CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Carver texted Lillian and asked her to meet him at the edge of the four-mile stretch of beach that ran along the upper half of Bitterfeld and into Mamaroneck; she agreed to this and asked him if he’d like her to bring him a flat white from the cafe she was at.
He was still relatively hungover, but he didn’t want to cede authority by letting her give him something, so he said no thank you.
She was already there when he drove into the parking lot, leaning against the concrete base of a light pole and looking like an off-duty model in a black puffer vest and aviators. He pulled up in the spot next to her, and she lifted her hand in a sort of salute, her expression unchanging.
“Hey,” Carver said as he approached her, locking the car and stowing his keys in his pocket. “How, uh, how you doing?”
“I’m good,” Lillian said, looking him up and down. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks. You have glitter in your hair.”
She reached up and fluffed her hair, which shined like Ralph’s coat in the sunlight. “Do I?”
“Yep.” Carver gestured toward the beach. “Shall we?”
There were fewer people out today than he’d expected, but it was cool and breezy by the water; the Long Island Sound was dotted by whitecaps.
Carver was glad he’d changed into jogging pants before he left.
They had relative privacy as they walked across the muddy gray sand, and more of it after they got past a wiry old man who was out with a metal detector.
“So, are we talking or what?” Lillian said, perching her sunglasses in her hair and looking over at him.
Carver took a deep breath of the briny air. “I think we should. I think I owe you a few explanations.”
“I’m pretty sure I get what’s going on here,” she said drily.
“I owe you some disclosures, then.”
“Okay, go for it.”
“First, uh, I slept with Scott again last night.”
“Yeah, I figured you would.”
He glanced at her. “Did you sleep with anyone last night?”
“No,” Lillian said, laughing. “The couple I left with wanted to sleep with me, but I wasn’t that interested.
I did do some coke with them, though, and we went to a club.
Then we drank at their place with some of their friends, and they let me play with their pet snake and their tattoo gun.
The husband let me tattoo a little L on his ass. It was fun.”
“Uh — okay. Good.”
“Any other disclosures?”
“I have a few things to tell you, but I wanted to start with the most important one.”
She nodded. “Go on.”
“I think —” Carver inhaled again. Suddenly this felt impossible in the same way it felt impossible to place himself in grave bodily danger.
His throat locked up, trying to stop him.
“I, ah.” Fuck it, fuck it, he needed to do it, it had to be done.
He thought of his father dead at thirty-three and thought about how angry at himself he would be if he kept living this half-life only to have even that snatched from him.
One breath later it rushed out of him: “I think I want a divorce.”
Carver’s vision went black at the edges after he said this, like the blood had drained from his head, and he continued walking on autopilot. When he came back into himself he got up the nerve to look over at Lillian, who was squinting with her gaze lowered as if thinking.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Can I counter?”
“Uh —” Carver shook his head, disoriented. “Yeah.”
“Obviously, if you’re dead set on that, there’s really nothing I can do about it. I just can’t believe you’re sincerely dead set on it. Everything was fine Thursday night.”
“But it wasn’t actually fine.”
“Well, obviously,” Lillian said, rolling her eyes. “No, I get that you’re unhappy, or whatever. But you’re not giving me any kind of chance to address it.”
“I know, I get how that’s not fair, but I don’t think you can.”
“You might not be giving me enough credit.”
“I think I’m gay, though,” he said with desperation. “Or gay enough that I can’t be completely fulfilled by you, you know? And the older I get, the harder it gets, like, with a woman. I know you’ve noticed that.”
“Yeah, it’s because male testosterone levels start falling off a cliff after age thirty,” Lillian said. “But I account for that, I let you do whatever you want with men.”
“But maybe I — maybe I want more than whatever I want.” He heard the incongruous sentence and revised it: “Like you were saying on the balcony. It isn’t always just about sex, for me.”
Lillian was quiet for a moment, continuing to match his stride as they walked.
“Look,” she said, in a voice so artfully gentle that Carver knew he wouldn’t like whatever came next.
“It’s fine to have a crush. But it doesn’t make sense to throw everything away for love when you can’t possibly be in love with this person. ”
Carver found himself grinding his teeth and stopped. “I didn’t say I was in love, but I would like to be in love.”
“So you aren’t actually in love with me,” she mused.
“Are you in love with me?”
Lillian was quiet.
“Please be honest,” Carver begged her. “You can be brutally honest with me right now, honey, I want you to. All the things you normally choose not to say because you suspect they’d upset me, or they’d sound, you know, socially incorrect — those are the things I need you to say right now.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “That makes things a lot easier. No, I don’t think I’m in love with you.”
Despite everything he’d just said, this was more offensive and painful than he expected it to be. “No?” he said, his breath hitching.
“No, because I don’t think that’s really the type of person I am,” Lillian confessed.
She stopped and took him by the sleeve, and he turned to her.
She cupped his face in her cool hands; her hawk’s eyes were bright with sincerity.
“But I really am so fond of you, Carver. I thought you could be like me, so I made an error there, I guess. But I don’t hold it against you that you’re sensitive.
You’re also very smart, and very driven, and we make an excellent team.
There aren’t that many people who I feel like I can really respect — most people are just so, you know, bluh — but I respect you.
I really enjoy walking into a room with you. ”
Tears leaked from Carver’s eyes and skidded sideways across his face in the breeze. “But you don’t love me.”
“I think I do, in a way.”
“If we were going down on the Titanic, would you stay with me, or get in a lifeboat?”
Lillian laughed. “Darling, I’d get in the lifeboat, I’m not a moron. Is that the acid test? Am I supposed to be a moron?”
“No, just…”
She wiped the tears from his cheek, then wiped them on his hoodie. “Where is all of this stuff coming from? I can’t believe the sex with Scott was that good.”
“What if it was?” Carver said. “What if that’s what I’m telling you?”
Lillian looked at him with a certain blankness on her face, then dropped her hands and started walking again. He followed suit.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to be married to someone who isn’t so obviously unhappy?” he said to her.
“That’s not a requirement for me,” Lillian said, shrugging.
“Okay, well, maybe it is for me. For my life.”
“But you’re making all of these wild assumptions. We’ll get a divorce and you’ll suddenly be happy? You’ll be happy with Scott? You have no guarantee that you’re improving on your situation.”
“I might also leave Blackbrick,” Carver said, and winced as she turned to him.
“Carver,” Lillian said in a bloodless voice. “Are you insane? Have you even thought about your carry?”
“Yes! Yes, I’ve thought about my carry!”
“What’s going on, seriously? You have a weird vibe today, there’s this strange look in your eye. What aren’t you telling me?”
Carver looked across the dark, agitated water to the green stretches of land visible on the horizon. “Um,” he said. “I did — I found something out last night.”
“Well, what was it?”
He turned back to her. For a moment he was frightened to say it, in a way he hadn’t been frightened to tell Scott. For some reason it mattered more to him what she thought of his mother; for some reason it was worse to imagine Lillian thinking of his mother as a whore.
“My mom had an affair,” he said, “and I’m not my father’s son.”
One thing he would miss about Lillian: she never stopped surprising him. She reacted to this by gasping, grabbing him by the arm and exclaiming in a low voice, “I knew it! Oh, my God!”
“What?” Carver said, horrified. “What do you mean, you knew it?”
Lillian held a finger up as she scrolled through her phone. “By the way,” she said, “your parents are sort of ridiculous and jumped-up people, I hope you understand this.”
“I’m aware!”
“Good.” She typed something, then scrolled some more. Finally she held it up and showed it to him. On the screen was an email she had sent herself in 2014.
from:Lillian Hallsten
to:Lillian Hallsten
date:Apr 10, 2014, 10:49 PM
i’m sending this to myself now in case i turn out to be right
i don’t think doug is carver’s real dad
- they look nothing alike
- his mom is smart and smart girls fuck around
- doug always looks at carver like he personally cuckolded him which makes no sense because it’s not like he’s close with his mom, either
“I sent that to myself after the engagement party they threw for us,” Lillian said.
“Thank you,” Carver snapped. “Thank you for that. Congratulations on your truly elite pattern recognition. Seriously, I admire that about you.” His anger was partly a self-indulgent performance: truthfully he was grateful to her for offending him and confirming his decision to leave her.
“Come on,” Lillian said. “It’s not even a rude email. I said your mom was smart.”
“No, no problem. You be yourself, honey. But you see how this might be shocking news for me. I guess my pattern recognition isn’t as good.”
“Sometimes I don’t think it is. You make pretty safe deals a lot of the time.”
Carver made a noise of frustration at her, and she gave him a chilling look.