After the hospital, the apologies, the forgiveness, the real sweetness after the crisis, she did what she had accused him of doing that first year. She ran away. She went to an inpatient facility in Pennsylvania geared toward the recuperation of severely depressed women for six months. She talked about her mother, started her memoir, and sold the first four chapters for much more of an advance than he had received. His parents gave them enough money so that he could hire a nanny on a salary for the year on the condition that he find them a better life and a stable job. His book appeared on some end-of-year lists, and he took the opportunity and wrote every contact he knew before he landed a tenure-track position at a small college in upstate New York. The Main Street looked like a town in New England. Cynthia had always wanted to live in New England.
He couldn’t help but believe that it was all because of money—the having it and then the not having it. Yes, there was postpartum depression and the new-parent feeling of being caged inside one’s home. Of course there was the psychologically resonant fact that she was now a mother, just like her own mother, who had committed suicide when she was ten years old. Of course it was the anniversary of her death. Of course there was her brain chemistry and the alcohol abuse and antidepressant adjustments. Still it felt as though none of it would have happened if he had simply been able to keep them in the easy, bountiful style that had accompanied the first months after he sold the book. If they had continued feeling that optimism about the future of their lives together. If they hadn’t lived in New York, among so many rich people, who sat in the playgrounds with Cynthia and him and told them about their private schools and tropical vacations in which someone else watched the baby. If he hadn’t turned money cop and rejected requests for babysitters and cars and takeout and therapy. If he hadn’t become her jailer just as much as the demanding, adorable Phee.
And now, with the possibility of owning a home, his secure position, the lower cost of childcare, the money Cynthia was making with her book, it seemed like they should be feeling carefree once again. But this time he was the one who felt trapped. He was so frightened of Cynthia, of what would happen should she relapse. The pressure of being a tenure-track professor meant he felt he always had to be doing more. He hadn’t realized how much public transportation and the pedestrian lifestyle suited him—allowing him time to think, allowing him space between his work and his home. Reliance on the car depressed him. Cynthia was only attracted to houses that were about one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars more than they could afford. Real estate conversations always ended in breakdowns. Now that Phee was in the college day care, it felt like he was running his ass to the ground while Cynthia had endless time to perfect her book. She even demanded she get to work nights while he put Phee to bed （he paused here to say that the possibility of the affair with John was nearly beside the point）。 They were stuck in a dynamic in which he couldn’t refuse her anything—couldn’t say that she had plenty of time to work given that her memoir-writing class qualified as less than part-time. Couldn’t say that yes, she picked up Phee at three and watched her until he returned home at six, but those three hours were nothing when you considered he was waking up at five to keep his head above water, as well as not working on his new novel, the only thing in this world, other than his daughter, that meant something to him.
He let the words out in a torrent, not allowing time to interject or respond.
“So,” he said when he finished, “is there more wine?”
I nodded and gestured inside. He told me he would come to the point when he returned, then went into the house. I almost asked him to find the mixed nuts and bring out a bowl, but then thought better of it. His wife, I’m sure, was an asker. I lit another cigarette, though I didn’t want it.
When he returned, he used the arms of the chair to lift his feet from the ground, tucked and folded his legs into a yogic version of crisscross-applesauce, lowered himself into the seat, and continued.
“So I woke up this morning and thought, Cynthia got to run away.”
I was surprised by his harshness. To call a suicide attempt “running away,” that wasn’t right. “You can’t really call it that,” I said. “She was in crisis.”
“But the motivating factor of all of it was escaping. She wanted to escape. And she did. I had to stick around, and she read the complete works of Kawabata on a deck chair in some sanatorium that looked like Mann’s Magic Mountain. Did she ask me before she decided to run? No. Did she prepare me? She did not. So.” He shrugged, caustic and nonchalant.
“So you want to take revenge.”
“Revenge? I don’t know. Quid pro quo is more like it. Nothing extreme—just a few days to escape. Maybe I’ll write, maybe I’ll just clear enough space out that I could write. Or maybe I’ll find something to write about.” And he looked at me as if I might be his subject.
“Here?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“But,” I protested, not understanding quite why I was protesting, for the sake of logic, maybe, or out of female solidarity, perhaps, or because as he had told his story I had felt a growing impatience and disdain for him that I could not yet comprehend or admit, “excuse me, but you, well, when she tried to—when she left, if that’s the right word, you knew where she was. Maybe not emotionally, but physically. She doesn’t know where you are.”
“No, she does, well, basically she does.”
“How?” I was confused. I had checked his phone when I returned from the gas station and it was still on the fritz. We had no landline at the cabin—he couldn’t have called her.
“You told her.”
My throat tightened and my heart pounded so thunderously it reverberated in my armpits. I felt the need to keep the appearance of eye contact with him and felt myself putting on a face of false surprise, squinting at his forehead, as though I were trying very hard to understand what he was saying.
“You wrote her that text message from my phone. About needing time.”
“What?” My brow was still furrowed and my head was now shaking back and forth very quickly.
“I have my laptop in my bag. I can see my text messages on my computer.”
I pushed words out of my mouth. “Well—drunk—you must have…”
“No, you wrote it. I didn’t write that. I know that I didn’t. It’s okay,” he said, smiling warmly at me. “It’s interesting.”
“Did she write back?”
“She did. We went back and forth a bit.” He unfurled his legs from beneath him, lowered them to the deck, and used his heels to lift his buttocks up in a pelvic stretch. “She said I could have a few days.”
“But do you want to stay a few days?”
“I do,” he said, lifting his arms high and wide, his voice strangled from his stretch. “That is, if you’ll have me.”
“Did she—admit to—John?”
“No,” he said casually. “But she’d be the first one to tell you she’s a liar. So who knows.”
He clasped his hands behind his head, looked over at me, and flashed his matinee idol grin, his teeth and lower lip stained purple from the wine.