J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

“I’m leaving you,” she said.

“Nooo,” I replied, automatically, in a kind of friendly/skeptical tone, as if she’d gotten something slightly wrong.

“I’m in love with Allan. He’s leaving his wife. We’re going to live at his lake place, and he will be investing in the expansion of my business.”

I don’t know how I must have looked, staring at her like that across the brilliantly lit dining room table. After a time I was able to say, “I don’t understand this.”

“Of course you knew, David. You’re just too simple and straight-forward to know what you know.” She made a face. “I mean that as a compliment. The fact is, you don’t need me. What you need is sex, music, and food. I need more than that. I need somebody with a vision. Allan understands what I want, and he wants to help me get it. He admires my ambition.”

There was so much to digest and refute in that little speech, so much that, on one hand, made no sense whatsoever, and on another explained so terribly, terribly much of Margaret’s behavior around me since we married, that I could only sit there, staring, with my mouth agape. Allan, I should add, was one of her investors — the big one, I guess. I’d met him — he was just some rich guy. Or so he seemed to me. I must have missed something.

“I do need you.” It was hardly the most important of her assertions to refute, but it was the thing I managed to blurt.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, no.”

“I’m ambitious!”

This drew a sigh. “David, what have you done for the past decade?”

“Raised our daughters,” I said.

“Yes.” She nodded, as though conceding the point. “Yes, and good job. But look at what’s happened to you. What about your music — you could have been great. But you gave it up.”

She was referring to the guitars and amplifiers, the tape machines and synthesizers and drums, which once I had used to record albums of instrumental music for independent films and television shows, and which I had gradually sold off, until all I had left was my trusty Gibson acoustic, the one I had found in a pawnshop in Nebraska during a road trip with an old girlfriend in 1982. It was true that I had sacrificed my ambitions. I had done this so that Margaret could go to cooking school, and then to open a restaurant, then run the restaurant while I raised Lyn and Rae. The money I got for selling those things, I gave to her.

Of course she was right that I might have continued to write and record. I might someday have achieved considerable fame and fortune, won an Emmy, an Oscar. What I had managed to achieve instead was happiness — at home, with our girls, bringing them up while Margaret labored in the trenches. I know, I know, it sounds like cold comfort, and at times I had wondered if that was how I should see it myself. But I didn’t miss what I used to do. My work, the trappings of it, had become a burden to me. It stood in the way of the simplicity that, however annoying it was to hear Margaret ascribe it to me, I nevertheless strove for. Lack of ambition had become my ambition.

In any event, ever since the I’m-leaving-you conversation, she had been going on a lot of “little trips,” the destination and purpose of which she refused to say. And then she would come home and stay with me and the girls for a couple of nights, and then she would leave again. And each time I figured she wouldn’t be back, and each time she returned as though she’d done nothing more scandalous than run down to the supermarket.

After two weeks of this, I asked her, Hey, what are you doing here? Are you staying with me? Or are you leaving me? And she wouldn’t answer, only stare over my shoulder, blinking. I continued to ask her every few days for another two weeks, and every time got the stare, until at last, a week before our vacation, she turned to me and said, in much the way she had the first time, “Okay, I’m leaving you.”

“Okay.”

“If you’re demanding I decide, that’s my decision.”

“Oh,” I said. We were back at the dining room table, with the girls in bed upstairs. Margaret looked thinner and more tired. “So you’re leaving me now because I keep asking you if you’re leaving me?”

She covered her face with her hands. I was angry. And at the same time I felt bad for her, really bad. “I’m leaving you,” she said, “for the reasons I previously stated.”

It was then that we agreed the lake trip would be the end, and when we got home, we would tell the girls. Or I would tell them. Or something.

We spent the afternoon in separate spheres, Margaret on the porch with her BlackBerry, me on the lakeshore tossing stones, the girls out in the middle of the lake lying on inner tubes in the bikinis their mother had bought them and I wished to hell they had held off a few years before wearing. Their names had been Margaret’s idea, which, like most things, I went along with. But the nicknames were my innovation — Lyn and Rae — and those were the names they seemed most comfortable with. I was aware that Margaret resented me for this, but resentment fueled a lot of her most productive activity, and I was happy to provide it. Not that I had ever striven to do so — Margaret would have found something to resent regardless of what I did — but I figured that, like other bad habits, it was best kept in the home.

Listen to me — trash-talking my wife. She was not all bad, Margaret. There were good times, moments of profound sweetness and fun. We were a team: us versus the fools. Nothing had changed, really, except that I wasn’t on the team anymore.

That night we went to eat at the Grimy Fisherman’s. Though we hadn’t yet seen another soul down at the lakeside, the place was packed. Belinda was heavy but agile, with a round fleshy face, lively eyes, and cascading piles of gold hair. Honestly she was pretty hot, and I loved her place, the pleasure of her patrons, her pleasure in them, the dim brown light and deafening noise. She kissed the girls, called them by name (my versions, of course), told them they were absolute heartbreakers, brought them special treats they hadn’t ordered and which wouldn’t show up on the bill.

At one point Margaret got up to go to the ladies. She brought her BlackBerry. Belinda showed up at our table in seconds, as if by chance, slipping into Margaret’s seat and resting a fishy hand on my shoulder. “So how are you doing?” she said seriously, and it was clear that somehow she knew everything.

“Oh, fine!” I chirped.

“Good,” she said seriously. “Good.”

Lyn was buried in her paperback — she always brought something to read for the dull moments in life, and I found this habit both endearing and highly respectable — but Rae looked up with shy, alarmed curiosity.

“We’re so glad to be back,” I offered.

Belinda nodded slowly. “You are always welcome here. You know that.”

“I do.”

“Don’t forget,” she said, and tousled my hair, as though I were a child.

When I looked up, Rae was staring at me. I smiled. She quickly bowed her head and moved the scraps around on her plate.

“I wonder what’s taking your mother,” I said.

Rae shrugged. “She brought her phone.”

“Ah. Did she now.”

A nod. At this moment Lyn looked up from her book and glanced at us both. “What?” she said. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “We’re waiting for your mom. Then we’ll have dessert.”

“No, thanks,” Rae said from under her hair.

“I think I’ll pass too,” I agreed.

Margaret returned, looking flushed and concerned. I ignored this. She didn’t want dessert either, but Lyn did of course, so we all sat for ten minutes watching her alternately eat an ice cream sundae and read. When she was through, she said, “You people are freaks,” and for once, none of us disagreed.