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Thomas was nowhere. She went back out into her car, and stared at herself in her rearview mirror for an hour, maybe longer. As if her own face would show Thomas’s secret, or show her where to go next. It didn’t. She had no idea where to look. Not that night. But she knew the beginning of the truth. She knew what was really happening with her husband.
It was another woman.
With blue eyes and noble hips, a tattoo of the Chinese character for peace on the nape of her neck, the one for joy on one of those hips. Her thirtieth birthday still years away.
It is still the other woman. And because she has refused to tell Thomas that she knows this, Gwyn has been left in the tricky position of putting together the rest of it—painfully putting together what she has wanted to know least—why Thomas has lied to her, why he has lied so elaborately.
Because the truth was so simple. An affair with a younger woman? How absurd! How cliché! But how familiar, too. If Thomas confessed there was som
eone else—as opposed to making up the Buddhism story—Gwyn would have been furious, but so furious that she would have wanted out of the marriage? Hard to say. Many friends have dealt with infidelity and survived. She might have chosen to do what they chose to do: to stay and to fight. For their marriages. For their husbands. For the only life they knew.
But religious conversion? Newfound belief?
Thomas was banking on this making him seem like a stranger to Gwyn. And who wants to fight to stay with a stranger? Who wants to stay?
This is why he lied, Gwyn knows. She knows now. She knows all of it: Thomas didn’t want her to fight. He didn’t want her to blame him, or feel hurt. He didn’t want to be the bad guy. He just wanted to leave.
This isn’t a simple infidelity, he had said. How right he had been. And how wrong.
Gwyn takes a final drag and puts out the joint with her thumb and index finger. A quick tap of the base. And puts the rest back in the walnut box, slides it under the sink. Then she wets her fingers, runs them along the bridge of her nose. Steadies herself.
He still doesn’t know that she knows the truth. Because he underestimated Gwyn in the worst way. He underestimated the great lengths she would go to to try to understand him. To try to meet him wherever he needed to go.
He underestimated how much she loved him.
So now, on the eve of their thirty-fifth anniversary, he isn’t the only one with something he is trying to hide. And Gwyn won’t be the only one asking the question: Can you ever know anyone?
Maitri.
Forgiveness.
No.
Not tonight.
part two
unexpected guests
Maggie
They are having a divorce party.
They are having a divorce party. Maggie knew this coming in. She knew most of this coming in. And yet, to hear them talk about the actual event, to have the event be this close to them, makes it feel more immediate. And certainly more bizarre. Everything here feels bizarre. Beneath these hardwood floors, soft curtains. Beneath these enormous windows looking out over the ocean and the clouds and the rest of everything.
And still. A small, arguably reasonable voice enters into her head, asks a question she is not sure she wants to answer—Who are you to judge? Why would you even want to?
Maggie was nine years old when her mother left them. There was nothing like a party—nothing like an announcement, even. Maybe Maggie would have been better off with some kind of ceremony. But her mother simply walked out the door on an otherwise typical Tuesday night, and no one even told Maggie it happened. For the first couple of weeks, her father pretended Jen Lyons Mackenzie (age twenty-nine, landscape architect, Aries) had gone on a trip—an extended vacation back out to Eugene to visit her parents. Maybe Eli was hoping it would turn out to be true, or true enough. That, at the panic-inducing age of twenty-nine, Jen had been rash in her decision to depart, would come to her senses and come back to them. But what kind of judgment was Eli using, hiding the reality? Her father was trying to save Maggie, by choosing which pieces of the truth she got to see. Which was the surest way to never save anyone.
She hoists her bag higher on her shoulder, follows Nate up the stairs, toward his childhood bedroom, and tries not to focus on how today is starting to feel like that. A day of hidden truths: incredible finances, childhood friends, creepy two-hundred-person parties.
Instead, she focuses on the several black-and-white photographs lining the staircase. There are gorgeous photos of the family, and enormous landscape photographs, mostly of Montauk—though, not surprising, she is mostly drawn to the ones with Nate in them. But then her eyes catch on the one at the very top of the stairs, a large eight-by-ten: Gwyn and Thomas in the front seat of an old pickup truck, the highway behind them, Thomas’s arm straight out in a way that suggests to Maggie that he is the one shooting the photo. Gwyn, meanwhile, is kissing his neck. And he is laughing. He is really laughing.
Maggie stops in front of it, runs her finger along the black frame. It is a nice picture, but when she looks up to ask Nate about it, he is not there. He has gone on ahead, without her, which is her first real indication that he may actually be affected by what he’s heard in the living room.
He’s left his bedroom door open for her. It is a corner room, small, with wood planks lining the walls and a square window near the ceiling that is the only source of light. It looks like a boat cabin, in its way, covered with too much blue: blue comforter and carpet. Blue bike in the corner. She goes right to it—the bike—runs her hands along the seat.
“This was your room?” she says.
