Rowan had pursued Juliette doggedly. After a flurry of e-mails, she said she’d meet him, just once, for lunch. They’d had lunch nine times, nine exquisite times, before they broke down and had guilt-filled sex, in his old beat-up Jeep Cherokee at the end of one of Beekman’s famous dirt roads. The sex ended with Juliette crying softly while Rowan held her as tightly as any human being could—it was perfect. It went like that for a good nine months—sex, then crying—until Juliette finally put a stop to it. She agreed, however, to let Rowan write her a letter every week, as long as he mailed it to a post office box in a neighboring town.
Those letters! Rowan was never more himself than when he crafted those letters, and after putting the first two into the mail and being sad he wasn’t able to reread them, he decided to make a copy before he mailed each one off. Rowan’s love letters were very nearly works of art, he thought, and they were effective too; every couple of months, Juliette would break down and send him a text, and then she’d agree to meet him, for the very last time, at “their” place, a bed-and-breakfast with a detached cottage, deep in the woods, that, midweek, Rowan was able to rent by the day. Then it was sex, tears, and more holding, and the whole thing would start up all over again. Rowan Howard was a family man, a loving father and an upstanding local citizen, a scratch golfer and a genius with a boneless pork loin—he was famous, in Beekman, for both his golf game and his pork loin in equal measure—who just so happened to be in search of the love of his life.
Long before Juliette, and years before Susan, even, Rowan had spent his twenties in Manhattan involved in what he feared would prove to be the most passionate, intense, all-consuming love affair of his life. Her name was Marissa LeFevre, and he still woke up from a dream about her at least once a week.
Marissa was a model and a former ballerina—technically, by the time they met, at age twenty-five, she was a former model too, but Rowan discovered that it took about a decade for a woman to admit that she was no longer a model—and she worked in an art gallery in a capacity that was largely decorative. She had an epic eating disorder, but Rowan didn’t figure it out for two years—not until he came home early to Entenmann’s boxes, the unmistakable sound of vomiting behind a closed door. The food thing didn’t alarm him. Didn’t all ballerinas-turned-models do that? It was practically in the job description. And Marissa responded to his acceptance of her binging and purging with a childlike gratitude. Here she was, being seen and known and still loved. She’d send him out at midnight with lengthy lists of foods she craved, and he would buy them, even if it involved stopping at several stores. He’d hit the Gourmet Garage for the ice cream she liked, then load up on candy bars at the twenty-four-hour Duane Reade, then pop into the bodega for an assortment of Hostess treats. He was her enabler, and she was his entire world.
Then he went to Vegas for his brother’s bachelor-party weekend, and Marissa swallowed a bottle of Advil and then dialed 911. You can kill yourself with Advil, Rowan learned later at the hospital, but the very choice of the drug convinced him it wasn’t a serious attempt, even though Marissa spent three days in the hospital on a psychiatric hold. He loved her. He loved every last bit of her, crazy and all. And he did his best to save her. She moved back in with him, and Rowan spent the next two years treating her like a fragile, precious doll. He asked her to come home with him for Christmas, but she refused, and then she orchestrated another breakdown to prove how much she needed him not to leave. The doctors at Bellevue advised him not to have any contact with her, for her own good, and they sent her home to Iowa, to her mother and the calm of life on the plains.
By the time he met Susan, Rowan was like one of those soldiers back from the trenches in World War I, unable to reenter normal life and incapable of communicating what he’d lived through. Their first date was a setup, orchestrated by one of the nosy yentas who worked alongside him at the firm, and he went along with it more or less against his will. He sat across the table from her, and it was like he was trapped inside a glass jar. He was numb, aloof, barely reachable.
Susan hadn’t noticed. Here she had the advantage of her narcissism—which was in the subclinical range, but just barely—and her laserlike focus on her life plan, which was clicking along nicely but now required a suitable man. And Rowan—tall, not bad-looking, with a decent job and all of his hair—was suitable. He was more than suitable. And she was thirty-eight.
Susan had been the engine driving their courtship, with her optimism and determination and purposefulness, and for the most part Rowan didn’t mind. He didn’t believe love could conquer all anymore. He had convinced himself that there were more important things than whatever Marissa LeFevre had to offer, things like stability, sanity, warmth. He didn’t exactly long for hearth and home, but it seemed preferable to a life of midnight bodega runs and biannual suicide attempts. He wanted a woman who would make a good mother. A woman who wouldn’t threaten to slit her wrists to get out of going to a dinner party. He found his new role as passive participant in the unfolding of Susan’s life plan refreshing. He’d been Marissa’s caretaker, her mother and father and shrink and best friend, and he was tired. He had nothing left to give, and he’d stumbled upon a woman who required very little of the deepest parts of him. He didn’t have to do anything, really. As long as he didn’t put up a fight, Susan took care of everything.
Six months into his marriage to Susan, Rowan realized he’d made a terrible mistake. He couldn’t stop thinking about Marissa. When he couldn’t reach her on her cell phone, he broke down and called her mother in Iowa.
“Marissa’s dead.”
“Oh my God,” said Rowan.
“She hung herself in the garage,” Marissa’s mother said. “People always want to know how she did it, so I figure I might as well tell them.”
*
“Captain Edward Smith, wireless operator John Phillips, and Mary Smith’s husband, Lucian, who would never see his unborn child alive.”
Wyatt was flicking his beads on the kitchen table while Lucy, exhausted and exhilarated from the night before, was staring into her coffee cup.
Don’t think. Stop thinking about it. This is an unsolvable problem, it is a riddle with no answer, it is an inverse Zen koan, one that sends the mind spinning in a million different directions instead of stilling it.
When you’re with Ben, you can think about Ben. When you’re with Owen or with Wyatt, think about them. It started to feel bad only when she thought more than a few months into the future, when the impossibilities started lining up like Wyatt’s Matchbox cars in impossibly long, perfectly straight rows.
“Captain Edward Smith, wireless operator John Phillips, and Mary Smith’s husband, Lucian, who would never see his unborn child alive.”
“What’s that, Wyatt?”
“Captain Edward Smith, wireless operator John Phillips, and Mary Smith’s husband, Lucian, who would never see his unborn child alive.”
“Who are those people?”
“People who perished in the ice-cold water of the North Atlantic Ocean.”
“Oh yeah?”
“They perished in the ice-cold water of the North Atlantic Ocean.”
“Do you know what perished means, Wyatt?”
“They perished in the ice-cold water of the North Atlantic Ocean.”
“Do you know what that means?”
“Not exactly.”