They were partners – that really was the best word for it. They had been partners long before they were together, in college when she did his homework and once, infamously, his laundry. Her best friend had seen it happen, seen him drop off the laundry bag outside her dorm – he claimed that no matter what he did, even separating loads, he couldn’t keep the darks from bleeding onto the lights, in the mock-elevated style they had he kept calling it a humanitarian crisis – and had been apoplectic with Lacy. “Look at him,” she said, they were staring at the dorm window at him, “look at him loping away in triumph.”
But she had done his laundry – it really was dire straits, some sort of intervention was needed – just as she had speed-read his chem textbook so that she could do a problem set that baffled him. And later on, when they were both in New York together, she had vetted and supervised his dating life. He had pulled up pictures on his phone, some of them just girls he was talking to on apps, some of them girls he actually was already sleeping with, it was hard to keep everything straight, and she would scroll through the photos and the chats, like a matchmaker with a book, some of them were bombshells, looked like centerfolds, but trashy, so many of them so trashy, and she would nix the most blatantly trashy of them but on grounds that he could understand. “She looks like the marrying type,” she would say, “I’ll bet this one pokes holes in condoms.” And she was a faithful witness and councilor to the various dating disasters of his hard-drinking, footloose early years in New York. “I don’t think you misled her,” she would say, “she presents herself like that, she gets trashed and sleeps with you on the first date, why in the world would she expect you to take her seriously?” And she had been present for the unexpected confession, he was in her apartment, still in his scrubs, scrolling through his most recent conquests, and he had suddenly paused, his thumb over the phone, and said, “I’m getting tired of this. I don’t know why I put you through it. I don’t know why I do it anymore. I’m getting to be a grown-up now. I can’t keep wasting my time like this.” And then he’d continued scrolling, wanting her opinion of this girl he’d just picked up in a bar, she was standing by her bed, wearing bra and panties, staring intently at the camera, Lacy couldn’t imagine the interaction, how he would have paused everything, asked her, this stranger, to pose for a photograph, he was scrolling very mechanically through the photos, the text messages, as if he were channel-surfing, not really asking for Lacy’s opinion, knowing what she would say.
That had sort of been the mood he was in, bleary, punch-drunk, sitting in his scrubs at her place, when he’d reached over – she was carrying a tea tray to the kitchen – grabbed her free hand and held it, for long seconds held it, then rested his cheek against it, kissed the backs of her fingers, said, in a tone she hadn’t heard before from him, “You probably know me too well to have any interest in me, and I’m sorry if I’ve been a bad friend, bad person, bad whatever, but you matter to me, I want you to know that, you really matter to me, and I want you to be in my life, always in my life, right now there’s only thing I’m sure of, that’s what I’m sure of.”
Lacy was wry, that was her persona. After he’d looked up at her and she’d seen that he really was looking at her very intently and anticipated a kiss, and she’d returned it, and after they’d had a series of talks, lying in their twisted sheets in her bedroom, which up to that point had always by silent agreement been off-limits to him, and with the rain serendipitously pouring down outside so that it felt like they were in a storm-tossed boat and for all they knew might be the last people left in the world, and he’d reiterated what she thought he was saying when he reached for her hand as she was transiting to the kitchen, and she’d expressed certain well-informed misgivings as to his character and he’d said, “I know you, you’re the only person I feel like I really know, and everything I know about you I like,” and she’d looked to the window blotted with rainwater and said, “I don’t know. Right now, I kind of feel like I’m Dick Cheney and you’re George W. Bush and you’ve had this whole search committee that hasn’t turned up anything and in desperation you’re just selecting the head of the search committee.” And he’d looked at her very seriously and gave her a deep kiss, his hand on the small of her back, which, by now, she’d already gotten used to, and said, “And I can only hope that we would be such a beautiful partnership.”
And with that the mood broke, they were no longer in their tribunal setting, with her scouring his motives, now they were in another domain, with their private jokes, their references that would be understood by nobody else, their agreed-upon roles. There was no painful period of diminishing expectations, no dredging up of the skeletons of past relationships – they had been so close for so long, really did know everything about each other. That was the point that she always made in conversations with outsiders, particularly the people who’d known them when they were friends. “It’s like falling in love with your brother and then realizing he’s not actually your brother,” she said, and started to feel she was maybe pushing her wry persona, “it’s like her getting together with the Paul Rudd character in Clueless.”
And it really was true, there was something to be said for their familiarity. They had always been mysteriously drawn together, even though his friends were not her friends and their interests were very divergent, there had been some bond the whole time, it was like for years they had been trying to put their finger on it, figuring out how they could fit into one another’s life, and then when they had finally exhausted all other possibilities they had settled on sex, love, and marriage. He had turned out in other ways to be a much better selection than her eyebrow-raising friends, the ones who remembered him from his oafish hockey player days, would have suspected. He had been overmatched by college and by pre-med but he had gotten through it and gotten through it thanks to relentless hard work, the hard work that got him up on the ice at five every morning no matter how late he’d been up the night before, the hard work that made him at least finish every assignment no matter how clueless he might be about the material. It wasn’t so easy to spot in him, but Lacy, almost from the beginning, had spotted it. And med school, contrary to expectation, was easier than undergrad, and then internship was easier than med school and residency was easier than internship, and the ridiculous 28 hour shifts seemed never to faze him, there was a certain comfort about them, they reminded him of the staggering-forward dogged energy that had kept him skating in the third quarter of a hockey game when every bone in his body wanted to quit or for that matter had kept him standing and drinking in his frat’s legendary drinkathons long after all of his brothers had passed out. And allied to his tenacity was a cunning that, again, was not easy to spot, but that Lacy had noticed, for instance, in the way he’d tricked her into running all his errands for him. And that cunning kept him in school long other than the others, pursuing different fellowships, apprenticing himself to top doctors in lucrative specialties.
It took a real partnership to get through this period of time. That’s what no one outside the medical world fully understood. He was saddled with debt, both from college and from med school, his family had never had money, he was living in New York, his salaries from his internships and residences were a joke, and he was playing a long game, not cashing in until he had a clear path lined up for him. She had been bouncing around in the way that the smart kids from school all seemed to, she’d gotten a master’s in anthropology, even though it had been a running joke for everybody in the program that there was no chance of the degree leading anywhere. Then she’d gotten a second master’s in public policy which seemed more practical although she’d really hated it and found the classes to be conducted more or less in gibberish. By then, she’d decided that she should be an academic – that’s what everybody had pretty much been telling her since her phi beta kappa days in school, “that’s where people like me belong,” she’d said ruefully, and her experience in the public policy program had convinced her of the idiocy and insanity of the ‘real world’ – but by this point Jim was mired in his residency, they were subsisting more or less on ramen and roti rolls, and she went to work. “I guess I have to do it eventually,” she said – she had a habit of pronouncements, she seemed instinctually to always take centerstage of their studio apartment, and in a kind of stage whisper, as if thinking aloud, to say, “How many more master’s degrees do I need? It’s time I supported this home.”
She’d taken a job with the city, which turned out to be just as mind-numbing and soul-crushing as the public policy program had hinted it would be. And she’d crunched budgets and color-coded spreadsheets and worked her way through all of the Ottolenghi cookbooks. By this point they were in their early 30s and suddenly he’d vaulted forward. He’d intelligently chosen his specialty and one day when she was helping him with his income taxes she’d realized that he was making over $200,000 a year. She’d actually cried when she saw that, just as she had when he’d gotten a very matter-of-fact letter from Discover Financial reporting that he’d paid off the last of his student debt, and it was very difficult for her to explain to him why she was crying over a tax form or a billing statement. He’d been in a different mood, he’d turned to her with a gleam in his eyes, said, “It’s your turn now,” and planted a kiss on her that, with her usual tendency towards analogy-making, she’d compared to Bill handing the mantle over to Hillary. It was a joke now that they were living in a studio apartment and they bought a house in Passaic and, to her amazement, he handled the arrangements with the bank all by himself. From there she commuted into the city to start her Ph.D program in Linguistic Sociology, which struck her as a good triangulation of all the previous work she’d done. The rest of her program was very fresh-faced, they were straight out of college, she reported back that you could almost see the green behind their ears. The first day, with the group going around in a circle, she’d introduced herself as Lacy McHale, and a week later had had to correct another student who’d called her ‘Ms. McHale,’ thinking she was a TA or something. “I’m just like you,” Lacy had said.
Their life now included all kinds of features that she would never have anticipated. It wasn’t just the mortgage, it was things like secretaries and malpractice insurance and charity dinners. In particular, it was the secretary that she’d had trouble adjusting to. Jim had a young secretary, Cara, who was from a neighboring town. She had no ambition in life as far as Lacy could tell, but she shadowed Jim incredibly diligently when he was in his office or sometimes when he made rounds, a silent accompanying presence with her clipboard except for the clacking of her high heels. Lacy noticed the way she kept sliding into Jim’s conversation, how he and Lacy would be working late tabulating expenses, how some housekeeping thing that normally would have been her purview, picking up paper plates and cups, for instance, would fall to Cara. She interacted with her frequently, over the phone when Cara gave her an update on Jim’s schedule, or at the door as Cara handed her a plastic bag from her latest errand, but she never got any closer to her, no matter how many times they met, Cara with her caked-on makeup, her plucked eyebrows, who always smiled icily and said she should ‘get back’ when LacyCara offered her a water or coffee. On the commuter train, to and from her classes, she found herself thinking more about Cara, the ritualized passage of expressions across her face, like in a kabuki, each one what was called for in the moment but revealing nothing about what she was thinking, and then she was at a barbeque – this was another feature of her life now – and saw, or was pretty sure she saw, the two of them holding hands as they waited on line for burgers.
These weren’t her people, they were all connected one way or another with the hospital, and there was no one she could press for information. There was no way around it, if she wanted to know the truth, which she did, she would have to comb through his devices. So she did it. She waited until he was in the shower or, better, on a run, and she opened his computer, opened his phone, tapped in his passwords, which were his pet name for her and their wedding date, and read through every message to and from Cara. It was laborious, exhausting work. He and Cara sent at least one message to each other every hour of every working day. And he was familiar with her, after a few months of their working together he’d switched to calling her ‘C.’ He signed some of his messages ‘xo.’ There were, she read with a sinking sensation in her gut, a few sly references to her. “Royal highness has run out of orange juice,” he wrote her once. “Would you mind?” It was bad, it was a bad insight into how he really thought of her – “LMH having a thesis crisis lol,” he’d texted, “can u make her understand I’m WORKING here” – but it didn’t have what she’d been looking for, what she’d braced herself for. She was deep in their correspondence – she was on his hospital e-mail now – they were complaining about a particularly intractable patient, he was due back from his run any moment, she looked up at the wall of his home study, looked out the windows, the view of the neighbor’s house, the neighbor’s joking ‘attack dog on duty’ sign. She said to the room at large in her old declamatory way, “I have become someone I hate.” She logged out of his accounts, pushed the computer back exactly to where she’d found it.
She did come clean to Jim. She had tried to keep it in, had tried to join in his conversation about hospital business, about a trip he wanted to take to see a hockey game, but it had just seemed like some kind of farce, like some exotic torture to be thinking only and entirely of the one thing that she wasn’t allowed to say. “I have a confession,” she said as a pronouncement, and noted the look he had, which was surprised and perplexed of course but also, she felt, furtive. She told him what she had done, and as she did, as she described her successful guesses at his passwords, as she detailed the correspondence she’d read, the troves of e-mails, none of them containing proof of an affair, she couldn’t help but be somehow proud of him. She was smiling as she described it to him, smiling and crying, blubber crying. “I was so ready for it to unravel,” she stammered through her tears, “I was so ready to be forced to see you not as I see you, as someone else, mean and secretive, and I know you’re probably furious but it was a relief, such a relief, to know that I was right about you the whole time, that you’re really you, it’s not like there’s some kind of a fake in your place.”
She wasn’t sure she was making sense. When she’d started to really cry, he’d wrapped his arm around her, tucked her into him, and she’d delivered her monologue to her nestling spot on his chest. “Are you mad at me?” she said and there was a long, excruciating pause before he cleared his throat and said, “I’m not mad. I understand why you feel I’ve been distant. I understand how that could have made you suspicious.”
That kicked off a major house improvement campaign. Grad school was slow and dragging, it was taking a lot of effort to land on the right topic for her thesis, it was better, she found, to distance herself from it, to be consumed with something completely different, like repainting a room, and let the right ideas, of their own accord, find their way to her. She became familiar with his things in a very different way, cleaned out closets, discovered in the backs of them his old jerseys, his ancient t-shirts, the clothes that she’d laundered for him back when they’d been friends and it seemed like somebody somewhere had to take mercy on this dilapidated kid. She became more familiar too with his devices. “Now that the damage is done,” he said shyly, grandly, and gave her permission to look through his e-mail when she had to. She had reclaimed some of the tasks that had been outsourced to Cara, now she went through his records and she found all kinds of deductions, several thousand dollars’ worth, that he’d failed to take on his returns.
That’s what she was absorbed in – a long-overdue purging of his inbox – and then followed a rabbithole of links to some listicle and had to go to the history tab to return to the inbox and that got her curious, for some reason she hadn’t thought to scroll through his history in the entire maniacal time she was poring over his e-mails and text messages, and in between links to medical journals and his fantasy leagues there was a ProtonMail site. When she clicked it she was asked for a login and none of the usual user names and passwords worked. She was too far in it to stop now. He was in the next room but there was nothing illicit about using his computer. She could hear him coughing and shifting his weight at the kitchen table. She searched through his desktop, his Word files, not exactly sure what to type in, what she was hunting for, but completely alert, the feeling of closing in on something. [She could hear him coughing and shifting his weight at the kitchen table.] In the notes she found a string of user names and passwords. None of them were LacyTracy or LacySpacey, his names for her, none were JmLacy or LimJim, or any of the other combinations of their names that they had never quite managed to work out. The ProtonMail was a completely non-descript account, it looked just like gmail, and most of his messages were once again to Cara, but these were different messages, she clicked on a photo in one of the messages and there was Cara standing by the side of her bed, in bra and panties, her hand out to take a selfie, the other hand pulling back her hair, her expression the same grim look that Lacy had seen in the photo of his bar pickup back when they were fresh out of college and he for some reason kept hanging out at her apartment. Other photos that she clicked on, in her numb curiosity, were more troubling still and she clicked on others that were from websites, some of which she’d vaguely heard of, some that she hadn’t at all, and there were messages from women, discussing dates and places and sending photographs.
She had already remonstrated with Jim, challenged him. She had nothing more to say to him. Fortunately, she could leave the house without passing him. She threw together a handbag with a few clothes and books and did not look back at the house, which had not been her idea, which had had so little to do with her. She took the train into the city and somewhere in her reverie staring out the window it occurred to her that she should text Jim so that he wouldn’t call the police or anything ridiculous like that. She told him what she’d discovered and that it was over, beyond over, and he texted back right away, very graciously actually, to say that he understood and was very sorry and didn’t expect her to forgive him. He would send her money, send her her things, whatever she needed to get started again.
She actually had an evening class she could attend for her program, and it occurred to her that that would be the cool, classy move, the woman who walks out of her marriage, walks out of her home, and, without missing a beat, strolls into graduate seminar, but she realized as the subway approached her stop that she couldn’t trust herself to control her emotions. She got out early and wandered into Central Park. She was near the Alice in Wonderland statue. That statue had the curious quality of never being findable when she was looking for it; of popping up only when it was least expected. It suited the strange equanimity of her mood. Her life had been a complete fiasco, that much was obvious. She had wrapped herself entirely around Jim, who was so trusty, so reassuring, and that had been a blunder, as simple as that, an error in intuition, a blunder, and life had marched on without her. It was all around her, the mothers with her shouting children, and then in the outer ring around the statue, tougher to take even in her numbed state, the lovers holding hands, the lovers planning their lives together, and she had missed it, missed all of it, been too trusting, too hesitant, whatever it was. No wonder Jim couldn’t come clean to her – he had been in it, with his quiet ambition and his long shifts and his cunning affairs – and somewhere in there she had passed out of it and how exactly was he supposed to break that news to her. For a long time she sat on her bench and she watched life, a lady getting older, no husband, no children, no real degree, a peculiar personality, a questionable sense of humor, a disastrous judge of character, she watched life and felt somehow that it had nothing to do with her – she had passed through something, she was on the other side of it now.
Keep 'em coming!
So many great female characters! Really rare and refreshing to read.