Locust Lane(20)
“It’s a simple request.”
“I wasn’t looking at your stuff,” she said. “I was coming to tell you that I’m concerned about Hannah.”
“What does reading my computer have to do with that?”
“I don’t know, Geoff. Maybe I was curious. You have some sort of big beef with your boss that keeps you from going into the lab for two weeks and I see there’s a message from him and I’m interested. Maybe I looked at it because we’re married and I was wondering how your life’s work was going. You know, husband and wife stuff.”
He stared stonily at her. You’re wasting your words, Alice thought.
“Whatever,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry I intruded upon the sanctum of sanctums.”
Once again, she started to leave.
“Well, just don’t do it again.”
That’s when it truly flipped, the old switch, the one her father had tried to beat out of her, the one that helped drive all those men away. Bad Alice had been conjured from the mists. She spun around this time.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now? This is the first time I’ve ever stepped foot into this, this, grotto!”
Grotto didn’t land with the weight she’d intended, but she stood by it.
“I don’t know that,” he said.
“Well, there are a lot of things you don’t know.”
His eyes narrowed. Careful, she thought. Cut and run. But Bad Alice had her by the scruff of the neck. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“What is this?” he asked slowly. “I’m just asking one simple thing of you.”
“This is me. Fed up me.”
“Fed up with…?”
“Everything.”
“Everything.”
“Yes, Geoff. Everything. Every last fucking thing.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It sure is. It’s a whole hell of a lot.”
For a brief moment, his righteousness wavered. They both knew that she was capable of going a lot farther off the rails than he was.
“I’m going to turn around and walk away from you now,” she said. “And I highly recommend you watch me do that in silence.”
To her grim satisfaction, he did just that. Her blood still up, she was tempted to hop in the car and drive straight to Michel’s house, sort things out with him as well. But that would not be a smart move. So it was back up to her room to stew in her percolating adrenaline. She lay flat on her back and stared at the ceiling. Take a breath, she thought. Get a grip. She’d just come perilously close to blowing everything up. Arguments and tantrums and threats were not a good strategy for her at this point in her life. If a split with Geoff really was inevitable, then she should take a more measured approach. A preemptive, surgical strike was winnable. A berserk domestic meltdown was much less of a sure thing.
Besides, there was no telling now where she’d wind up if she fled her marriage. Before making any sort of move, she had to deal with the unthinkable—that Michel might be done with her. What a catastrophe that would be. She’d have nothing if he left her. He was her lifeboat, her escape pod. Although maybe she’d been wrong to believe he felt the need for a breakout as strongly as she did. He’d still have things if he ended it with her. A sweet son who idolized him and planned to follow in his footsteps. An amazing restaurant. His looks, which would probably stay with him until he turned seventy. He could find a new lover in ten minutes. But Alice was stuck, especially with Hannah going off to college. Marooned in the burbs. Getting older by the day.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Marriage, the move to Emerson, settling down—it should have ended her lifelong meandering. It was her father who cut her adrift, with his bottomless silences and his tobacco-stained fingers that folded so neatly into a fist. Grasping, angry, suspicious of the world outside Shithole, Pennsylvania; this angry little man who devoted all his energy to the small chain of hardware stores he owned, joylessly hoarding every last penny he squeezed from his customers. It was as if he’d emerged, fully formed, from the anus of capitalism, to be forever streaked and redolent with its shit. Despite amassing a small, lonely fortune, he rarely spent a penny on Alice. He’d developed dementia in his early sixties and clung on to life long enough to drain the family’s savings on the best eldercare available.
Her mother had been no help. She’d discovered vodka just after Alice was born and it remained her bestie until breast cancer got her when her daughter was sixteen. Her father had grudgingly agreed to pay her tuition at a minor outpost of the state university, where she’d partied and fucked and daydreamed her way into academic oblivion. She fled to Hawaii, but returned to the mainland after a guy she’d been deeply involved with for all of three hours drove his Mazda into a banyan tree, ejecting himself into the afterlife and leaving Alice with a broken ankle. She wound up in Los Angeles, though the plaster cast and lack of money made life there impossible. She city-hopped her way back East, stopping in whatever was supposed to be the new hip paradise. Santa Fe. Austin. South Beach. Atlanta. Her stays in each city were measured in months. There was always a guy; in Santa Fe, a guy and his wife—Leander and Jill, about whom the less said the better. It was always the same. A sudden rush of attraction, followed by the slow drip of disillusionment that concluded with a curtain-dropping bust-up that sometimes involved the authorities. And then it was off to the next cool place. Jobs were just for money. Hostessing at a sports bar. Hotel reception. Telesales, for the better part of a Monday. That ill-advised week as a “muse” for a photographer mono-named Roman in Miami. She bypassed New York, suspecting it would eat her alive, and finally landed in Boston. She figured she’d better stop there. She was getting way too close to Shithole, Pennsylvania. She was twenty-six but felt much, much older.