—
And after that martini (and the wine that followed at dinner), Pam did not drink again.
For a week she felt unbelievably awful. She did not sleep, her left hand shook sometimes, and once she briefly thought she saw a person who was not there. She told Ted that she had some kind of bug, but he tested her for Covid.
After ten days of this—she was feeling better—she told Ted that she was going back to the city, and he said, “Would you mind if I stayed here?” And she said Absolutely not, she was simply tired of being in the Hamptons, this is what she said, and he was pleasant about it, and so she went to New York.
When she was back in New York—they lived on East Seventieth Street, very close to Central Park—she walked through their apartment, and she thought: I hate it all. I just hate it all. It was quite a moment for her. Even the sight of her sons’ bedrooms did not move her.
After a few nights of being back in the city stone cold sober, she called Bob. “I’m going to fly up to Maine and see you,” she said. She had not seen Bob in more than two years; he would visit her occasionally when he came to New York to see his brother, but of course he had not come to New York during the pandemic.
“When?” Bob asked.
“Tomorrow. If that’s all right,” Pam said.
*
When Bob told Margaret about this, she simply raised an eyebrow and said, “Lucky you.”
And of course Bob did not sleep well that night. He lay awake in the dark and heard Margaret’s tiny snores beside him and he thought about Pam, and he thought about their early days in New York, and yet he could not find a sense of these memories being real, and this disturbed him. It wasn’t until he remembered Pam living with him and Susan and also their mother one summer in Maine after their junior year in college, living together in Bob’s small childhood home in Shirley Falls—it was not until he remembered this that Pam became herself to him again. Her long brown hair that she and Susan had ironed one day on the ironing board, the way she would laugh with his mother…He remembered one summer night sitting in the living room with the three of them, and his mother mentioned something about birds that had once fallen down the chimney, adding, “Boy, I bet that toasted their tail feathers,” and Pam said, “I’d say it boiled their eggs.”
—
Pam.
He had loved her, oh he had. The energy of her!
*
Pam was driving quickly and well from the airport. The car held its own on the highway, and she turned up the radio and sang along. It was an hour’s drive, and she passed by many trees and also huge slabs of rock with muscular-looking ice attached to them. When she pulled off the highway to enter the town of Crosby, Maine, she was disconcerted by the sight of it. There was dirty snow on the ground, and it was cloudy, and when she checked into the hotel she was taken aback by how rudimentary it was.
Never mind.
She turned up the heat and sat on the queen-size bed—the place was clean, at least. And then she called Bob. “Room 202,” she said. She put her mask back on. Pam was very germophobic.
*
What Bob and Pam each experienced at the same moment was a sense of shock at the sight of the other one. It was not just that each looked older to the other; there was another difference at work here. Pam, to Bob’s eyes, looked rich. Her clothes were rich clothes is all he could think. Slacks that were gray, and a fitted top of dark blue. Her hair—thinner than he had remembered—was cut below her chin. But her eyes smiled at him with a familiarity.
Pam, for her part, could have died at the sight of this man, Bob Burgess, her first husband. It wasn’t just that he looked old: He looked schlumpy. His jeans were baggy, and his jacket was so old that the collar was somewhat shredded. This thought went through her mind: He could be working at a gas station. And the very moment she thought that, she understood that she had become a terrific snob, what was wrong with working at a gas station? His hair was badly cut and fell across the top of his eyes. Bob! She put her arms out and they hugged lightly, turning their heads with their masks on. Then Pam went and sat on the bed, and Bob slowly lowered himself into the armchair in the corner of the room.
“You look good,” Pam said.
“You do too,” Bob said.
—
And then she began to talk. As she talked, Bob became the old Bob to her, the one who was so familiar, and she talked for a long while without stopping. “I was a drunk,” she said, “a full-blown drunk,” and she described how she would drink in her dressing room, and Bob never stopped looking at her once. She told him about her friends, how dull they were, how they only spoke of certain things and always made their families out to be better than she knew they were. When she paused, Bob said, “How are the boys?” He removed his mask and put it onto the small table beside him.
Pam took a deep breath and said, “Oh, the boys. Bob. They’ve left me.”
Bob said, “That’s what kids do, I think.”
And Pam said, “Yes. Especially boys.” She told him that Paul was in finance in San Diego, and Eric was living in San Francisco. Pam paused for quite a long time and then she said, “Eric wears women’s clothes.”
Bob said, “Really? Is he, you know, transitioning?”
“He says no, he just likes to wear women’s clothes, so he does.” Pam hesitated. “Of course, Ted hates that, Ted is such an intolerant asshole, so small, and he says he doesn’t want Eric to do that in New York, and so Eric said, Well, then he won’t come back to New York. And with the pandemic he hasn’t.”
Pam’s eyes filled with tears.
But she wanted to get back to her own life, Bob saw that, and so he encouraged her to speak more about her days of being a drunk, which as far as he knew had ended only about two weeks ago. “That’s right,” she said, when he asked her to clarify that. “About two weeks ago. Huh.”
When she told him what she had heard going on between Lydia Robbins and her husband, and she told him graphically, Bob closed his eyes. A sense of heavy fatigue overtook him, and he wished she would stop. “And then he was gasping, calling out Lydia, Lydia—”
Bob put his hand up and said, “Pam, I get what you’re saying, I don’t need to hear the whole thing.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. After a moment, Pam said, “Awfully nice to see you, Bobby.”
“You too, Pam.”
—
Pam turned her gaze to look out the window. She took her mask off and tossed it onto the bed, and then she looked up at the ceiling and Bob saw that her chin was trembling. When she looked back at Bob her eyes had become watery again. She said, “Bobby, what I’m here to tell you is, I hate my life. I just hate it.”
And Bob nodded slowly and said, “I get that.”
“I know you do.”
