“I’m sorry,” Lawrence said, not sure if he was apologizing for worsening Franny’s mood or for whatever had happened with Jim at the magazine, or both.
“It’s okay,” Franny said, her eyes still hidden behind her arms. “I’m surprised Charles didn’t tell you.”
Lawrence sat down on the lounge chair next to Franny’s and waited.
“He fucked an intern.” She moved her hands and waved them around, as if to say “Abracadabra!” “I know, that’s it. Jim fucked an intern. A girl at the magazine, barely older than Sylvia. Twenty-three years old. Her father is on the board, and I guess she told him, and so here we are.”
“Oh, Franny,” Lawrence said, but she was already sitting up and shaking her head. He had imagined many scenarios for Jim’s sudden leave from Gallant, and for the tension in the Post family—prostate cancer, early-onset dementia, an ill-timed conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses—but not this one. Jim and Franny had always seemed happily solid, still capable of goosing each other in the kitchen, as off-putting as it sometimes was.
“No, it’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, we’ve been married for thirty-five years, it is not fine for him to have sex with a twenty-year-old. A twenty-three-year-old. As if there’s a difference. I don’t know. Thank you. Sylvia knows some, but Bobby doesn’t know anything about it, I’m pretty sure, and I’m trying to keep it that way for as long as possible. Maybe forever.”
It was strange that Charles hadn’t told him. Lawrence felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment, his own, not on Franny’s behalf. How could Charles not have told him? Lawrence quickly imagined all the ways he could have mortified Jim and Franny over the next two weeks, without ever knowing what he was doing, all the ways he could have said the wrong thing.
Lawrence reached out and put his hand on Franny’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Fran. I won’t say a word to the kids, of course. And I’m sure Charles would be delighted to murder him for you, if you just say the word.”
That made her smile. “Yes, I think so.” She stood up. “At least one of us has a good husband. Come on, let’s finish cleaning up before it’s morning and the cretins destroy everything all over again. It’s not the worst thing in the world not to have children, you know. Makes your life a terrible mess.” And with that, Franny kissed Lawrence on the cheek, almost tenderly, and walked back inside. Lawrence turned and watched her through the window as she turned on the faucet and squirted soap onto the offending pile of dishes. Lawrence was still holding a stack of garbage on his lap, including a magazine left over from the airplane full of “Sex Tips He Won’t Believe” and “What You REALLY Need to Know About Going Downtown.” He couldn’t believe Jim and Franny let Sylvia buy trash like that—it seemed as bad as openly reading an issue of Hustler. He thumbed through to the article about oral sex, which was really more like a list, complete with reader suggestions. Straight girls really just needed to watch one or two gay porn movies in order to learn everything they needed to know, Lawrence thought. Maybe he’d tell Sylvia that one of these days. Something moved in the corner of his eye, and Lawrence looked upstairs. Carmen was staring back at him from her open bedroom window. They made eye contact, and Carmen put a finger to her ear, as if to say, I didn’t hear anything, and then the light was out and the curtain was drawn and she was gone.
Day Five
FRANNY AND SYLVIA DROVE WITH JOAN, AND CHARLES, Jim, and Lawrence followed behind them. It was Franny’s idea to make a pilgrimage to the Robert Graves House in Deià, even though Franny claimed not to know anything about Robert Graves aside from the 1976 TV movie version of I, Claudius, which Jim said made her a heathen. That was right before they got into their separate cars and drove the forty minutes north. Sylvia was excited to get out of the house, but would have preferred a trip to the beach, despite the obvious drawback of having to deal with sand. This was like going on a school field trip with her mother, a pleasure she hadn’t had since elementary school, when Franny routinely volunteered to accompany the class to the zoo or the Museum of Natural History, when she would then shirk her duties and run amok, waddling in front of the penguins like the rest of the children. At least Joan was along for the ride. Franny made him drive, of course, because he knew where he was going and wouldn’t destroy the stick shift of the tiny tin box of a rental car, and also because she liked to sit in the front seat and be driven around islands by handsome twenty-year-olds. If Jim could objectify someone barely out of the teens, so could she.
“Sorry that we’re all crashing your date with Joan today, Syl,” Franny said, winking at her in the backseat. Joan checked her reaction briefly in the rearview mirror, his eyes faster than a snake.
“Let’s try to stay adult here, shall we?” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry that my mother is sexually harassing you, Joan. No le prestes atención.” She crossed her arms over her chest, secure in the fact that her mother would be adequately annoyed and therefore stay quiet for the rest of the ride. Franny turned to look out the window and hummed something to herself, a song that had nothing whatsoever in common with the song playing on the car’s cheap radio, a Céline Dion song that came and went as the mountain roads unfurled ahead of them. She rolled the window down halfway, enough for the air to send her short dark hair across her face.
Sylvia leaned back, curling her body into the corner of the seat. The car was the size of a pedicab, and about as secure. The chassis rocked side to side as they climbed a hill, and Sylvia closed her eyes, happy that if she was going to die on the mountainous roads of Mallorca, she at least would have had the last word with her mother. It wasn’t fair to be annoyed with her, but Sylvia was anyway. Obviously her father was worse, and the one to blame, but Sylvia had been inside their marriage for long enough to know that it wasn’t that simple, nothing was, certainly not a relationship twice as old as her. In the back of the car, with her eyes shut tight, New York felt farther away than an ocean, not that she missed it. Surely there were parties going on, woo-hoo, at someone’s empty house, with bottles of booze and lemonade all poured into some giant vat of vaguely citrus-tasting awfulness, but she would never go to a party like that again. One would think that a lifetime of being a good girl followed by one stupid mistake would pretty much even out, but one would be wrong.
There were four people from her class also going to Brown, but two of them she would immediately never speak to again, an obvious and unspoken agreement based on the fact that they hadn’t exchanged more than three words in all of high school. The other two were the problem: Katie Saperstein and Gabe Thrush. If Sylvia could have chosen two people to excommunicate for the rest of her life, to actually push a button and have them vanish off the planet, it would be Katie Saperstein and Gabe Thrush. Both together and separately.
Sylvia and Katie had been good friends—mud masks, sleepovers, shared Googling of half-naked movie stars. Katie was plainer than Sylvia; it wasn’t cruel to say so—she had brackish-colored hair and a nose that always looked like she’d just walked into a plate-glass door. Once, when Katie was frustrated by how long it was taking to grow out her bangs, she cut them off at her forehead, creating, in essence, a small, growing horn. They both wore terrible clothes (that was the point) from the Salvation Army, ill-fitting jeans and ironic T-shirts advertising places they’d never been. Since tenth grade, they’d been close, eating lunch together most days on one of the stoops around the corner from school, with Sylvia ignoring Katie’s blatant overuse of mayonnaise and Katie teasing Sylvia about her resistance to bacon. It was a good friendship, one that might have survived the leap across the chasm into college life. They’d talked about rooming together, even, but that was before Gabe ruined everything.