The Last Romantics(22)



The young woman Luna had been perched on a folding chair. Now she again stood. She tapped the microphone gently, but it was dead, of course, and so she called out, “Ms. Skinner?”

I felt a surge of great affection for her, irrational in its intensity. That mole, high on her right cheek. I struggled to recall the other Luna, the Luna from a lifetime ago.

“Yes, dear,” I said. “Please go ahead.” I wanted to scoop her up and protect her, to ferry her out of here and back to my house in the woods with its fence and bunker and generator and fresh-spring well. There I might convince myself that we were safe.

“When did the unraveling begin?” Luna asked.

“The unraveling?” I repeated.

“You said this was a story about the failures of love,” said Luna, her tone accusatory. “That’s what you said.”

“Yes. I did say that.”

“You repeat the word unraveling several times in The Love Poem. You said there was happiness in your family, and then—” Luna did not finish the sentence. She left the question hanging over me, over us all.

“And then,” I repeated. I cleared my throat. I glanced at Henry, and he winked, nodded for me to continue. If there is one thing I have succeeded at in life, I thought then, it’s choosing husbands.

When did Joe’s unraveling begin? I considered how to answer Luna’s question. When he met Sandrine? Or took the job at Morgan Capital? Or was it when his baseball career ended with one slide into home? Maybe it began even earlier, when he was still a child who looked like a man, tall and golden, watched and worshipped in Bexley like the local god of any small village. Later, when I asked my sisters, Caroline believed that it began during the Pause, when the ways in which love might disappear first became known to us. We were too young, Caroline said, for that kind of wisdom.

Renee said no, the Pause didn’t do that to Joe. Look at the day of our father’s funeral when he raged and howled. Renee believed that the unraveling began then, in the yellow house, Joe with the fireplace poker, surrounded by all those who loved him and no one, not one of us, able to help. From that moment, she believed, it was written across his skin, embedded within the veins.

To unravel is to unknit, disconnect, untangle, separate. To fall apart.

“I will tell you this,” I replied. “The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.” I was speaking directly to Luna now, not to the woman with the red hair and her partner, not to Henry, not to the faceless masses here in the hall who had paid money to see me speak. Only to Luna. “The unraveling began—” I said, but then stopped myself, tilted my head. “I don’t know when it began, I’m afraid. But I do remember when I first became aware that it was happening.”





Chapter 5




It was autumn 2004. An election year, long enough after 9/11 that we no longer spoke of it every day but close enough that the Manhattan skyline still looked broken. I had agreed to help Caroline clean out her new rental house in the small town of Hamden, Connecticut. I’d seen Caroline and her family infrequently since she and Nathan had left Bexley. In twelve years they’d moved four times, from one university town to the next in search of Nathan’s Ph.D. in biology and a permanent teaching position. The Skinner-Duffys now numbered five: Nathan, Caroline, ten-year-old Louis, and the twins, six-year-old Lily and Beatrix. Their most recent moves had been to cities where one of Nathan’s siblings lived—his brother Terry in Columbus, his sister Maddy in Austin. We’d assumed they’d settle there in Texas, the kids growing up with drawls and a fondness for BBQ, but last month Nathan had received a tenure-track offer from Hamden College, a cozy liberal-arts school located thirty minutes from Noni in Bexley and an hour’s train ride from me, Renee, and Joe in New York City.

Caroline was finally coming home.

“I’m happy to help with the move,” I told Caroline. “Whatever you need me to do.”

“Oh, Fi, thank you,” said Caroline. We were on the phone, Caroline in Austin, me in my apartment in Queens that I shared with Jenji and Beth, two friends from Vassar and a third, Umani, we’d found on Craigslist. I was twenty-seven years old and worked as an editorial assistant at an environmental NGO called ClimateSenseNow! My job sounded good at dinner parties, but it required little more than correcting the maddening typos of my boss, Homer Goshen, Ph.D., and writing the occasional high-minded press release. Because of this, and because I was paid less per hour than an adolescent babysitter, I felt justified in taking regular sick days. Inexplicably, Homer allowed it. Hope that ankle heals up, he’d say over the phone, or That must be a nasty bug. A guilty pang always followed these calls, but rarely was it strong enough to make me go to work.

“The Goats are useless,” Caroline continued. “No one can come, even for a few hours. They’re all so busy getting married or finishing their dissertations or whatever. Emily showed at New York Fashion Week, did Noni tell you?”

Emily was Nathan’s second sister, a recent graduate of FIT, prone to wearing foodstuff as clothing.

“She hasn’t mentioned it,” I said, although of course Noni had. “It’s hard to keep up with the achievements of those Duffys.” In the background I heard one of the twins singing a nonsense song and Louis calling, “Mom, where’s my oboe?”

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