“Do you realize how wrong that is? That you even have to specify that?”
“I could do without the judgment, okay?” She paused. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t.”
“So who did?”
She looked at me. “Bobby.”
I closed my eyes. “Margaret, if you’re about to tell me that my brother cheated on you, don’t. I don’t want to hear it.”
“No, but there are a lot of ways to disappear on somebody.”
“What was his?”
“I don’t know . . .” Margaret shrugged, not wanting to say it. I was angry, but then I could see why. I could see why she was hesitating. As soon as she started talking, she began to cry.
I put my hand on top of hers. “What happened?”
“Our marriage. Getting married young. The miscarriage young. And then we decide to wait to have a child. Bobby wants to wait and we wait too long.”
I squeezed her hand, remembering it all too well: Margaret losing the baby five months into the pregnancy. She was devastated, only pulling out after the wedding, only pulling out when they were entrenched in their life together.
“We spent years trying to have the twins. All those fertility treatments. And I was the one who wanted that, but he wanted them too. Then they arrive. And what does he do?”
“He’s not helpful?”
She wiped at her tears, but they kept coming, the towel I’d left on the sink now her handkerchief. “He is helpful. He was absolutely amazing with the twins. Matching me feeding for feeding. Diaper change for diaper change.”
“I’m not sure how that means he disappeared,” I said.
She smiled. “It means I disappeared. At least as far as he was concerned.”
“You’re mad at him for being a devoted father?”
“No, I love that he is a devoted father. But it just made it obvious that there was not a whole lot there when the kids weren’t. Do you know when the last time we had sex was?”
I shook my head fiercely. “I don’t want to.”
“You don’t want to? I don’t want to.”
“So you’ve started sleeping with Finn?”
“No, I’m not sleeping with Finn,” she said. “It was stupid, what happened. Finn came over on July Fourth. For drinks. Burgers. Bobby was running late, of course, and we’d both had too much to drink. And he had his camera there, you know? He had come from doing this terrible shoot of a couple’s dogs. I asked to see his photographs and so he showed me. He showed me the photographs of the dogs. And we laughed about how ridiculous they were. We were really laughing. And it was stupid. But I kissed him.”
I looked at her, speechless.
“But he pulled away. I could tell he didn’t want to, but he did. He put his beer down and walked out. Got in his car. Drove away. Actually, he sat in his car for a solid five minutes. Not getting back out. Then he drove away.”
I felt myself audibly exhale, relieved. Finn had stopped it, whatever Margaret had started. There was no unfaithful act. Except then I looked into Margaret’s face, my relief turning to something else. The longing I saw there stopped me in my tracks. It mirrored perfectly the longing I had seen when I looked at Finn.
She shook her head. “The thing is, Finn . . . he was my friend. He was my friend when I was fifteen years old and I knew he liked me even then. He liked me for the reasons I liked me. But I chose Bobby.” She shrugged. “I chose Bobby for all the reasons that everyone chooses Bobby. I just didn’t take it into account.”
“Which part?”
“The part where someone looks at you, really looks at you, when you walk into a room. You either have that with someone or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re fucked.” She paused. “That’s what I wished I had known going into this marriage, that we didn’t have the one thing you need most.”
I thought of Ben and how he made me feel when I walked into a room, like I was the only one there. I derived meaning from that, Margaret deriving meaning from its absence. Though wasn’t that just a story we were telling ourselves? Synchronization: You look up just when someone is looking at you. Your eyes meet and you feel like he recognizes your beauty. You look up and he is looking the other way and you tell yourself he never wanted you in the first place.
Margaret shook her head, trying to fight her tears. “Finn looks at me like that. I’m not turning us into Dynasty. I’m not sleeping with my husband’s brother, as much as I may want to.”
“Margaret, this isn’t about Finn. You need to talk to Bobby.”
Margaret shook her head, wiping away her tears, composing herself. “I fucked everything up,” she said. “And if you want to judge me for that, then judge me.”
Which was when Bobby stormed into the bathroom. Holding it with his bitten-down fingers. The other side of the two-way baby monitor.
“I think I’ll judge you, Margaret,” he said.
Sebastopol, California. 1994
They were spending the season in Burgundy. Or Dan was.
He was in the south of France and the countryside looked a lot like Sebastopol: rolling hills, sky. He didn’t love it here the way he loved it in Sonoma County, though. He didn’t love anywhere like Sonoma.
He hadn’t been here since he was twenty-three years old, interning for the best Burgundy producer in the region. He hadn’t wanted to be here now, but he had no choice. Two devastating harvests in a row, no wine he was proud to distribute. They needed the money. It had seemed like a good opportunity to come back. This was a renowned vineyard: They had finished high at the Judgment of Paris, they had finished the highest in many competitions since. And he understood why. This land, this soil, was agreeable. It was made to do exactly what he needed it to do.
But Dan missed his vineyard. He missed his kids, their voices far away on the weekly calls, Jen even farther. And the days he didn’t miss them were worse than the days he did because they brought something else. Guilt.
Dan felt guilty for being apart from his family, and guilty for being away from his vineyard. He’d left Terry to harvest for the season, knowing of course that Terry wasn’t going to do it the way he would. He would do fine though, and the money Dan was making here would allow them to make up the difference they lost—not just for the bad harvests, but for a bad harvest to come.
That was all a million miles away from the south of France, from the quiet life he was living on the vineyard with Marie, the winemaker here. They would read books at night, have long dinners, talk occasionally of their other lives, of Jen, of Marie’s boyfriend in Spain. He was a chef, who opened a restaurant in San Sebastian, who wanted Marie to come and join him there. Marie had no intention of leaving her vineyard to join him there.