“It’s going to be peak weekend,” he’d said on the phone. “Why don’t you come up and see the leaves with me? My friend Craig’s giving me the use of his house on Lake Champlain. He’s going to Bordeaux for a month.”
“God,” I said. “I want his life. I want your life.”
“I’d make that swap,” he said. “But you’d better do the math before you sign on. Anyway, it’s a big house. You wouldn’t have to sleep anywhere you didn’t want to.”
—
“Have you been in bed with a senior citizen before?” he said that first night. “I’m probably good for about once, so we should make this count.”
—
I continued living with my husband, so this was now called “having an affair.” Nobody had cellphones back then, and I kept quarters in my wallet for those trips to 7-Eleven to pick up Beer Nuts or half-and-half or dish soap; it seemed we were always running out of something. The in-laws flew in from New Mexico for Thanksgiving and I cooked my first, and last, turkey. His mother said she was too young to be called Grandma (she was fifty-six), so maybe—when the time came—she could be Nana. “Just ignore her,” my husband said as we were getting in bed. “Thirty-five’s not old. We’ve still got plenty of time.”
“Tell me you’re not serious,” I said. “I thought we were clear about this. Would you turn that out? It’s hurting my eyes.”
“Better?” he said. “That was a pretty long time ago. I sort of thought…”
“What?” I said. “Okay, let’s hear all of it.”
“This obviously isn’t a good time.”
“So what was your plan? Start working on me when I found my first gray hair?” Which I already had, though I hadn’t showed it to him.
“You’re being paranoid,” he said. “Can’t we even have a conversation?”
“Why don’t you have your conversation with Nana,” I said. “Maybe she’s still ovulating.”
Driving back to Croton after dropping his parents at LaGuardia, I told him there were things I needed to think over.
“Okay, I saw this one coming,” he said. “Male or female?”
“Please,” I said. “Are you a child?”
“If it’s the old guy, I guess you got a little of both.”
“It’s not anybody,” I said. “It’s what I told you.”
“Listen to her go,” he said. “Just keep me up to date on your thinking.”
—
I asked Andrea—yes, there really was an Andrea—if I could come down and sleep on her sofa for a while, just until I could figure things out. “Great,” she said, “so I’m supposed to put you up until the millennium?” She’d left Newsweek to be a features editor at Mirabella and lived a few blocks from my old apartment. I went back to the reverse commute and the alternate-side parking; some nights, driving around looking for a space, it felt like I’d never left. I brought a suitcase full of clothes and a box of books, all anybody needed, and left the rest of my stuff hostage. The architect was after me to move into his house, but I’d told him what I’d told my husband (things that needed thinking over) and that I’d see him only on weekends. Every Saturday I’d drive up to Rhinebeck and spend hours in his bed, where, results aside, I liked how greedy he was for me; he humored my craziness by letting me hide my car in his garage. Then, come Sunday afternoon, I’d stop off and meet my husband for a miserable late lunch at the Croton Diner, our old spot. Of course I told him I’d just driven up from the city. I don’t know why I put us through this. One time I forgot to put my ring back on—he always wore his—and he just looked at my hand and said nothing.
At Christmas, my husband went back to Albuquerque, where I imagine he and Nana had plenty to say to each other, and the morning after New Year’s—his plane got in that afternoon—I drove up, bought boxes at U-Haul, rented a storage unit and packed the rest of my belongings. I left a letter for him on the kitchen counter, signed “In sadness.” Exhibit A, I suppose, when I come before the Judgment Seat. The part of the letter that was true said that I didn’t know where I’d eventually be going, and that I’d keep trying to make things as easy as possible at work.
The man—what do I call him at this stage? “My lover” is sick-making, and there doesn’t seem to be a male equivalent of “mistress.” (Wordy Rappinghood, help me out here!) At any rate, he’d gone to Portland to visit his daughter, and my mother was in Costa Rica, with a friend whose husband had just died, so I treated Andrea to a Christmas dinner at Café des Artistes; she was sentimental about being alone with nowhere to go. I couldn’t really afford a second bottle of the seventy-dollar red wine, but one hadn’t been enough, and it was good of her to listen to my back-and-forthings when she hadn’t had a boyfriend—even in the loosest sense of the term—for three years, unable as she was to fake being either pretty or forward or biddable. And the waiter seemed to have low expectations of two single women, so I was determined to rack up an even more impressive total on which to tip him a fuck-you twenty-five percent.
“Why don’t you pass along whichever one you decide you don’t want,” she said. “Kidding.”
“I know how obnoxious I sound,” I said. “I should just go back, shouldn’t I? And chalk this other thing up to whatever.”
“He is awfully old. But if you weren’t happy…”
“Jesus,” I said, “if that’s the yardstick.”
—
I drove up to Rhinebeck for New Year’s Eve; he told me the boys were calling him pussy-simple because he’d backed out of a gig at some country club so we could spend the evening together.
“Listen,” he said, “I bought us champagne, but how about a drink drink?”
“I hate champagne.”
“Good—we’ll give it to the poor.” He got up and went to the kitchen, leaving me on the sofa hugging my bare knees, my bare feet on the soft leather cushions. A matching sofa faced this one, on the other side of a coffee table that had been an old wooden door in Guatemala, with plate glass over its carvings of droopy-necked birds. Two walls were all books; on another, he had a small painting by Richard Diebenkorn, whom I’d had to look up. The Diebenkorn, he said, was the one truly precious thing he’d been able to hang on to.
“I still think you’re crazy,” he said, handing me a glass of scotch with no ice. At home, he drank smoky single malt—he called it “premier cru”—with just a little water, to bring out the nose. It tasted like iodine, but I was getting used to it. “I’m rattling around in this big place by myself, and you want to rent some little studio where you don’t have enough room to swing a cat. You can live here for nothing—costs the same to run this place whether it’s just me or a whole seraglio. We could manage to stay out of each other’s hair. When we wanted to.”
“You realize I’m still married.”
“Oh, well, married,” he said. “In that case, forget the whole thing. We don’t want to call down Jove’s lightning bolts.”
“I just mean it’s weird enough as it is, going in and seeing him every day.”
“So quit going in. You don’t want to be there anyway. ‘The vibrant street life of downtown Peekskill’?”