He told her then about how when he was little he had spoken to his mother about not liking Christmas and how she had become angry and started to cry and he had walked away. “I think of that a lot, Lucy, and it just kills me every time. But I was a kid. I didn’t really get how hard her life was.”
Lucy stopped walking and looked at him. “Oh Bob,” she said softly. And then Bob understood. She had heard him. She had absorbed this from him in a way that neither one of his wives ever could.
6
By February the days were starting to get longer, but it was still very cold. And yet when the sun shone, as it did only on certain days, you could see that the days really were lengthening. Bob Burgess had noticed this for years, and people in Maine generally understood these lengthening days, even unconsciously, and with that came a rising of hope. But for Bob right now life was a strain. When he spoke to his brother, Jim was terse, and this reopened the wound for Bob that had always been there. Margaret continued to be busy with her church. She came home one Friday and said, “Avery Mason is getting himself on the board of the church. Because Ted Wiley died and there’s been that opening— Well, it turns out Avery Mason has been angling for the position and he’s going to get it.” Bob barely gave this a thought—it did not seem to him that Margaret thought about it much either. “You mean the guy who sleeps through every service?” Bob asked, and Margaret shrugged and said, “The very one.”
But Avery Mason, without Bob or Margaret knowing it yet, was getting ready to threaten Margaret’s job.
Lucy went back to New York for a couple of weeks, and then she and William were going from there to Florida for one more week. When she was in New York she sent Bob a picture of the view from her New York studio window of the skyline of Manhattan. Something about that view almost brought Bob to his knees. How he missed New York! But with his brother being so unpleasant to him (Bob still did not know where Jim and Helen had gone on their trip) he did not feel he could go to New York, and so he stayed where he was in Crosby, Maine. And he also missed Pam, his first wife, who still lived in New York; Bob had not seen her since before the pandemic. They had remained friendly since their divorce more than twenty-five years earlier.
—
But then, of all things, on one of these days—it was overcast, the clouds low and gray—in the morning, as he was heading out the door to go to the post office, Bob received a telephone call from Pam. She said that she was coming to Crosby to see him. “I need to see you. And you don’t seem to come to New York anymore.”
“When are you coming?” Bob asked; he had stopped on the stairway. And she said she was flying in tomorrow and would rent a car and stay at the hotel right there in town. “Are you okay?” he asked, and she said, “I don’t know, Bob. I just do not know.”
*
Here is what had been happening to Pam:
During March of the first days of the pandemic, Pam and her second husband, Ted, had left their apartment in New York City and moved to their house in East Hampton, where they thought they would be safer from the disease. The house was big: Pam and her husband were very rich, and their house represented this wealth. It had a large central staircase and five bedrooms, all with long drapes that Pam had designed to blow in the summer breeze, but of course there were no summer breezes in March.
Anyway. This is the setting in which Pam emerged as a monstrous alcoholic. She became quite impressive in the secretiveness and ingenuity with which she carried this off.
Pam was sixty-four years old by then and was not yet a grandmother, which worried her, and her two sons were no longer living in New York, which made her sad. And also her favorite son, the younger one, who lived in San Francisco, was causing her distress of a different kind. Her husband, Ted, had been (honestly) tiresome to her for many years. She still thought of herself as young but understood that she was not. She had a number of friends, many in East Hampton as well, and yet—this had felt rather sudden to her—she could barely stand them. They had become unbelievably insipid. Lydia Robbins was the one Pam considered to be her best friend. Lydia was ten years younger than Pam and had an energy that Pam enjoyed. As they took their walks, Lydia’s full glossy dark hair would fall across her face frequently as she turned to look at Pam, nodding at something Pam had said. But after they shared their confidences, Pam felt she couldn’t bear Lydia.
Didn’t anyone ever have anything interesting to say? They talked of movies they were all watching, of series on Netflix, they spoke about their children, but always carefully and in terms meant to hide their private disappointments, and they talked about one another. Of course.
—
In her dressing room—Pam’s private dressing room off the master bedroom, windowless but the size of a small bedroom—Pam hid vodka and wine bottles with screw tops. At five o’clock each evening she went into her dressing room, and from beneath her many hanging gowns she lifted the huge bath towel with which she had covered these bottles, and she drank from one of them steadily. If it was a wine bottle she would drink half of it, standing there wiping her arm across her mouth, and she always had gum to mask the smell, a certain kind that seemed sharper in flavor, and that was the start of her night. If it was a vodka bottle, she would drink three or four swallows. Then she would go downstairs and join her husband in the parlor for their pre-dinner martini, which he always made and handed to her, saying, “Here you are, my darling,” as though they were living in a British country house a century before. “Thank you,” she always said. She always said it politely.
Oh poor Pam!
Seriously, you should feel sorry for her.
—
And then they were vaccinated, and another summer came around, and there had been parties to go to once more. Pam returned to New York City occasionally, but her life had become the one in the Hamptons.
And yet as fall arrived again, Pam understood: Life, as she had known it, had ended. As the pandemic continued and boosters were needed, and new mutations kept arriving, Pam understood: Her life had taken some strange and horrible turn. She began to drink with even more of a vengeance, she could feel it, every night she was drinking with a vengeance, these were the words she thought of as she tipped the wine bottle to her mouth in her dressing room. Drinking with a vengeance.
It was a terrible secret. And it was a secret: There was nobody she could tell this to, and what did that say about the kind of friends she had? Were they all drinking secretly too? She had no idea. Secret means nobody knows.
—
Of course, there was the problem of what to do with the empty bottles.
—
When a few of them piled up, Pam put them into a plastic bag and shoved them into the bottom of her huge leather bag. And then she would drive, either to the grocery store or to the next town, Southampton, or even sometimes to Amagansett, and throw the bottles into a public trash bin. It came to her one day that everything was captured on camera now, and so she worried that she would be caught on some tape, a middle-aged (older than that, really) woman slipping these bags into public garbage bins. Sometimes she stopped to put just ten dollars’ worth of gas into her car so that while she waited by the pump she could nonchalantly dump her garbage bag into the trash bin the gas station had right there.
And, of course, she had to keep her supply up. She had cases of wine delivered to the house when she knew her husband would not be home, but this took work, and often she found herself in liquor stores all over Long Island; there were endless villages or towns to do this in. She bought vodka and the screw-top bottles of wine, talking gaily to the men behind the counter about “entertaining” a few people—“All vaccinated,” she would say brightly, though she understood that they did not care. She thought of these different men—because it seemed only men that were selling liquor—she thought of them as drug dealers.
—
Pam had married her money. Having come from western Massachusetts, an only child raised by older parents, she had gone to college at the University of Maine, where she’d met her first husband, Bob Burgess. She and Bob moved to New York as soon as they graduated, and what a blast they had those first years! They lived in a tiny apartment in the Village, and Pam had worked at a lab at Albert Einstein College, she was a scientist, she worked with parasitologists there (this was where she met William Gerhardt for the first time, Lucy’s now ex-husband; Pam had had an affair with him eventually), and Bob, after he finished law school, had worked for Legal Aid, and they made just enough money to get by.
When she met her second husband, Ted, he was already wealthy, a top executive at a pharmaceutical company. And then with the pandemic that company produced one of the vaccines and it was like a slot machine at a gambling joint, money just poured in. In her youth, Pam had not thought about money. It was not until she met Ted that she discovered this entirely different world in New York City, and she loved it. Or she became addicted to it. Which was another way she thought about it. She could not go back. Parties and receptions and tables at the opera and so many different clothes! And with Ted she had her two boys.
Bob had not been able to have children, his sperm count was not high enough, and Pam often thought that if he had been able to have kids, she would have stayed married to him; she thought she would not have had the affairs that she did.
—
So there Pam was, drinking with a vengeance night after night.
—
Then this happened, and it was ridiculous: Pam was in her dressing room one afternoon, it was in February, when one more variant of the virus had come and gone in New York—she had known people who got sick, Lydia Robbins had gotten sick two months before, but Pam had not. That afternoon she was in her dressing room, it was earlier than she usually started her drinking, this was around four o’clock, and she heard her husband come into the bedroom. She closed the door of the dressing room quietly and waited, even as she heard him call her name: “Pam?”
And then she heard him say, “It’s safe, she’s not here.” And Lydia Robbins said, “Oh goody, goody, let’s hurry,” and Pam listened as Lydia performed on Ted a sexual act that Pam had long ago stopped performing on him. It was astonishing. She heard him almost yelping, “Lydia, Lydia, Lydia!” And then it was over, and she heard them both laughing, she heard him zipping up his pants, and they went into the bathroom briefly—she thought Lydia was brushing her teeth (!)—and they left the bedroom.
—
Pam sat on the floor, drinking from a vodka bottle, and when she went down that evening, her husband, looking the very same as always, said, “May I present you with the perfect martini, my dear?”
“Thank you,” she said.
