Alternate Side(40)

Now, while her friends discussed nursing homes and dementia, Nora kept quiet. No one wanted to hear that her father and his wife, just turned seventy-five, almost sixty-five, were on a river cruise up the Danube, sending texts to Rachel and Oliver: Vienna is amazing! and Love from Budapest! Twice a year they spent a long weekend in the city, always staying at a hotel but taking Charlie and Nora and, if available, the twins out to dinner and brunch. Nora remembered walking through Central Park with them after sundaes at Serendipity when the twins were small and still easily co-opted by hot fudge and free balloons, watching as Carol slipped her hand into her husband’s and swung it slightly. Nora had felt such a spasm of envy that it almost made her faint.

It was one of the only marriages she’d ever encountered that wasn’t a mystery to her. Even her own. When people divorced, she was often surprised, and when they stayed together, sometimes more so. She thought that people sought marriage because it meant they could put aside the mascara, the bravado, the good clothes, the company manners, and be themselves, whatever that was, not try so hard. But what that seemed to mean was that they didn’t try at all. In the beginning they all spent so much time trying to know the other person, asking questions, telling stories, wanting to burrow beneath the skin. But then you married and naturally were supposed to know one another down to the ground, and so stopped asking, answering, listening. It seemed foolish, fifteen years in, to lean across the breakfast table and say, By the way, are you happy? Do you like this life? Familiarity bred contempt, she’d read somewhere, or at least inattention, but sometimes it seemed more like a truce without a war first: these are the terms of engagement, this is what is, let’s not dwell on what’s not. “Want what you have,” it said inside the waistband of one of Christine’s bestsellers, some patterned capri pants, and it sounded so life-affirming until you really thought about it, and then it just sounded like capitulation.

Sometimes Nora would look across the room at Charlie and feel the same way she did when she looked at her old oak rolltop desk and remembered how thrilling it had been to spot it across a dusty plain at an antiques show, even though nowadays she mainly cursed its sticky drawers and splintery edges. That was how most people stayed married, she suspected, nine parts inertia and one part those moments when she spotted her husband sitting across a long table illuminated by a votive candle, bending his head to listen to the blond pianist next to him, bending as though he were deeply interested in her remarks about how terribly Juilliard had changed and how vitamins were really unnecessary if only you ate by the 1/2/3 method. Bending his fair head, as he once had at a table in Montreal, when they were seated side by side and he said, “Don’t ever change a thing, Bunny mine. Not. One. Thing.” Bending it now because he was beginning to lose his hearing a bit. All the men seemed more attentive at dinner parties these days because they needed hearing aids and refused to get them. You could tell them you’d won the Nobel, her friends said, and they wouldn’t react because they hadn’t truly heard.

“Although how any woman stays married after she wins the Nobel is beyond me,” said Cathleen from her lunch group.

Charlie was still angry because Bob Harris had discussed a job with his wife, much less a Nobel Prize. Lord knows what he would do if he knew that Bob Harris had called Nora just the other day, left a long message, this time on their home phone: “I’ve been meeting with a mess of lawyers, all trying to hike up their billable hours, about this foundation thing. I think it would be good for us to talk again real soon so we can nail down your terms and title. Come on now—let’s get this party started.”





An eerie pewter light fought its way past the sheers into the bedroom, and when Nora went to the bathroom she could see the snow mounded on the pediment of the house next door, a perfect parabola. Downstairs Charlie had not started the coffee. Instead he stood, dripping, in the center of the kitchen, his down jacket on the floor, a pair of old ski pants unsnapped and unzippered at the waist. Nora wondered if this was because he had loosened them or because he hadn’t been able to close them at all. He always gained weight over the holidays, and when he was unhappy.

“No smart-ass comments, all right?” he said, his cheeks red.

“About what?” said Nora, sliding past him and flinching as a slick of cold water was passed from the waistband of Charlie’s pants to the back of her nightgown.

It always took her a few beats in the morning to remember what day it was, to make sense of the headlines in the paper. It had been a nightmare when the twins were small and the hour before they left for school had been full of things that needed attention: permission slips, misplaced homework, snacks that had been promised for a field trip, although not by her. As the coffeemaker began to hiss, Nora realized that Charlie had been digging the car out. The parking lot was still closed, the chain across the entrance secured with a new padlock, but George insisted it would reopen any day, and in the meantime he had persuaded Charlie to join him in parking on the street, as though it would be a defeat to begin to use the enclosed garage again. Charlie was chugging another glass of water as though he’d been running a marathon. “You do understand that you are shoveling snow at seven in the morning because of George?” Nora said.

“I’m well aware of your opinion,” Charlie said, wiping his face with a dish towel. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get to an off-site in New Jersey.”