What?
“You’re kidding,” Nora says. “How on earth did that happen?”
A great question—I’m thrilled she’s asked it—but Apple moves right on.
“Who knows?” Apple gives a dismissive wave with nails as red and shiny as her namesake. “Anyway, when the whole wisdom-of-the-elders approach didn’t work, my mother went the direct route instead. ‘He’s after our money.’ And ‘We’re better than that.’ We are. Like she was marrying him too, not that she would. That was her point. That, and I was a silly girl who had her head turned around because he was handsome and exciting and in love with me. It sounds mean, right? It sounds like we should be talking about what a bitch my mother was. And she was. However, she was also right. So I blame her because if she could have told me that nicely, if she could have told me in a way that didn’t make her seem like a wealthy, privileged bitch, maybe I would have listened. But she didn’t so I didn’t, and now look where I am.”
She pauses for breath. My mother takes the opportunity to interject, “Where are you, Apple?”
“Right? Exactly!” Apple looks like my mother has just proved her point. “Where am I? Stuck in this shithole. No offense. Raising my kid in a goddamn haunted house.”
Haunted?
“Married to the man she warned me against—no longer handsome, no longer exciting, no longer in love with me, though don’t feel bad: I assure you the feeling is mutual.”
“How did you and Nathan meet?” Nora asks, to remind Apple of a time when her feelings were fresher, fonder.
“Oh, I met Nate before I can remember.” Another dismissive wave. Apple must do her nails herself because Bourne doesn’t have a manicurist. “I met Nate before I was even born. Our families go way back, as they say. Boston society is a small world. So, you know, similar circles: same parties, same dances at the club, same charity benefits. At one of them—I honestly couldn’t tell you which one—we were seated next to each other, got to flirting, got to drinking. But I wasn’t very much older than she is.” With a shiny wave in my direction. “He was older and gorgeous and made my mother furious. There was no way I wasn’t going to fall for him. But now I’m paying for it. Suddenly I have to be worried about leaks and cracks and repairmen who won’t work over the winter. I mean it’s just such a mess down there. Dangerous probably. Who knows how broken really. This should not be my problem. This is not what I signed on for.”
“Why is it?” Nora asks. “Why aren’t these Nathan’s problems rather than yours?”
“Family.” Apple does a little shrug. “Legacy. You know?”
“That’s what you said last week. Family. But…” Nora trails off to ask without asking Why do you care so much about your husband when you care so little about your husband?
“I owe them.”
“Them?” Nora looks as lost as I feel. “Who?”
“My family. Or maybe not all of them but him at least.”
Nora begins, “Your loyalty to your husband is—” Strange? Inconsistent? Misguided? Who knows how she might have finished that sentence.
But Apple laughs. “Not my husband. God, no. My father.”
“Your father?”
“I guess probably it makes sense. Just, you know, grief.”
But it doesn’t make sense. Apple’s father has nothing to do with us. And I am starting to realize we need another plan. Of course Apple isn’t going to start giving out hints in therapy, in the first place because she probably doesn’t know anything but mostly, worse, because she doesn’t care. Whatever she’s upset about, it isn’t what her husband is doing to us.
“What are you grieving?” Nora asks gently.
Apple’s eyebrows go up like she’s surprised. “My father died.” She says this simply, like it should be obvious, like it is something everyone must know, and when she looks back up from the ground at Nora, it is with a melting of her painted face.
“I’m so sorry,” Nora says. “When did he die?”
“Just before we came. That’s why I agreed. I could give a shit about Nathan’s PR stunt. He can drown alone down here for all I care. But some of Daddy’s letters are still here.”
Still here?
“Letters?” Nora says.
“Daddy was a letter writer. Handwriting, stationery, nice pens. He did all his business longhand. He thought email was ruining the art of correspondence and the heart of negotiation. He was pretty out of it the last few years so he was spared the smartphone, but if he hadn’t been dying already, the text message would have finished the job. I know they say you can never really erase an email, but you have to be some kind of tech geek to recover one once you delete it. But letters? Well, you post them, and then they’re out of your hands, in both senses. You send them somewhere, and then you can’t just get rid of them with a keystroke. They’ll remain forever right where the recipient leaves them. I think that’s why they call it hard copy.”
“I’m not sure I follow, Apple,” Nora says.
“I can’t let his name get dragged into … well, any of this. That’s the kind of thing that mattered to him, his name. And now he’s not around to protect it anymore, it has to be my job. That’s why I’m so desperate to find—I don’t know—whatever there is to find. That’s why I’m here. Not for my husband, and not for his father certainly—I couldn’t care less about Duke—for mine. Nathan’s here to reopen. Myself, I’m here to re-close, here to make sure anything well lost stays that way.”
“Well lost?”
“Sometimes it’s important to remember things the way someone worked really hard for you to remember them,” Apple says, “rather than the way they actually were.”
* * *
At the bar later, Nora’s in something of a trance, eyes and mind both unfocused and elsewhere.
On the one hand, the guys are relieved she’s not yelling.
On the other, “Did we break her?” Tom asks me the third time he’s asked for another and she hasn’t heard.
“Weird day,” my Voice says.
“At the clinic?” Frank, who’s working his ass off since Nora is not, is ready to entirely forgive this fact if she will even incrementally forgive everything else.
“You know she can’t say.” I have that one saved. Frank and I have had this conversation before.
“Yeah, yeah, doctor-patient blah-blah-blah.”
“Nora’s not a doctor,” Hobart says, a point he makes often because it annoys her.
“You’d think a shrink would be saner,” Zach adds, same reason.
“They’re the craziest ones,” says Tom.
They’re baiting her. Usually they tease her because it’s all in good fun because they know she knows they adore her. Tonight it’s an apology, a peace offering, a plea that they might all return to normal, that she forgive them.
This wouldn’t work except that her mind is so far elsewhere it’s shed even her fury. She’s not angry with them at the moment because she’s not really here with them. They’re relieved—me too—but also confused, worried, waiting.