Alternate Side(69)

“We have to tell the kids,” Nora said in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of wine.

“Can we wait a couple of days?” Charlie said. “I’m pretty played out.” And he trudged upstairs.

As far as Nora was concerned, they could wait forever. The afternoon they’d sat down together to talk to Oliver and Rachel would live inside her for the rest of her life. Both of them had been home for the wedding of a friend from high school, and Nora and Charlie had waited until Sunday afternoon so as not to poison the exchange of vows between Emily Sternberg and Jonathan Ward at the Metropolitan Club, dinner and dancing to follow, festive dress.

“Your mother and I have something to discuss with you,” Charlie had said, choking up almost immediately.

“Please don’t tell me you’re getting a divorce,” Oliver said.

“God, Ollie, of course they’re not getting a divorce,” Rachel said.

Afterward Nora replayed those two sentences over and over, wondering if anything either of them could have said would have been worse. Would it have been more terrible if they had both assumed that was the case? Or was it more punishing that somehow she and Charlie had allowed them to think that this would never happen to them, what had happened to so many of their friends? Nora had been in a bad car accident in high school; they’d been T-boned at a stop sign, the little car her friend Amanda had been given for her birthday rolling twice before it came to rest on its side on the shoulder. Nora could still feel that moment in her body, all these years later, the sound of collapsing metal, the hard thrust of the seatbelt along her hips, even a shiny smudge on the dash where one of them had spattered some soda. It was the same with this. She could see the grain of the wood on the dining room table, the faint shadow of a circle where someone had put down a wet glass, a spike of light through the upper panes of the French door and then one of the chairs falling sideways as Rachel stood suddenly and thudded up to her room.

“This sucks,” Oliver said flatly. “This really sucks.”

“It does, buddy,” Charlie said.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and it was everyone’s fault. Nora had been married to Charlie without seeing him for a long time. She realized that they all assumed that if their marriages ended, it would be with a big bang: the other woman, the hidden debts. Nora had had more reasons than most to imagine that, veteran of a grand passion built on a big lie. But now she thought that was an aberration. The truth was that some of their marriages were like balloons: a few went suddenly pop, but more often than not the air slowly leaked out until it was a sad, wrinkled little thing with no lift to it anymore.

Because the children changed, they required attention, drew the eye: the year Oliver’s room started to smell like unwashed man, the year Rachel began to shut her door and frown when Nora knocked on it. The strep throat, the failing course. But the sameness of husbands, of wives, too, meant that in some sense they might cease to exist on a daily basis. They were like drapes: you agonized over choosing them, measured and mulled, wanted them just right, and then you hung them and forgot about them, so that sometimes you couldn’t even remember what color they were. Almost without noticing it, the young man who had kissed Nora on the forehead after walking her home from The Tattooed Lady had become a sad man who had seen the line of his life running off the reel like it was being dragged by a big fish in murky water. All the men, they feared loss of potency, of position, but what it all came down to was fear of death. Ricky’s van might as well have been a hearse.

Charlie wasn’t a bad man or even a bad husband. Like most men of his generation, he had grown up thinking that the basic maintenance of his life would be handled by women. And it was, by his assistant, the housekeeper, and, to a lesser and less solicitous and therefore less satisfactory extent, his wife. But arranging things for someone is not the same as loving him. It’s work, not devotion.

Of course there had almost immediately been a woman after Charlie had moved out. Maybe she’d even been there during the months when he was sleeping upstairs and Nora was on the floor below. Why wouldn’t that be so? Charlie was a nice man, freed from the accumulated weight of the petty grievances of ordinary married life. All her friends said women left because they were unhappy, and men left because they’d found someone new to be unhappy with. Nora realized how far they’d come when Charlie told her he was seeing someone and she realized she wasn’t as upset as she’d always expected to be. The woman was the nurse in his doctor’s office; they’d gotten to talking when he was waiting for the stress test during his physical. Nora could almost see it, the woman nodding her head sympathetically, Charlie confiding how hard the last months had been as she put a blood pressure cuff on his arm. She probably played golf, or at least was willing to learn. For her, a golf club would simply be a golf club.

“Transitional woman,” Christine said. “The one who gets a guy from wife number one to wife number two.”

“At least she’s not younger than Rachel,” Nora said.

“You sound pretty okay.”

“I am pretty okay. I just worry about the kids. You know how you’re supposed to tell them it’s nobody’s fault? We did, and maybe Oliver believes it—who can tell—but I think Rachel has decided it’s definitely mine.”

“Rachel is fine, Non. I see her every day. She’s doing really good work, and she’s made some nice friends.”