“So your plan is for us to go our separate ways,” I said, “and when things get desperate we toss it in an email?”
“That was the plan, yeah. Is there a problem with it?” She lay back on the blanket and looked up through the skylight.
“Well, there’s the magnitude of the lie, the risk of getting caught, and the way it ruins everything.”
She didn’t care. She needed me to be a part of it, to shield her from him.
“I can’t give up talking to you. I can’t go it alone. I think I was dying. You brought me back.” The curtains blew softly in and out. “I spent the whole morning chattering to you in my head.” She lay with her head back, sighing, her feet rubbing against the bedspread as she shifted her arm to a better position. “When it’s quiet, your voice is the one I hear.”
Throughout the time I’d known her, there’d always been a sense that the fantasy could not be killed or even weakened, that each of us contained the other and could function independently.
Downtown, the noon whistle blew. Then it was quiet. For a minute, I listened to the cicadas buzzing out in the sunshine. Her chest rose and fell as she lay there.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you enjoy the sound of Robin chewing granola?”
“Sure.”
“How about watching her stare at herself in the mirror, sucking in her gut, bragging about her paleo diet?”
“Granola’s not on the paleo diet,” I said.
“I told him, but he doesn’t care.”
She lay back in a white, rigid state of resignation, self-condemnation, postponing judgment, holding it in. “I’m so tired of being invisible.”
There was still some crap from her purse on the floor under the table. The table was made of enameled steel. My neck hurt. There were four places worn into the enamel by a lifetime of meals, so that the metal showed through. We both believed there was a rich erotic life out there that we’d been denied, that strangers knew how to access.
“Does your wife still lie on the floor every night with an ice pack shoved down her sweatpants, saying she tore something in her hip and her foot is broken from her Miu Mius?”
“Yes.”
“Saying her foot hurts or she can’t find the Advil and thinks she has rheumatoid arthritis or Lyme disease?”
“Yes.”
“And it leaves you lonely and missing the person right in front of you?”
“Yes.”
She sat up, staring at me. I went to the freezer and dumped the ice from the muffin tin into a dish towel, and brought it over to her.
While putting on her clothes, she called the camp to let them know she was coming, then walked downstairs with her shirt on crooked.
I thought of her, alone, in pain, in the car. I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of bed, but it was worse than that. A soft, dull, blanketed weight. There were cracked muddy smears on my thighs, her blood on my naked parts. Out of her, something torn, a wound, our imaginary family. The sight of her disemboweled grapefruit on the counter filled me with horror. I went to the bathroom and sobbed. My circuitry had been jangled. Windowless and dank, wallpaper buckling, the hum of the fluorescent bulb, the black line of mold in the grout, deep black fuzz in the fan vent, vinyl floor tiles that had come loose and been stuck back on crooked, terrible caulking, dirty handprints on the ceiling, water stains and wood rot from leaks in the walls. My sobbing had the obscene quality of a broken, cynical victim fake-laughing, desperate for revenge. Even by my own ridiculous standards, this scene went a little overboard.
I took some time wetting and drying my face, waiting for my personality to return, bawling like a pussy. I was so sick of losing her while also losing to her, by every conceivable measure. Her children would not fall into a junk-filled construction hole. Her marriage was endowed. Their winnings were secured offshore.
I looked around at the warped dresser, the cloudy mirror above it, the gouge in the wall behind it, the ladder, still standing beneath the cupola. I stared hard into these objects, like a little kid waiting for a seed to grow. I threw away the grapefruit and carried the garbage to the dumpster, grabbed my bike, and rode out to the ocean.
As I arrived, cyclists were parking along the highway, locking their bikes to the guardrail, and walking through dense scrub to the dunes. The column moved, more or less single file, leaderless, trudging. Climbing into the sun, we looked out over a Saharan moonscape, our ankles sinking into deep pouring sand. Every step was a different useless thought: I missed my chance. It just might work. I’m such a shit. I need my kids. I love my wife. Then the loop restarted. I’d crossed these dunes before, but they’d changed over the winter and I didn’t recognize the path. At the top of the rise the whole mountain fell sharply away. Beneath us, kids had flung themselves, tumbling, down the dune. I marveled at the strange geology. From this distance the ocean looked like nothing, rows of fun, frothy, rolly waves glinting beyond the sea of umbrellas. I had come to perceive the lonely existence of fatherhood and monogamy as submission and defeat, saw my own children as some kind of moral betrayal of artistic purity. How did other people do it? My neighbor Curtis watched Bobby Flay after his family went to bed. In the fall he planted bulbs and raked leaves. I needed more than yard work. And no matter what, I would never stop loving Amy. I would take her to my grave.
At the bottom of the dune were some old preserved wooden buildings, roped off with signage, and a hand-painted taco truck. Hipsters sat on picnic benches in porkpie hats and bikinis, smoking, watching the action on the waves. Surfers and kiteboarders in half-zipped wet suits ran across the parking lot. Little kids in neon shorts flipped their skateboards and fell and assessed their injuries. As I got closer the sea appeared tipped, as if coming from above me, bearing down. The sand was hot. The beach was packed. The wind came up. I stopped and put a hand up as a visor to study it, a roiling cauldron with heaving barrels crashing at bad angles and surfers flying into the air.
An incoming wave sounded like an airplane taking off, followed by a house collapsing. Almost no one was swimming. I had an insane headache, the worst in my life. A hundred yards down the beach, I was still looking for a spot to spread my towel. Heaps of burped-up algae lined the shore. Thick bands of slimy green stuff floated in the water.