How It Ended Part 21

Norman looked at Liam. "Did it help?"

"I suppose so," Liam said. He didn't feel he could go into it with this group. It would be like discussing s.e.x with his parents.

Lora took his cheek in her fingers, putting her face close to his and smiling sweetly, or so it appeared, though he'd come to suspect the sincerity of this particular gesture. "We love you, honey," she said.

As soon as he could, he retreated to a neutral distance; at that moment his phone rang and he answered it, happy for the interruption.

"Liam, it's me," Sasha said. "Don't hang up. I'm so miserable. I need to see you."

He shouldn't have looked to see if Lora was watching him, because she was. "I'm sorry, but you've got the wrong number," he said, feeling the heat in his cheeks. He turned off the ringer before slipping the phone back in his pocket.

"The phones are still completely screwed up," Jason said.

"So you've become a believer?" she asked, smiling brightly. It was the second Sunday of the new era and he'd just asked her if she wanted to join him at Ma.s.s. He shrugged. "I just ... at this particular moment in time, I'm feeling a sense of, I don't know, spiritual yearning. Is that so surprising, really?"

"If that's what you need, then I think you should by all means go to Ma.s.s."

"Look, I know you feel differently, but I don't want to argue about this."

"Who's arguing?" She reached over and stroked his cheek, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. "I love you."

"Maybe I'm weak, maybe I'm being hypocritical, but just indulge me in this, okay? If you don't want to go, I'll understand."

Lora a.s.sumed Liam's recrudescence of faith would fade along with the initial shock of that terrifying day. She was kind of a.s.suming the same thing about her own Xanax consumption; she'd cut back again once things returned to normal, but right now it seemed impossible to get through the day without forty or fifty milligrams.

After Liam left, she turned on the TV again, another escalating addiction that would surely subside in the weeks to come. She was watching the Taliban spokesman, defiant in his black beard and black robes, when she heard Liam's phone vibrating on the coffee table. She noticed that he'd turned off the ringer days ago, but now it was buzzing like a big flat beetle on the gla.s.s. She picked it up. "h.e.l.lo?"

There was silence on the other end.

"Did he tell you I'm pregnant?" Lora said, then snapped the phone shut and went to the bathroom and took two more Xanax.

For some reason, she remembered the conversation at Norman's loft. She'd almost forgotten about the whole confession thing, but suddenly she wondered if that had been the point of Liam's new faith: to clear his soul of mortal sin before the next plane hit.

Liam's office was inside the restricted zone south of Ca.n.a.l, and for the first week or so he didn't even think about going to work, but then a friend invited him to use his s.p.a.ce in Chelsea. He went back to work the second Monday, not that he foresaw a big demand anytime soon for the kind of edgy independent films he produced. When he got home that night, he could tell that something was wrong. His first thought, on seeing her stony expression, was that somehow she'd learned about Sasha.

"Any thoughts about dinner?" he asked.

"I'm not hungry."

"Shall I cook something?"

"I told you: I'm not hungry."

"I brought some DVDs from the office. Hedwig and the Angry Inch Hedwig and the Angry Inch and and Riding in Cars with Boys Riding in Cars with Boys."

"I don't think so," she said. Tears were pooling in her eyes, though she looked more angry than sad.

"What's wrong?"

"The baby's gone," she said.

"Gone?"

The tears were coursing down her cheeks, but her manner was defiant. When he tried to embrace her, she pushed him away and said, "I ended it."

Eventually, in his mind, it seemed, the abortion became subsumed into the narrative of the collective trauma. Liam went out and got drunk that night, but in the succeeding days he seemed unwilling to confront her about her motives, as if he was afraid their marriage couldn't survive the revelation of certain facts. At some point, after telling her that he believed in the sanct.i.ty of life from the moment of conception, he made the decision to forgive her, just as she, in turn, forgave him, though neither of them ever acknowledged his transgression. But he had presumably confessed his sin, and she sometimes wondered how he squared his own faith with her action, and her own unshriven state. Apparently, in his mind, she had committed murder. But divorce, too, was a mortal sin. As much as she despised his faith, she kind of liked the idea that Catholicism protected her matrimonial monopoly.

Most of the n.o.ble resolutions of that period gradually faded away, but Liam continued to attend Ma.s.s, without making a big deal of it. The fact that he stopped talking about it had convinced her of his seriousness. For her part, she tried not to give him a hard time.

The following spring, Lora was pregnant again. The days between the morning the stick on the home pregnancy test turned blue and the evening their son was delivered in December were among the happiest of their marriage. After a long period of apartment hunting and soul-searching-both of them of an age to have used the phrase "bridge and tunnel" to denote those living in the hinterlands-they bought a town house in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill. Like most converts, they became strident proselytizers, declaiming the virtues of the restaurants on Smith Street and insisting that it was only ten minutes by subway to the Village. They loved telling not only their friends but also each other how much they didn't miss Manhattan, though eventually this became something of a moot point when Liam started spending half his time in Los Angeles after one of his scripts was picked up by HBO shortly after Jeremy's second birthday. Lora couldn't pretend that it wasn't hard on her, being left behind to take care of the baby. And she couldn't help wondering what he was doing when he wasn't working, despite his declarations that every waking moment was consumed by the show. But he was an attentive father and lover during his sojourns in Brooklyn, and one morning she woke him at his hotel in Los Angeles to tell him that she was pregnant.

"That's fantastic," he said.

"You're happy?"

"I couldn't be happier. Aren't you?"

"I don't know. I'd be happier if you were here right now."

"I'll be home the day after tomorrow. We'll celebrate."

Unpacking his suitcase two mornings later while he slept in, she found, mixed in with his s.h.i.+rts, a baby blue silk teddy trimmed with black lace.

When Liam woke up that morning, he was alone. Sitting up in bed, he saw his suitcase, propped open on the floor, and recognized the light blue undergarment on top as belonging to his production a.s.sistant. For years he'd behaved himself and remained faithful to Lora, but recently he and Lanie had been working late, and one night she'd kissed him and he'd been unable to resist. He'd gone to confession the next afternoon, but it had happened again several times since. He didn't know how her nightie had gotten into his suitcase, but the more troubling question was why it was so flagrantly displayed, when he was ninety percent certain he hadn't opened the bag when he came in the previous night. What the h.e.l.l was he supposed to do now? He finally decided to bury it beneath his s.h.i.+rts and hope that it never surfaced again.

He descended the stairs with trepidation, but he couldn't read anything unusual in Lora's demeanor when he found her in the kitchen with Jeremy in her arms, attached to her breast. That she was still breast-feeding Jeremy at two and a half was a point of contention, but he wasn't about to get into it now. Lora seemed delighted to see him. "Here's Daddy," she said. "And we love Daddy, don't we? Yes, we do." She shuffled across the floor in her slippers, clutching Jeremy to her chest, and took Liam's left cheek in her fingers, pinching and pulling his face close to hers. "We love you so much, Daddy."

All weekend he waited for the accusation, but it never came. After two days at home, he would almost have welcomed a confrontation, but Lora seemed to have finely calibrated her chilliness to a degree or two above the freezing point, and when they had another couple over for dinner on Sat.u.r.day, she was overly effusive, gratuitously declaring her love on several occasions. Before the Robertsons arrived, he'd suggested they tell them about the pregnancy, feeling that the announcement would make it more real, might lodge the fetus more firmly in Lora's uterus, but Lora said it was way too early for that.

While Liam was mixing the margaritas, Lora told her new joke: "What's the biggest drawback to being an atheist? Give up? No one to talk to during o.r.g.a.s.m."

Shortly after she put dessert on the table, she stabbed him with a fork. She was talking to Donna about private schools when suddenly she brought her clenched fist, clutching her fork, down on his thigh, impaling him through his jeans.

If Liam, in his surprise, had been able to suppress a shriek of pain, it's possible the attack would have pa.s.sed unnoticed. As it was, Lora made the whole thing seem like an unfortunate accident, an absentminded gesture.

"Oh my G.o.d. Oh, Liam honey. You know how I'm always grabbing your thigh. It's like, s.h.i.+t, I forgot I had a G.o.dd.a.m.n fork in my hand. Poor baby, you're bleeding. I'm so sorry." She showered him with apologies and first aid, and even after the Robertsons had left, she maintained an air of concern and contrition. For his part, Liam was too frightened to confront her. He only hoped that she'd gotten it all out of her system at once. Maybe now they could go on as if nothing had happened.

Back in L.A., he told Lanie that it was over between them, citing the pregnancy, and she seemed to understand. In retrospect, he found it remarkable that communication between a man and woman with a s.e.xual history could be so straightforward.

A few nights later, they were cras.h.i.+ng a script, four of them working in the office till midnight, when they decided to move to his hotel suite, where they could order up a room-service supper. Liam was in the bathroom when the phone rang, and he rushed out in a panic. He knew who was calling.

Lanie was still holding the receiver. "h.e.l.lo?"

He grabbed the phone away from her and heard only the dial tone. It was three-ten in the morning; it wasn't hard to guess what Lora, if it had been Lora, was thinking. There was no way of verifying the incoming number on the hotel phone.

"What's the matter?" Brodie asked.

He dialed his home number in Brooklyn. After a half dozen rings, he heard his own voice explaining that no one could come to the phone right now. "Honey, it's Liam. Listen, I thought you might have called just now and I wanted to make sure everything's okay out there. We're all here just finis.h.i.+ng up on the script for tomorrow, me and Brodie and Issac and Lanie. I guess you're asleep. Just wanted to make sure everything was okay. Big kiss."

He called throughout the day, but Lora never answered. When he still couldn't reach her the following afternoon, he told his colleagues he had an emergency and caught the red-eye to New York.

She was in bed with Jeremy when he came in at seven. She said she wasn't feeling well, that she had cramps and was bleeding.

"Are you all right?" he said, breathlessly.

"Not really," she said.

"The baby?"

"There is no baby."

"You had a miscarriage?"

"No." She shook her head. "Not a miscarriage."

Having arrived all tense and alert, he seemed to deflate before her eyes, slumping to the foot of the bed. "How could you do this?"

"It's just a procedure," she said. Of course, she knew it was more than that to him. To him, it was a mortal sin.

"It's a life," he said. "Is this what happened the last time, too? You were punis.h.i.+ng me?"

"Punis.h.i.+ng you for what, my love?" Despite the pain, she managed a bright smile. "I just wasn't ready for another child. I didn't think we we were ready." were ready."

"But you know how I feel about this," he said. "How am I supposed to live with you after this?"

"Of course you'll live with me. With us-your wife and son. What else would you do? You know I love you, honey."

2008.

Sleeping with Pigs "Wait a minute," my shrink says. "Stop. Go back. Did you say in the bed?" in the bed?"

I nod cautiously. Actually, my mind was drifting off on a tangent. Even as I was droning on about my failed marriage, I was wondering, not for the first time, why she had a picture of John Lennon in her office and whether it was an Annie Leibovitz. You know, the one where he's in a sleeveless New York City T-s.h.i.+rt with his arms crossed.

"The pig was sleeping in the bed. With you. In the marital bed. With you and your wife."

"Well, yes," I say.

"You've been coming to me for more than a year, trying to come to terms with your guilt about the breakup of your marriage, and this is the first time it's occurred to you to mention that the pig was sleeping with you in the bed?"

I can see her point. I don't know why I didn't mention it before. It was actually a big point of contention at the time. On the other hand, I was behaving so badly by then that I didn't really feel I was in a position to make demands. Blythe used to have all kinds of jokes about sleeping with two pigs. No, actually, it was the same joke over and over. Plus, McSweeney's my surname and she liked to call me McSwine.

"Was this a nightly occurrence? How long did it go on?"

"Pretty much every night for a year or so. Two years maybe. Mostly at the end."

"And where did the pig sleep?"

"Between us."

"Between you. In the bed In the bed." Apparently, she wants to make sure she's clear on this point.

"Sometimes it would burrow under the covers and sleep down at the foot."

"Didn't you think this was relevant to our enterprise here? To the whole question of the fate of the marriage? That you were being asked to sleep with a pig between you. Am I safe in a.s.suming this wasn't your idea?"

"Of course not." About this at least, I can be emphatic. "It was hers."

"And you didn't object?"

"Well, yeah, sometimes. In the beginning."

"And then?"

"Well, you get used to things."

She sighs and shakes her head. "I think we need to talk about this."

I can see her point. In retrospect, here, on the Upper West Side of New York, sitting in this book-lined office across from my shrink, who is literally and figuratively framed within a constellation of diplomas and portraits of Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, I can imagine how bizarre this sounds. Now that it's come up, I'm kind of amazed myself that I let my ex-wife talk me into sharing the bed with her potbellied pig. Over time almost anything can come to seem normal in the course of a marriage: food fetishes, s.e.xual kinks, even in-laws. First you get talked into a pet pig, and the next thing you know it's sleeping with you.

"How did it get up on the bed?"

"She built a ramp. With carpeted steps."

"And you didn't think this was ... unusual? And, in terms of your marriage, unhealthy? How did you manage to have s.e.xual relations with a-How big was the pig?"

"By then? Hard to say, really. Too big to lift anyway. I threw my back out the last time I tried. Hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy pounds. About my weight. Plus, the shape's kind of awkward and it's not like they're going to hold still and stay quiet when you try to pick them up." Normally, her expression is pretty imperturbable, but for the first time in our a.s.sociation I get the impression that she's looking at me like I'm a crazy person. "They're actually very clean," I add. "And they're smarter than dogs." I realize I'm quoting my ex. I can antic.i.p.ate my shrink saying something to the effect that we were enabling each other in our respective fantasy worlds.

She nods slowly, drinking this in, and regarding me with what seems to me an air of wonder mixed with disappointment, as if she now has to reevaluate our relations.h.i.+p and start again from the beginning. It's the kind of expression that leads me to wonder whether psychiatrists ever fire their patients. I want to point out, in my defense, that her cat's purring away in my lap and she didn't seem to think there was anything weird about that.

"Well," she says. "We certainly have a lot to talk about next week, don't we?"

Having thought I was marrying a southern belle, I hadn't counted on getting Ellie May Clampitt in the bargain. I met her at one of the most fas.h.i.+onable watering holes in Manhattan, where she made an unconsciously grand, fas.h.i.+onably late entrance on the arm of a movie star. It was a birthday dinner for my friend Jackson Peavey, and the chair next to mine had been empty for half an hour. When I asked someone about my absent dinner partner and was told the seat belonged to Blythe, Jackson's aunt, I imagined a blue-haired southern dowager. I certainly wasn't prepared for the leggy, luminous blonde who finally alighted beside me with the ease of someone effortlessly mounting a horse. Though she has since denied it, I could've sworn the movie star leaned over and whispered, "See you later" as he took his leave. She should have been thoroughly daunting, except that somehow she wasn't.

"Hey there, Blythe Peavey, delighted to meet you. If I'd known what an excellent seat I had, I would've absolutely come sooner. That's a beautiful s.h.i.+rt. Is it linen? I love that color with your eyes. Have I missed any bon mots or bad behavior?"

She dispensed compliments with a liberality that would have seemed insincere in anyone I found less attractive and made me feel as if we were dining alone, tete-a-tete. She seemed to know quite a bit about me, which I found gratifying, considering how little there was to know at that early moment in my life, and what she didn't know, she seemed to be in a desperate hurry to learn. Eventually I admitted that I'd been expecting someone much older.

"My brother Johnson, Jackson's dad, is almost twenty years older than I am," she explained. "Jackson loves calling me 'Aunt Blythe,' which seemed funny when he was ten and I was twelve, but now that he's followed me to New York, I'm thinking of offering him lots of money to quit it."

Later she told a self-deprecating story about having lunch, in her early days in the city, with Leo Castelli and an artist named John something-she hadn't caught his entire name. She found him rather attractive and confessed to possibly flirting with him a bit, frequently repeating his name and touching his arm. The artist became more and more remote, until he finally said, "My dear, I've been called a john before, but never by a woman." Castelli later told her that she'd been flirting with Jasper Johns. "You can imagine," she said, "that I've never been able to show my face at a Castelli opening again, for fear of running into him."

I thought her story was a kind of wonderful spoof of the name-dropping that pa.s.sed for anecdote in the world I was then aspiring to enter.