The Daylight Marriage

by Heidi Pitlor

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Hannah was the kind of woman who turned heads. Tall and graceful, naturally pretty, often impulsive, always spirited, the upper class girl who picked, of all men, Lovell—the introverted climate scientist, the practical one who thought he could change the world if he could just get everyone to listen to reason. After a magical honeymoon they settled in the suburbs to raise their two children.

But over the years, Lovell and Hannah's conversations have become charged with resentments and unspoken desires. She's become withdrawn and directionless. His work affords him a convenient distraction. The children can sense the tension, which they've learned to mostly ignore. Until, after one explosive argument, Hannah vanishes. And Lovell, for the first time, is forced to examine the trajectory of his marriage through the lens of memory—and the eyes of his children. As he tries to piece together what happened to his wife—and to their lives together—readers follow Hannah through that single day when the smallest of decisions takes her to places she never intended to go.

With the intensity of The Lovely Bones, the balance of wit and heartbreak of The Descendants, and the emotional acuity of Anne Tyler, The Daylight Marriage is at its heart a novel about what happens when our intuitions override our logic and with a plot that doesn't reveal its secrets until the very end.

Release date: May 5, 2015

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

Chapter 1

Later, in weaker moments, Lovell Hall reminded himself of the logical fallacy that young scientists so often committed: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this. Of course, without certain information—and in the face of other unfortunate realities—the timing of that evening with his wife was impossible to ignore.

On the way home from his office in Cambridge, he had come to a stop in traffic with little more to look at than the back end of a maroon Dodge minivan and the rusted undercarriage of a semi. He was hungry. He was dizzy with hunger. This was the wrong day to have skipped lunch; he would probably miss dinner with his family again. And he had vowed to Hannah to make it home in time, for once. He had even left Mass Environmental before five. But because the universe had a way of conspiring against him, specifically when it came to being the husband that Hannah wanted, here he was with his car idling on high, here he sat mumbling obscenities about the minivan and the other commuters who drove instead of taking the train (his own office was nowhere near a train station), anticipating her barely muffled wrath when he got home.

When he finally opened the front door of his house an hour and a half after he had left Cambridge, he dropped his jacket at the foot of the stairs and went toward the kitchen. “I’m ravenous,” he said to Hannah as he helped himself to the soupy dregs of spaghetti at the bottom of the bowl. The two kids cleared their plates. She rose to collect the other dishes and glasses around him on the table.

“Route Two was a parking lot,” he told her. “There was an accident near the prison.”

“Oh,” she said.

It was a windy October weeknight, 2007, a howling, warm night, and the chimes on the back porch banged out their high notes. “I didn’t have time for lunch today,” he said. He glanced down at the puddle on his plate. “This is deceptively good.”

“Deceptively?”

He set down his fork. “I did everything I could to make it home in time, Tu.” Tu had been shortened from Tulip long ago. She turned on the faucet. He thought to say what he should have said the moment he saw her: “I’m sorry.”

Maybe she had not heard him talking with the water on. She was wearing the black stretchy pants and the moss-­green top that she always wore. Her coffee-­colored hair ran in lazy waves down her back to just below her shoulder blades.

“You look pretty,” he tried, probably in vain. He used to say this sort of thing to her all the time. It was the truth, no matter what old clothes she wore or her state of mind—or the filament that had gotten worn and stretched and by now just barely kept her and Lovell together. She was tall, one of the few women he had met who came within a foot of his own absurd height. She was lean but also soft, with a dancer’s long neck and pale gray-­green eyes and deep dimples. Still, seventeen years after she had first shown up at his apartment in Brighton with a bouquet of irises, the delivery girl for Fanciful Flowers, she was able to simply stand here and take his breath away. I am married to an objectively beautiful woman, he thought.

Was it shallow to reel in the presence of a woman’s beauty? A little primitive?

When he had finished his dinner, Lovell brought his plate to the counter. “Go, I’ll get the rest of the dishes,” he said.

“Thanks.” She went for the ratty yellow dish towel to dry her hands. He reached for the small of her back, but she was already off.

For years now, she had been quick to leave a room once he had entered it. Sometimes she grew jittery even when she had to stand near him; he tried but failed to remember when this had started. There may have been no sudden onset—he had to admit that there may have been the thinnest thread of chilliness when they first met years ago. He may have found it a turn-­on, a challenge or something like that.

The phone rang. Hannah answered it in the next room. Lovell finished the dishes and flipped through the mail. There, beneath the water and cable bills, was their second notice from NSTAR, this time all in red type. She was the one who took care of paying the bills. Annoyed, he propped it in a little tent at the end of the counter where she would see it.

He rooted around in his briefcase for his laptop. The radiosonde data had come in yesterday from Pago Pago and his new column at Weather magazine was due tomorrow and he had hardly begun. A climate scientist at a foundation that studied the impact of humankind on the planet, Lovell researched the link between global warming and hurricanes. He gave himself a half hour at the computer now, no more, and then he would spend some time with the kids before they went to bed. He could work on the column tomorrow if he got to his office a little early.

As it too often did, the half hour became almost two hours, and now he and Hannah stood on either side of their bedroom, Lovell peeling off his white undershirt and she rummaging around in her dresser drawer. He watched her tug at the neck of her old sweater as if it were itchy or too tight. She finally wriggled out of it and tossed it on the floor.

They had not made love in over a year, and not for lack of trying on his part. Lovell had no idea how to turn things around at this point. They had never been the sort of couple to go at it every night, but this was an eternity, even for them.

Janine, who would be fifteen in a month, was still sawing out arpeggios on her viola next door. It had to be ten thirty or eleven.

Ethan appeared in the doorway in his robot pajamas. “I can’t sleep,” he said, gesturing to Janine’s room. He was eight. “And the Mekenners’ dog won’t shut up again.” This had become his nightly refrain, his attempt to stall bedtime.

“I already talked to Janine,” Hannah said. “And sweetie, there’s not much we can do about King.” She was a good mother. She was patient when Lovell was not, anticipatory of needs and emotions that he could never predict.

Ethan replied, “You could call them.”

“It’s late,” Hannah said. “I’m sure they’re already asleep.”

“So their asshole dog gets to wake up everyone else in the neighborhood?”

“Ethan,” she said. “Stop listening to your sister. The mouth on her.”

Behind their backs, Hannah herself could sound like a sailor.

“He does have a point,” Lovell said. “King’s barks can really get under your skin.”

“How about one of you go ahead and pick up the phone?”

“Tu,” Lovell said.

After Ethan slunk out of the room, she said, “Remember he has the orthodontist tomorrow. We find out if he’ll need braces. God, I hope that doesn’t bring back his stutter.”

“Mm.” Lovell did not remember any mention of braces.

She shot him a look—she had finely tuned radar for his not listening.

He considered reminding her of the many legitimate things that occupied him, the slew of deadlines he faced at work, the fact that this was hurricane season, that his colleague Lucinda was out all week and so he would have to cover three meetings with Ford and Chrysler over the next two days alone. But he said only, “We got another notice about the electric. We’re three weeks late.”

“I know,” she said as she slid a sweatshirt over her head.

He waited for her to say more, and when she did not, he let other infractions pour out: the towers of recycling on the back porch, the missed tune-­up for her car. “Tu, this is the third time this year that you forgot the electric. They could shut us off.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s three notices,” he repeated. She worked at most ten hours a week at the flower store. Nothing that should have bothered her did. Nothing got through to her these days.

She stretched her head from side to side, maybe working out a kink in her neck. She gazed out the window as if taking in the enormity of the starry sky.

“Is your life so busy that you can’t remember to pay the bills? Can you tell me just what you do all day, every day?” He had finally said what he had only thought so many times.

She stood there in her faded Boston University sweatshirt, receiving what he had just said. “Fuck you.”

“Yet something else you don’t do.” He moved toward the bathroom, dumbfounded. It seemed as if he had just fired a gun that he had thought was not loaded.

“Lovell,” she called from the next room. “You say that to me and then you go and fucking hide? At least have the balls to look at me afterward.”

Here it was, her own sailor mouth.

Something—a shoe?—hit the door behind him just as he pulled it shut. A glass bottle broke across the tile floor. He looked and saw that it had been a bottle of Coco perfume. She was wearing perfume again? Chanel had to go for a hundred bucks an ounce. She did not possess one shred of financial responsibility. She had been raised by a nanny in a waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard. She had spent her birthdays at the Ritz in Boston or the Plaza Hotel (“You probably never read Eloise when you were little”). She had attended tony, off-­island boarding schools. But twelve years ago, her father’s business partner was convicted of embezzlement and the sailboat manufacturing company he and her father owned was liquidated. Donovan Munroe had to sell their property on the Vineyard and their brownstone in Boston, among other assets. He and Lydia moved from Edgartown into a three-­bedroom Cape in Vineyard Haven. They had to stop sending Hannah money every few months, sizable checks that would arrive ostensibly for her birthday or Christmas or “a little summer fun.” But she had viewed the situation with wide-­eyed curiosity. Here was an opportunity for her parents—and she and Lovell, since they relied heavily on those checks at the time—to try out interesting new stores and restaurants, to warm their cold hands over a blazing fire in the living room at night, to learn to knit and sew their own clothes. Janine was a toddler at the time, and Hannah began knitting small blankets for her, thick, fuzzy hats, mittens, and socks. As their savings dwindled, Hannah agreed to apply for a part-­time job at the flower store in town, where she still worked all these years later.

Lovell stared down at the shards of glass. It felt as if thousands of mites had gotten into his blood and were now nipping at him from the inside, making his heart pump at hyperspeed. It was impossible to stand still. His veins were hot.

“Every day you become more of an asshole,” she called. “Lovell.”

He had to steady himself.

“Lovell?”

When he returned to the room, she sat at the center of the bed, her legs crossed and her sweatshirt stretched around her knees. She looked almost nervous. “What were you doing in there? What the hell was all that?”

He would deal with the broken perfume bottle later. “Nothing,” he said.

“It sounded like something.”

“I just said it wasn’t anything.”

“You talk to me like I’m a bratty child,” she said. She drew a shaky breath. “That’s what you think I am—a spoiled brat.”

He knew what she was doing—trying to deflect blame and distract him from the matters at hand. “Let’s not have another argument about how I do or do not talk to you. Let’s go over the fact that you can’t even handle paying the bills. You forget to take out the trash. Are you depressed or something?”

“Something?” she repeated. “Do you hear how belittling you are?”

“Are you even listening to the words that I am saying? Or just the—what, the cadence of my voice?”

“The cadence says plenty.”

He hauled off and kicked the bottom of the bed frame. She reached to steady herself as the bed jerked backward, waiting for him to do something worse. Janine hurried past in the hallway. He went to slam the door shut.

“Hannah,” he began, tensing his leg again.

Now she looked afraid. They had gone beyond their limits. He had certainly gone beyond his. In the past, he had thrown a book or a pen at a wall and stomped around rooms, but now he was somewhere new, some menacing place with no walls or doors, no windows or light. “Listen,” he said, perhaps afraid himself. “I want to understand. I really do. Why is everything so hard for you? I mean in terms of work and daily life and even us. I genuinely want to know.” It was not ideal to conflate all their problems this way—money, sex, moods, life—but he could not help it. They had become indivisible.

Her fear looked to be dissipating. “Obviously,” she said, “you think I should work more hours. Forget about the fact that I can’t stand that goddamned store anymore. I’ve worked at some florist for the majority of my adult life, and at this point I can’t think of one good reason why.”

She had said this sort of thing countless times before. She seemed to blame him for her own failure to choose a more meaningful career.

“What job would you rather have?”

“If I knew, don’t you think I’d be doing it? I’m almost forty. I can’t exactly dream up some new life and, poof, just start over.” She swept her hand across her forehead as if she were onstage. “Oh, my whole life feels like an epilogue right now.”

This was rich. “Who really says that? Some woman in a cheesy movie? A character in a goddamned novel?”

Hannah made a gusting sound, as if she had been punched in the stomach.

“You have to decide to make it better. Right, Tu? No?” She had never had to work for anything. She had never been tasked with propelling her own life anywhere. She complained incessantly about what little work she actually did. Maybe he had reason to sound indifferent. “You just make a decision and go with it.”

“How do I do that?”

What was he supposed to say now? My whole life feels like an epilogue. Didn’t her life include him? He just shook his head.

“Thank you, as always, Lovell, for your stunning compassion and understanding.”

He was not about to let her continue playing the martyr. “Chanel? Really?”

“Keep it down. You want the kids to hear you?” she said. She had a point. The kids had heard plenty tonight—and over the years. “Wait, is that what you dropped? Or did you do something to it? You did something.”

“We are not people who can afford Chanel.”

“Oh God. It was my only perfume. Sophie bought it for me the last time they went to Paris to visit her parents.” Sophie Vallard, her college roommate, had grown up in France. “Why am I justifying anything to you?”

“And you call me belittling?” he said, burning inside. “You’re the one who secretly looks down on me. You’re the one who’s the almighty princess here.”

“Yeah? And you are a big fucking loser.” She rose and took a step toward the bathroom. “No, you know what? You broke it, you clean it up.” She reached for a pillow and held it to her chest. She kept her eyes on the mattress. She appeared to be deciding on the best way to continue—or whether to continue at all. She stood and walked out of the room.

Every molecule of rage flew away from him. He wanted to take back all that he had said.

He went to the window to see whether she was now in her car, peeling out of the driveway, but both of their cars sat side by side in the darkened driveway, unoccupied. He waited a moment to see whether she would appear below, but she did not, and so he went to lie down.

He faced Hannah’s pillow, bunched into a ball in its ivory case at the far corner of the mattress. The poison that they kept stored away inside themselves, this toxic stew that had expanded for years, had finally boiled o. . .