Leave the World Behind Read online

  3

  AMANDA VOLUNTEERED TO GO TO THE GROCERY. THEY’D passed a store, and she retraced that path. She drove slowly, windows down.

  The store was frigid, brightly lit, wide-aisled. She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro, even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. She bought organic hot dogs and inexpensive buns and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito’s vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared! She bought a three-pack of paper towels, and a spray-on sunscreen, and aloe, because the children had inherited their father’s pale skin. She bought those fancy crackers you put out when there were guests, and Ritz crackers, which everyone liked best, and crumbly white cheddar cheese and extra-garlicky hummus and an unsliced hard salami and those carrots that are tumbled around until they’re the size of a child’s fingers. She bought packages of cookies from Pepperidge Farm and three pints of Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream and a Duncan Hines boxed mix for a yellow cake and a Duncan Hines tub of chocolate frosting with a red plastic lid, because parenthood had taught her that on a vacation’s inevitable rainy day you could while away an hour by baking a boxed cake. She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black. She bought a bottle of olive oil and a box of Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnuts, a bunch of bananas and a bag of white nectarines and two plastic packages of strawberries, a dozen brown eggs, a plastic box of prewashed spinach, a plastic container of olives, some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange. She bought three pounds of ground beef and two packages of hamburger buns, their bottoms dusty with flour, and a jar of locally made pickles. She bought four avocados and three limes and a sandy bundle of cilantro even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. It was more than two hundred dollars, but never mind.

  “I’m going to need some help.” The man placing every item into brown paper bags was maybe in high school but maybe not. He wore a yellow T-shirt and had brown hair and an overall square affect, like he’d been carved from a block of wood. There was some stirring, watching his hands at work, but vacations did that, didn’t they, made you horny, made everything seem possible, a life completely different than the one you normally inhabited. She, Amanda, might be a mother temptress, sucking on a postadolescent’s hot tongue in the parking lot of the Stop and Shop. Or she might just be another woman from the city spending too much money on too much food.

  The boy, or maybe he was a man, put the bags into a cart and followed Amanda into the parking lot. He loaded them into the trunk, and she gave him a five-dollar bill.

  She sat, the engine idling, to see if she had cell-phone service, and the endorphin rush of the arriving emails—Jocelyn, Jocelyn, Jocelyn, their agency director, one of the clients, two missives sent to the entire office by the head project manager—was almost as sexual as that flutter over the bag boy.

  There was nothing important happening at work, but it was a relief to know that for certain rather than worry that there was. Amanda turned on the radio. She half recognized the song that was playing. She stopped at the gas station and bought Clay a pack of Parliaments. They were on vacation. That night, after hamburgers and hot dogs and grilled zucchini, after bowls of ice cream with cookies crumbled on top of them and maybe some sliced strawberries too, maybe they’d fuck—not make love, that was for home, fucking was for vacation, sweaty and humid and tantalizingly foreign in someone else’s Pottery Barn sheets, then go outside, slip into that heated pool, and let the water wash them clean, and smoke one cigarette each and talk about what you talked about after you’d been married for as long as they’d been: finances, the children, fever dreams of real estate (How nice it would be to have a house like this all their own!). Or they’d talk about nothing, the other pleasure of a long marriage. They’d watch television. She drove back to the painted brick house.

  4

  CLAY BOUND THE TOWEL AROUND HIS WAIST. THE GESTURE of opening double doors was inherently grand. It was cold inside, and very hot outside. The trees had been pruned to keep the shade from the pool. All that sun made you lightheaded. His damp feet left marks on the wooden floors. They melted away in seconds. Clay cut through the kitchen and out via the side door. He retrieved his cigarettes from the glove box, wincing at the gravel. He sat on the front lawn in the shade of a tree and smoked. He should feel bad about this, but tobacco was the foundation of the nation. Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.

  It was pleasant to sit outside, near naked, the sun and air on your skin reminding you that you’re just another animal. He could have sat there nude. There were no other houses, there were no signs of human life, save an honor-system farm stand near a half mile back. There had been a time they’d been so naked together, Archie a wisp of bone and giggles sharing the tub with his parents, but you grew out of that unless you were a hippie.

  He couldn’t hear the children carrying on in the pool. The house between him and them was not so large, but the trees absorbed their noise as cotton might blood. Clay felt safe, cossetted, embraced, the rampart of hedge keeping the world at bay. As though he could see it, he pictured Amanda, adrift on an inflatable lounge, pretending dignity (hard to do: even the duck lacks that somehow, the water’s undulations always ridiculous) and reading Elle. Clay unknotted the towel and lay back. The grass was itchy under his back. He stared at the sky. Without really thinking about it—but also kind of thinking about it—his right hand wandered down the front of his J.Crew suit, fumbled with his penis, gone cold and shy from the water. Vacations made you horny.

  Clay felt light, unfettered, though he was not fettered by much. He was supposed to be reviewing a book for the New York Times Book Review and had brought his laptop. He only needed nine hundred words. In a couple of hours he’d put the family to bed, fill a tumbler with ice and vodka, sit shirtless on the deck, laptop illuminating the night, smoke cigarettes, and the thoughts would come and the nine hundred words would follow. Clay was diligent but also (he knew it) a little lazy. He wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything.

  Clay had tenure, and Amanda had the title of director, but they did not have level floors and central air-conditioning. The key to success was having parents who had succeeded. Still, they could pantomime ownership for a week. His penis jerked itself toward the sun, a yoga salutation, bouncing, then stiff at the house’s allure. Marble countertops and a Miele washer and Clay had a full erection, his dick hovering over his belly like the searching needle in a compass.

  Clay ground out his cigarette guiltily. He was never without breath mints or chewing gum. He tied the towel around his waist and went into the house. The garbage slid out on casters from beneath the countertops. Clay ran the butt under the faucet (imagine if he burned the house down?) then buried it in the refuse. There was lemon soap in a glass dispenser by the sink. From the window he could see his family. Rose was lost in a game of her own. Archie was doing pull-ups on the diving board, hoisting his skinny body heavenward, his bony shoulders the pink of undercooked meat.

  Sometimes, looking at his family, he was flooded with this desire to do for them. I’ll build you a house or knit you a sweater, whatever is required. Pursued by wolves? I’ll make a bridge of my body so you can cross that ravine. They were all that mattered to him, but of course they didn’t really understand that, because such was the parental cont
ract. Clay found a baseball game on the radio, though he did not care about baseball. He thought the description comforting, the play-by-play like being read a bedtime story. Clay dumped two packages of the raw meat into a large bowl—Archie would eat three hamburgers—and diced a white onion, mixed that in, pinched in salt and ground in pepper, added Worcestershire sauce like daubing perfume onto a wrist. He molded the burgers and lined them up on a plate. Clay sliced cheddar cheese, halved the buns. The towel was slipping from his waist, so he washed the raw meat from his hands and tied it more tightly. He filled a glass bowl with potato chips and ferried the food outside. Every step felt familiar, like he’d been throwing together summertime meals in that kitchen all his life.

  “Dinner in a bit,” he called. No one acknowledged this. Clay switched on the propane, used the long lighter to make the flame catch. Half naked, he tended the raw meat, thinking he must resemble a caveman, some long-forgotten ancestor. Who was to say that one hadn’t stood once on that very spot? Millennia earlier or even just centuries, some shirtless Iroquois in hide loincloth, stoking a fire that the flesh of his flesh might dine on flesh. The thought made him smile.

  5

  THEY ATE ON THE DECK, IN DISHABILLE, AN ASSEMBLAGE OF towels in garish colors and ketchup-stained paper napkins. Hamburgers the size of hockey pucks inside airy bread. Rose was particularly susceptible to the tart charms of vinegar potato chips. Crumbs and grease on her chin. Amanda loved that Rose could still reach girlishness. Her mind was one thing, her body another: it was the hormones in the milk or the food chain or the water supply or the air or who knew.

  It was so hot that the parents didn’t even bid the children shower, let them sprawl on the gingham-upholstered sofa in their fleshy bodies, Archie lank and Rose lush: visible ribs and a constellation of moles, dimpled elbows and a downy chin. Rose wanted to watch a cartoon, and Archie was secretly comforted by animation—wistful for his own youth! His skin prickled in the air-conditioned chill, the unfamiliar sofa was soft, and his mind and mouth felt thick and slow from the day’s heat or exertion. He was too tired to get up for another hamburger, gone cold, doused in ketchup, which he’d eat standing up in the kitchen, the tile cold underfoot. In a minute, he thought, but his body was pleading with hunger from those hours in the pool or maybe just the hours cooped up in the car, his body always felt this way.

  Amanda went to shower. The thing was fixed in the ceiling, the water falling onto you as rain might. She set it as hot as possible to banish the residue of the SPF lotion. That stuff always felt vaguely poisonous, an ounce of prevention, etc. She wore her hair neither short nor long, without bangs, which made her look youthful in a way that was not good in an office environment. Two different kinds of vanity at odds—a desire to look capable rather than girlish. Amanda knew that she looked like the sort of woman she was. You could read it on her from a great distance. Her poise and posture, her clothes and grooming, all said who she was.

  Her body still contained the secondhand warmth of the sun. The pool water had barely been a respite, the tepidity of bathwater. Amanda’s limbs felt thick and superb. She wanted to lie down and roll away into sleep. Her fingers strayed to the parts of herself where they felt best, in search not of some internal pleasure but something more cerebral: the confirmation that she, her shoulders, her nipples, her elbows, all of it, existed. What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.

  Amanda wrapped her hair into a white towel like a woman in a certain kind of film. She spread lotion across her skin, pulled on the loose cotton pants she favored in bed, summertime, and an old T-shirt with a logo that no longer meant anything to her. It was impossible to keep track of the provenance of all their earthly possessions. The shirt’s cotton so worn that it shone. She felt alive and if not sexy, then sexual; the promise mattered more than the transaction. She still loved him, nothing like that, and he knew her body—it had been eighteen years, of course he knew it—but she was human, wouldn’t have minded novelty.

  She peeked out of the door to the living room. Her children looked dazed, fatted, odalisques on the couch. Her husband was bent over his phone.

  “Bed in twenty minutes.” Amanda gave Clay a suggestive look, then closed the door behind her. She stepped out of her pants and into the cool percale of the bed. She did not draw the curtains—let them watch, the deer, the owls, the stupid flightless turkeys—admire Clay’s still impressive latissimus dorsi (he rowed at the New York Sports Club twice weekly), which she loved to sink her fingers into, catch the pleasant stink of his hairy armpits, applaud the practiced flick of his tongue against her.

  The house was too far from the world to offer cellular service, but there was WiFi, a preposterously long password (018HGF234WRH357XIO) to keep out whom—the deer, the owls, the stupid flightless turkeys? She tapped the glass, spelling it out, random as Ouija or the rosary, then the thing took and the emails arrived, piling the one atop the other. Forty-one! She felt so necessary, so missed, so loved.

  In her personal account she learned that things were on sale, that the book club she’d been meaning to join was scheduling a fall get-together, that the New Yorker had written about a Bosnian filmmaker. In her work account, there were questions, there were concerns, and people were seeking Amanda’s participation, her opinion, her guidance. Everyone had received her out-of-office reply, sunny and authoritative, but she broke the promise to be in touch upon her return. No, don’t do X. Yes, email Y. Ask so-and-so about such-and-such. Just a reminder to follow up with that person about this matter.

  Her arm grew tingly from the exertion of holding aloft the too-small phone. She flipped onto her stomach, the sheets warm from her body, so the transitive warmth against her vulva was that of her own body, and flopping around in the bed was an act of masturbation. She felt clean, ready to feel dirty, but she worked her way through the emails, distracting herself until at last Clay came to her, smelling of furtive cigarettes and the lemon wedges in his vodka.

  The heat from the shower had softened her spine the way room temperature does a stick of butter. The occasional vinyasa class had made her more attentive to her bones. She let them give. She relaxed away from her usual resolve not to do the filthiest things they could conjure between the two of them. She let him knead his fingers into her hair and hold her head firmly but gently against the pillow, her throat a passage, a void to be filled. She let herself moan more loudly than she might have at home, because there was that long hall between them and the children’s rooms. She bucked her hips back and up to meet his mouth, and later—it felt an eternity but was only twenty minutes—she took his wilting penis into her mouth, marveling at the taste of her own body.

  “Christ.” Clay was wheezing.

  “You have to quit smoking.” She worried about a cardiac event. They were not so young. Every mother had contemplated the loss of a child; Amanda had no emotions left around the theoretical death of her husband. She’d love again, she told herself. He was a good man.

  “I do.” Clay did not mean it. There was already so little pleasure in modern life.

  Amanda stood, stretched, happily sticky, wanting a cigarette herself; the dizzying effect would put her at some remove from what they had just done, which you needed after sex, even with a familiar. That wasn’t really me! She opened the door, and the night was shocking with noise. Crickets or whatever bug that was, various maybe sinister footfalls in the dried leaves of the woods beyond the lawn, the stealthy breeze moving everything, maybe the vegetal growth actually made a sound, even, the barest scritch, scritch of the advancing grass, the heartbeat throb of the oak leaves flowing with chlorophyll.

  Amanda had a feeling like being watched, but there was no one out there watching her, was there? An involuntary shiver at the very idea, then a retreat into the adult illusion of safety.

  The two of them crept, naked as Neanderthals, across the deck, the only light a slice of it falling through the glass door. Clay heaved the
cover off the hot tub, and they sank into its froth, the steam obscuring his glasses, a satisfied sensual grin. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness. His pale flesh in stark relief. She could see him as he was, but she loved him.

  6

  NO ONE HAD BOUGHT CEREAL. ARCHIE WANTED A SPECIFIC taste less than the feel of processed grain gone soft enough in milk. He yawned.

  “Sorry, champ. I’ll make you an omelet.” His dad had this stupid game of being the best at making breakfast. Though he was a good cook—he always put butter on the toast and then put it back into the toaster oven so it melted into the bread until the thing was sloppy like someone had already chewed it—there was something sad in the way he needed attention for it.

  Amanda was spreading sunscreen on Rose’s back. The television was on, but no one was actually watching it. She wiped her hands on her own bare legs and put the bottle into the tote bag. “Rose, you’re bringing three books? For one afternoon at the beach?”

  “We’ll be gone all day. What if I run out of something to read?”

  “The bag is already very heavy—”

  Rose didn’t want to whine, it just sort of happened.