Chapter 39
39
THIS PAST SUMMER
After Anton signed the credit card bill, Lisa took the pen, enjoying the heft of it in her hand. The name of the restaurant was written in gold on the side. Le Cannu. She slipped it into her bag, a souvenir of this night. The night Anton took the bait.
It had taken two weeks to get here. One day, in bed, she had been talking about how nice it would be if the two of them could take a trip. She enjoyed bringing up money because she knew it was a sore spot with him.
“With what money? I have one credit card and Gwen watches my purchases like a hawk.”
“Are you serious?” Lisa had feigned outrage. “That’s horrible. No one can live like that.”
“Last summer she saw a charge she didn’t recognize and made me produce a receipt. For headphones! When I told her I was planning to go to a writers’ conference, she checked online to see if it really existed. She actually checked! To see if I was on a panel, like I said I was.”
“Are you allowed to go?”
He had laughed bitterly. “ Allowed. Allowed. Like I’m a fucking child.”
“What if I went, too?” She had propped herself up on one elbow, letting the sheet slip from her body, exposing her naked breasts. “Got a hotel nearby? A different one from where you are staying for the conference. You could come to my hotel and that way no one would see you or recognize you. We could have a couple of days to ourselves. Long, lazy nights.”
“I’d love to. Believe me, that sounds amazing. But could you do that? What would you tell Marcus?”
She had rolled her eyes. “Marcus wouldn’t even notice. I’ll tell him it’s some coaching retreat or something. We’ll be able to go out to a romantic dinner…” She had walked her fingers across his chest.
“I wish I could pay. I wish I could be the one to take you to dinner, buy you gifts, champagne.” He had rolled onto his back, pulling a pale-pink throw pillow from behind his head and tossing it across the room. “I hate this pillow. This comforter. This room. Nothing about this house, not one thing, feels like mine. Besides my leather club chair, I didn’t pick out one piece of furniture in this house.”
“I wish we could run away, just us two,” Lisa had said.
“Me, too. Go somewhere, start over.”
“What’s stopping us?”
“Money. I have none.”
“What about this house?”
“Her parents bought it. It’s in a trust. The BMW and the Lexus, too.” He had rolled toward her. “Gwen and me were never right. I should have listened to my gut instinct. I cheated on her, you know, when we were first engaged. It was my pathetic way of trying to break it off. I thought she’d dump me for sure. But no, she treated it like a bump in the road, and kept that wedding train on track. Nothing was going to interfere with her plans.”
“She’s so manipulative,” Lisa had said. Anton had begun to annoy her recently. He was so needy and his self-pity was boundless. But she was careful not to let her feelings show. She knew how to handle him, to tell him what he wanted to hear. “Is that all I am? An escape plan?”
“No.” He had cupped her face. “You make me feel alive. I love you, Lisa.” He had leaned in for a long kiss. After they had made love again, she had returned to the subject. “What would it take for us to run away? To start over? Cash-wise?”
“Realistically? I think a hundred thousand to get us on our feet. A former teacher of mine emailed me about an opening for a writing professor job at a college in Minnesota. It would be a full-tenured position, decent salary, not a ton of money, but it’s cheaper there. I wanted to apply, but there’s no way Gwen would ever consider moving to Minnesota.”
“I would,” Lisa lied. She hated the cold, and she had no intention of leaving Marcus. Ever. When Anton talked of them leaving their spouses and running away together, she would encourage him. It was flattering, but she didn’t mean it. Marcus earned in one month what Anton made in a year, and unlike Gwen, he gave her free rein.
“You would?”
“Of course. To be with you. Between what you make and what I earn, plus what I’d get in the divorce from Marcus, we could live very comfortably.”
“But where am I going to get a hundred thousand dollars?”
“I might have an idea, but…” She had paused, looking down shyly and letting out a little laugh. Inside, she was roiling with anticipation, but she had to stay cool. She didn’t want to scare him off. “No, you wouldn’t go for it.”
“Try me.”
Two weeks later they were in Tampa, finishing dinner at Le Cannu. So far on their trip to Tampa they hadn’t discussed what she had told him that night back in Bethesda. She had given him the broad outlines—that Scott was really Michael Finch and he was wanted in California. That keeping that quiet might be worth a lot of money to him. But that was it; she hadn’t wanted to push too hard. The impetus had to come from him.
“Won’t Gwen notice?” Lisa asked once their server had taken away the signed check. “When she sees this on the credit card bill?”
“I’ll tell her it was a work dinner with colleagues,” Anton said.
“I don’t know how you live like that. Being watched, being micromanaged.”
He reached for her hand and squeezed. “It’s not forever. Anyway,” he said, pulling his hand free and taking the last bite of the crème br?lée they were sharing, “even Gwen can’t object to my eating a meal with other adults.”
They walked out of the restaurant, well-fed, drunk, and happy. They locked arms and headed down to the boardwalk so they could stroll along the beach. Lisa leaned into Anton.
“This feels so right,” she said.
“I think this is how it’s supposed to be,” Anton said. “It’s just that when you’re young, before you get married, you have no clue what marriage is going to be like. You have no idea what qualities to look for in a life partner.”
“So why did you ask Gwen to marry you?”
He laughed. “Who said I asked? She wanted marriage, and I didn’t see why not. We had been together since right after college, all through our twenties. She took care of me. I was writing, and she supported us, made sure the rent was paid, that there was food. I mean, she made my early success possible. I thought we were well-matched; she was creative, too, but in a different way. But now I realize she had been mothering me.”
He said this as if taking care of someone was a high crime.
“You mean smothering you,” she said, and they both laughed.
“It’s true. She never allowed me to grow into a man. She was infantilizing me so she could control me.”
“That’s terrible,” Lisa cooed. “So selfish.”
“It is,” he said. “It really is. She liked that I couldn’t cook, or that I didn’t know how to do laundry. She’d complain, yeah, but it made her feel needed. She used to say that if it weren’t for her I’d never see a dentist or a doctor, and it’s true, but she cultivated that dependency. Because if I was allowed to really step up, to become independent, it might threaten her dominance. If I didn’t need her anymore, I might leave her. She became even more insecure when The Last Cyclamen took off. She insisted on going with me everywhere, to every appearance, every book signing. She was terrified that my success would make me realize I didn’t need her anymore. Because she knew, deep down, that she wasn’t enough.”
The words thrilled Lisa to her core. She could never get enough of this kind of talk. When he trash-talked Gwen, it more than made up for his immaturity and self-absorption. She tilted her head. “In what way wasn’t she enough?” Lisa asked, looking up at him.
“She’s just not a sensual person. She’s nothing like you. She won’t even make love with the lights on. Has to be pitch-black.”
He held her gaze for a moment, and the warmth exploded inside her. How she wished she could somehow secretly tape these conversations and show them to Gwen! But it had to be enough for now that Lisa knew.
“Not that she isn’t a good mother,” Anton conceded.
“She’s wonderful.”
“And very organized and efficient.”
“Responsible.”
“But a wife? A lover?” He shook his head. They took off their shoes at the top of a set of stairs that descended to the beach. Barefoot, they walked hand in hand, drunk not only on alcohol but on an exhilarating feeling of freedom. They had done what so many middle-aged people dreamed of, if only for a weekend—broken free of their roles. They weren’t young again, they were ageless. They existed outside of their contexts and so anything was possible. Later that night, after they’d had sex in Lisa’s hotel room, it was Anton who brought up approaching Scott for money.
“We’ll start small, maybe fifty thousand?”
Lisa almost choked. “That’s starting small?”
“You know how much Scott makes each year? He owns his own company! What’s the point of doing this if we go lower? We only get a few bites at the apple, maybe only one. I estimate to start a new life, we’ll need two hundred.”
He had said one hundred before. He was getting greedy. But Lisa wasn’t about to rein him in.