chunks, crisp like apples. She was feeling a little crazy but inclined to be more so. She wanted to stay in the bath forever, eating apricots until the tub filled, not with water but with hard little dark-brown stones, rough edged, bits of soft orange fruit clinging to the crevices. As it was, there were just enough to pool together in the bottom of the tub, schooling like fish seeking safety in numbers. Yes, thought Alice, stay forever.
But eventually she grew cold and practical. Slowly fishing the pits out, feeling for each one with her fingertips, she secreted them back in the damp, empty paper bag. Running the warm water, she scrubbed, the shampoo foaming on her scalp gradually displacing the grime of three days’ sweat—New York City sweat—complicated by hot air forced down subway tunnels onto platforms, by sidewalks crowded with tourists who didn’t know how to walk, and by wave upon wave of longing and regret.
Friday, May 25, Memorial Day Weekend
He tried not to compare the woman he’d fallen for all those years ago—outdoorsy smell, bad-girl black jeans, highbred WASP confidence, quirky, geeky mind—to the woman he now knew. When they’d met, the seven-year age difference in his favor conferred a romantic seniority with what he hoped was a daddy-tinged sexiness of the older man heating her brain. The boon of a younger woman found its locus for him in what he’d quickly discovered was an unmarred body at the peak of physical perfection: sizable breasts high and taut, dimple-free ass that always seemed to hang halfway out of her too-small white cotton underwear, and the glorious, clean, fragrant cunt. He was evolved enough to know he must use the word only in his mind, and he did so with the greatest affection. To him, cunt captured a schoolboy’s fear, ignorance, and lust for the forbidden object. When he went down on her he did not want to think of the urethra, labia majora, labia minora, Bartholin’s glands, vulva, vagina, clitoris, and anus. But cunt, yes, that was a word.
The reckoning of her beauty, even now, was not insignificant. Of course he would not have married a beautiful but stupid woman. He wouldn’t have even married a beautiful but uninteresting woman. Alice was complete—a brainy biophysicist out of his league—at least he’d thought so at the time. They’d had just three years of what had felt like an inevitable coupling. It is written, he’d whisper to himself in jest when stray moments of doubt fogged his optimism. She moved into his apartment on Bleecker Street, they mingled their debts and assets, introduced each other to their respective parents, and, within a year, were engaged and then quickly married.
Alice got pregnant too fast. What a tired cliché that was. Or should he say he got Alice pregnant too fast? It hardly mattered. A mistake? She was a scientist for fuck’s sake—and he a doctor. He’d been hoping for years of blissful coupling, time for him to further establish his practice and time for her, most of all, to finish her research on the internal dynamics of starling flocks. He’d hoped she’d land a plum university or think tank job, but there hadn’t been time.
When Alice, her face puffy from crying, told him she was carrying not one but two fetuses, he’d heartlessly gone out without her and gotten flat drunk on gin. Later, they talked about it but agreed an abortion wasn’t for them even though Alice had already had one in college. The pregnancy of their shared future babies had felt different. As a couple they were fearful that in course, when their living children arrived, they’d be shadowed by the twins’ ghosts endlessly hinting at the possibility of unknowable lost charm, intelligence, and talent. They feared the absence might cast doubt as much on their ruthless decision as on the children they chose to keep.
The twins were the end of the financial trajectory he’d vaguely wanted for himself. Whatever it involved, its focus was on nicer things—a bigger apartment with a view and no street noise, tasteful furniture he chose rather than found or inherited, luxe hotels and restaurants, and not ordering the second-cheapest bottle of wine on the list. Through his practice his father had made a good life for himself and his two children. That’s all Peter wanted. Security. Sometimes he felt he’d attained it, but somehow the concept had morphed.
Alice wanted things he didn’t understand. Sure, there were nicer things to have now than there were in the 1960s and ’70s. Back then there had been a standard of quality that, once attained, need not be exceeded. There was such a thing as enough. Now there were seemingly unending tiers of quality, each claiming greater integrity and intrinsic value than the next. Did Alice need the $400 (at 50% off) organic duvet cover made from heirloom cotton in eco-friendly Italian mills she’d recently purchased for Bette’s (now her) bed? Eight hundred dollars for a twin duvet cover? It seemed impossibly expensive, but he was humble enough to acknowledge the possibility that he simply lacked the sensibility to appreciate fine things.
Just the night before, Alice had gone on about the repulsive juiciness of a pinot noir, its lack of finish and dimension. Tossing the wine down the sink, she’d been just about to pour the remainder in the bottle down after it when he stopped her. It tasted just fine to him. He drank it happily. Alice could and would buy something better and more expensive. It never occurred to him to object. He provided for his family. It was such an old-fashioned way to think of the purpose of his work, but it was accurate. He worked to supply his family with housing, food, wine, education, clothes, and, yes, even a $400 duvet cover and a $36 bottle of pinot.
The years following the birth of the girls surprised him as their tiny presences erased their identity as a couple. From the day of their birth, Emile and Bette created a massive void of need that they—but mostly Alice—instinctively filled with all the time and energy they could spare without destroying their own selves entirely. The shock that the two of them no longer existed as an essential entity wasn’t nearly as terrible as how little that loss mattered next to the magnetic force of the two live humans they’d made. The babies became the center of any room they occupied, commandeering the conversation before emitting a gurgle. What a marvel of human evolutionary design that even ugly babies were impossible to ignore.
On hiatus from her research and writing, the biological inevitability of nursing her young further transformed Alice from a cerebral creature into the most physical of beings. The tedious procedures of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and nurturing two small children exacted a material cost. Peter, an intimate witness, tenderly perceived devastating loss as the girls needs whittled away at the fiber of the woman he remembered.
The extended office hours of his busy practice freed him to experience the life of his family as an all-female domestic performance with guest appearances from him in the evening and on weekends. For the first five years he was cast as the fool—he’d arrive home in the evening to gently chase the girls, his monster antics calibrated to provoke that uncanny fleeting fear that elicits a child’s screeching delight while stopping short of terror and tears. He’d then bathe his little putti, as he liked to call them, in towering masses of bubbles, their sexless bodies slippery in the warm water. Snuggling them into the bed they insisted on sharing, he’d give dramatic readings of the same books again and again.
In the years of their girlhood—when they still wanted as much of him as they could have—he played the easy hero by taking them to movies, plays, the ballet, and concerts. What began with Pixar and Disney films, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan onstage, The Nutcracker and Cinderella in toe shoes and tutus, evolved into standard grown-up fare by the time they were teenagers. By then he had a firm bond with them around all this fancy culture—shared tastes, memories, regrets, events to anticipate. When the girls became adults in miniature, forcing their independence by closing their bedroom doors, he’d taken the parenting lead by offering himself as a more reasonable, steadier alternative to Alice. Plus—he had the ritual of all that shared culture topped off with drinks and dinner.
When the syrupy Shirley Temples had been replaced by bracing gin and tonics before the performances and buttered pasta and chicken breast after the show had become ambitious meals of dumplings and organ meats, the bit part had vanquished the lead. It was cheap on Peter’s part to swoop in as the authority when Alice had thanklessly done the hard work for more than a decade—and still did much of it—but she left him no choice. By then she had frayed, the edges of her personality and sense of purpose having dissolved or moved inward after more than