At this, Lil burst into tears, for he was right, he was right, he was always right. Deep down, she did blame him. “I’m sorry,” she said, through sobs. “I didn’t know how bad it was for you. I’m so sorry. It’s just, I have so much to do. I’m so tired. I have like fifty papers to grade and I made dinner—”
But it was too late. He was beyond consolation, possessed by some sort of wild, rigid fury. “I didn’t ask you to make dinner,” he screamed. “What is wrong with you? If you have papers to grade, grade them. Don’t make dinner.”
“But we have to eat,” she said, or shouted, for she was angry now, too. What was wrong with him? Why did he always act as though everything was her fault? “What would we eat for dinner if I didn’t cook?” Didn’t he see that this was the point of being married? To eat dinner together, to make a life together, out of small things.
“Why do you have to be such a bitch?” he asked, grabbing a bottle of scotch, uncapping it—keeping his eyes on her, as if daring her to react—and tipping a slug of liquid into his throat, then exhaling dramatically, like a movie outlaw. “Why?” he asked. “I don’t get it.” And the sad, quiet way in which he asked this question—as though he really wanted to know the answer; and as though an answer were truly possible, as if she might say, “Well, Tuck, you see, I received this special training from an institute in Uzbekistan”—stung her more, somehow, than all his shouting and sarcasm, for she could see that he really meant it. He really thought she was being purposefully unkind, undermining, castrating, whatever. But she could not answer, and so she watched, fighting more tears as he wiped his lips with his hand, and stalked heavily into the bedroom, closing the door behind him with a resonant thud.
“So, is this why you didn’t go away for Christmas?” Sadie asked her. Emily had gone up to the counter to get them coffee and a cookie.
Lil nodded. She’d seen Sadie at New Year’s—the Peregrines’ annual party—and not said a word.
“Were your parents upset?” asked Beth. Will, to all of their shock, had taken her home for Christmas. Sam had been with his mother’s family, in California.
“Not really.” Lil smiled. “You know they hate the holidays.” Lil’s parents both reviled Christmas and rejected Hanukkah, which they viewed as an invented holiday and “too much fuss.” Still, Lil and Tuck had planned to visit them in December—spending the twenty-fifth, as per one of the Roths’ few traditions, at the Golden Panda on Melrose—and then head to Atlanta, for a few days with Tuck’s mom, over New Year’s. But they’d waited to buy their tickets, which they thought they’d pay for with Tuck’s bonus, rumored to be handed out in cash on the twenty-third. But fate—or Tuck’s boss—had intervened three days before that date and there had been no bonus, which meant there had been no trip. And though her parents weren’t terribly upset, they were baffled that Lil canceled so late. “Are the tickets refundable?” her father asked. “Um, we don’t actually have tickets,” Lil told him. “How were you planning on getting here?” he asked gruffly. Her father would have made the arrangements back in September, perhaps cashing in some of his many frequent-flier miles. He would have planned the whole trip long before Thanksgiving, from car rentals to guidebooks to restaurants. This was part of it, Tuck’s inability to plan. He was, it seemed, incapable of thinking beyond the next five minutes. When he was hungry, he wanted to eat immediately. Or, as with his job, if he wanted to sleep, he simply slept. He was a child. And she’d thought him, when they met, so grown-up, so different from Dave and Tal and the other men she knew, who all seemed spindly and adolescent by comparison.
“I think I was more disappointed than they were,” she said, dropping an irregular lump of brown sugar into her coffee. It was true. Her parents, typically, seemed more annoyed at the inconvenience of her canceling than disappointed that they wouldn’t get to see their only child at the holidays. But then Lil hadn’t been particularly looking forward to seeing them, either. Her visits home always devolved into arguments—“What are you going to do with a Ph.D.? Work in a coffee shop?”—which ended with Lil slamming the door to her childhood room and hiding therein for hours, thumbing through old copies of Sassy, just as she had in adolescence. As a child she’d wondered if she was adopted—a fantasy she now recognized as commonplace and clichéd—and that her real parents, quiet and dignified, might swoop in and save her from the Roths, who in turn existed in a state of rankled perplexity at their bookish daughter. (Did she really not want a nose job? Did she really not want to spend Saturday at the Beverly Center?) She wasn’t sure, in retrospect, why she’d wanted to go home, other than to show Tuck off, to show them that she’d succeeded, if not in the way they’d wanted her to. “I was really needing to get out of the city.”
“But you got to go to Rose Peregrine’s fabulous partay,” said Emily. She’d gone down to North Carolina for the holidays. “You guys were, like, doing lines off the coffee table, right?”
“Of course,” said Sadie. “But we stopped when the hookers arrived. They get so greedy.”
“It was fun?” asked Beth earnestly.
“It was fun,” Lil confirmed. In fact, it was the promise of the party that had sustained her, in a way, on that awful night, while Tuck stayed locked in their room and she finished dinner—boiled the penne, compiled a pale, perfect salad that she knew would not be eaten, at least not that night. Tuck would find another job, a better job, she told herself, as she peeled cucumber and tore apart the cool leaves of a Boston lettuce. Or, if he didn’t, she would convince him to go back to Columbia, which would, in a way, be better. They would have less money—much less—but he would become Tuck again, the man who could spend hours talking about the prosody of Gerard Manley Hopkins and why Charles Simic was a fraud, which she would infinitely prefer to a fifteen-hundred-square-foot loft and a trip home to L.A. And it would be fun to be in New York over the holidays. They could do New York things, touristy things—the storefronts of Fifth Avenue, the skating rink in Central Park—and, for the first time, attend the Peregrines’ party, which, to Lil, had taken on a sort of mythic status. She envisioned the Peregrine place lit gauzily by candles, flowers springing from oversized vases, chattering masses of Peregrines dressed in black.
But when she pictured herself among her beloved Peregrines, she saw herself alone. She could easily imagine the party, like others she’d attended, but more festive, more fancy. She would wear the navy wool sheath she’d just found at Beacon’s Closet, a Dior from the sixties, which was surely worth more than she’d paid for it, and sip Prosecco from a slender flute, her back warmed from the parlor fire as she chatted with Rose Peregrine or Sadie’s aunt Minnie, whom she loved, a cranky old socialist. She tried to insert Tuck into the picture, to no avail. Though she could, without effort, imagine arguing with him about going to the party. She had seen it happen countless times. He would agree to go, then, when the night arrived, say, “Where is it again? All the way up there? Isn’t it just going to be a lot of old people?” And then there would be the assertions that the Peregrines hated him, everyone hated him, everyone was against him, even those whom he’d met for all of a moment. And on and on, so that it would come as a relief when he said, at last, that she should just go alone.