Page 17

Sarah

July 12, 1992

Los Angeles

They were packed for Italy. Their clothes neatly folded by Louisa, the nanny, earlier that afternoon. It hadn’t always been Louisa’s job, but Richard had started to let the household staff go after Helen was born. First the cook. Then the housekeeper.

They’re too close, he said. We need more privacy, more of a family feel.

Sarah hadn’t noticed the paranoia at first. The way it was growing, seeping into all aspects of their life. She told herself she didn’t mind. She hadn’t grown up with it all—the staff, the money, the ease. But she had grown used to it. It was a fact that felt sour, a little rotten.

She joined her husband in the living room. She perched on the couch, not fully seated, each muscle engaged, ready to stand. To bolt.

“Have you read the play?” she asked Richard.

It was nighttime in Bel Air and their flight was early. Helen had been put down two hours ago. Helen. The reason she had stayed. The reason she was still trying. Sarah had never known her parents, both dead in a car accident when she was only six months old. She had been raised by her grandmother in Andover, New Hampshire, but the woman didn’t survive to see her graduate college.

Helen deserved more.

In any case, the Lingates abhorred divorce. They thought it was tacky. But mostly, they thought it was expensive. Divorce, Richard always said, split the pie .

“Not yet,” he said.

“Will you promise to read before we go?”

“Why?”

“Because I need to let my agent know you have.”

Sarah stood and picked up his wineglass. Pinched it together with hers. She left him in the living room, tapping out time to the overture that played low in the background. In the kitchen, she refilled both their glasses. For months she had written at the kitchen table while Richard was at golf games or drinks or meetings, only to slide her pages into Helen’s diaper bag as soon as she heard him push through the front door.

She hadn’t meant to hide her work; it had been an impulse. An animal instinct she followed without examination. Maybe it was because he had been a writer once, too. In the early years of their relationship, it had knit them together. They feverishly passed pages back and forth, walked arm in arm discussing their process, their fears. But then, as her career began to soar, his faded. Slowly, her work seemed to rattle him. Or maybe it was her ambition.

When the work became hard for her—after they moved to L.A., after Helen—Richard seemed relieved. It was easier on the marriage, after all, if they had both failed. Together.

But when Helen turned three, the fog lifted. As quickly as it had rolled in, it burned off. Sarah wrote. At first only a sentence or two here, a letter to a friend there. The feeling so new, Sarah worried at the end of every session it might not be there the next day. But it was. And every day, a little bit of her came back, too. Back from the hard early days of motherhood, back from the strangeness of Los Angeles, back from the pressure of Richard’s family. Her work had been there, waiting.

The relief nearly suffocated her.

A new play had poured out of her. As if the words had been gathering behind a dam, mixing and curing until they were ready for the page. When she was done, she let them sit. Just to be sure they really were something. Two weeks later, she pulled them out while she and Helen were at the playground, and she read them in the sunlight next to the sandbox.

They were good.

The dialogue was sharp and biting. The story, heart-wrenching. She packed the play into a manila envelope and sent it to her agent. The days following were excruciating.

“What’s eating you?” Richard had asked a few weeks ago.

“Nothing,” she said.

She still hadn’t told him. She hadn’t told him because Richard had grown used to the Sarah who didn’t write, who arranged flowers, who had idle hobbies and the occasional large credit card bill. It was a life he knew. A wife he knew. One he had always told her he didn’t want. But then, nothing had been the same since they moved to Los Angeles.

Her agent’s call came a week later.

“Sarah,” he said before she could even get anything else out besides Hello, “this is it. This is going to be huge. But just one thing…”

“What?”

“Have you run this by your husband yet?”

—

“He’s a writer.”

That’s what one of her friends first told her about Richard. He’s a writer.

They were at his house, in a second-floor living room that overlooked Turtle Bay Gardens in Midtown Manhattan. A stretch of townhomes occupied by creatives with money, where all the kilims were threadbare because they were antique.

“And his family is loaded,” her friend whispered.

“So he’s a real writer.” Sarah laughed.

“You should meet him.”

The friend had brought her to the party. Saying it was a new literary salon and that the host knows everyone, though the invitation list was extremely limited. Sarah had almost declined, but then, she made it a rule to go to strange parties, if only to squirrel away particularly egregious pieces of dialogue or imitations of character. It was her favorite part of the job—the petty theft of humanity.

And although she was in his living room, drinking his cocktails and eating his canapés, Sarah didn’t need Richard Lingate. She had started by winning the O’Neill and getting a few pieces produced off-Broadway. Then had moved on to a Whiting, a Guggenheim, and a short stint at Lincoln Center. She was established. She wasn’t looking for a patron. But that evening she watched him finesse each group, she saw how he connected people who might be of use to one another, she witnessed him holding court. It was impressive, the way he knew just which words would flatter.

Richard Lingate, she learned from others—not from him, never from him—had a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton and had worked briefly as an assistant editor at a major publishing house before realizing he could make a larger artistic impact here, in the living room of his apartment, than he could there. And, someone whispered to her, he liked to keep his own hours, which apparently were not aligned with what a normal job required. He was the closest thing to an artistic aristocrat she had ever encountered, and the old-worldness of it delighted her.

Richard Lingate was an anachronism. A welcome one.

“I’m Richard, by the way,” he said, finally cornering her by a bookcase as people were beginning to filter out. Sarah’s fingers were itching for a pen or pencil to record everything she had seen. She felt desperate that this might be her only glimpse of Richard Lingate’s perfectly shabby living room, of his lightly worn-in loafers.

“Sarah,” she said, and extended her hand.

“Someone here told me you’re a writer.”

“A playwright.”

He held up both of his hands. “A playwright. Excuse me. Well”—he took her hand and bent over it, the gesture so mannered and yet so at home in the brownstone—“it is the oldest art form.” And then he walked across the room and began to plunk out Peter Allen’s “Everything Old Is New Again” on the piano, smiling at her in between nodding at his guests as they left.

He was, she thought fleetingly, the perfect subject for a satire. But then, she liked him. Everyone did. Sarah never did find out how he got her address, but he sent a note the following week, thick cream card stock on which he had written an invitation to dinner.

In retrospect, she should have seen the real Richard sooner. She might have seen the way the books were arranged, always in alphabetical order. She might have noticed the way he was unilateral in the advice he offered his guests. She might have been more alarmed by the way he snapped at the maid, his voice cold, shot through with condescension, when she brought them lukewarm coffee, the wrong sugar cubes. Do you need me to write it down for you? Would that help you remember? Memory is a muscle, you know.

But at the time it had all struck her as eccentric. Artistic. A little esoteric.

All things Sarah aspired to be.

With Richard, New York transformed into a fever dream of dinners and frothy conversation, of shoulder straps slumping down arms in the summer heat, of cigarettes furtively smoked on fire escapes. Richard, it seemed, was as hungry as Sarah, and together they ate the city. There wasn’t a performance or exhibition or reading they missed. There wasn’t a day they didn’t talk about words or art or what to see next.

Richard was erudite and funny and that particular brand of uptown with downtown swagger that Sarah had never been able to resist. They were in love. And like all love, theirs was going to last forever. After six months, they were married at city hall. Sarah never even met his family. She signed a prenup without reading it; she would have signed anything. It was that early flush, when the money didn’t matter because everything was so easy. Only later would she realize it was so easy because of the money.

Until one night, a year into their marriage, Richard said: “My father is sick.”

Sarah stood and made her way across their living room—because by then it was theirs—and sat on the arm of the chair next to her husband. She ran her fingers through his hair. “Baby, no,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head.

“My brother thinks I need to come home. That this might be it. Impossible, but I always thought he would live forever. I think he did, too.”

Sarah had asked, once, about Richard’s brother.

“He’ll run things one day,” Richard had said. “My father made it clear when we were young that he thought I was weaker. Because of my size. My brother is bigger than me. In every way—taller, broader. I was never as good as Marcus at sports, at math. Never as good at fighting, either. It was exhausting, the way he set us against each other. Over everything.”

Sarah could see a younger version of her husband, easily wounded and fragile. He had that temperament—he could be tender, but also petulant. It was what made him such a great reader and viewer—his sensitivity. The thousand miles New York had put between him and his family had helped him realize he wasn’t that boy anymore. Wasn’t the younger, softer brother. She was grateful for the distance.

But now he needed to go back.

“Will you come with me?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said.

She didn’t know it then, but they wouldn’t return to Manhattan.

—

Richard’s father died when Sarah was two months pregnant and they had already been in Los Angeles for a year. Initially, she had tried to keep one foot in New York, but every time she made plans to travel back and meet with a producer or friend or even her agent, Richard would beg her to stay. So she did.

In Los Angeles, she had no friends. No theater. No work. There was only the family: Marcus and Naomi and Richard’s ailing, ill-tempered father, the brothers’ mother having died when they were in high school.

Prep school, Marcus called it.

After ten months, she began to consider a separation. She wanted to suggest it. The word alone might snap Richard out of the spell his family had cast over him. Richard never seemed to mind the way their world had shrunk. He started to remake himself as a patron, a figurehead. Static and unmoving. Like his father. But before she could find a good time to talk about it, she found out she was pregnant.

Sarah stayed for the baby. She promised to work on her marriage for the baby. She became the kind of woman she had always pitied: dependent, weak, doing it for the children. Meanwhile, every day, Richard disappeared. He came up with plans he had no intention of seeing through—a production company he was going to start, a gala he hoped to host. She wanted to be angry. She was angry! But then her feet swelled and her body changed, and her energy slipped away. It became impossible to think about anything but the pregnancy. All she could do was complain about the heat, the constant California sunshine that seemed to beat down, unrepentant, into the late fall.

She focused on the delivery. It was her milestone. But when Helen came, things only got worse. It was strange to love someone so fully. And yet she felt like she was always at a remove from Helen, from herself. Like she couldn’t reach either of them through the haze of early motherhood. Sarah never held it against Helen; she held it against herself. That she could feel that way about her own child. Their child.

“You don’t really need to work,” Richard said when Helen was three months old and Sarah was a wreck. Despite a nanny, despite a night nurse, despite Naomi lending them her housekeeper three days per week, despite the house, the flowers, the cashmere baby blankets and silver rattles, the monograms and blissful whitewashed adobe walls—the old her felt inaccessible. She was too tired to work anyway.

Sarah let the Lingates pull her under.

Naomi took her shopping and to lunch at the polo club. She dressed for dinners and fundraisers and clinked champagne glasses with women who had painted their lips larger than they really were. She consulted on Naomi’s flower arrangements, her party planning, her charitable giving. She tried desperately to find a good bagel, a place to smoke, but she only ended up picking at salads under no-smoking signs. They had been gone so long there was nothing left for her in New York. Her peers moved on, her agent signed other talent. And meanwhile, she sat in the California sunshine, smiling. Smiling, nursing, babbling, watching the walls close in.

—

Sarah brought two glasses of Tempranillo into the living room, a stack of loose papers held in her hand.

“Just read it,” she said. “It will only take an hour.”

Richard swirled the wine and looked at the title page— Saltwater —before he took the pages from her. There was a time, once, when he wanted to read everything she worked on, every scrap of writing, every draft. Now he only thumbed through the stack.

“You didn’t tell me you were working on anything,” he said after the silence had stretched thin.

“ I didn’t know I was working on anything,” she said.

It was the truth.

“That sounds like semantics,” he said, taking a sip of the wine. Then he looked at her. It was the same blank expression he had worn when she left the room, the kind that was always intended to strip her of her humanity. The look that said: Why do you bother?

Sarah thought of Helen in her crib, of the fact that everything Richard said about her work these days sounded like a sneer, an afterthought, like a reminder to leave petty cash for the nanny.

“The truth?” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you.”

He didn’t push. They both knew why. Sarah wanted to say it had happened gradually—the way their relationship twisted into a set of roles neither one of them had signed up to play.

“Could you not sit here while I read?” Richard said, looking up from the fourth page of the play. “I don’t like you looking over my shoulder.”

Sarah went to the kitchen, and then out into the garden, which at night smelled of jasmine and gardenia. She wasn’t nervous; she knew he would hate the play. He would have hated it whatever it was. Because it was hers. Because it was a reminder of who he used to be, too. The person it seemed he had lost when they moved to the West Coast. Or didn’t want to be. Or worse, never had been.

Sarah followed a stone path that wound around the back of the house, the grass between the pavers dewy, slicking the soft in-betweens of her toes. She stopped at a large picture window. The panes were rippled and old, like the house, but through them she could see her husband dropping pages of the manuscript onto the floor, a small pile growing next to him.

Sarah watched until he was halfway through, when he stood, knocking his wineglass to the floor. It stained the pages red. Even through the glass, Sarah could see them curl. She knew his answer then, but went inside anyway.

“Absolutely not,” Richard said.

“Just think about it,” Sarah said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“It’s about us !”

“Don’t be so loud. You’ll wake the baby,” she said through her teeth. “And it’s not about you.”

“Everyone is going to think it is.”

She wouldn’t admit to him that it was about them. That in the first draft, she hadn’t even bothered to change the last name from Lingate. A new name had been applied in revisions, the details rearranged. But it was them on the page. All of them. Even Richard.

“It’s just a play,” she said.

“A play written by my wife about a family that looks very similar to my own. How am I supposed to explain that? It will be called a roman à clef!”

“It’s not even a novel!”

“That doesn’t matter. People will gossip. Our name means something. Don’t you get that?”

Sarah never heard him talk like this when they lived in New York, but his family—his father, his brother, even these houses—seemed to exert a gravitational, hypnotic pull. He slotted back into the family structure seamlessly, without protest. It was the lack of protest that most upset Sarah. Richard never once seemed to chafe against the limits of this world. She did.

“Richard, there’s always going to be talk about a family like yours,” she said.

“Do you understand the lengths we go to in order to keep that kind of chatter to a minimum?”

There were so many rebuttals— It’s not gossip, it’s art; It’s not your family, it’s fiction; You need to relax; It’s not your decision —but Sarah could feel it, the way he was digging in, hardening against the idea. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t imagined this might be the outcome. She had been certain, actually, that it would be.

“It’s embarrassing enough,” Richard said, his voice low, “that your work is so public.”

Sarah stiffened. It had never bothered him before that her plays were public. If anything, he liked the attention.

“What happens if I go ahead with it anyway?” Sarah said. She picked up the stack of pages on the floor, the top half soaked a rich burgundy.

Richard sighed and looked at her for the first time that evening, the first time, really, since Helen had been born. In a way that said he still knew who she was, he knew and he hated it.

He said simply, “We’ll sue. You’ll lose everything.”

What Sarah didn’t tell him was that she already had. A fact that, he’d yet to realize, only made her more dangerous.