packed the moka pot with espresso and started it on the stove. That morning I had taken the glass of water with his phone in it from beneath my bed, pulled out the waterlogged device, and put it in a bowl of rice. When he asked for it, I would tell him I had found it in the toilet and was trying to save it.
It was cold in the cabin. I wore wide-legged corduroy pants and a silk turtleneck beneath a fitted cambric work shirt topped with an oversized woolen cardigan. My hair was plaited and pinned on top of my head like a German. In the morning, when I realized Vlad would not be waking anytime soon, I spent an excessive amount of time applying my makeup so that it did not look like I was wearing makeup.
“Whoa,” Vlad said as he entered the room. He wore his blazer over the pajama pants and his arms were crossed and shivering. I pointed to a sweater of John’s I had selected for him—a lambswool pullover made for the coldest of winter days. He took off the blazer and put it on—it billowed and flowed girlishly around his hips.
“The coffee is almost ready,” I said. He thanked me, then went to look out the glass doors that led to the lake. He seemed subdued, philosophical almost. I poured him the coffee, and not knowing how he took it and feeling too shy to ask, I filled a small pitcher with cream and made a tray with a bowl of sugar cubes. I placed it on the coffee table, and he turned toward the sound, sat down without speaking, and fixed his coffee with an obscene amount of milk and sugar. He looked bloodless and withered, a movie star playing a sick scene.
“This is so good,” he said as he finished it, and I replenished his cup.
I waited for him to ask where his phone was, or suggest we leave right away, or propose some sort of plan that linked us with the outside world, but he drank his coffee and said nothing.
“Would you like some eggs?” I asked hesitantly.
“I will eat whatever you give me,” he said.
I found the classical station on the radio and fixed him scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage links, raisin-bread toast, and a glass of orange juice in silence. Ravel’s “Boléro” played, and he hummed along, staring into the middle distance.
When the food was ready he came to the kitchen table and ate with fixed intensity. It was like watching a time-lapse video of an invalid recovering strength. As he ate, in a steady rhythm, color returned to his gray face, and his limp limbs seemed to plump with renewed energy. When he finished, having consumed the meal in silence, he leaned back and ran his hands up and down the sides of his abdominals.
“Excuse me,” he said, and walked very quickly to the bathroom, where he stayed for twenty minutes.
While he was engaged, I checked his phone, soaking in the rice, and confirmed that the screen was still warped and nonresponsive. Then I checked my own—another text from John came through, a picture of a platter of cherry tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella on skewers. His message read, The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his own *caprese.* Pedant that he was, he followed it up with another text, Voltaire, get it? Then another: This thing is a farce. I could resign now and end it. We’d save a fortune.
I texted him back, Why don’t you?
Civil suits. We didn’t get all the evidence until the hearing started, Alexis and Sid are looking it over today.
Ok
Where are you? I’m worried. I miss you.
I missed him too, in a way. The thought of he and Sid and Alexis all working together, drinking beers and going over his evidence seemed fun and familial. I started and erased several messages to him, but then I heard the door handle of the bathroom turn and I clicked off my phone.
“Jesus,” Vladimir said, “I feel like I was hit by a truck.”
I asked him if he wanted some painkiller, but he said no, only water. I pointed him to the glasses. He asked if I had apple cider vinegar. I had bought some the day before, in fact, and he mixed in a tablespoon. “For belly bloat,” he said, like a joke, though he meant it. As he was drinking, I pushed the bowl that contained his phone toward him.
“I found it in the toilet,” I said. “I think it might have fallen out of your pocket.”
“Nice one, Vlad,” he said. “Thanks for rescuing it.”
“Do you—want to see if it works?”
He shook his head. His lips were puffed with bitterness. “No.”
“Do you want to—use mine?” His lassitude was confusing me.
“I want to take out a boat,” he said. “Do you have boats?”
I pulled a kayak from the storage shed and brushed spiderwebs from the oar and the life jacket. I pushed him off, and he waved goodbye. Only when he was at a good distance out on the lake did I feel an erotic throb return, as I watched his shoulders undulate with the paddle, far from me. I went back inside the house and pulled the file of my book up on my laptop, hoping I had time to add an extra five hundred words before he returned. But instead I stared at the cursor blinking and wrote nothing.
What was he playing at? I couldn’t understand. I understood that during the night, still under the effects of the sedative, he had only wanted to sleep, he couldn’t think about the outside world, his wife, his daughter. But come this morning (or afternoon—I realized it was now after 2 p.m.), I had expected him to want to get back to that home and daughter as soon as possible. If he believed me about John and Cynthia, I would have expected him to be in more of a rage—ranting at me about my husband or fuming about his wife’s betrayal. But never mind him, I also didn’t understand my own mind. Did I wish to keep him here with me, in his docile, agreeable state? If he stayed, and we drank a bottle of wine or two, would it lead to our coupling? Last night, again, probably still under the influence, he had made it seem like that was a possibility. But I couldn’t believe that was true. And besides, when he caught sight of my low breasts, my rumpled thighs, the loose skin of my stomach—
I thought of lying in the graveyard on the day David didn’t come, the day we didn’t run off together to Berlin. I thought of looking into the eyes of the cat who stepped over my body. At the time, I remembered, I had been hit with a deep, heartbreaking depression. There are no happy endings, I had thought. I was too old to be having the revelation at the time, but it pounded in my chest nonetheless, the dramatic words bringing dramatic tears to my eyes. I wondered though, now, what I would have done if David had come. Would we have even gotten to the airport before I myself turned back? Surely I would not have left my daughter, my shining pride, even if the gesture was supposed to be modeling a kind of female independence and pursuit of happiness I believed would serve her in the future.
Unable to withstand it any longer, I took a brisk two-mile walk to the gas station at the top of the road and bought myself a pack of cigarettes. As I returned, turning the corner toward the house, I once again expected to see my car gone, Vladimir fled. But the car was still parked where I left it, and when I entered the living room Vlad was sitting on the couch, wearing nothing but a towel, the space heater blasting his bare skin, reading an old lake house copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He rose when he saw me, gripping his meager covering.
“Sorry,” he said. “I fell in the water. Then I came back and showered, then I picked this up, then I lost track of time.”
“Let me get you some clothes.”
“Thanks.” He relaxed back on the couch and held up the book. “I forgot how good a writer Lawrence can be,” he added.
“The beginning is very good,” I said, my eyes locked on his face, trying not to notice that the towel had slipped quite low, so the V of his lower abdominals was visible. “But once the caretaker and Lady Chatterley actually get together it’s nearly unreadable.”
“The first paragraph—”
I made a sound of assent and interrupted, “ ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.’ ”
“Novels don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Big pronouncements about the way of life.”
“He undercuts it though, doesn’t he,” I said. “He says something like, ‘Or so Lady Chatterley thought.’ ”
“Good memory,” he said.
“I don’t know why I remember it,” I said. “It struck me at the time, maybe.”
I was backing out of the room as we spoke, wanting to get away from Vlad’s aggressive state of undress as quickly as possible.
I came back with a pair of sweats and a shirt, put them on a chair (I found I could not hand them to him), told him to dress, and excused myself to the bathroom. In it I found his soaked and discarded clothes balled up in the tub, except for John’s sweater, which hung over the shower bar. It would ruin the shape of the garment to dry like that. I put the clothes in the washing machine, avoiding crossing paths with Vladimir, then brought the sweater out to the deck, where I laid it flat on a cushion in the sun and did my best to reshape it.
Then I sat on the deck chair and lit a cigarette. I was smoking for less than a minute when Vladimir joined me. He was clothed, to my great relief.
“You bad girl. Can I have one?” he asked. “That looks divine.” Something about the way he spoke—he could say the silliest word, divine, and make it sound like an artful, funny choice.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said, handing him one.
“Every once in a while,” he said. “I quit when Phee was born, but I sneak one when I can.”
And the tiniest pang of something passed over his face, the thought of his daughter, most probably.
But then he rolled his head, laid it on his shoulder, and raised his eyebrows at me. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he countered.
“I don’t,” I said, taking a drag.
And although I thought it might ruin whatever spell had come over him, I asked him what his plan was, and he said that before he answered he wanted to know mine.
I didn’t have one, I told him. I had brought him to the cabin because I wanted to show him the space and offer it to him as a writing retreat once it was winterized, as a patron might, because I had enjoyed his book so much. I told him that we had obviously gotten off topic and out of hand. I said that as it was study week and I didn’t have to teach, and I didn’t necessarily want to be in the same house with John while the hearing was taking place, I had considered extending my time here, so long as the weather remained mild enough that space heaters during the day and blankets during the night would suffice. I said I could drive him back now or whenever he wanted, that he was welcome to stay.
He asked if there was any more wine, and I poured us two copper Moscow-mule mugs full of red and brought them back out on the porch.
“You live quite the designed life,” he said when I handed him his cup.
“I’m just old,” I said. “I’ve had enough time to get the right things and get rid of the wrong ones.”
“You’re not old,” he said, and his voice was harsh in a way I hadn’t heard before. “You’re always saying that. Stop saying that.”
My lower eyelids filled with tears, but I swallowed them down, smiled, and thanked him for reminding me.
He looked out to the lake. His profile was not as beautiful as his face full on—his nose looked more rounded and long, his neck extended diagonally from his chin.
“Do you know what happened to us in New York?” he asked.
I said I didn’t. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
“To Cynthia and me.”
Ah. I said I knew what others had relayed, but not much more.
“I want to tell you what happened. I’m going to look at the lake and tell you the story.”
For Cynthia it had started years and years ago—he began with that disclaimer. But for him, and for him and her, it all seemed to start when he sold his book. Before that they had been two adjuncts scraping by in New York City—carrying around jars of peanut butter in their bags to avoid buying food on the go, keeping credit cards in drawers, buying secondhand clothes, eating free pizza at student-oriented events, renting films from the libraries, going to open hours at the museums, seeing theater only if a friend got them free tickets. It was the way that they had lived since they were eighteen, thriftily and lightly. They took pride in spending so little and would challenge each other about who could get through the week on the lowest amount of money. It was simple and eco-conscious and freeing.
The book advance had been significant for him—it doubled his yearly income—but he was sensible enough to know it was not life changing. He didn’t quit any of his adjunct teaching jobs. He and Cynthia went out for a fancy dinner, he bought a three-hundred-dollar pair of boots, they flew, rather than drove, to visit his parents in Florida. When they went out walking they bought six-dollar lattes without remonstrating themselves. They started shopping at the organic market. Cynthia, who had previously relied on the adequate therapists-in-training at the university where she worked, started psychoanalysis with a notorious practitioner who specialized in extreme trauma. There was a newfound ease and sense of possibility in their waking, working, everyday life.
They didn’t consider the increase in taxes. They didn’t consider the fact that because of his onetime burst of income the fee for their insurance plan would skyrocket. They got pregnant, mostly on purpose, but they weren’t the kind to plan a baby by planning how much more money said baby would cost. By the time Phee was born they were already back to attempting to subsist off their monthly income. After she was born the great hemorrhaging began. Cynthia had two adjunct jobs at the time she got pregnant, and when she inquired about the maternity leave policies for non-tenured faculty, she was informed that they didn’t have any—they replaced her immediately. Vlad started trying to find extra work wherever he could—editing other professors’ papers, tutoring SAT students, mentoring senior projects and independent studies as well as teaching his own classes. Cynthia was home with the baby and getting restless—she needed babysitting, she needed to get out, she needed time to write—he could see she was fraying at the edges. He should have noticed how serious it was, but he was also fraying at the edges. The city was bearing down on him; everything was so expensive—babysitters were twenty dollars an hour, the psychoanalyst would see Cynthia three times a week or not at all (and he didn’t accept insurance, so not at all), bills from the hospital and the midwife arrived with no seeming end. Cynthia had been sober when she and Vlad met at graduate school, her drinking and using had been something he knew about only from her writing, but then one night she came home from a walk with Phee with a bottle of white wine in the stroller caddy. That night had felt celebratory and bonding, they had fun, sloppy sex. Soon, however, the situation turned, as he should have known it would. They became enemies. When she drank she compared him to the litany of famous men who had left their wives when they had children for their own work, so that he could ascend while she floundered in obscurity. Bewildered, he told her to go to back to AA, and in response, she drank more. She refused to stop nursing, and Vlad was convinced Phee spit up more than an average baby, imbibing his wife’s pickled breast milk. Their recycling clinked with glass bottles of hard liquor as she plummeted into a wrathful and impermeable depression.
One Sunday afternoon—he hadn’t noted the date, and he should have; he constantly thought about what would have happened if he had remembered that it was April 22—he took Phee to the park. He had packed the diaper bag with care, bringing a blanket, the little neon triangle toy she loved, a change of clothes and diapers, bottles of pumped milk in freezer sleeves, a squeezy pouch of vegetables, a sandwich and a book for himself. He loaded up their stroller. He was so glad for the chance to escape her. Cynthia and the tyranny of her emotions. They were barely talking to each other at that time, out of deference to the oppressive tininess of their apartment and the fact that every discussion seemed to lead to an argument. That morning, however, she was buoyant, playful with Phee, and affectionate with him, calling him her handsome man and kissing him on the side of the mouth. He resisted her, assuming her lift in mood was only because he had promised to take the baby (and himself) away at 9 a.m. and return no earlier than 4 p.m. It was only because she felt guilty for sloughing Phee off on him that she was, for once, acting like a loving wife instead of a resentful cell mate.
She had been conscientious. Knowing how images can burn, she left a note outside the apartment door that said, “Please leave Phee in the high chair in the kitchen before you come into the bedroom.”
He took that note as proof that she didn’t fully mean it. If he had walked in with Phee and seen the bedroom door closed, he would have assumed she was communicating that she was still not in a place to see them. He would have assumed she was trying to let him know that she was finishing something. He would have left Phee in the stroller and lain down on the couch and tried to read the new short story in the New Yorker. He wouldn’t have walked into the bedroom to find her foaming, moaning, and soiled, 911 already dialed on his phone.
After the hospital, the apologies, the forgiveness, the real sweetness after the crisis, she did what she had accused him of doing that first year. She ran away. She went to an inpatient facility in Pennsylvania geared toward the recuperation of severely depressed women for six months. She talked about her mother, started her memoir, and sold the first four chapters for much more of an advance than he had received. His parents gave them enough money so that he could hire a nanny on a salary for the year on the condition that he find them a better life and a stable job. His book appeared on some end-of-year lists, and he took the opportunity and wrote every contact he knew before he landed a tenure-track position at a small college in upstate New York. The Main Street looked like a town in New England. Cynthia had always wanted to live in New England.
He couldn’t help but believe that it was all because of money—the having it and then the not having it. Yes, there was postpartum depression and the new-parent feeling of being caged inside one’s home. Of course there was the psychologically resonant fact that she was now a mother, just like her own mother, who had committed suicide when she was ten years old. Of course it was the anniversary of her death. Of course there was her brain chemistry and the alcohol abuse and antidepressant adjustments. Still it felt as though none of it would have happened if he had simply been able to keep them in the easy, bountiful style that had accompanied the first months after he sold the book. If they had continued feeling that optimism about the future of their lives together. If they hadn’t lived in New York, among so many rich people, who sat in the playgrounds with Cynthia and him and told them about their private schools and tropical vacations in which someone else watched the baby. If he hadn’t turned money cop and rejected requests for babysitters and cars and takeout and therapy. If he hadn’t become her jailer just as much as the demanding, adorable Phee.
And now, with the possibility of owning a home, his secure position, the lower cost of childcare, the money Cynthia was making with her book, it seemed like they should be feeling carefree once again. But this time he was the one who felt trapped. He was so frightened of Cynthia, of what would happen should she relapse. The pressure of being a tenure-track professor meant he felt he always had to be doing more. He hadn’t realized how much public transportation and the pedestrian lifestyle suited him—allowing him time to think, allowing him space between his work and his home. Reliance on the car depressed him. Cynthia was only attracted to houses that were about one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars more than they could afford. Real estate conversations always ended in breakdowns. Now that Phee was in the college day care, it felt like he was running his ass to the ground while Cynthia had endless time to perfect her book. She even demanded she get to work nights while he put Phee to bed (he paused here to say that the possibility of the affair with John was nearly beside the point). They were stuck in a dynamic in which he couldn’t refuse her anything—couldn’t say that she had plenty of time to work given that her memoir-writing class qualified as less than part-time. Couldn’t say that yes, she picked up Phee at three and watched her until he returned home at six, but those three hours were nothing when you considered he was waking up at five to keep his head above water, as well as not working on his new novel, the only thing in this world, other than his daughter, that meant something to him.
He let the words out in a torrent, not allowing time to interject or respond.
“So,” he said when he finished, “is there more wine?”
I nodded and gestured inside. He told me he would come to the point when he returned, then went into the house. I almost asked him to find the mixed nuts and bring out a bowl, but then thought better of it. His wife, I’m sure, was an asker. I lit another cigarette, though I didn’t want it.
When he returned, he used the arms of the chair to lift his feet from the ground, tucked and folded his legs into a yogic version of crisscross-applesauce, lowered himself into the seat, and continued.
“So I woke up this morning and thought, Cynthia got to run away.”
I was surprised by his harshness. To call a suicide attempt “running away,” that wasn’t right. “You can’t really call it that,” I said. “She was in crisis.”
“But the motivating factor of all of it was escaping. She wanted to escape. And she did. I had to stick around, and she read the complete works of Kawabata on a deck chair in some sanatorium that looked like Mann’s Magic Mountain. Did she ask me before she decided to run? No. Did she prepare me? She did not. So.” He shrugged, caustic and nonchalant.
“So you want to take revenge.”
“Revenge? I don’t know. Quid pro quo is more like it. Nothing extreme—just a few days to escape. Maybe I’ll write, maybe I’ll just clear enough space out that I could write. Or maybe I’ll find something to write about.” And he looked at me as if I might be his subject.
“Here?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“But,” I protested, not understanding quite why I was protesting, for the sake of logic, maybe, or out of female solidarity, perhaps, or because as he had told his story I had felt a growing impatience and disdain for him that I could not yet comprehend or admit, “excuse me, but you, well, when she tried to—when she left, if that’s the right word, you knew where she was. Maybe not emotionally, but physically. She doesn’t know where you are.”
“No, she does, well, basically she does.”
“How?” I was confused. I had checked his phone when I returned from the gas station and it was still on the fritz. We had no landline at the cabin—he couldn’t have called her.
“You told her.”
My throat tightened and my heart pounded so thunderously it reverberated in my armpits. I felt the need to keep the appearance of eye contact with him and felt myself putting on a face of false surprise, squinting at his forehead, as though I were trying very hard to understand what he was saying.
“You wrote her that text message from my phone. About needing time.”
“What?” My brow was still furrowed and my head was now shaking back and forth very quickly.
“I have my laptop in my bag. I can see my text messages on my computer.”
I pushed words out of my mouth. “Well—drunk—you must have…”
“No, you wrote it. I didn’t write that. I know that I didn’t. It’s okay,” he said, smiling warmly at me. “It’s interesting.”
“Did she write back?”
“She did. We went back and forth a bit.” He unfurled his legs from beneath him, lowered them to the deck, and used his heels to lift his buttocks up in a pelvic stretch. “She said I could have a few days.”
“But do you want to stay a few days?”
“I do,” he said, lifting his arms high and wide, his voice strangled from his stretch. “That is, if you’ll have me.”
“Did she—admit to—John?”
“No,” he said casually. “But she’d be the first one to tell you she’s a liar. So who knows.”
He clasped his hands behind his head, looked over at me, and flashed his matinee idol grin, his teeth and lower lip stained purple from the wine.
“C’ai bum another cigarette?”