Big Little Lies(126)

Perry turned to look at her. He looked like a stranger with his black wig. The blackness made his eyes appear brilliant blue.
“We’ll talk to the teachers,” he said.
“I’ll talk to his teacher,” said Celeste. “You won’t be here, remember?”
“Right,” said Perry. “Well, I’ll talk to Max tomorrow, before I go to the airport.”
“What will you say?” said Celeste.
“I don’t know.”
There was a huge heavy block of pain lodged beneath her chest. Was this a heart attack? Was this fury? Was this a broken heart? Was this the weight of her responsibility?
“Will you tell him that’s not the way to treat a woman?” she said, and it was like jumping off a cliff. Never a word. Not like that. She’d broken an unbreakable rule. Was it because he looked like Elvis Presley and none of this was real, or was it because he knew about the apartment now and everything was more real than ever before?
Perry’s face changed, cracked open. “The boys have never—”
“They have,” cried Celeste. She’d pretended so very hard for so very long and there was nobody here except the two of them. “The night before the party last year, Max got out of bed, he was standing right there at the doorway—”
“Yes OK,” said Perry.
“And there was that time in the kitchen, when you, when I—”
He put his hand out. “OK, OK.”
She stopped.
After a moment he said, “So you’ve leased an apartment?”
“Yes,” said Celeste.
“When are you leaving?”
“Next week,” she said. “I think next week.”
“With the boys?”
This is when you should feel fear, she thought. This is not the way Susi said it should be done. Scenarios. Plans. Escape routes. She was not treading carefully, but she’d tried to tread carefully for years and she knew it never made the slightest difference anyway.
“Of course with the boys.”
He took a sharp intake of breath as if he’d experienced a sudden pain. He put his face in his hands and leaned forward so that his forehead was pressed to the top of the steering wheel, and his whole body shook as if with convulsions.
Celeste stared, and for a moment she couldn’t work out what he was doing. Was he sick? Was he laughing? Her stomach tightened and she put her hand on the car door, but then he lifted his head and turned to her.
His face was streaked with tears. His Elvis wig was askew. He looked unhinged.
“I’ll get help,” he said. “I promise you I’ll get help.”
“You won’t,” she said quietly. The rain was softening. She could see other Audreys and Elvises hurrying along the street, huddled under umbrellas, and hear their shouts and laughter.
“I will.” His eyes brightened. “Last year I got a referral from Dr. Hunter to see a psychiatrist.” There was a note of triumph in his voice as he remembered this.
“You told Dr. Hunter about . . . us?” Their family GP was a kindly, courtly grandfather.
“I told him I thought I was suffering from anxiety,” said Perry.
He saw the expression on her face.
“Well, Dr. Hunter knows us!” he said defensively. “But I was going to see a psychiatrist. I was going to tell him. I just never got around to it, and then I just kept thinking I could fix it myself.”
She couldn’t think less of him for this. She knew the way your mind could go round and round in endless pointless circles.
“I think the referral is out of date now. But I’ll get another one. I just get so . . . When I get angry . . . I don’t know what happens to me. It’s like a madness. Like this unstoppable . . . and I never ever actually make the decision to . . . It just happens, and every time, I can’t believe it, and I think, I will never, ever, let that happen again, and then yesterday. Celeste, I feel sick about yesterday.”
The car windows were fogging up. Celeste ran her palm over her side window, making a porthole to see out. Perry was speaking as if he genuinely believed this was the first time he’d said this sort of thing, as if it were brand-new information.
“We can’t bring the boys up like this.”
She looked out at the rainy, dark street, which was filled with shouting, laughing, blue-hatted children each school morning.
She realized with a tiny shock that if it weren’t for Josh’s revelation tonight about Max’s behavior, she probably still wouldn’t have left. She would have convinced herself that she’d been overdramatic, that yesterday hadn’t been that bad, that any man would have been angry if they’d been humiliated the way she’d humiliated Perry in front of Madeline and Ed.