Stories We Tell Ourselves Read online

  She did the things you do on a computer to prevent all contact with someone. Maybe the Historian had written to her his despair over her silence, maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he guessed they’d been found out, maybe not. Maybe he and his wife were having sex again. Maybe they’d never stopped. Maybe he’d found someone else. Someone less intent.

  Nick asked how often (twelve meetings, sex four times) and where (a bench on 11th Avenue, a coffee shop on 9th Avenue, his office, a Chinese restaurant, their apartment, a playground, a dive bar, a church, the stairwell of a Bikram yoga studio in Chelsea, a dollar store, a record store, the dive bar again), but he never asked why. He asked again and again, eliciting more and more detail, until the affair was stripped of any reason and reduced to a series of inconvenient manoeuvres, slots in a calendar, and ill-fated decisions about time and place.

  When Nick let her sleep in the same bed as him again she stayed close to the wall, giving him space, and doing her penance at the same time. For two weeks he turned his back on her. And then one night he slept on his back, reached under her neck and pressed her head against him. It was difficult to breathe in this position and it made her scapula sore, but still she stayed there. There were times after that when she caught him looking at her from across the kitchen, like an enemy. He’d say he was a fucking idiot, that he should have kicked her out a long time ago. She’d say, yes, he should have, and begged him not to.

  Lois stopped missing the affair in early June. By then it had been over for seven months. Until that point, the city was just a giant grid that held them both. The Historian was likely in one of eight, ten, twelve places. She could take the subway to one of these places and be metres away from him, perhaps, through concrete and windows and tunnels. He might leave a building, turn a corner and see her there, coming down the sidewalk. What then? Would he shout to her from across the street, call out her name like an old friend? If so, she would have to walk on, pretend not to hear.

  Nick believed her when she said it was over. But so what. It being over was just more evidence it had existed. There were lemons in the kitchen cupboard that were almost as old as their relationship, Nick thought. Captured in rock salt, they still shone yellow and showed no sign of corruption. Lois had canned them one night, following Joan’s recipe. She’d told him the lemons wouldn’t be ready for weeks, and for that reason he’d read the operation as an early act of commitment.

  Nick opened one of these jars now, and tipped the lemons into a colander. He put them under the tap and let the water wash out the slime that had kept them desirable all these years.

  Without the brine the lemons were thin and translucent, and when Nick took them out of the colander he felt how fragile their flesh was, and how a clumsier hand was all it would take to tear them apart.

  *

  Joan found out about Heide at the start of November.

  Frank had been disconnecting by increments for years, but in the last two weeks of October he’d all but vanished. He spent more and more time in his maps and on his blog (or so he said), and started using his phone for email. Frank, who left things lying all around the house, kept the phone buried deep in his pocket at all times. One day he switched the phone to silent, but still it hummed through his cords, sometimes up to twenty times a day.

  At night, instead of falling asleep in front of the ten o’clock news, Frank disappeared into his study and closed the door. It didn’t take long for Joan to realise that his newfound appreciation of podcasts was just an excuse to keep the door shut. She grew more and more suspicious, and eventually asked Frank if he’d perhaps adopted a new pre-Indo-European prefix.

  The day she hacked into his email, and found it to be full of a German woman she vaguely remembered had preceded her, she sat at the kitchen table for several hours, wondering what to do. If she confronted Frank, he would defend himself against actionable infidelity and accuse her of snooping. Somehow, she suspected, this would become about her prying.

  Joan decided to give Frank the chance to extricate himself from this correspondence on his own. She would make him paranoid that she knew, and manipulate a dignified outcome for them both. Frank had no idea why Joan was suddenly playing Wagner all the time. ‘She hates Wagner,’ he wrote to Heide in late November.

  In one of his emails to Heide, Frank complained about his saltless diet. He did not go as far as to use the word ‘bland’, but Joan read it anyway. She started seasoning their food again with some zeal, grinding salt over his salad and vegetables, and pushing squares of salted caramel chocolate with their after-dinner coffee. ‘That’ll show him,’ she thought. ‘Maybe she’s trying to kill me,’ Frank wrote to Heide.

  Joan had craved salt with the two girls, but not with William (whom everybody called Wim), disproving centuries of questionable pregnancy counsel. With Wim, she craved a boy. Her instincts proved dependable, but she already knew this from having once filled out a Jungian personality quiz on the last page of a woman’s magazine. Like Pericles, President François Mitterand and, some speculated, Barack Obama, she was an ENFJ (Extrovert, iNtuitive, Feeling, Judging) – anxiously altruistic and logical.

  When Frank moved his pregnant wife and daughter out of their cramped apartment in the old town and into the rental house in the suburbs, he’d spoken of a temporary situation. Six months at most. Joan had unpacked only a few boxes, thinking they’d be in the new house before it was time to take out the winter clothes.

  Over the next four years, Frank finished a great many houses. Just not theirs.

  Every now and again, Joan opened a new box; to find old clothes for the new baby, to revive her Roxy Music records. When her mother died, she tore through three boxes labelled KITCHEN just to exhume the julienne slicer from her childhood. She julienned everything for a month. Frank complained that it looked like play food. Eventually, when the last box was unpacked, it was time to move again.

  Wim was almost four by the time they moved into what Joan called the New Chapter house. Lois wanted the room in the eaves – the one with the romantic half-moon window and a long hallway to separate you from everyone else. Maya wanted that room, too, but it was given to Lois, the eldest. Maya and Wim had adjoining rooms with a sliding door that could be opened to increase the play space. Within two years the diplomatic opening was walled up, and their Lego collections kept separate.

  The new house, which Frank had designed himself, was like a salt dome. New columns swelled up through the foundations, sprinkling white dust on the children’s quilts. Walls were built and later knocked down to expand the dome in useless places, such as too close to the neighbour’s precious boxwood hedge. One year, Frank mined the basement to excavate an unsanctioned wine cellar, causing a minor landslide in the garden. They were having dinner on the terrace one evening when the lawn suddenly swallowed the ficus. One room in the basement was soundproofed to watch films in, then waterproofed for a wetroom, then filled to the ceiling with firewood.

  Frank couldn’t leave the house alone. It was never finished, there was always something that could be improved – or, as Joan put it, worsened, to be improved someday when we’re dead. Frank picked at the house like a scab, but it was Joan who couldn’t heal.

  Once, when Frank was working on an extension for a luxury spa in Switzerland, there was no hot water for ten days. He blamed the new-fangled boiler, and shouted at someone over the phone. He asked to speak to that someone’s manager, and then yelled at them. Every night, Joan hauled saucepans and kettles of boiling water to the bathroom, and the girls had to bathe together. One evening after the school run, Joan came in to find Frank hunched over one of his maps with a pencil and a magnifying glass. When he asked for the eyedrops, something in her snapped. She marched over to him and swept the open maps and papers off the table with her arm. Crash went Frank’s glass of water as it smashed to pieces on the marble floor. The water puddled between them like a moat, and it was hard to tell the broken ice cubes from the shards of glass.

  ‘Do you hate Papa?’
asked Maya, who was ten at the time.

  ‘Hate is a strong word,’ Joan answered, rinsing soap out of the girls’ hair with water from the kettle.

  ‘So is love,’ said Lois.

  Eventually the children grew into adults, but the house continued to toddle. Not everything had developed right. There were empty sockets and live wires poking out of dry wall, full of promise. There were holes in the roof that let in the wasps, which built their nests under the black tiles. The gaping chimney flue had been covered with a blue tarpaulin since 1995.

  Meanwhile, Frank became known for his cultured renovations of other people’s chalets, and had carved out a niche locally as a green social housing expert. His own, permeable home guzzled heating oil and, at one point, even housed a concrete factory. The house and Joan eroded each other mutually over the years, much like Joan and Frank, but everyone knew, especially the kids, that Joan could be depended on to make a palace out of a mole hill.

  So when Maya announced that she, her husband Cole and the kids were coming over for Christmas, Joan asked Frank to do something about the deadly holes in the unfinished parts of the house, particularly the ones with protruding rusty metal rods. Frank’s answer was to hang CAUTION signs on the landing and in the garden, and behind the open skylight into his bat cave.

  ‘You must be joking,’ said Joan, when she saw the signs.

  ‘What?’ said Frank.

  ‘They’re five and one, Frank. They can’t read.’

  Frank took down the signs and replaced them with new ones, depicting a cliff face, a falling baby with an upturned mouth and a skull and crossbones. Joan couldn’t help but notice that Frank’s Sharpie crag, with its curtain of limestone stalacmites, bore a striking resemblance to Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen.

  2. Leaps and Bounds

  WHEN MUMBLED IN your sleep, invincible can sound a lot like invisible. And so it was that, on the night of Thursday to Friday, Nick didn’t know for sure how he made Lois feel. The next morning he woke up before her and made oatmeal, sweetening it when he knew she liked it salty.

  They had eaten out last night, got drunkish, and watched Brief Encounter in a slumberous heap. Nick hoped the warmth would turn into sex, but the warmth just turned into sleep, as it often did.

  After Nick left for work, Lois scraped the rest of her oatmeal into the compost bin and took a shower. The bathroom was cold from the inexorable two-inch gap between the window and the sill. The plastic hinges on the window had snapped two summers ago, and now it had to be kept at this height to ensure it didn’t pop out of its grooves and kill someone down on Guernsey Street. Nick had cordoned off the window with duct tape and stuck a note to it that read: ‘Do not attempt to open this window: it is broken, like the healthcare system.’ He’d have written ‘marriage’, thought Lois, had the broken window not preceded the affair.

  Lois opened her mouth under the shower head and let it fill up with hot water. The water dribbled out of her mouth and gathered at her feet, catching up to her ankles because of a clogged drain. She looked at her watch. She wondered if the Historian was having a shower, too. If their two run-offs were combining underground at this very moment, and if that was the closest thing to a reunion they would ever know.

  In two days, she would take a bath in her parents’ house. Her parents’ tub was deep, and never had a scum ring. Their bathroom window functioned, and came with a view of the French Alps. The two nearest mountains tumbled down to the lake and made a rocky valance that framed all the other peaks in the distance. She wondered whether the tiles were up around the tub, or if there was still a border of concrete, gouged to hold stones that might be heavy and Italian and would likely never materialise.

  As she rubbed the moisturiser into her face and down her neck, and into the back of her hands, and down her legs that got scaly in the winter, she thought of her mother’s beauty products, lined up on the windowsill and in soft woven baskets that slid perfectly inside drawers. Joan compensated for Frank’s architectural impasses with finishes she plucked from the pages of Elle Decoration and Architectural Digest. She poured cans of sealant onto crumbling concrete floors, hid ceiling wires inside paper lampshade decoys, and painted the plywood matte white. The downstairs toilet was a library for her collection of magazines about beautiful, safe, finished homes – homes that existed to be enjoyed, not negotiated.

  Lois was looking forward to being in the thick of that familiar balance – somewhere between her father’s dreams of an impossible reality and Joan’s dreamy magazine realism. Soon. Soon she would be home, using her mother’s anti-wrinkle cream combined with a periwinkle night cream, reversing time on a nanoscale. At the end of the holiday her mother would send her home with half a pot of face cream and an open tube or two of something with a rare and pricey fragrance, like quince or milkweed. They would last into the spring, along with the illusion that she was the kind of woman who, like Joan, filed away her moisturisers into categories.

  Three dollar bills fell onto the mat when Lois opened the front door. Coffee money: one of Nick’s romantic deeds. She never knew when to expect coffee money. Nick’s perfect grasp of timing was what made his demonstrations so unpredictable. He came home with just-because flowers, and caught her off guard with his needs. ‘Write me a mash note today,’ he’d text her, ‘or I’ll go out drinking all night, and piss in the sink.’

  She picked up the money and walked out into the eighth consecutive snow day.

  *

  Lois knew that hawks were not a common sight along the industrial stretch that fuses Greenpoint to Williamsburg. So what was a hawk doing, perched on the tennis court fence at Bedford and North 12th, at 8.20 on a Friday morning? Why would something as consummate as a bird of prey waste its camouflage on the sloppy grey stuff that fell on New York City, poisoned as it was before it even hit the ground?

  It was snowing hard, but at least it was snowing vertically. The hawk’s talons made black rings around the frosted steel chain link. Snowflakes came to dissolve on its beak. The snow on the Bedford sidewalk was piled so high that when Lois stopped beneath the hawk, it was only six feet away from her face. The sight of icicles on the steel fence made her teeth ring. Inside her coat pocket, her phone shivered with an incoming call.

  She knew it was her mother calling because her mother always called in the morning. But today it was too cold for hands to come out of pockets, even with gloves on. Lois ignored the phone, and eventually it went still. A squirrel rappelled down a sycamore to excavate a quarter cream-cheese bagel from a hill of slush, a few feet away from Lois. It occurred to Lois that, unlike the hawk, the squirrel did not look out of place at all.

  For the most part, she thought, everyone is in the wrong place at the wrong time. And those who weren’t had their own crosses to bear, such as the burden of a life’s work, or martyrdom. Take the New York squirrel: only slightly cuter than a rat, but with much greater benefits. Unlike the rat, which is hated with some hysteria, the squirrel can forage for pizza crust and crumbs out in the open, without fear of man (don’t care) nor hawk (in the city, as rare as an orchid).

  Take her mother: a good girl from Nottingham who’d sought out the kind of Gallic abandon sold to her by the French New Wave, only to find herself raising three children in a town where you couldn’t hope for a decent cup of tea. Or maybe that was being in the right place at the right time. Who even knew.

  After it was scooped up out of the snow by the combined action of claw and beak, and during the first few seconds of its rude airlifting, the squirrel looked as bewildered as Lois. They shared this, she and the squirrel: the microscopic passage of disbelief in time. It was between them, and them only. Now the squirrel did look out of place, too high in the sky, and too on its way to dead. And yet it hadn’t broken any rule of nature or city.

  The hawk seemed to have known what it was doing all along. Like nothing was a coincidence, not even the drama of its chosen backdrop – the billowing chimneys of the Con Ed power plant on t
he other side of the East River.

  By the looks of things, the squirrel was being carried away to a more secluded perch, somewhere in Queens. Lois imagined a nest under the subway tracks, or in the spire of a Catholic church, perhaps in Corona. Or maybe the bird was headed further out, somewhere on Long Island.

  When the hawk was out of sight, Lois continued to walk down Bedford. As she turned to meet Berry, the phone started ringing again. She pulled it out of her pocket. The word FAMILLE throbbed across the display.

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  ‘Hello, poppet,’ said Joan. ‘Are you in the street?’

  ‘Yes. I’m always in the street when you call.’

  ‘Are you on your way to work?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Lois. ‘I’m almost there.’

  Lois passed a woman with a baby strapped to her chest. The baby was wearing a lilac snowsuit and looked like it had been pumped full of air. In the past two years, the city seemed to have filled up with other people’s babies.

  ‘Well, I won’t keep you,’ said Joan. ‘I was just calling to warn you.’

  ‘Warn me of what?’ asked Lois.

  ‘If you sense any tension between me and your father, I mean, extraordinary tension, it’s because things are extraordinarily tense.’

  Lois wondered how long before the squirrel got eaten. Maybe by the time she got to the office. Surely birds of prey didn’t toy with their catch.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Look. I may as well tell you – but don’t tell your sister. I don’t want this to turn into a big family drama.’

  Families are to secrets what holes in trees are to squirrels, and nests under water towers are to hawks: a nest and a refuge, a place to drag your feed back to. When the secrets are spoken, you realise they were there all along – so many reasons to drawbridge into one another’s business, and to love each other less, and to love each other more.