The Dissident Page 14

  “Physical contact?”

  “Well, yes. In extreme cases. But not necessarily.”

  “Have you ever had a boundary violation?”

  Gordon looked up from his magazine. “No.”

  Cece sat down on the plush settee. She did not feel ready to get into bed. She wondered what the authors of that study would make of this marriage, the last ten years of which had contained very little physical contact, hardly a single violation of either of their boundaries. You could make it twelve years if you didn’t count a brief interlude in the early spring of 1990, when they had gone to “couples” with Cece’s therapist, Dr. Plotkin. That was just after Phil had moved to New York. Three months later, the sessions had ended abruptly, when Gordon decided that Dr. Plotkin was underqualified.

  Cece had been relieved to stop the intensely awkward sexual encounters that characterized those three months, which Dr. Plotkin had referred to as “experiments in intimacy.” Coming down in the elevator, after one of the final sessions, Gordon had remarked: “I think the sexual realm may perhaps be closed to me for good.” Then he had pressed the button; they had descended to the lobby; her husband had held the door for her into the bright street. In the car on the way home, he had talked about how computers were revolutionizing genealogical research.

  Cece wondered if this feeling of dissociation was particular to her marriage or common to lifelong bonds in general. She would’ve liked to take a poll, to do research among her tennis partners and the parents of Max and Olivia’s friends, but if you said something like, “It isn’t at all like they told us it would be, is it?” or, “We were so naive,” everyone would just agree with you right away. But we do not have sex, she would have liked to say. Not ever. Would they be shocked? Or would they smile knowingly? She wondered if every relationship had a secret in it, something too embarrassing to reveal to anyone.

  Gordon closed the journal and put it on top of the stack. “Are you ready to turn out the light?”

  “I thought we were going to talk,” Cece said.

  “I’m sorry,” Gordon said patiently. “Did I forget?”

  “No,” Cece said. “But I mean, we haven’t talked about Phil.”

  “What?” said Gordon.

  “We haven’t talked about the thing with Phil.”

  “The thing with Phil,” Gordon repeated, in an uncomprehending monotone. It was a teacher’s tactic: a way of allowing a student to recognize his or her own error.

  Cece fought a sudden urge to cry. Crying had a predictable effect on any negotiation with Gordon; he would immediately stop the conversation and do what ever it took to calm her down. His strong response to tears was one of the things that had reassured her before their marriage, when she had sometimes worried that his extreme rationality signified a cold and unyielding aspect of his character. He loves animals, she remembered telling her friends. He is eager to have children.

  “I mean, with him staying here. I was surprised that you—”

  “Would you prefer that he didn’t?”

  “No,” Cece said.

  Gordon nodded, as if it were settled.

  “No. I just remember that you said—” She stopped.

  “Yes?” Gordon asked patiently.

  These conversations were bizarre. It was as if they were working from two separate sets of data, as if their memories had been formed in two different marriages. Gordon did not seem to remember the things that she remembered, and therefore those things did not seem quite real. He acted as if they were discussing a kind of hysterical fantasy of Cece’s, which he was doing his best to curtail. He seemed slightly embarrassed for her.

  “I just thought we should talk about it,” she said.

  “Phil is your—concern,” Gordon said cheerfully. “I leave it in your capable hands.”

  Had he started to say “affair”? Had he stopped himself?

  Gordon patted the space next to him. “Are you coming to bed?”

  Although Phil had been central to many of Cece’s private appointments with Dr. Plotkin, she and Gordon had talked about him only once in the couples counseling. Dr. Plotkin had asked Gordon whether he was concerned about his wife’s close friendship with his brother. Gordon had looked startled.

  “Could you be more clear?”

  “Are you afraid that your wife is having an affair?”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Because she wouldn’t want to hurt you,” Dr. Plotkin suggested.

  “Because my brother is a loser,” Gordon said. “He’s not Cece’s type.”

  “Can you remember what made you ask your brother to stop spending so much time with your family?”

  Gordon nodded pleasantly. “Of course. I thought he might be a bad influence on the children.”

  “On the children, rather than on your marriage?”

  “Yes.” Gordon turned to Cece. “Is that what you thought I was worried about? Why didn’t you say so?”

  It was lucky that these questions were rhetorical, because at that point in the session, Cece had been unable to speak.

  23.

  CECE HAD THOUGHT OF SEPARATION. SHE HAD EVEN SPOKEN THE WORD “divorce” out loud, in Dr. Plotkin’s office, and to a few of her closest women friends. She and Gordon would not be like other divorced couples, she firmly believed. They did not have money problems, for one thing, nor was either furious with the other. Were Gordon to move to an apartment—perhaps temporarily, on a trial basis—Cece imagined that the four of them would often have dinner together, and go to the movies; there would be no question of the children’s spending holidays anywhere but in this house.

  She had not been quite so concerned about Olivia, whose perfect grades and devotion to the dance troupe were augmented, now that she was entering her senior year, by an impressive social life. She wanted to go to Berkeley, and although they were going through the whole production with the other applications, Olivia was practically guaranteed admission, as the child of a professor in the UC system.

  It was lucky that she didn’t have to worry about Olivia, Cece thought, since worrying about Max took up so much of her time. She had worried even before the accident. In middle school his grades had hovered in the C range, in spite of the fact that all of his teachers said he could do better. He didn’t like art class, but he liked to draw. Looking over his homework, she found odd-looking superheroes: men with cars, weapons, and sometimes wings, next to masked women with the kind of breasts you drew if you did not get to see many real ones.

  Max had never liked to read, but he had been a devotee of National Geographic from the age of ten; his science report card always said that if it were not a question of so many missed or late assignments, Max could be getting As. Cece didn’t think that grades were very important—that was one of the values she and Gordon shared—but the problem was that another one of their values was the importance of college, and you could not be a white kid from a private school in Los Angeles with no extracurriculars and a C average and expect to get in anywhere decent.

  Apart from his grades, however, Max had been doing better. Last year he had made two new friends—Chris, a quiet redhead who had gone all the way through St. Matthews with him, and an Indian kid named Ashok, who had just moved from Teaneck, New Jersey. The first time Cece met Ashok, he had told her he was planning to become a writer of best-selling “espionage-themed” thrillers, and that if she wanted to read a sample of his prose, she could log onto his Web site: ashokundercover.com. Chris and Ashok were perhaps not the coolest kids in the class, but they seemed to really like Max. The three of them spent many afternoons upstairs in Max’s room, working on the “zine” they were designing, which would be called The Mole. When Max had shown his mother a draft of the cover—a precisely rendered pen-and-ink drawing of a surprisingly appealing rodent—Cece thought that perhaps everything would be OK. She had decided that it might be time to talk to Gordon.

  She did not think her husband would be in favor of a separation, nor di
d she think he would argue. She imagined him being disappointed in her, more than anything else. The thing she came up against, again and again, was telling the children. She couldn’t picture what they would say in such a talk, or even determine where they would say it; she was sure, for example, that the living room would be the wrong choice. No one was comfortable in the impressive but much too formal living room: she regretted the white carpet, which made guests feel they had to take off their shoes, as well as the piano that none of them knew how to play. The conversation would happen much more easily in the kitchen, except for the fact that the only seating in the kitchen was the stools at the counter—and they could hardly have the conversation like that, in a row, as if they were a bunch of regulars at the local bar.

  In the end none of it had mattered. After Max’s accident, there was of course no question of a separation. They had conducted a series of very different conversations, in Max’s room, where there was only one chair, so that someone always had to lean uneasily against the window frame or the bathroom door. Max had explained that he’d been “just kidding” about blowing his brains out, and that the only reason he wanted the Beretta Cougar handgun was so that his drawings for The Mole would be more accurate.

  “But why didn’t you just tell the officer that?” Cece asked.

  “They still would’ve arrested me,” Max said calmly.

  “But why would you have said—what you said?” Cece found that she couldn’t repeat what Max had said.

  “I was kidding,” Max said. “How many times do I have to tell you.”

  “Try to put yourself in our shoes,” Gordon said. “Can you understand why we would worry?”

  “It was a joke,” Max hissed, not looking at either of them.

  “It wasn’t very funny,” Cece said. She was sitting at Max’s desk, while Gordon sat on the bed. Max was leaning against his bookshelf with his arms crossed in front of his chest, staring out the window at the balcony, where a staircase led down to the driveway. His body language was the equivalent of a fortified tank; at any moment, she expected him to plow right past them toward those stairs.

  “That cop was an asshole,” Max said. “He thought I was psycho. He thought I was, like, Dylan Klebold or something.”

  “I don’t think Dylan Klebold was psychotic,” Gordon had intervened.

  That got Max’s attention. He stared at his father.

  “I mean, don’t all teenagers have those feelings? That they’d like to blow up their entire high school?”

  “Yeah,” Max said. “But most people don’t actually go and do it.”

  “Did you think about it?” Gordon asked.

  Cece could not believe they were talking about Dylan Klebold. They were talking about the news. Dylan Klebold came from a troubled family, in which the parents kept guns. It was a tragedy with profound social consequences, but what did it have to do with them?

  “I can’t believe you think I’m Dylan Klebold too,” Max exclaimed. “I was going to draw a fucking cartoon. I didn’t even have any fucking bullets for it.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being angry,” Gordon had said.

  “I’m not fucking angry!” Max screamed, tearing past them out of the room.

  24.

  THEY SPENT THE WEEK BEFORE SCHOOL STARTED AT HOME. ON THURSDAY morning, Cece came down to the kitchen to make muffins. Salty was resting on his plaid flannel bed, with his nose on the floor and his big, wet eyes open, blinking up at her. Dr. Spock was trotting through the downstairs rooms, making his rounds, Gordon called it.

  Cece made two batches of blueberry yogurt muffins and sliced oranges to squeeze for juice, which she wouldn’t do until everyone was awake because of the noise of the juicer. Her children never ate eggs, and she and Gordon were watching their cholesterol, but she had started buying them, just in case Phil or Mr. Yuan wanted some. That was the thing, both exhausting and wonderful, about having guests: having to guess their needs. It was almost like having small children again.

  Once she had taken care of the human breakfast, she started in on the animals: wet and dry food for Spock, who needed to gain weight, and diet kibble for Salty, who had an old dog’s belly. While she watched Spock eat (otherwise Salty would shoulder in and finish the bowl), she administered Ptolemy’s insulin, pinching the skin at his neck in a way the vet promised would feel normal to him, since it was how his mother had once carried him in her mouth. It had, however, been a long time since Ptolemy was a kitten; as soon as Cece released him, with a gentle caress, Ptolemy turned around and bit her ankle.

  There were footsteps above her head, and Cece heard girls’ voices on the stairs. Olivia’s friend Emily had spent the night. Emily and Olivia had gone to school together for years, but it was only after Olivia joined Dance Directions last year that the two of them had become close. St. Anselm’s was known for its arts programs—Mr. Yuan was an addition to a long line of visiting scholars—but among the arts it was the dance department that distinguished itself.

  Cece was proud that Olivia had been accepted into this elite troupe, but she lamented the new friends who came with it. There was a great deal of talk about body shapes and sizes, under the auspices of dance. Whose waist was thinner, whose breasts were shapelier, whose butt looked the best in the leotards? If she were honest, Cece didn’t much like modern dance, which always looked a little melodramatic to her. She thought the Dance Directions routines (“choreography,” Olivia corrected her) were a bit sexual for high school: last year she had seen a poster hanging right in front of the school, which had been vandalized, the “Di” replaced with a large “E.” It was easy to see why the boys from William O. Douglas, St. Anselm’s brother school, never missed a performance.

  “At school some people think we’re bitches,” her daughter explained, over lunch at a restaurant in Brentwood the day after she’d returned from Paris. (“Bitches” surprised Cece, but she concealed it.) “But we’re not. It’s just that we don’t like to be around people who aren’t interesting—Emily can’t stand anything pedestrian.” (Perhaps as a mother you accepted “bitch” in exchange for “pedestrian” used as an adjective?) She could tell how important it was to Olivia that she understand what was special about this new friend, and Cece tried hard to keep an open mind.

  “What do her parents do?” Cece asked.

  Olivia shrugged, impatient with such a pedestrian question. “I don’t know what her dad does, but they lived in Paris when Emily was a kid, and so she speaks French really well. I think maybe her mom does some stuff at school.”

  Cece was conscious of the fact that she was not an embarrassing mother, as far as mothers went—that she wore the right clothes, drove the right kind of car, and acted neither older nor younger than her age. When she had told Olivia about the possibility of working at St. Anselm’s three days a week, Olivia had said she thought it was a good idea. Her daughter’s approval meant more to Cece than the job itself, and Olivia’s encouragement was what had made her finally call Ms. McCoy to accept.

  In fact, everyone had been extremely enthusiastic, from Gordon, to Joan, to Pam and Liz and Carol, her Thursday morning doubles partners. Why did so many people think it was important that she do a job, a job so nonessential that the head of school had told her to let them know “a few weeks” before the term started whether or not she would be joining them? Once she had accepted, Gordon had brought home a bottle of champagne, to celebrate her new “career.” Of course there had never been any question of the job being paid; everyone knew that Cece didn’t need the money.

  The girls came from the front hall, blinking and stretching and exaggerating their exhaustion.

  “Is it really only eleven-thirty?” asked Emily, entering the dining room before Olivia and glancing, aghast, at the grandfather clock.

  Emily had blond hair, pulled up into a messy chignon. She had green eyes, a button nose, and the kind of pink and gold skin that had once been called a “healthy tan.” Emily wasn’t any taller than Cece (f
ive feet five inches, rounding up) and in fact had similarly symmetrical features; any stranger coming upon the three of them would’ve guessed that it was Emily who was Cece’s daughter, and Olivia who was the friend.

  In Cece’s opinion, Emily was nothing special, especially compared with Olivia. Her daughter had inherited her height from Gordon’s side of the family (both Joan and Phil were very tall). She had long, dark hair with a hint of red in it, a high, pale forehead, and dark brown eyes. She had strong, striking features that made you look again; if she was not conventionally pretty, there were moments when you would have called her beautiful.

  “Good morning,” Cece said. “How did you sleep?”

  “Comme ci comme ça,” said Emily.

  “That means ‘So-so,’” Olivia informed her mother. “Emily speaks French way better than me.”

  “I have a bit of insomnia,” Emily said.

  “Really?” said Cece. “That’s terrible, at your age.”

  “My mom says it’s from drinking coffee when I was little. My au pair used to give it to me.” Emily glanced around the kitchen. “Speaking of coffee,” she said.

  “I’ll make a pot,” Cece said. “The blueberry muffins are still warm.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Olivia said. Blueberry muffins were her favorite.

  “That sounds wonderful,” Emily said. “But if you don’t mind, I think I’ll stick with coffee. And maybe an orange or something, if you’ve got one?”

  At that moment Spock tore into the breakfast room, making a beeline for Emily. He circled the newcomer twice, barking: Emily backed against the wall.

  “I’m sorry,” Cece said. “You’re not allergic, are you?”

  “No—it’s just—”

  Spock licked Emily’s knees.

  “I’m not crazy about dogs.”

  “Spock, get OUT,” Olivia said. She grabbed Spock’s collar, opened the door, and shoved the dog out into the yard—something Cece tried not to do now that Fionnula was living in the rose garden. In this case she didn’t say anything, although she wondered about people who said they didn’t like dogs. What was there not to like about a dog like Spock?