Second Acts Read online

  SECOND ACTS

  Teri Emory

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York, New York

  Amberjack Publishing

  228 Park Avenue S #89611

  New York, NY 10003-1502

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Teri Emory

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Emory, Teri, author.

  Title: Second acts / by Teri Emory.

  Description: New York, NY: Amberjack Publishing, 2017.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781944995317 (pbk.) | 9781944995348 (ebook) | LCCN 2017933489

  Subjects: LCSH Female friendship--Fiction. | Middle-aged women--Fiction. | Interpersonal relations--Fiction. | Love stories. | BISAC FICTION / Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PS3605.M66 S43 2017 | DDC 813-6--dc23

  Cover Design: Mimi Bark

  “There are no second acts in

  American lives.”

  - F. Scott Fitzgerald

  PART I:

  Pasts and Prologues

  Sarah:

  A Change of Plans

  “Day and night, and day again.

  And people come and go away forever.”

  —Judy Collins

  I was dreaming about Paris.

  I resisted the intrusive ring of the phone, wanting to stay in my dream. Ellie and I were strolling through Le Marais, window-shopping.

  “Mom,” she was saying, “remember the first time we came here, when I was twelve? You bought me a headband with the Mona Lisa painted on it, and I wore it to school every day for a year.”

  The phone finally nudged me out of sleep. It was Helen, my former sister-in-law. No one else would call so early. As usual, she seemed to be in the middle of a story that began before she dialed my number. I can barely follow Helen’s train of thought when I am fully awake. Now, I just let her talk.

  I divorced Helen’s brother, Martin, almost fifteen years ago, but Helen and I have stayed close. She still calls me several times a month and likes to prattle on about people I hardly remember from years ago when Martin and I lived near her and her husband, Sidney, in Acedia Bay, Florida. She always finds a way to interject an anecdote about Martin in which he is portrayed as sane and likable—even admirable. He’s volunteering at a shelter for the homeless, she’ll say. He’s taken up yoga. He’s bought a kayak. He’s become a vegetarian.

  No matter. I was married to the man for ten long years, and I took notes. Just once, I’d love to tell her that if her spiel about Martin doesn’t include some words like “Such a pity! Struck down in the prime of his life!” then I’m not interested in hearing any more. I never say this directly, of course. Instead, I punctuate Helen’s unruly sentences with strategic “uh-huhs” that for most people would speak volumes. Helen, however, is sarcasm-challenged—can’t recognize it, can’t produce it.

  “I ran into your friend Violet Bailey last week,” she was saying. “She insists you were the best thing that ever happened to Acedia Bay, and her life hasn’t been the same since you moved back to New York.”

  “I miss Violet too,” I said agreeably, still half asleep.

  “I sent Ellie a plane ticket,” Helen said. “She’ll definitely be here for Sidney’s birthday party.” Oh, right, Sidney’s sixtieth. Helen’s called me ten times about it. “I told her I’d pay for Doug to come too, but she says he’s swamped with schoolwork.” I wasn’t sure if Helen knew that Ellie and her boyfriend Doug lived together in Morningside Heights near the Columbia campus. Ellie probably thinks, rightly, that her Aunt Helen would disapprove.

  “I still haven’t given up on your coming, you know,” Helen went on. “You’re not worried about Martin being here, are you? All he ever says is what a good job you’ve done with Ellie. He’s probably bringing Pauline with him—you know he’s still seeing her, right?—assuming she can find someone to stay with her kids. She’s a terrific mother.” Helen believes it will strengthen her case with me concerning Martin if I learn that the women in his life are upstanding citizens, and she rarely misses an opportunity to sing the praises of Pauline or the others who preceded her.

  “It would mean the world to Sidney to have you at the party. To both of us,” Helen said. “Why not stay for a few days? You haven’t visited in, what, more than four years? Ever since Kevin moved in with you. Tell him we’d love to see him again, but on our turf this time. I can’t believe you’ve never brought him to Acedia Bay.”

  “Kevin will still be in Dallas on business. He’s visiting his son there,” I said. To his credit, Kevin graciously accepts the continued presence of my former in-laws in my life. He even claims to enjoy their company when they visit us in New York.

  “So come alone,” she said. “Let me buy your plane ticket.”

  I liked the idea of helping Sidney celebrate his birthday. Besides, even my best jokes about Martin were getting a bit thin; seeing him might inspire some new material.

  “I’ve got frequent flier miles I can use,” I finally told Helen. “If it’s okay with you, though, I’ll ask Violet if I can stay at her house.” I figured Martin, and mother-of-the-year Pauline—if she showed up—would surely sleep at Helen and Sidney’s.

  __________

  I met Martin in Manhattan when I was twenty-eight. My apartment was a rent-controlled, third-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side, an easy walk from the Café Luxembourg. I was working as a senior editor at The Abbott Literary Review, where I had just landed a plum assignment: a series of critical essays on the Algonquin Roundtable writers. Apart from my recurring fantasy of moving to Paris one day, I had never considered living anywhere but New York.

  I was also teaching a night class in fiction writing at the New School. My students were over-privileged and overwrought young adults recently out of college. Most still lived at home, but they thought of themselves as counter-cultural because they subscribed to Mother Jones and went to poetry readings in Hell’s Kitchen. Existentialists with trust funds. They dressed entirely in black, chain-smoked during the breaks, and fantasized about the life of the mind. I loved their essays about alienation and ennui. Even when their punctuation and grammar were shoddy, their passion was real.

  I was ripe for marriage when Martin came my way. Both my mother and my hormones were sending me persistent messages about making babies, but I had not dated many promising candidates for fatherhood. Among my recent suitors were an ER physician who worked seventy hours a week and fell asleep in restaurants; a struggling sculptor who decided he’d do well to return to his ex-wife, what with her trust fund and all; and a television producer with a rather expansive definition of fidelity.

  Martin introduced himself to me while we were waiting in line for tickets to an outdoor performance of Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park. He was thirty-two at the time, a public relations director at Chase Manhattan. We talked for an hour as the queue inched along. We exchanged business cards, and he called the next day to ask me out to dinner. I was grateful to spend an evening with a man who could stay awake all the way through dessert, who had no heiress girlfriend waiting in the wings, and who ex
pressed reasonable interest in marriage and children. Six months later, Martin proposed to me during the intermission at a performance of A Chorus Line, and I said yes.

  Shortly after we married, family connections led Martin to a lucrative job offer to be vice president of marketing at Fieldstone Public Relations in Acedia Bay, where Helen and Sidney had lived for many years.

  “It’s near Jacksonville,” Martin said, as if he were talking about a sophisticated world capital. “The climate is good. This is a great opportunity for me, Sarah. For both of us, really.”

  To Martin, the decision to leave New York was an easy one. He had no family there, no friends either. Martin’s relationships with other men were activity-specific. He was in a monthly poker game with some guys from his office. He played racquetball with one of our neighbors. He went to Yankees games with Al, someone he’d known since high school, but with whom, to my knowledge, he’d never had a conversation about anything but baseball. For Martin’s purposes, any males willing to share his interests, for limited segments of time, qualified as friends.

  For me, though, it was hard to imagine living a plane ride away from everything and everyone I knew in New York City. My parents were still alive then. I could stop by their place for brunch any Sunday. Beth and Miriam, my best friends since we met in college, both lived near me in the city, and seeing them regularly was fundamental to my routine. I couldn’t imagine the editor of a literary journal would find work in Acedia Bay, Florida. What kind of life would await me a thousand miles from the Strand Bookstore and Balducci’s?

  “We can fly back to visit as often as you like,” Martin said. “And won’t Acedia Bay be a better place than Manhattan to raise a family?”

  And so I agreed to take a detour from the life I had always wanted.

  I was already pregnant with Ellie when Martin and I became Florida residents. We settled into a two-bedroom place in Woodridge Gardens, a flamingo-pink, stucco apartment complex with a swimming pool on the grounds and weekly bingo in the clubhouse. It was July when we moved in. My ankles swelled from the humidity. I learned to run errands in the mornings when it was still reasonably cool. In the afternoons, the air outside was like a wet wool blanket, and I’d sequester myself in our air-conditioned apartment and wait for five o’clock, when violent electrical storms would take over the skies. Thirty minutes later, there would be no sign that it had rained, except the humidity was even worse.

  I decorated the baby’s room in primary colors. I ordered a layette by phone from a grandmotherly saleswoman at Saks in New York. I baby-proofed every inch of the apartment, though I knew we’d probably move to a house before the baby was mobile. I came to enjoy grocery shopping at the Publix, where well-mannered teenagers loaded groceries into my Honda, refused to accept tips, and called me Ma’am. I used my New School faculty ID to obtain a Visiting Academic card to the Acedia Bay Hospital medical library. I spent hours there perusing obstetrics journals. The most advanced science course I’d ever taken was high school biology, but I didn’t let that stand in my way. I’d never known a tricky situation I couldn’t read my way out of, and bearing a child would be no exception. I drove my obstetrician crazy, grilling him on his knowledge of obscure childbirth complications. Finally, when I demanded he send a vial of my blood to a lab in Sweden to check for a problem that occurs once in every three trillion pregnancies, he’d had enough.

  “With most women, I worry that caffeine or alcohol could have bad effects on their pregnancies,” he said wearily. “In your case, Sarah, I’m tempted to burn your library card.”

  True, I felt healthy and the baby seemed to be developing fine, so I let up on him. But I didn’t quit reading the journals.

  Our daughter arrived two weeks early, in the middle of a tropical storm during our first steamy September in Florida. Just six pounds with a full head of silky, black curls like Martin’s, and almond eyes like mine; she was perfect. I held her in my arms and apologized for having arranged it so that she’d have to go through life with Acedia Bay on her passport. Remember, you were conceived in Manhattan, I whispered as I held her. We named her Elinor, for my grandmother. We called her Ellie from the start—most people do, except for our divorce lawyers, to whom she would come to be known as minor child, female.

  Martin’s job in Florida turned out to be the good opportunity he had been promised. We were soon able to afford a large house (later, legally, our marital domicile) in a new development down the road from Helen and Sidney. We bought white wicker furniture for the sunroom. I planted gerbera daisies on the front lawn. I perfected recipes for homemade mayonnaise and key lime pie. For Ellie’s sake, for the sake of my marriage, for the sake of my sanity, I found ways to derive pleasure from the small routines of domestic life. A forcibly happy stranger in a strange land.

  Ellie was just learning to crawl when I landed a job teaching English Composition at Acedia Bay Junior College. Most of my students were the first generation in their families to attend college, and my attempts to expand their literary frame of reference pretty much failed. They found my assignments irrelevant to their vocational plans.

  “I’m majoring in occupational therapy (or accounting),” they’d say. “What good will it do me to read ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener?’”

  I’d tell them that the world was in desperate need of occupational therapists (and especially accountants) who can deconstruct Melville.

  Just like poor Bartleby, they’d answer, “I would prefer not to,” missing completely the irony of their response. I yearned for my angst-ridden New School rebels back in Manhattan.

  I met my friend Violet Bailey at the college. She taught a course on the ecology of North Florida. She introduced me to other part-time instructors who, like me, were educated young wives and mothers, begrudgingly transplanted to an outpost of their husbands’ choosing. My colleagues banded together on weekends with their families to socialize at swap meets and to gorge on all-you-can-eat catfish specials at restaurants on the bay. I could never get Martin to participate in these outings. He’d had “enough of people” at work, he said.

  No one event signaled the inevitable death of our marriage. Our relationship disintegrated little by little. First we stopped having sex. Then we stopped touching each other at all. Martin brooded and retreated from me, from everyone except Ellie. I suggested marriage counseling, but Martin declined. I couldn’t bring myself to leave him, though. As long as he remained an attentive father to Ellie, I held out hope that he could still be a husband to me.

  I had endured eight years in Acedia Bay, when Martin, about to be offered a partnership in his company, announced that he was quitting his job. He said he needed time to Think About Life. I soon found out that the only “life” he needed time to “think about” was his own. He showed no interest in going back to work or in doing much else. Apparently, Thinking About Life (a career, by the way, that pays rather poorly) was all he could handle. We had enough in savings to scrape by, but I persuaded the dean at the college to let me teach a class in conversational French to make a little extra money.

  After Martin quit his job, we argued all the time. I’d come home from teaching to find him sipping coffee and reading a book at the kitchen table. I’d ask, “How are you?” and he’d reply that he’d appreciate my not speaking to him in such a disapproving tone. Our voices would get louder, our words more disagreeable, until, at last, I’d cry, at which point Martin would accuse me of being manipulative. He’d retreat to the spare bedroom for the night, and I’d sleep alone in our king-sized bed. After a few months of this routine, the separate sleeping arrangements became permanent, but the arguments stopped. We had run out of things to say to each other.

  One day Martin was supposed to pick up Ellie from her ballet class while I was at my office on campus. Ellie’s teacher called me to say that the dance school was about to close for the day, and Ellie was crying because no one had come for her. Martin had simply for
gotten. That’s when I began to Think About Divorce. Finally, I left him.

  I stayed in Acedia Bay after we split up, too disheartened and enervated to make any big changes. Too, I thought it would be good for Ellie to see her father as often as he could make time for her. Ironically, Martin left Acedia Bay before I did. A good job in Miami, he’d said.

  Martin has moved around quite a bit since then. Twice a year, he sends Ellie a plane ticket so she can fly to wherever he’s living and see him for a few days. Ellie keeps the details of these visits to herself. She and I adhere to an agreement tacitly instituted when she was a young child: I never say anything negative to her about her father, and she avoids talking to me about him at all.

  Which is why, apart from Helen’s updates, I get only sporadic news about Martin’s life. I estimate that Martin has had six careers (not including Thinking About Life) and at least a dozen girlfriends since our divorce, but I may have lost count. A few years ago, a friend called to report that she had run into Martin in Atlanta, where he had acquired hair transplants, a business card that said The Martin H. Roth Group, International Marketing Consultants, and a very young massage therapist as his live-in girlfriend. Sometime later, Helen let me know that the massage therapist had left Martin for a chiropractor, and Martin was joining a startup computer company in Nashville with plans to move in with a country-western lounge singer named Pauline.

  The last time I set eyes on Martin was more than three years ago, at Ellie’s high school graduation. I had arrived hours ahead of the ceremony to save a row of seats for our contingent: me, Kevin, Helen, and Sidney. Helen had placed her sweater on the chair next to hers to reserve it, I knew, for Martin, but he arrived late and he sat in the back by himself. When the ceremony ended, he made his way through the crowd and slapped a check in his daughter’s hand by way of a present. He wouldn’t shake Kevin’s outstretched hand. He left without saying a word to me. Ellie took it all in, biting her nails, eyes darting nervously from Martin to me to Martin again. I wanted to kill him.