Four

And it was definitely the town of Cuento I fell for. I never warmed to the Beige Barn—who could?—but Cuento was a different story. The wide downtown sidewalks with benches and dog bowls and hippies playing the street-corner pianos. The street-corner pianos! The quiet streets in the old residential neighbourhoods with the shade trees and the basketball hoops and kids on skateboards waiting their turn at the stop signs. I liked the way the pizza joint would start selling hot slices at closing time, and I liked the taco wagon with the outsize burritos. I liked the way people put free stuff out on the sidewalk with cardboard signs saying free stuff and the way it took ten minutes to buy a newspaper. “Hey, how are you today?” “I’m good. How are you?” “I’m great, thanks for asking. What can I do for you this morning?”

Bran was the one who brought me to it all and shared it with me, and he was so pretty and horny and he laughed all the time. And any time he puzzled me, I assumed I was picking him up wrong. Oh, how I chuckled at the way we didn’t understand each other. Oh, how blithely I assumed it would all make sense in time. Oh, how much more attention I should have paid.

When we went out for dinner with his partner and his partner’s new husband, I thought I was missing something. Or they were joking. Americans, I told myself, are known for their irony. The partner, Brandeee (with three es), had got married just before Bran set off for Turnberry and his own whirlwind romance, and they were still at the nauseating stage: feeding each other forkfuls of pasta, dropping hints about their sex life, trying out various pet names. I asked them about living in Cuento just to stop the pookies and punkins, since we were trying to eat.

It sounded, to the untrained ear, as if all three of them agreed: the benches in the downtown attracted vagrants, the dog bowls harboured mosquito larvae, the pianos were scruffy. The roots of the shade trees in the residential streets wrecked the suspension of their Infinitis, the basketball hoops took up parking spots, and the kids on the skateboards were breaking the law. None of them had ever eaten a hot slice and when I waxed on about the burritos from the taco wagon, Brandeee and Mr. Brandeee wrinkled their noses and Bran stared at me. I didn’t tell them I’d got my Converse from a pile of free stuff.

They couldn’t object to the extreme friendliness of the guy in the newspaper shop, but that was because all three of them got their news on a screen during their morning treadmill session.

I told myself I would learn their ways. They couldn’t all be complete tossers. Bran couldn’t, because I was falling for him and he was nuts about me. He had to be a good guy because he had proposed and I was sorely tempted. He must have hidden depths. If I said yes, I would dive in and find them.

Reader, I married him, as Jane Eyre said. And he was a tosser, wrapped in a blanket of wanker, dipped in asshole batter, and deep-fried in dickhead oil. As she probably didn’t.

I married him, I started working toward counselling accreditation in the California system, I called myself a life coach in the meantime, I hung my shingle (and started learning America-speak like hung my shingle). And to help my case, as soon as I was a legal resident, I applied to become a notary. Who could witness legal documents. Like divorce papers.

I took another sip of my cream of tomato mocha chai latte, now with a hint of lemonade concentrate, gagged, and searched my bag bottom for stray Tic-Tacs.

How soon did I know I’d made a mistake? Well, the honeymoon was great. We went to Saratoga, another real place, as it turned out. Cold drinks, hot sex. Low stress, high hopes. Then we came back.

I had been a marriage guidance therapist for nine years by this time. I had seen dozens, scores, legions of marriages contracted between well-matched couples who knew each other inside out and shared common goals. I had sat there trying not to roll my eyes while most of them descended into pits of lye.

Also, I assumed good intentions. Bran had wooed me, pursued me, and swept me off my Uggs like something from a Regency romance. With Uggs. He wouldn’t have done that for no reason, I told myself. I was right.

The first crack formed on the outer layers at an Easter potluck at Brandeee’s house. And that’s another thing. The bloody potlucks! Dear American people: Have a party or don’t have a party, but don’t have half a party that’s more trouble than it’s worth for everyone. Personally, if I’ve made a big bowl of guacamole, I’d rather stay in my own house on my own couch with Benedict Cumberbatch and eat it, than go and stand around in someone’s back garden with a paper plate and enter it into the guacamole-off with a crowd of passive-aggressive housewives who bought the seasoning mix from Trader Joe’s. And while I’m talking about the paper plates, what’s with the paper plates? And plastic forks? And polystyrene cups? American people! Parties mean dishes. Suck it up. Because nothing says “B-list” like being made to eat Trader Joe’s guacamole off a paper plate with a plastic fork at the house of someone with a dishwasher and a housecleaner.

Not all of which is technically Bran’s fault. So back to the Easter Potluck at Brandeee’s.

“What were you thinking of taking?” I asked him. I was sitting on the beanbag I had bought in Target and dragged into his “gym” so I could hang out and chat while he was on his treadmill in the morning.

“I thought you might want to take care of it,” he said. “You know, bring something … appropriate … that they might not have had before. Make your mark.”

I thought he meant something British. I think if you asked a hundred people in a studio audience, they’d have thought the same.

So I made spotted dick.

And I put a sign on it, because the name’s half the fun.

And there it was on a long trestle table (with a paper cloth) in Brandeee’s back garden, beside the primavera salad and the electric slow-cooker full of lamb meatballs and the bunny-shaped chocolate mousses sitting in a tray of ice. And fourteen plates of recombined product from Trader Joe’s and Costco, let me say.

“What is wrong with you?” Bran muttered with his teeth clenched hard enough to split his veneers. I had found out they were veneers during a night of unusual positions. It endeared him to me at the time.

“Communication breakdown,” I said. “Soz.”

“Was it supposed to be funny?”

“No ‘supposed to be’ about it,” I said. “It is funny. Spotted dick, Bran. Come on.”

“No one is laughing,” he said, looking around like the wrath of God while everyone pretended they didn’t know we were fighting but at the same time spoke very quietly so they could hear us. Paper and plastic are great for that, at least. No clashing and clinking to cover the sweet sound of someone else having a public domestic.

“Blaike laughed like a drain,” I pointed out. Brandeee’s son, Blaike, had just about swallowed his tongue.

“Blaike is fifteen years old,” Bran said. “He’d laugh at a … ”

“Fart gun?” I suggested. It didn’t help.

“I even said ‘appropriate,’” Bran hissed. “I clearly said ‘make something appropriate.’ I meant for Easter.”

“Fine!” I said, quite loud. “Nail it to a fucking cross then.”

And that’s how I found out that, even in California, about as far from the Bible Belt as your bobble hat, in a town with a mosque to its name, there’s still a line.

I talked him down later in the day. Cultural norms, learning process, the long tail of Puritanism informing American—But he started frowning, so I dialled back.

“You remember what it was like in Scotland?” I said. “Even in a golf resort. Remember when you tried to get a bucket of ice and that waiter asked if you had sprained your ankle? It’s just that we’ve got different expectations, Bran. To me, Easter is more about … daffodils and chocolate and … it’s not as if you go to church. Does Brandeee go to church? Only, you said Burk was her third husband and I just—”

“Burt.”

“Blurt?”

“BURT!”

“Burt. You said Burt was her third husband and I just assumed she was pretty secular, you know.”

“She attends the Unitarian Universalist congregation, as a matter of fact,” Bran said, and I had never heard him sound so … prissy. Also, I didn’t know what Yooyoos were then and so I missed the chance to deliver a snort.

“My mistake,” I said.

“I forgive you,” said Bran.

I chewed that over for a good long time before answering. Long enough to go from sarcasm (you are a benevolent master) and nit-picking (I didn’t apologise) all the way to what I finally said which was:

“Well good then.”

It fills me with a kind of nostalgia now: my very first well good then. Like tasting something that, years before, gave you volcanic food poisoning.

These were the memories I was lost in when the door of the interview room opened and a woman put her head round it.

“You’re free to leave, Ms. Campbell,” she said.

“Oh?” I said. “Says who?”

She came a little further in and I saw the empty shoulder holster she wore. Plainclothes.

“We ran the tape from the building entrance,” she said. “In at six and still there when the officers arrived. You are good to go.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Sorry about the coffee,” she said, nodding at the half-empty cup.

“You’re a detective then,” I said. She quirked her head. “I couldn’t get beyond ‘hot beverage’ and that was after drinking it.” She smiled, understanding, and then turned away and set off along the corridor. I kind of wanted to run after her. No one else within a ten-mile cordon would have understood me, I was sure.

I restrained myself and was rewarded when she turned back.

“Like I said, you are absolutely free to walk out. But if you felt like coming back in the morning … Mizz Visalia is going to be arraigned and if I had money on it, I’d guess bailed, so she could use someone around.”

“Have you got any recommendations for where I could spend the rest of the night?” I said. It might have come out weird, because she blushed and cleared her throat before she answered.

“Nearest motel’s just down the block,” she said. “But can’t you just go home? You’re Branston Lancer’s wife, aren’t you?”

“Ex,” I said. “So no.”

She grunted. “Shuffled the pack again, huh?”

I grunted back. It was a bit too horribly accurate.

About a month after the Easter Potluck came the fateful day. I was supposed to be going to a book club after work, but work had been great. The first actually good day. I had picked up a client—two clients, technically. Clovis and Visalia Bombaro, both in their eighties, needed some guidance on ending their marriage amicably—and I wanted to share the news with Bran. I wanted to tell him that they had met at the age of twelve at a family picnic. They were cousins. In fact, Mrs. Bombaro, sixty-seven years into the marriage, still called him Cousin Clovis, which was weird but hardly worth the effort to change now. After all, he would still be her cousin when the papers were signed and the property divided. Whatever. I looked forward to regaling Bran with the failure of a marriage between people of exactly the same background, the same ethnicity, from the same village in Italy, from the same family, who worked together in the family business Bombaro Pyrotechnics (Nothing goes Boom like Bombaro!), and yet were giving up. It made me hopeful about the two of us, in comparison.

And the book club was reading The Goldfinch.

So I went back to the Barn. I let myself in softly and closed the door behind me with a gentle click. Mrs. Bombaro’s words were still ringing in my ear.

“Boom? Boom is right! Boom, he’s gone. Boom, he’s back. Boom, the toilet seat is up. Boom, the toilet seat is down. He puts a water glass down on a cork coaster and it wakes the dog!”

“Sixty-seven years I work hard all day and come home to this!”

“Minor irritat—” I said, before I gave up. But it made me conscious of the way I usually slammed in and yelled his name, crashed my keys into the bowl, and clomped over to the fridge.

It was Lupe’s day and the house was gleaming. I took my shoes off at the front door so as not to put Converse rubber on the perfect polish of the floor and shushed along the bedroom corridor in my socks.

It was a complicated set of sounds. At first I thought a small animal had got caught in some moving part of the air conditioner. There was a rhythmic squeaking and a wet sort of slapping noise and there were little snuffling sounds. Then I came around the bedroom doorway and saw, on the bed, Branston’s bottom, pure snowy white where the sun had never penetrated his golf shorts. It was bobbing and swishing, looking as if it was chewing on something bouncy. Waggling on either side of it were Brandeee’s regularly pedicured feet and, clutching his shoulder blades, were Brandeee’s regularly manicured hands. Her engagement ring winked away in time.

My first thought was that not many therapists get to take part in such a classic scene. It would be no end of help professionally. Next up, I knew this was my chance to be either very cool or very lame. I would be telling this story for years and this was the moment to make sure I came out of it the winner. Third, I couldn’t help noticing that I didn’t feel shocked or hurt. I felt the kind of profound relief I had only ever felt once before in my life: when I thought I’d lost my wallet and then found it behind the couch. Last, admittedly, I wondered how bad The Goldfinch could actually be.

I leaned against the doorjamb, checked Facebook, did half a BuzzFeed quiz, took a couple of pictures of Branston’s bum—one clenched, one flexed—and waited. Finally, with a moan from him and a few unconvincing gasps from her, he fell flat. Their sweaty chests made a wet fart sound as he landed. Neither one of them laughed, although I had to bite my cheeks. Branston, after a few deep breaths, rolled off.

“Cheers, love,” I said, catching Brandeee’s eye. “I don’t suppose you’d do my ironing as well, would you?”

And out it all came. She had had three husbands. Blaike’s dad was the first. Poor Burt was the third, and the second was guess who. He was so mightily pissed off with her for marrying Burt that he flounced off to Scotland to show her he didn’t care. And while he was there, he thought of something even better.

“I didn’t expect it to get this far,” Bran said. He was sitting up in bed, right at the edge, as far as he could get from Brandeee, who was sitting up right at the other edge, holding the sheet up like a bulletproof vest. “I thought she’d come round before the wedding.”

“Ours or hers?”

“Well, first hers and then ours,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lexy.”

“No hard feelings,” I told him. Then at his look, I added, “That was sarcasm, Branston, you total fucking creep. Do you think maybe you could have hooked up with someone who lived in Cuento anyway? Someone who wouldn’t have given up a job and moved thousands of miles for your little game of chicken?”

“I see that now,” he said, squirming. He was physically squirming.

“Are you trying to wriggle out of a condom?”

“No,” he said.

“Wrong answer,” I said. “Now I’ll need to go and get checked for skankitis.”

“There’s no need to be crude,” said Brandeee. Her first contribution.

“Really?” I said. “Seriously? I’ve fallen short of your standards of gracious behaviour, have I? Wow.” Then I went into the walk-in wardrobe and took a suitcase down from the high shelf. I dumped it on the bed between them.

“I can’t leave tonight!” Bran squeaked.

“But I can,” I said. “I’m going to Reno to divorce you and I’m taking your car because I’ll still have to come back to Cuento to see clients. Some of us”—I flicked my best disgusted glare at Brandeee—“honour our commitments.”

I thought I had played it so well, but if I’d chucked him out on Goldfinch night and stayed put, I’d have a clue where to go now. If I’d sent him to Nevada for the nine weeks it took our divorce to go through (Americans can certainly hustle), I’d have friends and neighbours and Lupe to turn to now. Unfortunately, I’d spent those weeks on the couch of a hotel room and didn’t even get the same housekeeping three days in a row.

Apart from that, it was a delight. America is a wonderful place to be bathed in self-pity: Netflix serves up such endless comfort and the twenty-four-hour supermarkets serve up junk food of such great diversity and in such gargantuan units. I watched an entire season of The Good Wife (irony absolutely intended) in one breaded boneless barbecued choc-chip sitting.

“Nearest motel’s just down the block,” I repeated as I left the cop shop. The car park was brightly lit, but when I got back to the street it was dark and deserted in both directions. Which way was down, in a town like a billiard table? The locals probably knew—2nd and B; catty corners; make a right—but it was all Greek to me.

I looked left, towards where the street dipped under the railway line and came up in total blackness. Then I looked right to where it crossed the downtown and headed for the suburbs. Somewhere that way was Bran’s house. That way were green lawns, blue pools, and beige tiles tended by elves at dawn.

I was headed where the elves came from. If there was a motel I could walk into after midnight on the Fourth of July, it was that-a-way. I followed the road towards the railway line, literally crossed to the wrong side of the tracks, and somewhere in the close damp dark of the underpass, finally left my old life behind me.

“You are kidding!” I said, as I caught sight of it. Last Ditch Motel, the sign said in pink and yellow neon tubes like balloon animals. Clean and comfortable, the small print added as I trudged closer, free continental breakfast, fast WiFi, bug nets.

The office(Open!) was at the end of one horseshoe arm. The other end was a launderette called Skweeky Kleen. In between were an empty pool and maybe twenty rooms, double-decker. Some were in darkness. Some shone like pumpkin lanterns, lamps glowing behind orange curtains, but most flickered television blue.

I pushed open the office door braced for pimps and roaches. Inside, a room perhaps ten feet square contained two wrought-iron patio tables and four chairs and on a counter beside them sat a microwave and a bagel cutter. There was a red plastic basket with bags of oatmeal arranged in it and a pair of coffee jugs. It was hours till breakfast but already the shoes were frying.

On the other side of the room, behind a reception desk of Formica mended with leopard-print duct tape, sat a woman of perhaps sixty years, slumped in a Barca-lounger with the footrest extended, deeply asleep. Her chin was on her chest and her glasses had slipped down her nose.

I cleared my throat.

“Plate?” she said, coming awake without so much as a flicker. She sat up, kicking her footrest back and launching herself out of the chair, coming to rest perfectly centred behind her reception desk, with one hand on the mouse of her computer and one hand on her phone.

“Plate?” I said.

“The license plate of your Prius, hon,” she said. “Hybrids have ruined my system after fifteen happy years. I used to wake up whenever a car pulled in, but it’s all over now.”

“I don’t have a Prius,” I said. “I don’t actually have a car.”

“Where’s your luggage?”

“I don’t have any luggage either,” I said. “I just need a room.”

“For?” she said. She narrowed her eyes. With a close look and now that she wasn’t nestled into her chins, I wondered if she was even sixty. Her skin was dewy and her eyes bright. It was just that her hair was silver and cut in a no-nonsense Grandma style and she wore a t-shirt that read I don’t like morning people.

“Well, the night,” I said. “And maybe tomorrow night. What else would I want it for?”

“An hour,” she said, bone dry. She turned away and looked at her keyboard. An honest-to-god board with hooks on it and keys hanging from them. The back of her t-shirt read Or mornings. Or people.

“Two queens or a king,” she said, turning back.

I thought she was giving me more information about how prostitutes order motel rooms. “Definitely not,” I said. “Absolutely nothing of the kind.” I took my credit card out and slid it over the Formica towards her. It was my and Bran’s joint account, platinum of course. I was using it all the way up to the gate at SFO international departures, then I’d snip it and send it back to him.

She glanced at it and then regarded me for another silent minute or two, until at last her face cleared like Alka-Seltzer. “Lancer,” she said. “Tooth-fairy Lancer?”

“I left him,” I said.

“I like you,” she said, her voice as dry as ever and not so much as a twitch at her lips. “Sonofabitch whistled show tunes clear through my root canal.”

I had a mental image of some sort of trumpet (I was so tired by that time I was getting spacey) but mystifying as most of her utterance was, there was no mistaking sonofabitch, and any enemy of Bran’s was a friend of mine.

When she had swiped my card, she shoved a key at me. “Room 213,” she said. “The fan rattles like a mother but I can give you earplugs.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “See you in the morning. If you’re still on shift.”

“Ain’t no lottery drawing ’tween now and then,” she said. “I’ll be here. No lean.”

“Sorry?” I said. “To get the door open?”

“My name is Noleen,” she said, then looked at the card as she handed it back. “Lego … what?”

“Lexy,” I said. “Campbell. Lexy Lancer was … ”

“One of Stan Lee’s off-days.”

I laughed. I had decided somewhere around half-past nine that I might never laugh again, but Noleen got a chuckle out of me. It was as short as a snapped biscotto, but it was unmistakably mirth.

As she settled herself back into the Barca-lounger and strained the foot and headrests apart, I let myself out and closed the door softly.

By the time I opened the door to room 213 I would have curled up in a dumpster full of soup cans, so it was no miracle that it looked welcoming. No roaches, no mould in the bathroom, sheets pulled tight enough to bounce pennies off the bed. I drank two plastic cups of tap water, brushed my teeth with the corner of a towel, and slotted myself into the tight sheets like a library ticket.

The fan was indeed symphonic. I just had time to say to myself, What a bloody racket. I’ll neve—and the next thing I knew the sun was shining in the open curtains and my cheek was attached to the pillow beneath it by a patch of drool.