Good Riddance(33)

A few weeks into our separation, she called me. Had I received the German nutcracker she’d sent home with Holdy last Monday? She’d found it in a box with ornaments . . . on and on to news of her two dogs and their monogrammed Tyrolean winter coats.

“I assume he kept it for himself,” I told her.

That provoked only silence until she asked, “Could you put Holdy on?”

“I can’t.”

“He’s out?”

“I have no idea.”

Was it my job to fill in the blanks? Because she wasn’t my mother, my confidante, my problem, I decided not to elaborate. “When was the last time you talked to him?” I asked.

“Monday. I left a few messages, but I haven’t heard back.”

“Try a text.”

“I don’t do that.”

“I’ll text him and tell him to call you.”

She said coyly, “And tell him he’s a terrible son! But maybe if he calls, he gets another chance.”

Was she clueless? Or perhaps she’d been in on the plot and was only feigning congeniality.

I texted him, CALL YOUR MOTHER & TELL HER ABOUT US!

I gave it thirty-six hours, then called her back, newly motivated to squeal if the coward hadn’t come clean about the separation. I suggested lunch.

“What a good idea! You’ll be my guest. I insist. Pick a place. You know what I like.”

I picked a favorite restaurant of hers that was a doozy, figuring I might as well make it a very expensive, five-star sayonara.

I had to admit she was handsome in an august way, with the white pageboy and bangs of someone who’d once been a natural blonde. She was wearing the pearls, three strands that she’d told me would be mine some day and then, please God, a granddaughter’s. I’d planned to tell the story of our dissolution over coffee, but I was having trouble making small talk in the face of my suspicion that she was Holden’s willing accomplice. I began with “I know this might be the last time you want to see me . . .”

Did that evoke anything? No. She crossed her knife and fork over her untouched lobster salad.

I started off delicately, or so I thought, with “Things could never be the same after he ruptured several commandments—”

Who was this usually dainty Episco-Republican opposite me, now practically spitting? “Don’t talk to me like I’m some . . . some . . . Southern Baptist! Commandments! Ha! You don’t think I know that you threw him out!”

I leaned across my own salad, and hissed, “For good reason! Did he tell you that he stayed out all night with a woman he’d met in a hotel bar? I even know her name: Amanda. Because he confessed.”

No answer, just an unnerving stare.

“And that confession led to a bigger one: that he’d been having sex with other women from the time we met: when we were dating, when we were engaged, then after the wedding. I think the only time he was on hiatus was our wedding night.”

“And . . . ?”

And? My face must’ve registered my incredulity, because her next question had a tinge of humanity. “Is there any chance . . . ?”

“Any chance of what?”

“Any chance he exaggerated his extramarital love life?”

Was that a smile of sisterhood she’d just flashed? “It’s not as if Holden is a specimen,” she explained.

“Bibi! He told me he was a sex addict. And he’d go to rehab—like drug addicts and alcoholics—in some place like Minnesota.”

She had started shaking her head with the first syllable I uttered. “Wouldn’t I know that? Wouldn’t he have come to me first to say, ‘Mother, I have a problem’?”

“‘Mother, I’m a sex addict’? I don’t think so.”

Was Bibi looking thoughtful? Was she summoning a mother-son conversation from their past? I asked what she was thinking.

“You didn’t know Holdy’s father. No, how could you? He was ancient history by the time Holdy met you. What am I saying? He was gone in many ways by the time I brought Holden home from the hospital as a newborn.”

I knew she’d been divorced but wasn’t positive which of her ex-husbands had been Holden Phillips III. I asked if by “gone” she meant that he’d passed away that early in their marriage.

“Unfortunately not.”

I said yes, now I remembered. Then, just for meanness’ sake: “Back in the day when broken homes were rare enough that Holden felt like the only kid in the class without two parents on visiting night.”

“I don’t like to talk about it.” Her voice was now tight. “Of course, when supposed friends in your church are sleeping with your husband, you have to take a stand, don’t you? You don’t just show up and smile at the two b-words who were having relations with your husband. It’s so humiliating.”

Whoa. I’d brought out the best or worst in Bibi. I asked how she found out about the women.

“I connected the dots. It wasn’t that hard.” What followed gave me another glimpse into the very un–New Hampshire, Upper East Side world of privilege and drama: “I hired a private detective. The rest was easy. They know what to look for. He wasn’t caught in flagrante delicto but in what you might call the comings and goings, the before and after.”