When It Happens to You (11 page)

“You would know,” she said. She quickened her pace slightly and kept her gaze forward. He sped up to stay close to her.

“How recently did you guys separate?” he asked.

“I found out last September that my husband was fucking my daughter's nineteen-year-old violin teacher.” She pronounced the word with a staccato sharpness, emphasizing the
k
.

“So, not so recent,” he said.

He felt her shiver next to him.

“It feels recent,” she said. “It feels like it happened yesterday. Well, maybe not yesterday, but at least last week.” She stepped to the side, narrowly missing tripping over the money bowl of a street performer. “We were together for twenty-one years,” she said with a sigh. “Married eighteen of them.”

Peter nodded as he felt the weight of what she was saying. Twenty-one years. He was fourteen when Greta and her husband were likely doing what he and Greta were doing right now. Falling.

“That's a long time,” he said. He winced at the reductiveness of his comment.

“My whole life,” she said. She stopped and looked at him. The light from the neon signs flashed across her face. “Hey, you aren't a cheater by any chance, are you? I don't know what we're doing, but before we do . . . just tell me.”

“I'm not,” he said. She scrutinized his face for a moment and then exhaled. They resumed walking. The abruptness of her question had caught him off guard, and he lied before he could even think of a way to tell her the truth. Though in a way, he felt that there was truth in his statement. Being with Greta inspired in him a desire to be something better than what he was, better than what he had become. Even if this feeling was ephemeral, as love more than often is, he wanted to chase it. Even if it only lasted this week, he told himself, he would hold this vision of his better self in his mind as a reminder of what he could be. Why not start now? He stopped and took a deep breath. Reaching out, he took her by the elbow and pulled her close.

“Greta, I have.”

“Have what?”

“Cheated.”

He saw her eyes flash and then just as quickly dissolve into a distant and unreachable pain. “Good to know,” she said coldly as she set off walking again. He tried to hold her hand, but she shook herself free of his grip, as if he were attempting to hand her a fistful of bees.

“I didn't want to lie to you,” he said.

“But you did lie,” she said. “That's what it was. A lie.” She picked up her pace. He watched her retreating from him and then ran to catch up to her.

“Stop it!” Peter cried out. “Have you never lied? Have you never cheated? On anything? On a math test even? I'm not proud of what I did. But it's not who I am.”

She looked at him, and he watched the anger mingling with pain and fear. He stared back at her, refusing to release her gaze. With the superstition of the newly fallen, he felt that if he blinked first, he would lose her. She closed her eyes and shook her head.

“This is silly,” she said. “I mean, God. We just met.” She half smiled and shrugged her shoulders in a sad sort of resignation.

“And we've already had our first fight,” he said. “We don't waste time.”

“I'm hungry,” she said.

“So am I.” He pulled her into him and felt her cheek hot against his chest. He took her shoulders in his hands and held her a short distance away from him to see her face.

He looked at her in wonder. Everything that he owned in the world was three thousand miles away, and yet here was all that he wanted, glorious in its smallness and its brightness, its soft and unwavering trueness. It all came into focus. Colors seemed to burn and fluoresce. Cynics would say that it was chemical—that this feeling was nothing more than the all-powerful cocktail of dopamine, adrenaline, and serotonin firing the neurotransmitters in his brain like the night sky in July, and though they would be right to an extent, Peter imagined that in Greta's eyes he could sense the presence of something that had been so long absent in his life it was almost unrecognizable. Hope.

 

Early the next morning, he walked the four miles back to his sister's house rather than take a taxi. He was wide-awake, though he and Greta had stayed up most of the night talking.

Didier was in the kitchen, bare-chested under a striped silk robe, wearing espadrilles.

“
Ho!
The prodigal son returns,” he said, pouring coffee through a ceramic dripper.

Lindsay came into the kitchen in bare feet, her long hair pulled back off her face. She rubbed her eyes with her right knuckle and squinted at him.

“You're back,” she said.

He could tell that she was angry at him, though he wasn't exactly sure why.

Didier walked over to her and handed her a cup of coffee. He kissed her on the top of her head and then headed out into the garden with his copy of
Le Monde
. He motioned toward the empty coffee press to Peter on his way out.

“There is more coffee in the . . .
comment dit
?”

“Grinder.” Both Peter and Lindsay spoke at the same time. Peter laughed. Even Didier couldn't annoy him today.

“Thanks Di Dawg,” he said.

Didier let the screen door slam behind him.

Lindsay spoke without turning around. “Please don't call him that. He doesn't have the same sense of humor as you. He thinks you're being an asshole.”

“Well, he wouldn't be the first,” Peter said. He pulled himself up onto the kitchen counter and fiddled with the various wine and champagne corks scattered there. He picked one up and threw it at Lindsay. He aimed for her shoulder but caught her in the back of her head.

She whipped her chair around.

“What the fuck, Peter!”

“Why are you so angry with me? Are you still mad about the party? It was almost a week ago!”

“That party was for you,” she said. “It was something nice I wanted to do for you, and you chose to go get high or whatever it was that you were doing.”

He thought of telling her about Greta, but there was something in his sister's face that he hadn't seen since his arrival. All of the airiness of her party persona seemed to have vanished. There was a crease in between her eyebrows that he hadn't noticed the last time he saw her but that he instantly recognized. It was their mother's.

“I'm sorry,” he said. He watched the back of her head as she stared at the computer screen in front of her, her shoulders slumping forward. And then she collapsed, burying her head in her arms.

Peter jumped down off the counter and studied the computer screen. His eyes scanned an e-mail from First Meridian Mortgage informing Lindsay Layton that she was being denied a loan. He looked at the other e-mails in her inbox and saw that the majority were from other banks and various mortgage companies.

“What's going on?” Peter asked.

Lindsay lifted her head up and opened her mouth to speak, but a sob caught in her throat and she started to cough instead. He waited for her to finish.

“I thought this one was going to come through. My financial adviser . . .” She trailed off and went back to her computer and started clicking through the e-mails.

“I have this one in here. Hang on, let me find it . . .” She opened one e-mail after the other. Peter looked at the top of the mail program and noticed that there were more than twenty-seven thousand e-mails in her inbox.

“How bad is it?” Peter asked, kneeling down next to her.

“I don't know, I can't tell,” Lindsay said. “They said that they're going to foreclose on the house.”

Peter put his hands on her shoulders and turned her away from the screen.

“Lindsay,” he said. “Hey, Linds, look at me.”

Lindsay lifted her eyes up to meet his. They had a wildness in them—her “crazy-eye” look, he had always called it. He recognized it from when they were little and their mother would drop them off at the ski area in the morning and tell them to stay on the intermediate blue runs; as soon as they scrambled out of their mother's Plymouth Voyager, Lindsay immediately headed for the black-diamond trails. She would always seek out the hill that was too steep, the drop that was too high, the turn too sharp. Before Lindsay would leap, she would give him the “crazy-eye” look. Peter knew even then that Lindsay was taking extraordinary chances with the singular hope that maybe this time would be the time that their father would come. He had already started a new family in Montreal with Joëlle, a French Canadian woman who had headed the language department at the university where their father had taught science. But by then, whether a birthday or a holiday, a fractured cheekbone or a slight concussion, nothing was ever enough to bring him back.

In the kitchen, Lindsay stared at him, sadness and fear mingling with fury. She needed Peter, just as she had once needed their father, and he could see in her expression that she couldn't help but resent her brother for that need.

“It'll be fine,” she said. “It'll work out.” She stood and began to tidy up, taking papers off the counter and idly placing them into little random piles by the stove. “So, where have you been going these nights?” she asked.

Peter hesitated and then told her about Greta.

Lindsay stopped and looked at her brother, surprise overriding the anxiety that had been giving her face that pinched look.

“Greta?” She looked confused. “You hooked up with Greta?”

Peter felt a twinge of annoyance and protectiveness.

“I didn't exactly hook up. I . . .” He stopped himself from trying to justify his feelings. “I like her.” He settled on this understatement as a means to end the discussion. He didn't want to share this with anyone at this point. Not before he was sure of it. And not with Lindsay, who, from the time that they were in high school, had made a habit of becoming friends with whichever girl he was interested in. Before long that girl would be Lindsay's friend, and Peter would be relegated to the role of “Lindsay's brother.” He stopped telling her about any woman he was interested in, even after he had moved to New York and the threat of Lindsay's interference had ended.

“Anyway, let's figure out what's going on with your finances,” Peter said. “That's more pressing.”

Lindsay shrugged and moved her attention to a bouquet of flowers, still wrapped in cellophane and stuck inside a champagne bucket. She took out a pair of scissors, unwrapped the flowers, and began cutting their stems under water.

“I just didn't picture you with Greta is all. Don't get me wrong. She's perfectly nice,” Lindsay said, plucking the dead leaves off of the stems. She got a vase out of a low cupboard, filled it with water, and submerged the stems. “How old is she?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Peter lied.

Lindsay looked up at him.

“Didn't come up,” he said, lying again.

“She's got a kid, you know,” Lindsay said. She took a penny from a dish full of change and tossed it into the vase. “And a husband. Though I guess right now they're separated?”

“Are you asking me?” Peter said. “Or telling me?”

“I'm sure you can take care of yourself.” Lindsay flicked her hand out as though she were shooing away a bothersome insect, but Peter was relieved by the gesture. It meant she was extinguishing the subject for now.

Lindsay walked over to the window and watched Didier sitting in the sunlight, turning the pages of his paper. “Look at him,” she said, gazing at Didier as though he were an exotic pet. Peter had seen the same expression on the faces of Persian cat breeders on nature programs.

“He really has a talent for living,” she said.

“Does Didier know anything about the house being foreclosed upon?”

Lindsay shook her head. “He doesn't like to talk about money. He says that I'm obsessed with money and that I only talk about it to control him.”

Peter thought of many different things to say, but knowing his sister's unfailing protectiveness toward Didier, he chose not to say anything.

“Lindsay, where is the money going? You have clients, right?”

“More than I can handle.”

“And they pay you.”

“Of course they pay me.” She turned and looked at him. Their mother's crease reappeared between her eyebrows. “Why wouldn't they pay me?”

“I'm just trying to understand. Where is the money going? I mean, you don't have a family . . .”

Lindsay threw her hands up. “I don't know. I don't know where it goes, Peter. This house, everything in it. Didier's Hasselblads. His office, my office. Salaries. The trips to Europe. The corridas in San Sebastian. The apartment he bought with his brother in Belleville. Didier's mother has needed help since she broke her hip, so we've been helping her . . . I don't know. It adds up.”

“And does Didier pay for any of this?”

Lindsay shook her head.

“Do you even ask him to?”

“He said that he doesn't want this life. That it's only because of me.” Lindsay opened a cupboard and took out a prescription bottle. She shook free a pill and then replaced the bottle in the cupboard.

“He said that he would be happy just to live in a suburb of Paris by himself eating pasta with ketchup, doing his art. He says that it's a sacrifice he makes to be with me.”

As Lindsay poured herself a glass of water and swallowed the pill, Peter pictured Didier at the party, opening the bottles of wine and sniffing the corks.

Lindsay left the empty glass in the sink and walked back to the window. She put her hand up to the glass. Didier looked up from his paper, shielding his eyes from the sun. He smiled and blew her a kiss.

She turned back to Peter, her eyes full of tears and her chin trembling.

“And I don't want him to go away, Peter. I love him.”

He felt alternately moved and revolted by his sister's devotion to this man, whom Peter had always dismissed as parasitical, preying on the generosity of his sister. But as he watched her gaze beatifically at him through the window, he noticed the color return to her face for the first time that morning. He had to consider that she wasn't only his for the taking, but that theirs was a mutually agreed upon symbiosis, one that had been evolving for a long time, until it was no longer clear who was the orchid or insect. It is undeniable that everyone in the world has a currency of some kind. His sister was beautiful, successful, and she loved him. And in return, Didier stayed, when many men before, beginning with the first one, had not—for this alone he was treasured.