A Stolen Summer

Still, the likelihood is that she will never see him again.

She makes an extra effort with dinner, buying halibut despite the expense. It was always Larry’s favorite, but they haven’t had it in the last year or so, since the day he came home from what he said was a company retreat and informed her that he’d found his totem animal. An “empowerment teacher” had led him on a vision quest, during which a wolf had appeared to him. The wolf, the guru told him, had come to guide him into the full expression of his self.

It was hard to imagine anyone less wolflike than Larry, but perhaps that was the point: the wolf’s qualities were what he needed. She could see that. A vague dissatisfaction had been gnawing at him. He’d followed the signposted corporate path to a solid management job, but a bitterness had crept into his accounts of the office, and she realized that his success felt so bloodless to him, so mediocre, that it was beginning to feel more like defeat. He began to buy uncharacteristic articles of clothing—pink socks, a leather bomber jacket—which disappeared after a few outings.

“I feel like I’m an illusion of myself,” he said to Eve once, in a rare moment of vulnerability. When she asked him what he meant, he couldn’t quite explain: he was blurred into a mass of people, and the idea that he, Larry, was an individual person, distinct in any way, was just a trick. It wasn’t a Matrix-like sci-fi horror vision; it didn’t apply to everybody. Just him, and people like him. He was losing his outline, or doubting if he had ever had any, seeping into a general sludge.

From the first hours they spent together, Eve had loved Larry’s surreal sense of humor, the way he imbued inanimate objects with motives and desires. It added a liveliness to his practical reliability. But he rarely found anything funny anymore. Eve felt a chill as she recognized, in that vision of human sludge, the imagination she’d once delighted in soured by despair.

He watched sports on TV as he always did, but his eyes became foggy, his hand held the beer bottle as awkwardly as an amateur actor holding a prop. He stopped seeing his old friends, and Eve doesn’t know if he’s made new ones. Their social life contracted, until Eve felt she could count her own friends on the fingers of one hand. Gradually, Larry moved into the spare bedroom: first his clothes, then his comb and nail clippers, and finally his nighttime self. The solidity, the sense of rational, practical certainty, that she was so strongly drawn to had abandoned him.

She has tried again and again to locate the moment in time when the slide started. But she cannot pin it down. His dissolution is like a creeping stain, reaching further and further into the past.

At first Eve welcomed Larry’s inner wolf, as she would have welcomed anything that promised to help him find his sense of himself again. Now she hates it and distrusts it. Once he was gentle and considerate; now he has become brusque, even deliberately rude, and proud of himself for every selfish action and bad-tempered snap at the world. When Allan was little, he used to beg Eve to read The Jungle Book to him over and over again; she remembers those wolves as dignified, protective, family-oriented. Larry’s feral inner self is a loner stalking through a kill-or-be-killed world. If only he’d read The Jungle Book, she thought.

Still, Larry was a good father. She loved to watch through the window as her menfolk played catch in the backyard, Larry contorting his body into bizarre shapes, Allan squealing with delight and trying to copy him. When Allan was a teenager, Larry took him on weekend fishing trips. Eve would ask what they did and Allan would always reply, “Nothing much.” But she saw what that undemanding companionship did for Allan: gave him a quiet confidence, an even keel.

“My default setting is happy,” Allan had reassured her when he opened his fifth rejection letter from medical school. She felt panicky, but he remained serenely sure that all would work out for the best. And it did.

The halibut is Eve’s attempt to remind Larry of their sweet days, before every dinner had to consist of red meat. But when she calls him to the table, he doesn’t come down for another ten minutes. By then the fish is dry and he eats it with an air of forbearance, as if he’s taking one for the team. He picks up an asparagus spear, watches it droop, and drops it back on his plate with distaste. It’s not my fault, Eve wants to scream at him, you’re the one who spoiled dinner.

“I’m sorry. It cooked too long,” she says, but then adds, “during the time before you came downstairs.”

“You could have given me some warning,” he says. “I was in the middle of something important.”

“Something for work?” she asks, hoping to jump-start the conversation.

“No.”

The instrument, hidden inside its case, sits on the sideboard behind Larry. Eve has prepared her tale of sleuthing through the flotsam of displaced nations and has been looking forward to telling it. Larry rarely asks about her day, and recently he has been sharing little of his own, so Eve has fallen into the habit of rehearsing their dinner-table conversation while she cooks. Now, however, she’s unwilling to offer up the instrument on the altar of forced companionship. If she did, she’d be exposing it to another blow—from Larry’s self-absorbed indifference. She feels an urge to protect it, like a lost child that she’s taken charge of until its mother is found.

“I’m going for a run,” he says, standing up before swallowing his last mouthful. He’s lost weight in the past year, and looks lean and slim. The fact that he’s healthier is the very thin silver lining.

He folds his napkin, drops a kiss on her cheek, and reaches into a cupboard for a stick of beef jerky on the way out. A year ago, he would have helped her clear up.

As she lies in bed that night, Eve realizes that not once during the lunch with Robert and Micajah did she mention her husband. She deliberately mentioned Allan, and she mentioned her business, wanting Robert and Micajah to see her as an independent woman and not just somebody’s wife. But does that mean she had to behave as if she was nobody’s wife? She wonders why neither of them asked—especially since she was wearing a wedding ring.

Half of that question is easy to answer. Robert didn’t care. He was delighted to see her only because she would be a mirror to reflect back to him his own glory as a father and a lawyer both. Any old or new acquaintance would have served.

And the other half?

Micajah didn’t care either. Which can have different meanings. One of which could be that, like her, he didn’t want to bring a husband into the space between them.

She tries to trace it back, to the first moment when she felt the beam of Micajah’s focus locking onto her. Before he brushed against her foot; before the talk of roses. When she caught him eying her dirty knees? No: out on the sidewalk when Robert whirled her round. It was she who sought his eyes, to stabilize herself. By the time she was standing on firm ground again, the connection was made.

Then, later, that shockingly intimate gaze. Could such a look have existed across the distance of a restaurant table? It was, she imagines now, how he would look at her if they were making love. It said, We are so joined, so complete, that the rest of the world does not exist. Meeting it was like riding a rodeo horse. When Micajah turned to his father and said something teasing, that was the eight-second buzzer. Whatever he said, whatever Robert replied, was white noise in her ears. That’s when she reached for her handbag, made an excuse about a just-remembered appointment, and left.

She has never seen that look in Larry’s eyes. He looked at her with love in their early years, a sparkle of pleasure at a quirk of speech or an idiosyncratic movement. But sex had always been basically a roll-on, roll-off deal. She’d thought that was how he wanted it. He’d glance at her quickly and look away, as if he was embarrassed or didn’t want to force her to look at him. Now she wonders if he didn’t dare to pause and pour his heart into hers, for fear she would close hers against him.

I might have, Eve realizes with a lurch. I was scared too.

It was the same fear that Larry felt: fear of being fully seen. She and Larry both wanted to be what the other wanted them to be; they hid their frailties, were ashamed of their faults. Maybe, she thinks, he thought that I loved an idea of him—a partial person, not the whole. He dreaded being seen—and so did I.

Now, after being held in the beam of Micajah’s steady gaze, she yearns for it. The very unlikeliness of his interest in her made pretense absurd.

Did she ever really, truly love Larry? Even yesterday, she would have answered yes, she did. Now, lying in bed, thinking about Micajah, the truth is that she doesn’t know.

I am being ridiculous, she tells herself, panicking. He touched my foot by accident. He probably looks at everyone that way. There’s no reason he would be interested in me.

Maybe he has a mother complex, she thinks. But that comes as a comfort, not a diagnosis—a possibility, not a problem. It wouldn’t be enough to make her say no.

And there she is, back again, like a compass needle dragged inescapably to the north.

The next day, Eve wakes with the spider on her face. It’s been there most mornings, for months now—a heavy darkness pressing on her brow, reaching sharp points into her eyes, her sinuses, cracking the corners of her mouth, making her head ache from the bones out.

Her breathing is shallow, though she’s so used to it that she hardly notices. Her stomach feels sour, as it usually does until she brushes her teeth. Her thighs are lead weights, and her feet are hot and uncomfortable. She sleeps with them outside the covers and often they’re cold, but there’s no way to warm them without the raging heat. Sometimes she fantasizes about chopping them off.

Many mornings, she rolls over and buries her face in the pillow, longing to drop back into unconsciousness. When that fails, she lies prone, one arm across her eyes, summoning the strength of will to greet the new day with optimism—what her mother used to call a good disposition. Eve dislikes people who feel sorry for themselves. She deals with her own burden of darkness by leaving it in her bed and, once upright, pretending firmly that it isn’t there.

Her heart thuds, too hard and too fast, as if it is trying to rev up the momentum to run away. It will calm down soon, as it always does; the thought of coffee helps. A latte, warm and bittersweet, soothes the jagged edges of her nerves. She will walk to the coffee shop and have somebody make one for her. She allows herself this luxury a couple of times a week, on days when she needs to feel cared for.

She resolves that today she will put all thoughts of Micajah from her mind. The name draws her back to that Shakertown and its naive, decorous purity. Since sex was forbidden, the sect grew only by conversion. No wonder it died out.

She hears Larry in the hallway, his door opening then shutting. They too sleep separately, but in resentful, repressed inequality rather than in equable, asexual peace. The bathroom Larry uses is not en suite; it also serves the room that Eve still thinks of as Allan’s. Though he keeps his bedroom door closed unless he’s actually walking through it, he leaves the bathroom door open. It’s a territorial power play that Eve accepts as a quid pro quo for his acceptance of the lower-status bedroom. She won’t go into the hallway until she hears his footsteps on the stairs.

The rasp of the blender drifts up from the kitchen. Larry is making his morning smoothie. Its ingredients are kept in a special drawer in the fridge into which nothing else is allowed, and which he has requested her not to open. Maybe he’s putting raw meat in it, she thinks, but the joke—if it is a joke—isn’t funny.

She’s hungry. Her stomach is clenching. Feeling treasonous for not wanting to see him or talk to him, she waits for the businesslike bang of the door. Then she will get up and revel in the empty house. He’s going to Arizona for work this week, and she’s looking forward to a few days of solitude.

Things are easier now that he has his own room. In the last years when they shared a bed, they would wake and turn away from each other if they weren’t turned away already. They would exchange cursory good mornings and she would ask, “What do you want for breakfast?” and dutifully she would have cereal, or eggs, or French toast, waiting for him when he came downstairs. The secret smoothies are a blessing too. Until she stopped doing it, she had no idea how much she resented starting her day by serving him.

She asked her son the same question, every day until he left home. She mulls it over as she lies in bed: how she has perpetuated the servitude by training the next generation to expect it. But isn’t that what a good mother does? When her mother said it to her, it was different: training by example, the flip side. She got breakfast for her father and her brother on the days when her mother lingered in bed.

Until the moment he left her, Eve’s mother served Eve’s father. She brought him a drink when he came home from work, she asked solicitously about his day, she never questioned that he did nothing to help with the cooking or the cleaning up, when she had had a far more stressful day with five children to care for than he could have had, in his well-appointed office with a well-appointed secretary. The details have changed, not the dynamics. The serving has become subtler: buying Christmas presents for Larry’s mother, praising him for taking any small share of the housework, making “Daddy time” the family priority. As the years tick by, Eve is starting to understand why in more brutal days old women were reviled, exiled, burned as witches: they’d stopped worshipping at the shrine. They could see that it was all just smoke and mirrors.

As Eve sits at the kitchen table, eating a slice of the apricot tart she made for dessert last night but didn’t serve, her phone pings. She gets few texts now that Allan is out of the country. Mostly they’re from Deborah. But this is too early for Deborah. She doesn’t open her store until noon so she can lie in bed late.

“Mornings are the best,” she said lasciviously once, enjoying Eve’s discomfort. “I get to spend time with my little friend. Actually, a really nice big friend! Poor Ted, he never measured up, but then what man does? No man around here, anyway. Once you go wired, you never get tired. You should try it, Eve. Stop being such a born-again virgin!” Deborah knows about Larry’s move into the guest room.

Eve has thought about it in a desultory way, but the idea of going to a sex shop is repellent. She’s afraid that if she searches online, ads for sex toys and hookup sites will haunt her screen forever. At times, she has wondered if she has any libido left. Menopause hasn’t really started to show yet, but maybe loss of interest in sex was the first sign.

The text is from a number she doesn’t recognize, with an area code she doesn’t recognize.

Hi, Eve. Send me a photo maybe I can help. M

Micajah.

For a crazy moment, her imagination spirals into naked selfies, compromised celebrities and politicians. She laughs out loud at herself. The tumultuous return of her libido, yesterday, is disturbing and intoxicating. She’s tired of feeling guilty over Larry. For now, she will put her guilt aside.

Micajah is simply offering to help. Or rather, it would be simple, if not for that “M”.

She knows she doesn’t actually need help. The instrument was an impulse buy, and she can easily absorb the sixty dollars it cost. She can stash it away and forget it. Allan can throw it in the garbage when she’s dead.

She goes to the dining room and opens the case. The choice is plain: save it or send it to its grave. Strange, how this inanimate object has the quality of a living creature. She picks it up with both hands and turns it over, where the splintered wood is pale and raw against the golden varnish that, in this clear light, has the mottled depth of centuries. She cannot trash this; it’s impossible. She wants the wound mended.

She sets it on the table where the light shows it best and snaps four photos: a wide shot, close-ups of the carved vines and the leaf-blinded Cupid, and the horrible gash in the back. As she waits for the whoosh that tells her the last text has gone, she fits the instrument back into its case. The vines seem to be reaching toward her, to pull her in, to twine her together with Micajah.

He phones twenty minutes later. She feels her heart pound as the number lights up her phone. She lets it ring, willing herself to calm down, but any longer and it will go to voicemail, so she swipes her finger quickly across the screen.

“I think I can help,” he says.

“You know someone who could fix it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you give me his number?”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“He’s . . . tricky.”

“Oh,” she says.

She feels like a stammering teenager, and hopes he can’t tell. She used to love to picture the physical connection between herself and Larry as they talked: the receiver held against her ear, the spiraling cord linking it to the phone, then the wires and cables threading through the miles to where Larry was, another spiraling cord, and the receiver touching his ear. But the electrons whizzing between her and Micajah leave no trace. She imagines an airy chain of particles and waves, with millions and billions of other chains whizzing through it, as insubstantial as magic.

“Meet me,” he says.

She’s on the verge of saying, Can’t you just give me his number? Instead, she says, “When?”

They settle on the following Thursday. He gives her an address.

Micajah’s persistence makes Eve feel special in a way she never has before. Larry’s judgment didn’t carry the authority of Micajah’s, even though Micajah is essentially a stranger. She was special to Larry when they were young, but she knew that didn’t make her objectively special. There was nothing extraordinary about her; it was just that she was a good fit for him. He was not extraordinary either, which appealed to her then. She suspected she had a streak of Bill’s wildness in her—she was drawn to stories of adventure, rebellious thoughts that she let loose into the air like helium balloons. When it killed him, she determined to kill it in herself.

For five days, she is walking on eggshells. She is certain that Micajah does not feel the same.

3

The club has no sign. It’s on the Upper East Side, a quiet part of Manhattan. The streets feature well-groomed older women walking very well-groomed small dogs, and occasional uniformed nannies pushing strollers built like mountain bikes. It is the middle of the day, so there are no visible men.

Two chic, beautiful girls sit behind an ornate desk.

“I’m meeting Micajah Burnett.”

“Ms. Armanton?”

“Yes.” It feels transgressive, admitting to her maiden name.

“He’s waiting for you in the library.”

The second girl presses a button. Eve hears a discreet buzz. A doorman opens an inner door. Eve has never been in a place like this: oozing comfort, patinated with money, every surface polished or faux-painted or plushly cushioned.

She spots Micajah in a corner, beneath the oak paneling, the glow of a lamp reflecting off his dark hair. He’s sitting in an armchair. A backgammon board lies open on a low table. He rises when he sees her.

“You came.”

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

“I figured maybe you said yes just to get me off the phone. You’re too polite to hang up on me.”

“And too polite not to turn up when I said I would, I guess.”

Her smile moves quickly beyond politeness, as if Micajah has lassoed it and pulled it close to him.

“What is this place? It’s quite something.”

“A club. Favored by older British rock stars, South American drug lords with surgically altered faces, and Russian oligarchs.”

“And you?”

“On special occasions.”

His clothes are scruffy in the way of movie stars caught by paparazzi in the park: jeans, T-shirt, creased cotton jacket. Flip-flops, as on the day they first met. Smooth, square toenails.

“Two sisters,” he says, following her eyeline. “You get used to getting pedicures.”

She can’t tell if he’s joking or not. To cover, she focuses on the backgammon board, the pieces set up ready to play on their eight sharp points. It is made of chocolate-colored leather, with points of alternating cream and ocher outlined in gold tooling. The pieces are discs of agate and white marble. It is a board for emperors and plutocrats. She runs her finger along a seam where two colors of leather meet, inset-sewn rather than appliquéd so that there is no obstruction to the pieces sliding across them.

“Dad told me you’re pretty good.”

“I was,” she says. “I haven’t played since my brother died.”

“That must have been tough for you. My dad . . .” He shrugs. We’re different from him, the silence says. No need to say more.

“I ordered tea,” he says, sitting down.

“Tea’s perfect.” People who have assignations do not drink tea. It is possible, and acceptable, to drink tea with the offspring of one’s friends.

He gives her a piece of paper with a name and phone number on it. “This is the luthier I know,” he says. “The man who’d be able to fix your instrument. His name is Yann Logue. He’s eccentric. Don’t be put off by his manner, he’s not trying to be rude. It’s not personal.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to call him,” Eve says.

“The best way would be if we just took it to him,” says Micajah. “But you’ve got his number, in case you never want to see me again.”

She stashes it in her handbag, after a glance to make sure she can read his writing. It’s almost calligraphic, each letter formed with care. She wonders if he always writes like that.

“Sorry if I offended you the other day,” he says as he pours from a teapot perched on a side table. “Maybe you love roses.”

“I like climbing roses. But lots of people want formal rose gardens.”

“Status symbol?”

“I suppose. Or just lack of imagination.” She takes a sip of tea. “Did you know there’s a rose called Richard M. Nixon?”

“With the M?”

“Yes.”

“That’s actually revolting.”

He reaches behind his chair and brings out a bunch of spectacular, full-blown peonies, a wet paper towel wrapped around their stems.

“I don’t know if they’ll last long enough for you to get them home.”

“They’re far more beautiful than roses.”

A young man— Waiter? Bellboy? Concierge-in-training?—materializes with a vase half full of water. He places it on the side table and departs.

“Did you arrange that?” she asks Micajah.

“They’re good here. They think of everything.”

“You did.” He escapes the accusation rather than denying it, by picking up his dice cup and raising it toward her as if he’s making a toast.

“Shall we play?”

“Sure.” She picks up her own cup. He tips one die into his palm and rolls the other. A six. She does the same. A six also. She feels a twinge of embarrassment, as if she’s done it intentionally to flirt with him.

“Game on,” he says, turning the doubling cube to two.

The game comes back to her. She finds herself able to move her pieces without counting, to know instinctively when to risk getting hit and when to close ranks and protect. It’s a relief not to have to talk. She lets the rhythm of the game take her, the ebb and flow of the energy across the board, his hand reaching toward her when he moves his pieces and withdrawing as he collects his dice, her hand reaching toward him when it’s her turn. She finds herself staring at his long fingers as they slide the marble discs into place.