“Every day, for months. You can’t put that on someone you live with. It’s too heavy. But how much time does it take to read an email and write back ‘I love you’? Twenty seconds? Ilana also did that for me. It’s nice when someone says it.”
Even during years when their time at the conference went badly, compared to previous summers, they’d head home revived by some deranged new thinking. Five summers, with all the excitement leading up to it, all that time afterward to relive it and compare notes. They’d meet in other places too, but the conference was better for pure release, a block of days to rid themselves of awkwardness and flinching at phantasms, without the humiliation of skulking around a hotel lobby. This was, after all, a work trip; they taught the class together. And even while it remained impossible to touch the other in public, they went ahead and assumed we knew. We did.
Four years ago, Ilana moved to L.A. with her husband and son. Got lost in the shuffle at her record label, fought with producers, went through years of limbo hell. Scored movies that never got released, had a mastectomy, called herself “Frankenboob.” Her son missed half of eighth grade with mysterious ailments and ended up in a private school for stupid rich kids. Frederick’s father died, he lost his teaching job, found a new one at a state school an hour away for less pay.
There were teary messages and missed birthday phone calls, sudden ill-timed fevers of horniness, flurries of nude selfies, hot messages on Christmas Day, smelly hotel rooms in Boston and L.A., windows facing an airshaft, horrible carpets with squares cut out, exposing cement and glue underneath. And afterward, alone, feeling shifty and wrung out from a sleepless night of heedless fucking, he walked alone at dawn in the bracing wind of November on Columbus Avenue beside Thanksgiving Day balloons. Later, when he gave in to melancholy and combed through their early letters, those ancient correspondences, he was unrecognizable to himself, talkative, lyrical, and boisterous, full of steamy excitement and the thrill of the unknown.
Frederick told me everything. They never wrote a musical together. Half of the songs they’d written were unfinished. None were good. They never met each other’s kids. Other things had also once seemed inevitable. This year, for the first time since the year of her lumpectomy, they hadn’t seen each other once between conferences. Neither one could muster the energy or manage the logistics. And when, two nights ago, on Friday, they’d finally gone off together to discharge their affairs, she’d fallen asleep immediately and he could see in her sleeping that their sex hadn’t changed her. It hadn’t changed him either, until he saw her lying there, then felt jealous and panicky and couldn’t sleep, and in the morning was forced to go through the motions, while her motherly mollifying made him feel like her idiot son. Saturday afternoon had been an improvement, though only from repetition. But last night, after the party, down the beach from the Azamanians, in the rain, beneath some billionaire’s heavily anchored volleyball net, they screwed once more, on the sand, and it was perfect and wiped out everything.
“It was nice,” he said, nodding his head.
“I bet.”
“We’ve been lucky.”
We had turned around where the beach narrowed at the trailer park and had circled back, and were at our towels again. At five, the lifeguards blew their whistles and packed the equipment onto their ATVs and left. The wind had died down, which seemed to calm the water. Frederick’s secrets had left me in a weird state. There were gaps between sets of roguish waves. It was a trap, another vow, another job. I ran like a maniac and dove under the rolling surf. It was cold and I stroked spastically. The waves were biggish but not demonic, and I watched them coming and tried to get a sense of an approaching surge. It was all in pieces. I got slammed and half the ocean went up my nose. Farther out was a smooth rolling sea, and I had no problem treading water.
Looking back at the shore I saw her at our towels, perched on one knee but not sitting. Ilana had come to the beach after all. Good for them. He looked up but not directly at her. Soon the sun would begin its shameless, cornball, rhapsodic routine, a perfectly engineered, lurid light show of color, softening slightly at this hour before it turned a golden pinkish yellow, fading the world. Sandpipers dipped their wings and flew past. Fred had been trying to warn me, as a brother, as a friend. Or maybe he’d just been relieving himself of the burden so he could get back to business. Or maybe he wanted me to know how lucky he’d been; how he’d found this arrangement that demanded nothing; that he’d been careful not to blow up his marriage; that Ilana had become an old friend, a comrade, who he joined once a year for these magically efficient sexual interludes.
If she hadn’t played, hadn’t slipped, if I hadn’t rushed it, or wasted half of her pills. If they’d given her drugs this morning she’d still be here, with her arm in an umbrella bag, treading my same water. What a pig I was. What a disaster. We owned that dumb little bed but never got out of it, never saw the ocean, never got the chance to have our own fun. She was different from Robin; that was all that mattered. Her height, her shoulders, her smell meant freedom. Fred slid over, and Ilana sat beside him. Look at them. Please sit. Stay. I would take her back, broken, miserable, and blind to my needs.
Who would cave first? Who would show the least restraint for their sanity, who would crack? Would we keep this up for years as some soul-sucking, double-secret support group?
A wave bore down and pulled me into a trough and I curled up and waited until it passed. I was fifty or a hundred feet from shore. Then another, and another. I got spun inside a washing machine, legs flung supernaturally back and behind, my body bent in half like a doll, eyes peeled open in airless panic. I shot to the surface and caught a wave, riding high, like the driver of a Greyhound bus. It tossed me right up onto the beach a little ways from them, hacking and spitting as I stood, pretending I knew what I was doing.
Smoke from the outdoor grill blew by as the cooks started dinner. The air was softer here. The grass felt warm underfoot. I went to the tent for something to get the taste of seawater out of my head.
Burt sat at a table in the corner, arms folded across his stomach, beard resting on his chest, gauze wrapped around his head like a soldier from World War I. Carl sat across from him, with Mary, the administrative coordinator, and Chris, the kid who made announcements. When I walked over there, Carl stood up and stepped away from the table. He still wore the yellow linen shirt, wrinkled like a boiled chicken.
“I got a report that you were causing a problem last night at two A.M.”