The Vibrant Years(46)
“Is it horrible to laugh?” Aly asked, laughing. The blast of salty ocean air made a heady combination with the lightness she felt in Radha’s presence. “You’re the only person on earth who can make me laugh right now. And thanks for making me think about Mummy and sex at the same time, as though my marriage hadn’t completely turned me off it for life already.”
“Liar. That was the one thing that wasn’t broken in your marriage.” They stopped to slip off their sandals and leave them by their rock and then set off on their walk. Radha had several clients in the Naples area, and whenever she was in town, walking along the ocean the way they had done growing up in West Palm Beach was a given.
Aly savored the feel of cool sand between her toes and tried not to drift off into the past. “If you call getting stuck in a cycle of having horrible arguments, then falling into long silences, and then having makeup sex not being broken.” Because that’s where their marriage had ended up in its final years.
“Sounds fabulous, actually,” Radha said. “Not just fabulous, it’s genius! Taking the boredom out of marital sex by only having makeup sex.”
“Should we slap an acronym on it and start a club?” Aly said, still laughing.
“Hold on, I got it. MOAN—Marital Orgasm-Apology Network. I like the sound of that.”
The man running past them turned around and gave them a thumbs-up.
Aly was laughing so hard, she was in tears. “I hope you don’t mean for it to be a secret society. It might be hard to keep it quiet.”
“Good one!” Radha said delightedly. “MOAN, the sound of a happy marriage.”
When their laughter died down, Aly found herself frowning again. “The last thing I need right now is to deal with Ashish. I thought I was done with that. Isn’t divorce supposed to be the end of having to deal with your spouse?”
“Not if you’re roomies with his mother. To say nothing of coparenting. Coparenting takes divorce into the death-and-taxes category. There’s no escaping it.” That was Radha-the-lawyer speaking.
Radha-the-wife was as content with Pran as anyone married for twenty-five years could be. Which is to say, she believed he was the best thing that had happened to her, 40 percent of the time. She had married Pran in the most unexpectedly traditional arranged setup. After being dumped by her college boyfriend over email, she’d taken “things into her own hands” and told her parents to show her “what they could come up with.”
They’d done well. Not only was Pran one of the most solid people Aly knew, but he was also the most irreverently funny. Ashish and he were as close as Radha and she, and the loss of their four-way dynamic was one of the saddest casualties resulting from the divorce. Aly had lost the community of families Ashish and she had been part of after the divorce, but losing Pran and Radha’s couplehood friendship was the part that stung most.
“I still think Cullie shouldn’t have told Ashish. Is it weird that I feel betrayed?” A wave skimmed close to Aly’s feet, and she let it lick the tips of her toes without breaking stride.
“Honesty or coddling?” Radha matched her stride easily and threw Aly a sideways glance through the barely salt-and-pepper strands she refused to color, unlike Aly, who’d been obsessed with not letting her gray roots show since the ripe old age of thirty.
“Coddle me, please,” Aly said, knowing full well that Radha was incapable of not speaking her mind.
“I don’t believe for a moment that Ashish came down to check on Bindu. That does not sound like him at all. Although this is the first time a dead body has been involved in your ma-in-law’s shenanigans, so even I’m out of my depth here.”
Radha loved Bindu—even more than people usually did—so Aly laughed. The memory of dropping a wine bottle from shock was so mortifying, it made her cheeks burn. If Radha knew she’d done that, she’d smack her upside the head for giving Ashish’s ego even more oxygen.
But Radha was right. There had to be more to her ex showing up than taking care of his mother. Ashish and Bindu’s relationship didn’t work like that. Bindu showed up. Ashish expected her to always be there to make everything okay. Until Aly and Ashish’s divorce, Bindu had never reneged on that understanding.
The converse of that was not part of the equation. Her mother-in-law was almost pathologically independent. She’d never needed any taking care of.
“Ashish knows you’re here for whatever Bindu needs. You do realize it’s weird how you and Bindu are together. Pran’s mom is a whiny witch, and she gets worse with age.”
“Maybe guys are only nice to us when we don’t get along with their families, and when we do get along with their families, they take us for granted.”
“Who the hell knows,” Radha said. “Men want us to believe they’re uncomplicated. It’s such a lie. They’re like knots under wax. How do you ever unravel a hidden snarl?”
“Ashish doesn’t even pretend to not be complicated. He loves being complicated.”
For the first ten years of their marriage, Aly had worked herself to the bone, worked a job that sucked her soul dry, taken care of the home front, the cooking and cleaning, raising Cullie, building a healthy social life, though Bindu had helped. Aly had made it possible for Ashish to travel for work and establish himself as a respected professional, so his hard work had been financially rewarded. Without her, he wouldn’t have been able to do any of that.