CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
“I’m going through something,” he said. “This fucked me up. I am shocked. Can you see things from my perspective?”
Lillian drew closer to him, getting in his face a little. “Why don’t you see things from my perspective. You dragged me to your hometown —”
“— you dragged me here —”
“— you dragged me to your hometown, and then two nights in a row you snuck off for sex with your high school boyfriend, who has fleas, and suddenly you want a divorce?”
“Don’t talk to me like we have a normal relationship. Don’t talk to me like a jilted wife. You know exactly what we have.” Carver spotted a jogger at the edge of his peripheral vision coming down the beach, and went quiet.
They started to walk again, to hasten this person passing them. As soon as they were out of earshot, Lillian said, “There’s no need to get excited. Of course I know what we have. But when I lay out the facts, they sound terrible, don’t they? And how am I not going to point that out?”
“I know they sound terrible. I don’t care how they sound. I want out. Please let me out.” She didn’t respond, and he said more loudly, “Please.”
“Don’t beg,” Lillian snapped. She was quiet for a few moments. “Pitch me on this. Tell me how we do it.”
“Okay,” Carver said, in immense relief.
“And justify it to me, too. I don’t actually care what your justifications are, I just want to make you tell me.”
“Justify it. Okay. I want to have a satisfying sexual relationship with my life partner. Together with that person, not on the side of them.”
“We have a sexual relationship,” Lillian said grouchily. “I could try with the prostate stuff again, as long as I can gag you or something.”
“See, I just want more than that.”
“I thought you’d like that idea. You’re impossible.”
“For you to fully please? Yes. Absolutely. And it’s not your fault. I just want out.”
“Okay, but I just don’t —” Lillian brought her hand to her forehead in an almost liturgical gesture.
Carver knew this was very hard for her. She was so used to getting what she wanted.
He felt irrationally guilty for letting her down.
“You’re not stupid. I know you’re not stupid.
But you don’t seem to be accurately pricing in the fact that a relationship with Scott probably wouldn’t work. ”
“No, I am.”
“And you want to quit your job? Carver, why? I would rather you divorce me than have you quit. I would keep working with you even if we got divorced. We complement each other so well, you’d be throwing away a great thing for no real reason.”
Carver was surprised and deeply flattered to hear that she felt she needed him this much. “It’s felt hollow lately,” he said.
“Oh, my God, everything is hollow. You think your Scott doesn’t feel hollow?
I looked him in the eye while he was talking about his career, he’s tired.
I know some part of you, maybe the gay part, is secretly convinced that artists are high priests and the only real people alive, but everyone is equally fake.
Everyone goes to work and performs the motions, no matter what their job is. ”
“No, I don’t think that’s true,” Carver said. “I don’t. You know why? Because my parents really loved being lawyers, I could see it in them. Even when they were exhausted and burnt out. They loved it in a way I don’t love this.”
“But you’re very good at it.”
“I’m not good at it because I love it. I’m good at it because I looked at it, saw its benefits, and decided to be good at it.
You don’t understand because the reason you’re good at it is that you love it.
You didn’t have to do any of this, you would have had a lot of money either way.
Most women in your situation don’t choose a career like this, but you chose this because you love it. For you, this is your art.”
Lillian pondered this for a moment. “I do love it,” she said.
“Right. And imagine if suddenly you didn’t.”
“Yeah. I’d probably quit.”
“I want to know if there’s more out there for me. I just want to know.”
She reached up and took his hand. Carver was surprised, but felt no desire to pull away from her. “Finish out the year,” she said, squeezing him.
“I’ll definitely finish out Q2.”
“Come on. Do you want to be a bad leaver?”
“No, but I will be if you guys force me to be. I’m not negotiating from the position you think I am, okay? Consider me to have completely lost my mind and assess me from that standpoint.”
Lillian walked beside him in silence for a moment. “Okay, if you’ve lost your mind, does that mean you don’t care how our divorce gets spun to our friends? Because I do care about that.”
“I don’t plan on embarrassing you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But what are you going to tell people?”
“That we split up and I’m busy finding myself. They won’t care about the details. I’m the more disposable half of the couple.”
“Carver, don’t be an idiot, of course they’ll care about the details.”
“Well, then tell them whatever bad things about me you want to.”
“I don’t want to,” Lillian said, like he was again being an idiot. “You looking bad makes me look bad, even if we split up. I want to make you look good. I don’t want people to think you’ve gone crazy.”
“Why is what I want to do so crazy? We have friends who’ve been convicted of securities fraud. Why is it so appalling for me to quit my job and leave you to go fuck a guy who doesn’t have money?”
“It’s not appalling, it’s strange. It also makes it look like I wasn’t taking proper care of you.”
“No, it looks like I was lying to you about who I was and what I really wanted. You’re the victim here.”
“I don’t want to be the victim,” Lillian said, and dropped his hand.
“I think, honestly, we should spin this as a decision we made together. Like we came to the conclusion that this was best for you, and then I end up taking over the division on my own, which is good for my career. So it looks like I sort of maneuvered you out for your own good.”
“Sure,” Carver said, glad to hear her problem-solving.
“And what about everything else? What about our embryos?”
“Right. Be honest, did you ever actually want to use those?”
“Well, maybe,” Lillian said. She was quiet for a moment. “Honestly, I didn’t ever really get the point. I kept waiting to get it, and never getting it. So I guess… no.”
Carver chuckled and shook his head at his own gullibility. “Okay.”
“We could donate them to science. Like, stem cell research.”
“That feels ghoulish considering we didn’t use any, like we just made them for that. Can’t we just have them destroyed?”
“Are you pro-life suddenly? Don’t be a bumpkin, Carver, what if they lead to a breakthrough in cancer research or something?”
He chuckled again, this time at the irony. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Yeah. Whatever, right?”
“Good, so that’s settled,” Lillian said. They walked in silence for a while, traipsing across the muddy sand, whipped continually by the breeze. “I am still just having a hard time understanding why you’d be willing to give so many things up.”
Carver worried at his bottom lip with his teeth.
This was extremely difficult to explain even to himself, so how was he supposed to explain it to Lillian?
She couldn’t feel what he was feeling. “I kind of feel like I woke up from a dream,” he said, “and now I have to go about my day and my life according to the logic of reality. I can’t keep living according to the dream’s logic, it just isn’t possible.
I’m not the person I was when we got here on Thursday, as absurd as that may sound. ”
Lillian appeared to ponder this, her golden hair blowing around her face. “I think I can understand that,” she said, to his relief. “Is it just because of the sex with Scott, or because you found out you’re a bastard?”
“Both, I think.”
“Who is your dad, by the way?”
“Uh… he was a friend of my parents, actually. My dad was in his firm’s international project finance division in the eighties, and when Chip was a kid they were sending him out for like a month at a time to go deal with foreign regulators and shit, so he wasn’t home much.
And my mom ended up having an affair with this friend of theirs. ”
“Right, and?” Lillian said, almost impatiently. “What was the friend like?”
“He’s dead, actually. Died at thirty-three.”
Lillian made a low whistle. “What happened?”
“Cancer.”
“Cancer,” she repeated. “Huh. What did he do for work?”
“He was a doctor. He was training to be a cardiothoracic surgeon when he died.”
“What did he look like?”
Carver stopped and took out his phone to show her the photo of Isaac. She bent over the screen, squinting, tucking her hair behind her ear. After a moment, she said, “Jewish?”
“You can be a very unsettling person,” he told her.
Lillian rolled her eyes. “Carver, I like Jewish people, you know that.”
“Yeah, he was Jewish.”
“I knew it. He’s better-looking than Doug. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Doug, but he doesn’t have a lot of charisma. This one, I can tell he has charisma. I see why your mom cheated.”
“Okay.” Carver tucked his phone back into his pocket. “Let’s not get into the sexual aspect, please.”
They started walking again, and Lillian mused, “Cardiothoracic surgeon in Manhattan? He’d have to be extremely intelligent.”
“I think he was, yeah.”
“That explains you. I mean, your parents are smart, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve always thought you outclassed them overall.”
“Thank you,” he said stiffly.
Lillian glanced at him. “Is the truth hard for you to deal with? Because given the history here, I’d expect you to be relieved.”
“In some ways I am,” he admitted. “It’s complicated.”
“Obviously,” she said. “Especially with your father being dead.”
She said this matter-of-factly, and Carver’s heart twisted. “That does complicate things,” he said.
“I wish I understood you better right now,” Lillian said. “I feel so behind.”