The Complicities
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Synopsis
Award-winning author Stacey D’Erasmo tells a haunting and emotionally affecting story about a woman trying to rebuild her life after her husband’s arrest, and what she knew—or pretended not to know— about where their family’s money came from.
After her husband Alan’s decades of financial fraud are exposed, Suzanne’s wealthy, comfortable life shatters. Alan goes to prison. Suzanne files for divorce, decamps to a barely middle-class Massachusetts beach town, and begins to create a new life and identity. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from Norfolk State Prison, she tries to cleanse herself of all connections to her ex-husband. She tells herself that he, not she, committed the crimes.
Then Alan is released early, and the many people whose lives he ruined demand restitution. But when Suzanne finds herself awestruck at a major whale stranding, she makes an apparently high-minded decision that ripples with devastating effect not only through Alan’s life as he tries to rebuild but also through the lives of Suzanne and Alan’s son, Alan’s new wife, his estranged mother, and, ultimately, Suzanne herself.
When damage is done, who pays? Who loses? Who is responsible?
With biting wisdom, The Complicities examines the ways in which the stories we tell ourselves—that we didn’t know, that we weren’t there, that it wasn’t our fault—are also finally stories of our own deep complicity.
Release date: September 20, 2022
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Print pages: 304
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The Complicities
Stacey D'Erasmo
Because—and this is another part of my point, this is what’s so frustrating about how stories like ours get told—there was so much that we didn’t know because we didn’t know one another yet. So much that I didn’t know. And the things I knew couldn’t help me when there were all these other things that I didn’t know were happening. Besides, facts only take you so far. And even facts look different next to other facts.
For example: how big was his crime? Bigger than a breadbox, smaller than Chernobyl. If, let us say, the roof of your local high school gym collapsed during school hours because of shoddy construction, it was that big. So maybe it would be only a day in the national news, unless it was your child who was in gym class when the roof fell in, and then it’s the rest of your life, and the lives of everyone you know. It depends on where you’re standing.
Of course, I happened to be standing very close, because I was Alan’s wife. Noah was just a teenager. In our case, the crime had to do with money—Alan worked in money—but it could have been worse. There are so many ways to go wrong, terrible ways. I’m not saying he didn’t commit a crime; he did things with people’s money that you aren’t really supposed to do, he’d been doing it for a long time, and he got caught. I thought he was clever about currencies and exchange rates, but it turned out he’d been doing other things. Anyway, people who were already rich got angry. But the damage, to switch metaphors, is like water damage. It isn’t proportional to the crime. It seeps and spreads unpredictably. At first people don’t understand why there’s a water stain, as it were, on the ceiling, or where the dripping is coming from. And then they do. And then it gets very bad. Life gets impossible, pretty much, and people have lots of opinions, and they say you destroyed their family’s future, but did anyone care about our family and what was happening to us? Why were we suddenly the bad guys?
Although the trial and everything after took a long time, it felt as if in one day my entire life vanished. Alan went to prison. I left him, left what was left of our Boston life, which wasn’t much, and came out here, to Chesham, Massachusetts, a lower- to middle-class beach town indistinguishable from the many such beach towns that line the curved upper arm of the Cape. Chesham is on the ocean side, a freckle not far from the Cape’s elbow. By then, Noah was in a so-so college in Kansas and refusing to speak to me for leaving his father. My mother had vascular dementia and was living in a nursing home in Vermont. My father was dead. My two older sisters pitied me with all the silent vehemence with which they used to envy me. Our former friends dropped me. I was alone. I had no plan, just an instinct to get out of town for a while until I could figure out what to do next.
I had a little money in my checking account from the divorce, my wits, two suitcases, and a car that I quickly realized would stand out too much in Chesham. I rented a house about a ten-minute walk from the small center of the small town. It was more a shed with electric baseboard heat than a house, a shingled shotgun shack with half-suns made out of painted strips of wood on the front. Darker inside than I would have liked, a low ceiling, a musty scent. A kind of upper half-floor on which the bed—i.e., the futon—could lie, with a plexiglass skylight above the bed. Tacked on at the back of the house/shed/shack, however, was a small addition with a double-paned clerestory window. It was unclear what this room, which opened off of the kitchen, could have been—something to call an extra bedroom for summer rentals? But it was this small, secluded, semi-useless room that contained the house’s one beauty that made me rent the place right away. Of all the ugly things I could afford, this one had that long eye set high above, and light slanting down from it.
I sold the expensive car. With some of the money, I bought a little green used Honda that smelled of cigarette smoke inside and had only two working doors, both on the driver’s side. The seats were covered in that fake velvety stuff, dull gray-brown, with splotches. The smoke was baked into that fabric, nothing would ever get it out, and anyway, somehow I believed that the smoke was what was holding the car together at all. The hubcaps were rusty, the gas cap was loose, and the windshield wiper in the back window didn’t work. The car was cruddy, but it ran, and it provided great cover.
So there I was: alone, forty-nine, still pretty enough: straight blonde hair and a straight nose, a slender build. I am physically stronger than I look, even freakishly strong in the arms and hands. My butt is bigger than you might think it would be when you see me from the front. In front, I’m ladyish, but behind I’m a bit of a donkey. In Chesham, I could pass for any number of unremarkable women: soccer mom, boutique owner, high school teacher, whoever. I used my maiden name: Suzanne Flaherty. Around here, that’s the kind of name that’s so familiar it almost doesn’t seem like a name at all, just a part of the landscape, like a hedge. That was how I wanted it, because people make a lot of assumptions about someone like me.
I mean, look: sure, you can call me complicit, but there’s complicit and complicit, isn’t there? It isn’t only one thing, one label that explains everything in every situation. There isn’t complicity but complicities, errors of different sizes, plus there are other factors, choices that in hindsight maybe weren’t right, but in the moment it seemed different. Other people have done a lot worse things. Pol Pot. Drug cartels. Sex traffickers. And we weren’t like those Wall Street buffoons you’ve seen, the nouveau riche ones you can see coming a mile away by the supernatural glow of their teeth veneers. I graduated summa cum laude from Smith. Alan was a complicated guy, and he truly was so smart. Incredibly smart. We sent Noah to Montessori school. We listened to NPR. Our friends were really interesting people, local artists and a chef and gay guys who went to Burning Man every summer. We composted before hardly anyone else was doing it.
No one ever really believes that you didn’t know, but there’s knowing and there’s knowing. I knew that a good life cost money, that’s what I knew, and I knew how smart Alan was and how hard he worked. Let’s put it that way.
The upshot was that when I got to Chesham, I had no résumé, even though I’ve worked hard all my life. My last job on paper had been as a publicist for a wine distributor, but that was way back when Alan and I were first going out, and those skills didn’t mean much here, anyway. This is a year-round town, not all summer rentals, and it traffics in tangibles: things to eat, wear, use, smoke, or help you stop smoking. A little praying here and there. A rehab center in the next town over. Also, commercial fishermen, Brazilian and Ecuadorian immigrants who staff the kitchens and hotels and the many motels, the Almeida Butcher and a restaurant next door run by the butcher’s son, a yoga studio next to a Snip ‘n Wave Beauty Parlor, a few CBD emporiums. It was clear that I was going to have to improvise.
I got the idea from that room with the clerestory window. It was so calming in there. It reminded me of a place I used to go to get massages all the time in Back Bay. My favorite masseur was a man named Eagle, who had to be forty-five if he was a day and always smelled of sage. Maybe that’s why I rented the house, subliminally. I was standing in that empty room wondering what to do with it, and all at once I remembered the scent of sage. I thought—and I have no idea how this could suddenly happen, but it did, it was a strange time in so many ways—well, maybe I could do that. I could try, couldn’t I? What did I have to lose? Who would know if I failed? I found a little online course and it didn’t take more than a weekend to do it and then print out a certificate. I framed the certificate and hung it in the otherwise empty clerestory room. Eagle had something like that on the wall in the Back Bay place, hanging under the shelf with all the plants.
I thought of it all as an experiment, something to do in between the life I had left and whatever I was going to do next. Kind of like a hobby. It was easy to set it up. In one weekend I had decorated the room in Early Coven and picked up a space heater and a table that would do. With a twin-size futon on top, and towels and blankets and sheets on top of that, it felt great, just like the real thing. I nailed a face cradle to the table, hammering efficiently. I bought some oils like those Eagle had used and a few CDs of soothing instrumental music. I put up a flyer with those little tear-off tabs on the bulletin board at the small, quaintly shingled library in town. I bought a gauzy, embroidered top made in India and drawstring pants. I pulled my hair back into a simple ponytail.
The first two clients were nothing special, though they seemed satisfied enough when they left. The change happened with the third one. When she came through my front door, my first thought was, Olive Oyl. Everything about her was long and pale: long legs, long arms, long neck, long face, long hands and feet, a long braid of salt-and-pepper hair. Her name was Julie, she said. She was one of two librarians at the small library.
“Suzanne,” I said, shaking her long hand. I led her to the clerestory room. “Please undress and lie facedown on the table, under the sheets.”
“Oh, cool,” said Julie, peeking into the room. By candlelight, the photos of the prairie, the Sphinx, and a beach in Goa looked inviting and expensive and a little blurry in a good way. The space heater hummed cozily.
I closed the door, waited a few minutes, and tapped.
“Come in!” she called out.
I went into the room to find Julie undressed, hair loose, lying on the table under the sheet and blankets, face in the cradle. “Is it warm enough?” I asked.
“Yup.” She wiggled her long feet.
“Lavender or plain oil?”
“Oh. Well, plain, I guess.”
I turned on the music, oiled up my hands, and put my palms on the base of her long, pale neck. Eagle always started this way with me. My thumbs aligned on Julie’s vertebrae. Her body seemed like a slender length of cloth that could twist and slip through a keyhole. She breathed in, breathed out a minty smell. Her back was smooth, white, and narrow, dotted with a few moles here and there. Her shoulder-length hair was ridged from her braid. I pushed down with the heels of my hands. The muscles just beneath the skin were strong, resistant; they felt like pebbles wrapped in leather. I stood on my tiptoes to get a good angle to push down at the place where her neck met her shoulders. Her fingers fluttered under the sheet as I worked. In the flickering candlelight, the sepia grass of the prairie in the picture almost seemed to move in a breeze. The space heater glowed.
“Pressure okay?”
“A little more, if you don’t mind, hon,” she replied, voice thickened by the face cradle.
I pushed harder, gliding my oiled elbow along the rim of her shoulder blade. Her elbows, eyes up along her body, were rough and red, with deep furrows. The skin above her elbows was rough, too, untended. The muscles in her arms were well developed, but her skin everywhere was the same shade of white, as if she rarely spent much time outside; there was little difference between the color of the skin in the middle of her back and the color of her arms and face.
“Better?”
She nodded.
I re-oiled. Her skin, parched, soaked in the oil. Her right side was tighter than her left side, her right shoulder higher than her left. I figured it must be from right-handedness, but it gave her the appearance of being in a continual state of shrug, even when prone.
“You’re new here,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where you from?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Long way.”
“I guess,” I said. “Breathe in, please. Hold it. Now breathe out.”
I pushed down hard and she sank more deeply into the table. “Ooof,” she said. I covered her back and began on her hands and arms. I watched the clock: half an hour head to feet, turn over when you’re ready, half an hour feet to head.
Julie’s breathing had slowed by the time I was finishing with her left hand and scooting around the foot of the table to begin on her right hand. Her left arm slipped, dangled off the table, so I had to scoot back and gently tuck it against her side. The gold of her wedding ring gleamed, slick with oil. A branch rustled against the massage room’s clerestory window. Julie’s right hand was rougher than her left. The nails on both hands were short, unbitten. I interlaced my fingers with hers and moved our joined hands back and forth, rotated our wrists. Her wristbones were pronounced. All of her bones were pronounced, long and thin as she was, which made massaging her feel curiously anatomical, even medical. The leg-bone connected to the thigh-bone. She was all perfectly joined structure.
Her feet, however, were a mess. She had large bunions on both feet, knobs of bone that pulled her feet into watery diamond shapes and crowded her toes backward onto one another, like a line of falling dancers. Her heels were cracked. One ankle looked different than the other, bigger. Did that mean she had broken it at some point? Or was she born like that? I coated my hands with oil and rubbed as hard as I could on her misshapen feet, these stepchildren and burden-carriers of her body. I didn’t know why a librarian would have such terrible feet, what was in her past or her genes that did this. I didn’t ask. To me they were like duck feet, some part of her below the waterline, invisible, that did all the work and took all the weight. I went five minutes over on her feet.
I covered her feet again with the sheet and blanket. I put a hand on Julie’s shoulder and told her softly that she could turn over when she was ready. The wind moved over the prairie in the candlelight. The branch rustled against the clerestory window. The space heater sighed its hot breath. She woke, snuffled, wiggled down, and turned over. I put the little buckwheat and lavender pillow over her eyes. Her shoulders softened under my hands, nearly leveled. And then it happened.
It’s difficult to explain what it felt like. The easiest part to say is that my hands felt hot and alive in a way they never had before. I was doing the things the instructor had showed me how to do in the video, but my hands knew better, they were smarter and more precise than anything my mind could direct. My hands knew, and my arms knew, and my body knew where to stand to get the right degree of leverage and how to push.
“Damn,” said Julie. “That’s great.”
But I already knew that, or I should say, my body knew it. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had never felt so competent. I knew right away that I could do this. I could help people this way. It was exhilarating, and it just flowed. I flowed. I knew that I was where I was supposed to be, at last. I rubbed Julie’s earlobes and behind her ears, pressed around her hairline. The skin on her temples was so thin that I was almost afraid I would tear it. That was Julie: the battered feet, the elegant height, the fragile skin with the veins beating quietly beneath. I knew what she needed, where to push.
After, I waited for her in the living room with a glass of water. She was so tall when upright, like a walking tree. She looked taller, even, than when she had arrived. She sat down in a chair to put her sensible shoes and thick socks on her hobbled feet, twisted as roots.
“Wow, did I need that,” she said. I handed her the glass of water. “My husband just fussed all week. He has multiple sclerosis. Been in a wheelchair for a year now.” She drained the glass. “You ever been married?”
“Once. Not anymore.”
“You must get a lot of guys in this town picking up on you.”
“Not so much.”
Holding a hair tie in her teeth, she quickly rebraided her hair, banded it. She was upright, efficient, and slightly reserved. “Well, thank you, Suzanne. This was great. Maybe I’ll have another sometime.”
“Tell your friends,” I said.
“Totally.” Julie reached into her bag for her wallet. “Welcome to Chesham.”
I nodded and smiled as I put the cash in my pocket. I walked her the very short distance to the door, waved goodbye as she got in her car and drove away, tooting the horn. I went back into the massage room, where the candles were sinking into waxen puddles. The sheets where Julie had lain were faintly marked by the impression of her oiled body, like the shroud of Turin, if Jesus had been really tall. I gathered the sheets and put them in the cotton laundry bag under the massage table, folded the blankets, put the eye pillow away, blew out what remained of the candles, turned off the space heater. I lay down on the massage table for a few minutes, absorbing the ebbing warmth of the room. I got up, left the door open, and sat down in the living room to read a book of poetry by Mary Oliver. The lingering heat and the faint scent of skin and candle smoke wafted toward me. Even as my entire life had crumbled behind me, and my future was uncertain to say the least, I was content. I was entirely content.
The surprising thing was that Julie became a regular client and she did tell her friends. When the first set of tear-off tabs were gone, I put up another flyer with a fresh set. Over the course of about six months, I developed the beginnings of a little practice. It was hardly any money, but I was so excited to have discovered my gift. Finally, I knew why my hands and arms were so freakishly strong, and they got stronger still. With my hands, I cared for the sore and wounded, the flabby and scarred, the small-town real estate agents and retired schoolteachers, who lay on my table. And I realized something, too. Every body—every knot beneath the skin, every scar, every hitch in someone’s walk—tells a story, although most of the people who came to see me didn’t seem to know the stories that their bodies told. They just wanted, they said, to relax a little. They had stress.
But their bodies were more forthcoming. One lady wore a bathing suit for her session, which amused me until I noticed that the suit had a prosthesis built into it for her missing breast. Her feet were perfect, little toenails like scallop shells. I almost wept. Her muscles were pliant, supple, almost no tension anywhere. She had been through something terrible, clearly, but her body showed no fear, no holding. Bathing suit or no, she was utterly unguarded. A large, dark-skinned man of few words and with a lazy eye lay heavily on the table, his muscles like concrete. It was hard work; I was sweating. He was completely silent. I wondered why he was even there. When I reached the small of his back, though, he began to shake and then to cry. I said, “Hey, hey,” sat him up, gave him a tissue. He hung his head, fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose as if he had a nosebleed. “Fuck,” he kept saying, curved into himself. “Fuck fuck fuck.” He couldn’t meet my eye, couldn’t finish the massage, and left a massive tip. Another man, who had very abundant body hair, kept trying to guide my hand toward his semi-erect penis as he lay face-up. “Absolutely not,” I said, feeling like Little Red Riding Hood admonishing the wolf. “Get up and get out.” That happened more than once, to be honest, but I wasn’t daunted. A few wolves were nothing compared to all the open souls I was meeting, and helping, on my table. I counted myself lucky to have found my vocation, even at my age, even after all that I had lost.
I needed more money, though, so I got a bartending shift on Tuesd. . .
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