“God, she’s so angry,” Sarah said quietly to Karen after one particularly ferocious bout.
“Of course she is. Hell hath no fury. You’re not the only woman scorned. However much you and Ben tell her that it’s not about her and that it’s just about what went wrong between you and him, she probably can’t see it that way. You should have her go talk to somebody.”
“A shrink?”
“Why not? Aren’t you seeing someone?”
“I’m not the type.”
“What’s the type? You get sick, you see a doctor, right?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps. Sometime.”
“Whatever. It’s none of my business. But maybe you should think about it for Abbie.”
Sarah already had, but didn’t feel like discussing it, partly out of loyalty to Abbie and partly because she felt she had bungled the whole thing. She had mentioned Abbie’s anger to their doctor only the previous week when she went to see him for some more sleeping pills. He said therapy would be a good idea and that he’d be happy to put them in touch with someone. Abbie should drop by and see him, he said. But when Sarah told Abbie, she almost got her head bitten off.
“What, you mean you think I’m crazy?”
“No, sweetheart, of course not. It’s just—”
“If that’s what you think, just get me committed.”
“Abbie, come on—”
“Mom! Okay, so I’m mad at him. But isn’t it about time somebody got mad around here? I mean, it’s allowed, isn’t it? You’re so goddamn controlled, anyone would think you didn’t care.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I’ll handle it how I want. Just leave me alone.”
They celebrated the new millennium at a beach bar and restaurant that protruded on wooden stilts over the water and was run by a soulful West Indian called Basil, whom Abbie had adjudged the only real human being on the entire island. Sarah had promised herself that she wasn’t going to get emotional but when midnight struck and the fireworks went up and everybody was hugging and kissing and wishing each other happy new year and Abbie and Josh came to find her and the three of them stood there, clinging on to one another like three lost souls, she just couldn’t help herself. They all cried, even Josh, bless him. But that was the only time Sarah allowed it to happen.
Back at the house, on the answering machine, Benjamin, calling from his mother’s in Abilene (or so he claimed), had left a nervous message for them, sending his love and wishing them all a happy new year. Yeah, right, Sarah thought.
He had phoned her a lot at first, and almost every time, despite herself, she had ended up crying and screaming at him. And sometimes he cried too and called her sweetheart and told her he loved her, which made her so mad she wanted to smash the phone. Because if he loved her, if he really damn well loved her, why the hell had he left? In the end, she told him not to keep saying this and asked him not to call for a while.
Then Beth Ingram dropped her little bombshell. Whether it was on purpose or not, Sarah couldn’t be sure. Probably. But one day they were talking and Beth was being really sweet and consoling and then, quite casually, said something about how Sarah must have felt that other time. Sarah said sorry, hang on a minute, what did she mean other time? And Beth ummed and ahhed and blushed a little and then reluctantly told her she had been talking with the wife of an ICA associate at a party a while back and this woman had let slip that Benjamin had been having an affair with a young real estate lawyer who occasionally did their conveyancing. Apparently, at work, absolutely everybody knew. Beth said she had just assumed Sarah did too.
Sarah hit the stratosphere and that very night, after too many glasses of wine, she called him at his mother’s and the bastard wasn’t there. Margaret said she didn’t know where he was, that he was away on business somewhere. Oh, sure. In Santa Fe, no doubt, fucking that little painter whore. Fucking The Catalyst. Sarah called his cell phone and left a blistering, drunken, accusatory howl of a message, which she regretted almost as soon as she hung up and even more so in the sober light of the next morning.
The nights were the worst. When the pills didn’t work and she lay alone in that vast bed with a leaden writhing in her gut, waiting for the dawn. Sometimes she would stretch a leg across and feel the creaseless cold space that howled of her husband’s absence. After the first few weeks, to assert herself, she tried moving into the middle. But it felt wrong, somehow too final, as if by doing so she was admitting that he would never come back. Because he would come back, she knew he would. He couldn’t just have left her like that, left his home and his children, could he? Could he?
He flew up from Kansas the week before Christmas to see the kids and bring their presents. He bought each of them a cell phone, so they could always call him, he said, which prompted a scornful laugh from Abbie. Like hell, she said. As if.
He stayed with a friend in the city and took the kids out for dinner. He wanted Sarah to come too but she wouldn’t and it was all she could do to persuade Abbie to go. The poor kid came home afterward in a flood of tears and ran straight to her room. Joshie sat wearily at the kitchen table and told Sarah that Abbie hadn’t spoken a civil word the whole evening, just sat there spitting venom at her father across the table and making sarcastic remarks.
Out in the store now, she could hear Jeffrey saying good-bye to his customer and a few moments later he appeared in the office doorway, holding his hands to his head in disbelief.
“Did you hear that?”
“You were wonderful.”
“I think we should give this up and open a record store.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Then at least when people came in who didn’t know the title or the artist or publisher, they could at least try humming the damn thing.”
Sarah laughed. He nodded at the computer screen.
“How’s it looking, boss?”
“Dismal. Let’s sell records instead.”
“That’s not the right answer. You’re supposed to say,
‘Well, Jeffrey, in the circumstances, bearing in mind the state of the industry, the intensive competition, the proliferation of alternative media and other leisure entertainment opportunities or, in plainer English, the fact that nobody under thirty gives a damn about books anymore or wants to do anything that might require more than the attention span of your average hyperactive gnat, bearing all that in mind, we’ve done pretty goddamn well, thank you, Jeffrey.’”
“Bravo.”
He bent toward her and gave her a kiss on the forehead.
“Let’s close and go have a nice lunch someplace,” he said.
“Good idea. And I’ll have one of your cigarettes.”
The theme of the day was “Express Your Humanness.” At least, that’s what Ben thought the woman in the leotard and red sarong had said, right at the beginning, when they were standing in that big circle, all barefooted and holding hands. He hadn’t been able to hear too well because he was standing in front of a big electric fan that was blowing his hair all over the place. It might have been “Express Your Humorousness.” But that wasn’t, as far as he was aware, a proper word, so he was settling for “Humanness.” Not that what some of those around him were doing wasn’t humorous. Particularly the old guy with the gray beard, who was dressed up in purple robes and a turban, like some spaced-out elder of the Taliban, spinning all over the room with his eyes closed and pressing a bell pepper to his chest. Maybe he hadn’t heard the woman’s instruction, either, and was hedging his bets.
It was called “Body Choir.” And Eve and Lori came here every Sunday afternoon, along with fifty or sixty like-minded souls, to express in dance and movement whatever was on the menu. The venue was a big hall with a high ceiling and a sprung wooden floor. It was right beside the railroad, so close that even when the music was playing loudly, the whole place shuddered when the trains went by.
The music was strictly new age, a lot of breaking waves and whale calls. Ben had always wondere
d why whale talk was always assumed to be soothing and blissful when nobody knew what the hell the creatures were saying to one another. Surely whales had fights like everybody else? Maybe they were actually yelling at each other. You miserable humpback bastard, that’s the last plankton you’re ever gonna get from me. Oh, get a life, go blow some air.
At this moment, Lori was over on the other side of the room, expressing her humanness, and perhaps a little more, with an irritatingly good-looking young guy with a ponytail. He had taken his top off, which men apparently were allowed to do but women weren’t, at least not for several weeks now, since a voluptuous Swede called Ulrika displayed her assets and a poor guy who’d had a triple bypass collapsed and had to be carried outside. Even in Santa Fe, self-expression apparently had its limits.
Another rule was that the dancing was supposed to be noncontact. But some seemed either not to know this or not to care. Several couples were writhing on the floor, so intricately entwined that it was hard to figure out which limbs belonged to whom. Ben feared for their disentanglement. They were going to end up like a knot nobody could untie. Someone would have to call the fire department.
Most people, however, like Ben, were dancing on their own. Now and then someone would sidle up and smile and dance with him for a while and then sidle off somewhere else. Eve was about ten yards away at this moment, dancing sinuously with her eyes closed and a little half-smile on her face. She was wearing a cropped white linen top and some tight red breeches that showed her hips and tummy and she looked so damn sexy, Ben’s humanness was longing to express itself in a way that would have to wait.
She had been worried about bringing him along here today, saying she didn’t know if it was really his kind of scene. Maybe she thought he might mock it or would be too uptight and self-conscious to take part. She kidded him that he would have to wear a leotard or at least some spandex shorts. As it turned out, he wasn’t, by a long way, the oldest or straightest-looking person there and, in his gray T-shirt and faded blue jeans, he didn’t feel too out of place.
For the first ten or fifteen minutes, after they all started dancing, Eve had stayed close and kept glancing at him to gauge his reaction. He wasn’t the world’s greatest dancer and the whole thing was, he had to admit, pretty hilarious. But he was trying to enter into the spirit of it and was almost enjoying himself. He just wished he could relax more, go with the flow, clear his head a little.
This was his third visit to Santa Fe since leaving Sarah and the longest so far. Outside, the snow had gone. There was almost a hint of spring. He had been here two whole weeks now and, though he didn’t quite know why—for it would be so easy to stay—he felt it was time to be going back to Kansas. They were lovers now, and at last it was okay between them. More than okay. They were in that heady, breathless state when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. He had never dared dream it might happen so quickly.
Two months ago, back in December, he had called her from his mother’s in Abilene and told her in a shaky voice that he had done it, he’d left. And there was this long pause, several momentous seconds, and then she said, quietly, “Come.”
And he drove down that very night, five hundred miles, through the fog and the snow, across the plains and icy slivers of Oklahoma and western Texas, and arrived just after dawn and found her house and tapped on the door. She was wearing a black woolen wrap over a white night-dress and her face was all worried and pale as the dawn. But she took him inside and stood there and held him. And he didn’t want to, he’d promised himself not to—because how could she, how could any woman, want a man so raw and weak and wretched—but he couldn’t help himself and began to weep. And she held him. For a long time, just stood and held him.
Then she sat him down at the kitchen table and made coffee and some poached eggs and wheat toast and sat watching him eat with her elbows on the table and her chin cupped in her hands, staring at him and gently smiling. It was as though neither of them could quite believe he was there. Then little Pablo, three and a half years old, whom Ben had never yet met, emerged from his room in his pajamas and sat at the table too and started talking to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find him there.
But then, when big things happened, people rarely behaved the way you’d expected. Ben’s mother and sister to name but two. Right or—more probably—wrong, he had felt he couldn’t tell either of them over the phone that he had left Sarah. He had to tell them in person. He called his mother from New York to say he was coming to stay and, of course, she was thrilled. The night he arrived she cooked his favorite pot roast dinner, just for the two of them.
Naturally, Ben knew she would be upset at what he had to tell her. Any mother would be. But she had always so adored him and believed in him, affirming his every action and decision, even those he knew himself to be wrong, that her reaction that night, when finally after supper he broke the news, took him completely by surprise. She was distraught, furious, excoriating. She even struck him on the arm. How could he leave his wife and children? How could he?
“You made a promise!” she wailed through her tears, which seemed shed as much in anger as in grief. “A promise! You go back, Benjamin. Do you hear me? You go back! You made a promise!”
Eventually she calmed down and wept as he tried gently to explain why he had left. Not that it was possible, without telling her things he had no wish to hear himself say or, for that matter, share with anyone, least of all his mother. He spoke instead in coded clichés, saying that for many years now, although they had put a brave face on it, he and Sarah had not been happy together, that things hadn’t been good between them, that they had both changed and grown apart. And at last these homilies seemed, if not to convince her, at least to soften her to a kind of sad acceptance that the deed was done and that no amount of chiding would undo it. All she wanted, she said through her tears, all she had ever wanted, was for him to be happy.
If his mother’s reaction surprised him, his sister’s nearly blew him off his feet. He drove to Topeka to have lunch with her the following day. Sally was five years his senior, enough to ensure that as children they had never really gotten to know each other. Aware he was the object of his mother’s blatant favoritism, he had always treated his sister a little delicately, as if she might, justifiably, resent him. He was relieved, on those rare occasions when he saw her, that she didn’t seem to. Not yet, anyhow.
Sally was what used to be called a handsome, rather than a pretty or beautiful, woman. She had their father’s intense brown eyes and heavy brows. She was taller than she seemed to want to be and stooped a little, as if she were carrying some invisible load on her shoulders. She had married an accountant named Steven, a man so momentously boring that Abbie had even christened a verb for him. To be Stevened by someone or something or to feel Steved out or totally Steved had long been absorbed into their lexicon of family slang. Sally and Steve had two children who sadly seemed to have scooped most of their genes from their father’s end of the pool. Both had become accountants.
Ben had expected to take her out to a restaurant but instead Sally had prepared lunch for them in her trim kitchen, with its lace curtains and collection of ceramic frogs on the windowsill. Steve was at work, so it was just them and the frogs. Again, Benjamin waited until the meal—grilled pork chops followed by lemon meringue pie—was over before telling her his news. He knew as he spoke, from the way her eyes were narrowing, that he wasn’t going to get away lightly. When he finished, there was an ominous, quivering silence.
“What gives you the right?” she hissed.
“How do you mean?”
“What gives you the right! To leave.”
“Well—”
“I mean, we’re all unhappy! Every couple I know. I don’t know of a single goddamn marriage that I could put my hand on my heart and say was happy.”
Ben shrugged and shifted a little on his chair.
“Do you know of any?”
“Well??
?”
“Do you? I mean, really happy? I don’t. It’s part of the package, Benjamin, you idiot! Get real! Do you think Mom and Dad were happy? Do you?”
“Well—”
“Of course they weren’t! Nobody is. But that doesn’t mean you just up and leave. Oh my, I’m so unhappy, boohoo, so hey, I’ll just walk out on my wife and my kids. For Christ’s sake, Ben, get real!”
Ben felt paralyzed with shock. But she hadn’t finished. In fact, she’d barely started. She went on to give him a scorching lecture about how he was a victim of this ridiculous, upside-down consumer culture in which everyone was constantly being bombarded with the pernicious promise of happiness and, even worse, being told at every turn that they had the goddamn right to be happy. And if they weren’t, they could be, if they just got themselves a new car or a new dishwasher or a new outfit or a new lover. The messages were everywhere, Sally said, in every magazine you picked up, on every dumb TV show, fueling greed and envy, making people dissatisfied with what they had, persuading them they could change it and be happy and successful and beautiful, if only they had some gorgeous new thing or a new girlfriend or a new face or a new pair of silicone tits. . . .
If he hadn’t been so amazed or so starkly implicated in the diatribe, Ben might have given her a standing ovation. As it was, he lowered his eyes and nodded and tried to look suitably admonished. And half an hour later, having twice denied that there was somebody else, somebody new, for by now he was too scared to admit it, he kissed her good-bye and walked to the front gate with a stoop in his shoulders that almost matched hers. Not Steved but thoroughly and ignominiously Sallied.