The good thing was, no heartbreak existed in her relationship with Peter—no big drama, no sleepless nights. He had a daughter in her forties, but she lived in Argentina and hardly ever came to California. California! Every time her plane touched down at LAX, and she looked out the window at palm trees, it amazed her that she had a life, even a part-time life, in a place like this. And what was California, anyway—theirCalifornia, anyway—if not a place where the sun always shone, and your biggest problem was getting through the freeway traffic?
It probably said something about what Peter and Eleanor shared, and what they didn’t, that he never came to Boston—let alone New Hampshire—or asked to meet her children. In an odd way, that made it easier. Too much had happened to start over now. How could she ever explain everything? Better not to try.
Peter knew that Toby had issues with his cognitive development, of course, and that Al didn’t come home. He’d heard about Eleanor’s visits with Ursula and Jake in Vermont. But how did you explain having given birth to a child you had considered to be your daughter, who told you that everything about the first twenty-two years of her life had felt like a performance? (“What did you think you were performing?” Eleanor had asked her, that day outside the airport. “The act of being female,” Al said.) How did you explain what it was like finding your four-year-old son facedown in that pond you’d built—standingin the hospital corridor as the doctor spoke the words “irreparable brain damage”?
How could you explain to a man who owned a house in Pacific Palisades and another in Ojai about all those years you spent starting every day making two columns on the back of an envelope:Money coming in. Money going out? Bills that could wait. Bills that couldn’t. Taking a pen to a piece of paper and in the time it took to sign your name, giving away forty acres of land on which you once believed you would live forever.
How could you explain to a man like Peter what it meant to love a piece of land as Eleanor had loved that one? Better to let it all go, say nothing, start over fresh on a whole other coast, at the wheel of a rented forest-green BMW convertible.
Only—what was a person supposed to do with all that history? Who would she be without it? How could she ever be known?
For a little over three years, Eleanor split her time between the Boston condo and Peter’s house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. When she was out west, she drove to Pacific Palisades on Friday nights to spend the weekend with Peter. Sometimes they went to an art opening or a fundraising event for one of the many cultural organizations Peter supported, on whose boards he occasionally sat. Sometimes they went out for dinner, or took a weekend trip to his house in Ojai, or to Big Sur maybe. Carmel. London.
One Friday she called him to say she thought she’d stay home that weekend, if he didn’t mind. She needed time for herself. As she anticipated, he expressed no concern or dismay.
When the next weekend approached, she realized she didn’t feel like going to see Peter then, either. On the third weekend, when he sent a text to tell her he’d been called away to Beijing on some kind of business, she felt only relief.
They had a few dinners after that, and one more weekend away together, at which time they agreed that the relationship had run its course. The astonishing thing, for Eleanor, was that no tears were shed, no rancor expressed on the part of either of them. It stunned her how easy it had been to end things, and how sad it was that thiswas so. Maybe a person only had a certain amount of wild, obsessive attachment to offer up over the course of her lifetime, and Eleanor’s had been spent already. (Most of it for Cam, in their early days. And, though she hadn’t realized this until it was over, for Timmy Pouliot.)
She might have viewed the ease of her breakup with Peter as good news, but it made her sad. It was a surprise to discover that among the emotions she missed, one was a particular kind of deep grief that can come only from the deepest variety of love.
When the series ended, and her responsibilities as a script consultant were over, she gave up her furnished sublet in Silver Lake and returned to Brookline, full-time, with no regrets.
90.
I Met Somebody
For a few years there, Eleanor used to invite Darla’s daughter, Kimmie, to join her for Christmas, and for a couple of years the two of them had shared a meal of Chinese food and a double feature of Blockbuster holiday films. But Kimmie was married now, with a baby. Off in Las Vegas, of all places, making a new life, the way her mother always wanted. Remembering what it had been like for herself, when she was young, to navigate life without parents, Eleanor made sure to call Kimmie now and then—on Darla’s birthday, and her own. But Kimmie had made the choice Eleanor recognized well—to immerse herself in the marriage she’d made to a man who appeared to bear no resemblance to her father, and to being a mother.
These days Eleanor spent her holidays alone, or someplace warm that had a pool. There had been that one sad holiday she’d shared with Russell, from the personals, and his two sweetly hopeful sons. The three amigos. Maybe that one Christmas cured Eleanor of any future attempts to insert herself in anybody else’s holiday celebration. She must still have, somewhere in the back of her cupboard, the big roasting pan she used, back in the days she cooked the holiday turkey. But she hadn’t taken it out in years. Wouldn’t even know where to find it now.
In the early days after her children moved back to the farm, Eleanor went on many dates, then fewer, then none. One time, when Darla was still alive, she had made the observation, about some online dating site to which she’d paid a rare visit, that the same profiles were there, of men she remembered from ten years back. A few had changed their pictures, and their ages were different now, of course, but they looked familiar. She had actually gone out with a few of them.
“Pretty sad, huh?” Eleanor had observed to Darla. “They’re still knocking around after all these years.”
“And you’ve been on there yourself long enough to know,” Darla had pointed out.
Eleanor hadn’t given up her membership on Match.com, but she didn’t spend long hours reading profiles there, either, and on the increasingly rare occasions when a message popped up (“Hey babe! Nice smile”), it went unanswered. If you were over fifty years old, and you admitted you were, your dating prospects were probably not great.
Even Timmy Pouliot wasn’t as young as he used to be. She had run into him only once since that night at the bar, and he seemed different. For the first time in all the years she’d known him—since he was thirteen years old—he hadn’t greeted her with the look she’d known since the day they first met at the waterfall. He was distracted, looking over her shoulder, as though he were keeping an eye out for someone.
“I hear they made a TV show of a book you wrote,” he said. He would have watched it, only he didn’t get cable.
He asked how her kids were doing. She asked about his brother and his mom.
“Still trying to marry you off?” she asked.
“I met someone, actually,” he told Eleanor. When she asked for details, he’d seemed reluctant to offer them. Maybe that meant he’d met someone he actually loved. Someone other than her.
91.
A Teenager in the House
Flipping through the Sunday paper one morning, Eleanor’s eyes fell on an article about an exhibition opening at the natural history museum affiliated with Harvard. A major bequest had been made, of what was said to be the single most substantial collection of arrowheads assembled in North America. Oddly enough, the individuals responsible for the gift had not been wealthy collectors or archaeologists. It was a pair of brothers in their early twenties with no particular background in Native American history who had chosen to donate the arrowheads to the museum as a way of honoring their father.
“Our dad worked at an insurance agency all his life,” the older of the brothers was quoted as saying in the article. “But this was his passion from when he was a little kid, and he passed it on to us. Just about every weekend, growing up, we’d drive to some crazy place, nowhere near anything, and take out our digging tools. It was like a treasure hunt.
“The way he talked about those arrowheads made us think about the people who’d made them and what their lives might have been like. He taught us to recognize the beauty in those little pieces of stone.
