Attachment Read online

  When she thought about it now, the Warner children’s personal creation myth, with its clean sound track of sleigh bells wafting up from the old mining town at the bottom of the mountain, Jean was once again searching for some explanation of their individual destinies. And, once again, any hint of the real shape of things remained blurred. Back on the shelf, then, that random meeting she kept in a small glass dome, nostalgia enhanced by poor visibility in this pocket-size blizzard of love.

  Mark was due for another trip “ashore”—their word for home, as if St. Jacques was not an island but a raft. She knew she had to pull back from his affair, whatever else she decided to do about it, but had she learned enough yet? What mission had been accomplished that could allow her to lay off? Looking out the kitchen window over her sinkful of dirty, misshapen vegetables, Jean saw the hummingbird she called Emerald flickering in the bushes: busy, always so busy. A bird of work. And she thought about Mark’s work. “I cut up magazines,” he’d told her that first day in the video shop and though she thought he’d been joking that’s exactly what he did. He cut and reassembled and reanimated images clipped from advertisements, and the results were judged to be “political.” In fact, Mark had no politics and was instead guided by his feel for shape and color, for the lovely lines of old products, for unusual typefaces, and by a distinctive, fairly childish sense of humor.

  That first Oxford show received solemn praise and sold out, Jean’s lumpy sweater swelling with pride when she heard the news. Like Mark himself, the collages were a compelling mix of the elegant and the slightly goofy, and sometimes they were touching, even if, as with all good art, it was hard to say quite why they should’ve been, these homemade gardens of ultraearthly delights: consumer galaxies of known brands, household products gaining in beauty and strangeness as they were wrenched from humdrum uses and set on a planetary course that revolved, in one way or another, around him.

  The first piece she saw at the exhibition in Jericho had at its center a photograph of the artist at eight, blue eyed and blond, a perfect dimpled cupcake of a face, with thick mother-combed hair. He was irresistible: his nose sprinkled with freckles, his bright eyes peering out with the look of slight hesitancy he wore even now. Was it the work she’d fallen for—and the idea of untouched innocence at the still heart of this mundane swirl—or just this dear, unsure English boy, his clever eyes both daring and held in check? Jean simply could not imagine what someone like Giovana would see in him, and her failure to conjure up a connection only increased her solitude.

  Maybe something in her own character invited betrayal. If this sounded like the mind-set of a victim, the opposite was true: a lawyer by training and inheritance, Jean could not accept a fate devoid of responsibility, and she knew that in her marriage she’d been, as her daughter might put it, actively passive. Until that evening in the video shop, she’d wished she could be the kind of girl who not only went to the May Ball but who twirled like a weather vane atop a dawn-lit fountain in a soaked and possibly shredded yellow gown. But Mark had changed all that. He was an artist with a sold-out one-man show. And she no longer worried about graduating with a law degree that wouldn’t be recognized in her own country. That wasn’t going to matter, because Jean wasn’t going to live in America.

  She hadn’t bargained, though, on his abandoning his work. They were married late in the fall after her Finals, and gradually Mark stopped making his collages. Against her protestations, he’d even pulled out of a group show at Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art. “An artist should be judged by the exhibitions he declines” was how he put it, even as he declined to be an artist. A commission from a family friend—a company logo, then a publicity campaign—grew, like any one of his previous works, into a dizzying commercial cosmos. Soon the jobs were pouring in. Jean thought his success was due to his childlike outlook, his chief purpose being to amuse himself. He logged long hours but always gave the impression of a man at play. When he gave up art for good, he did so without hesitation; his life would be his biggest and best collage, he said, and he put Jean’s freckled nose at the center of his universe—and Victoria’s, too, when she appeared, a dainty six-pound parcel, in the spring of 1983.

  So what had gone wrong? Both of them had been restless, and they’d traveled, taking baby Vic along. He loved the markets and the alien signage; Jean liked being on the road with him, and here they were, still on the road. She’d given up her law career before it even began. She was newly twenty-three when she gave up her name and her country. It now struck her with painful force that she’d been crazily precipitate and, as a result, her isolation without Mark would be total. All those years, she’d believed their delicious shared isolation, their sense of twinship, arose from intense and intimate sufficiency. Now she saw that he might, just possibly, have been keeping her in a compartment, a nice base from which he could wander. To sustain her complicity, he’d even found her a job. At that point she still wrote the occasional legal column, an extension of what she’d written for Cherwell, the Oxford student paper. But it was Mark who’d come up with the health column, something to keep her busy during her confinement. She seized on this antique term, of course without realizing just how extensive a confinement it was to become.

  For the final four months before Victoria’s birth, preeclampsia kept Jean horizontal. Mark would mix them cocktails—a festive virgin punch for her—while she read out the latest installment of the diary that was the kernel of her column, these idiosyncratic, and addictive, musings through the prism of the body: high blood pressure, alarming fluid retention, strange pee… Mark, in his enthusiasm, foisted some of her pages on a client, the owner of Mrs magazine, and his instinct was soon vindicated by thousands of paying readers. Who could have predicted such a vast unabashed voyeurism, which generated more mail from readers than the magazine had ever received?

  The column, “Inside Out with Jean Hubbard,” had been syndicated on its fifth anniversary—toasted by proud Mark with his ready champagne and by Victoria, not yet five herself, with a finger-painted card—and now also appeared in a Scottish weekly, a free subsidized newspaper in Ireland, and a new Russian women’s magazine whose meager fee Jean waived for the chance to reach across the blighted steppes to needier women, many—as they wrote to tell her—with a halfdozen kitchen abortions behind them. Her brand-new agent got her into the Australian magazine HO—Her Own—and the “younger” American Splash, where her column had been misleadingly retitled “In Your Shoes,” accompanied this time not by a stamp-size author photo but by a fashion sketch in purple of a stiletto-heel pump. The years brought further magazines, an ever-increasing flow of letters, and also social invitations. But on the whole Jean and Mark continued, for ever longer periods of time, to stay in.

  Now she tried to determine if there’d been a pattern to their spasms of seclusion—a coincident abstinence from sex, say, or any other hint of infidelity. Nothing. Their frequent trips—whether together or apart, Jean to the grandparents in New York with Vic, and Mark to the Continent in pursuit of new clients—made friends unsure of their reliability as dinner guests and enabled them to dodge what invitations they did get.

  They’d loved to imagine living in another country and traveled whenever they could—but work or school had conspired to keep them mainly in Camden. So, with Vic settled at university, Mark promoted himself to a nonadministrative role. (“How about ‘nonresident genius’?” he’d polled his wife, in search of a title.) When he identified St. Jacques, glamorously distant, undiscovered, and not on the way to anywhere, Jean immediately called Mackay, her editor, to discuss a slight change of emphasis in her column: the time had come to bring the world to the wonderful readers of Mrs.

  Just to herself, Jean thought: on the island they’d be étrangers, foreigners, but also strangers; their strangeness gone legit—not quirk, just fact. There they wouldn’t be snobs but stoics, in a tropical, Frenchified setting. What more could you possibly want?

  No one had worked harder at shuttin
g down their London life than Victoria. She sprinkled mothballs with the theatrical zeal of a television cook. Her boxing and labeling and sealing and stacking might have been filmed as an exercise video: burn fat while you pack. As the departure day neared and the frenzy to be ready mounted, Vic also answered readers’ letters as “Jean Hubbard”; she was faithful to her mother’s straight style, only once or twice, out of boredom, slipping in a note of ingratiation or hauteur. For her father she assembled from her beloved vintage shops a complete tropical uniform (successfully complying with his strict instruction: no turquoise and no palm trees), aware that it would have to stand in for his bold collection of city suits, the grasshopper-green gabardine, the red pinstripe, the navy silk Nehru collar, and not forgetting the triple-breasted gray flannel suit he’d designed himself with a middle lane of buttons: a joke and, like the others, exquisitely tailored.

  Vic would stay on in the little house in Albert Street, the envy of her friends, who called it the Mum’s Away Café. She would feed the cat, begin her second term at University College, and stick with her Saturday job at Vinyl Solution, alphabetizing the secondhand records. She’d asked Mark and Jean—as she’d taken to calling them—if she should clear out all their old albums, now that they didn’t even own a turntable. And, though they hadn’t offered, Jean had a pretty good idea she’d move into their bedroom. She saw all this one day, still making piles on the floor—toss, store, pack—while Vic stood with her friend Maya in the doorway. Maya, who had a stream of boyfriends and was living in an austere college room, looked at the Hubbards’ great barge of a bed and sighed. What Jean didn’t see till later was how much Victoria wished she’d been consulted about their leaving. How much she hadn’t wanted them to go.

  People need social interaction, Jean concluded during this period of agonized review, struggling to ground the flying debris of her life—and shut out the unsummoned images of a gyrating Giovana that swiveled through her mind. Slamming the door on such unsolicited stripograms, she’d tell herself that Mark had plenty of interaction at the office. There was Noleen, gentle, reliable, good for laughing at his jokes—with her smoker’s baritone and unrevised side-parted sixties hairstyle held in place by a lone, low-slid bobby pin. Sure, there were also the revolving interns who filled any successful agency—not such a consoling prospect as Noleen—but weren’t they Dan’s department? Dan, who’d turned up at Mark’s office one Monday, taking the stairs three at a time, letting himself in, and asking about a job as if responding to an advertisement. He’d admired some of Mark’s ads, particularly his campaign for a secretarial course: a photo of a curvy girl’s fingers spread provocatively over a keyboard, above the line Isn’t it time you learned your place? This insinuating secretary tapped on people’s peripheral vision across the city—and certainly on Dan’s, who then took the initiative to track down the creator.

  Mark liked that about him. Dan hadn’t gone to university, or even to art school, but he clearly had no doubt about his rightful place in the world. Twenty-seven and boasting a blank CV, he was a broad, big-voiced, strong-jawed northerner with pink cheeks and narrow rectangular glasses that had looked dated when they were new—a detail that endeared him to Jean, an old hand at, even a believer in, failed fashion. Within six months he was Mark’s heir apparent at the firm—and “hair replacement,” as Victoria joked to her mother, referring to his mane, as black, rich, and shiny as crude oil. But he was, perhaps above all, Mark’s link to a male world and a male future, one of willed camaraderie and surrogate sexual adventuring, artfully packaged in the service of commerce.

  In the Internet café one morning, toward the end of her unusual infatuation, Jean gazed at the latest Giovana: wearing only a dog collar, on all fours and a leash, tongue out as if panting. How could Mark go for this stuff? she wondered. How could Jean? Pretending to be your husband’s libido was no parlor game. And of course every exchange with Thing 2 led her to a punishing image of Mark and Giovana fucking—with its free reminder of her own enforced celibacy.

  Writing as Mark, she had to consider Giovana from his point of view. The person who granted such extensive permission had to be, Jean thought, beloved. He would at least be very grateful. Giovana must be a love object, not merely a collection of warm, suctioning chambers—mouth, cunt, ass, hands, the deep engulfing crevice of cleavage, she could see him fucking that, and also, with nostalgia for the intercrural solution of his long years away at school, her powerful-looking thighs.

  She imagined Mark making new sounds with Giovana. When she and Mark made love it was like a silent movie, with some happy and winded joint sighing at the end if it all worked out, as if they’d just made it indoors from an unforeseen hailstorm. But with Giovana, she was convinced, Mark had entered a brighter, louder world. He would believe he was at last giving proper expression to the quintessential sacrament, and that he was doing it in the name of all men. His primal score—which in Jean’s private listening room ranged from Gregorian chant to the howl of an unanesthetized amputee—was also wonderfully validating for Giovana, and this she let him know with her rhythmic panting and meandering moans as he tirelessly pounded the air out of her. It was a yodeling duet fueled by self-praise, a paean to fabulous athleticism and abandon. But they had nothing else to say to each other; Jean felt pretty sure of that. All the e-mails, her own included, were written versions of those moans and slurps, noises that had to stand in for more evolved endearments, for expressions of love between equals.

  Once, Giovana apologized for having begged him to stop whatever unspecified but infinitely trying thing he’d been doing to her. Pinned, cornered, trapped, gasping and gagging, Giovana would’ve raised a surprisingly delicate hand, pleading for a timeout, and how masterful Mark would’ve felt, condescending—or not—to let her breathe. Having his way: it was something he “needed” to do, Jean thought, because it had no place in their marriage, where the flow was naturally companionable, proactively considerate. Her Mark would pull the car over during her sneeze attacks in hay-fever season, just to pat her back. This Mark “headboarded” Giovana, pumping indifferently past her frantically flapping hands until—how had she put it?—my eyes pop and roll out of my head on the stream of yr satin come. Going too far, that was their pact. For Giovana, Jean thought, reading and rereading this latest scene, submission was a source of power. It kept Mark there because it made him believe the opposite of the truth: that he was in charge. But the further Jean went the less likely it seemed she would ever again put herself in that position. And what position was that anyway? On her knees, on all fours?

  Thanks for the nice description, Jean wrote back the following day, in comically understated reply to this tranche of highly worked porno, sent by the star herself. Jean intended to limit herself to simple, gurgling appreciation. Wasn’t that what everybody wanted? Not Giovana.

  Nice? was all she wrote back, uncharacteristically terse, and in punishment sent no new images.

  Jean did indeed feel chastised, and deprived, but increasingly she also sensed that whatever she wrote and whatever Mark did to her, both Hubbards giving it their all, for Giovana it wasn’t nearly enough. And it never would be. What she wanted—no, demanded—was more. Escalation had been steep from their first contact. Jean could easily see how for Mark things had quickly gotten out of control.

  The next morning she again found herself in the Internet café, installed, as usual, before the last, and most private, cubby. She was staring at Giovana straddling a shocking-pink air mattress, adrift in a pool of eye-smarting blue. Her head was thrown back, and Jean wondered if all that thick, perfectly undulating black hair could possibly be natural. Her sunbrowned breasts sparkled with sweat or suntan oil, and she squeezed them together between her down-stretched arms so they swelled like loaves of glazed bread, her mouth slightly open, and her eyes half closed in familiar rapture.

  Jean stared at the screen and consciously erased Mark from her mind. She had discovered, in the past few weeks, the satisfaction of imagin
ing Giovana’s body being used, and not gently, by other men altogether, and there was a host of them to choose from, including Aminata’s son Amadou, all the boys from the taxi rank in Toussaint, and the dreadlocked Christian, but beginning, of course, with the customs inspectors, just doing their job in a small soundproofed room at the airport. Today, for reasons she couldn’t have explained or maybe for no reason at all, she settled on Mark’s deputy.

  She slotted him into the poolside view she had before her, and there was Dan taking Giovana from behind, thumbs planted in her soft hips, slapping noisily against her wobbly brown haunches and pushing her half off her float, which had been dragged out of the pool, her long nails digging for purchase between the tiles. Giovana was looking very worried; she could hardly take it but she was taking it. The noises she made in Jean’s head moved from apprehensive animal utterance to frightened animal utterance to clenched silence—one indistinguishable from the many kinds of silence: concentration, meditation, fear, or indeed speechless ecstasy.

  Though Jean had never before drummed up Dan and didn’t consider him remotely sexy, she did find him perfect for Giovana—sufficiently ruthless and brutal—and without realizing it, she found herself awkwardly perched on the hard edge of her chair, helplessly frozen in a moment of unplanned release, like when she was a girl in the playground before she knew what an orgasm was, paralyzed on the climbing rope. Thinking about this later, Jean was mortified, and depressed—not so much at having been aroused by Giovana, who was, after all, made (and managed and decorated) for pleasure, but at her excitement in the violence of it.

  Mark went to London and Jean stayed away from town, even though the fact that there’d be nothing new while he was with his lover hardly made a virtue of this abstinence. Too late for virtue. Everything was sullied, and she was rotting from within. She felt crabbed, soiled, tired, and old. Finally she felt so ill she went to one of St. Jacques’ spa hotels to see a fabled nutritionist, who diagnosed her as suffering from “adrenal exhaustion.” Expensive new term for infidelity, Jean thought as she grimly wrote out her check—noting, with additional chagrin, that there wasn’t even a word for the female cuckold.