The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A keenly observed multi-generational novel about sex, marriage, shame, money, divorce, guilt, bad therapists, French food, death, and one old rooster, by the acclaimed author of Wise Men.

Henrietta Olyphant has lost her husband, her money, and is about to lose her hard-won anonymity: The Inseparables, the scandalous and critically despised bestseller that Henrietta wrote decades earlier, is set to be reissued. At the same time, her daughter Oona is in the middle of a divorce, and has begun an affair with her therapist. And Oona’s teenaged daughter Lydia faces scrutiny and shame when a nude photo unintentionally circulates around her boarding school. In the wake of these upheavals, the women come together unexpectedly to sift through the mess. Told over the course of a few days, this incisive and moving novel examines what happens when our most careful ideas about ourselves unravel and we must invent ourselves—and our family—anew.

Release date: July 19, 2016

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

1.

As usual, the book only made her problems worse.

The new editions arrived overnight from New York. One large box came, torn already at the corners. When the deliveryman knocked, Henrietta pretended she was not at home. From an upstairs window she watched him, obviously cold in his uniform, looking harmless, carefully holding the box as if it held something truly valuable. A storm was just beginning. Constant wind bent the stand of birches by the road. Snowdrifts gathered in steep, clean slopes beneath the casement windows. The best option, she decided, was to leave the box out in the weather. That way, mercifully, the snow and sleet might ruin everything.

  

Hours later, though, her daughter was digging in.

“Disaster averted,” Oona announced, home from her shift at the hospital, snow and ice on the hood of her coat. “I’ve saved the books!”

Oona smiled fiendishly. This was the look that afflicted everyone who ever came in contact with this thing. She put down the box on the kitchen counter and expertly ran the sharp edge of her car key through the cardboard.

“Don’t open it,” Henrietta pleaded, reaching out to try to stop what was about to happen. “Please. Let’s just put it back outside and let them all get destroyed. That’s the healthy, reasonable thing to do.”

“You have to let me do this,” Oona said. “I had the worst day. A guy came in from a car crash with his lower half in a zillion pieces.” Oona held up some Styrofoam peanuts and crushed them in her hand until confetti poured through her fingers. She was an orthopedic trauma surgeon at a hospital in Boston. A good deal of her stories started like this. More confetti came down. “Like, a zillion pieces.” Oona was the rare medical professional who somehow made surgical scrubs fashionable, a feat she accomplished by wearing all black, all the time, from scarf to clogs, as if she were a medical ninja. “The Styrofoam, so you know, is supposed to represent bones.”

Oona had ended her marriage earlier this year, and ever since she had been living at home again, in her childhood bedroom. For Henrietta, this turned out to be good timing. Her husband, Harold, had passed eleven months ago, and it had helped to have her daughter back in the house, to have, however temporarily, another soul here, under the same roof, another person breathing and speaking. This sudden recurrence of mothering had become the perfect antidote to her widowhood.

Oona was tall, like her father, and had his same profile, his same wide-set eyes, his exact same laugh. Henrietta had never been more grateful for this than in this last year. At times it seemed inconceivable that they might have ever raised a doctor together. Especially in this house, with the occasional chicken running through, with its loud music, and with their gallons of artery-clogging homemade butter in the freezer. For years Harold was a successful chef with a French restaurant in downtown Boston, and it turned out that all their Sunday evenings here in the big open kitchen julienning carrots and butchering meat had at least left Oona comfortable with sharp knives.

Oona reached into the box and took out the first copy of the book, immediately pressing it against her chest and feigning devotional ecstasy. Henrietta looked away. After all this time, the familiar pink cover was back in her life.

“Oh my goodness,” Oona cried out in mock surprise.

“Don’t act like you weren’t obsessively tracking this package,” said Henrietta.

They had known, of course, that the box was on its way. People in New York had alerted Henrietta to this fact last night. Let us know what you think, they had implored her, deliriously excited, full of foolish optimism, as if she was inclined to think anything positive after all this time.

“This is so wonderful,” Oona said. The box held eleven more copies. “Can I keep it?”

“You already have a copy, I’m sure,” Henrietta said.

“I have a collection of copies. But none so pristine,” said Oona.

The truth was that Henrietta was long in the habit of denying her book’s existence, but this was difficult to do when it was there on her counter, and in her daughter’s hands. This month her old publishers, Hubbard and Co., were set to release a new (still pink) edition, replete with, of all things, critical essays and appreciations. Henrietta had not known such things might apply to a book like hers. Her editors had asked her to write the introduction, something light but wistful, and she’d refused. They’d called after her for weeks. Just write something, they’d begged. Anything! Don’t you have any thoughts about your book? She’d responded with an email that read,

For a very long time I have tried to ignore the fact that I authored this book. You should understand that this is the work of someone very young and supremely untalented. I know I am not alone in that opinion. I say this with full knowledge of how uncouth this sounds: I really just need the money.

Enthusiastically yours,

Henrietta Olyphant

She had written the book here, during her first years in Massachusetts. Earlier in her life, she had taught in New York. Women’s studies. The politics of the human body. The gendered dialectics of mass-market media. Harold had moved them here when she was pregnant. Without classes to teach, she thought she would try her hand at fiction. She was young and full of confidence. Mostly she wrote at night, in short fits while Oona slept. Her heroine was a twenty-five-year-old woman named Eugenia Davenport, a newspaper reporter tasked by her editors during the summer of 1967 with finding the most desirable man in New York City and then getting him to marry her. Henrietta had the idea to structure the book like a visitor’s guide to the female body, designed to emulate the traveler’s companion that tourists brought with them to Paris, replete with maps and photographs and historical anecdotes about the various cathedrals worth seeing. In every chapter, Eugenia Davenport had a new lover, and with every new lover there were discoveries to be made. Henrietta cringed even to hear the word “diagram” now: The Inseparables had in it the first in-depth diagram of the vagina that had ever appeared in a mainstream book, or, more accurately, a book that was being sold in the supermarket, and which any woman, or grandmother, or, for that matter, any nine-year-old boy, could pick up while waiting for the checkout clerk to finish bagging. This is to say nothing about the way she’d drawn this particular diagram—like an ironic treasure map to a mythic hidden colony.

If they spoke of it at all while Oona was growing up, they called it That Thing. Or sometimes That Motherfucking Thing. Until a few months ago, Henrietta wondered if she was the only person who remembered what it really was, or what it had meant to that whole generation who’d professed to love it. But then Henrietta had needed the money, and this whole ordeal had started up in earnest once more. Her picture had appeared last week in the Globe, and then in People. Strangers had lately begun to recognize her again. Recently, whenever she was out in downtown Aveline, someone inevitably would stop her, someone about her age, squinting to see if she really was the same woman from the back of the book, the one holding that infernal silver teapot. The conversation was usually about the scene three chapters from the end, when Eugenia smashes her own teapot through the front window of the Cadillac belonging to Templeton Grace, the man she blames for ruining her impending marriage. The teapot was intended to be some ironic joke, some winking insult to the women she’d been trying to make a comment about, women like her own mother, for whom the teapot, or the serving spoon, or the watering can, had become the family coat of arms. That smashing of the window was supposed to symbolize some epochal generational shift. Women assuming some whiff of a man’s primal violence.

The repudiation was endless. The book had been construed as something she hadn’t intended. She’d been called out by smarter, better-educated feminists for having contributed to a caricature of women being shrill and unstable and willing to throw teapots through the windows of American luxury automobiles. The book was cheap, critics said, and irresponsibly witless. Its depiction of sex-crazed women would almost certainly prove counterproductive to the struggle. Henrietta had called the book The Inseparables because she was trying to make a point about monogamy and fidelity and about the unspoken hope of all newlyweds: that their marriage might go out into the world unbreakable, tough as steel. This, too, was criticized for being overly simplistic and sentimental and also too beholden to patriarchal norms. The people she’d set out to pillory had become the book’s biggest champions. For a year, at every one of her public appearances, cheery housewives brought her silver teapots, hugged her, whispered loving encouragement into her ear. Finally someone had written a book for them! A breezy, fun, sexy book! And it had pictures, too! The men who Henrietta hoped might feel stung by this book—men who saw the advent of the Pill and the subsequent ushering in of the sexual revolution as an excuse just to fuck more and fuck everyone and fuck with impunity—wrote her letters suggesting that she very probably wanted to fuck them, too. These men also felt compelled to show up at her readings. Although she refused to admit it aloud then, she’d been crushed when her book was rejected by the erudite establishment she’d assumed she belonged to. If she chose to search them out, she found dozens of news articles attesting to this rejection, all with variations of a headline much like this: “Olyphant Insists Sex Book Is Actually Good for Women.” She’d sought to make an asshole of people, and people had very rightly made an asshole of her.

She never wrote another book, or another article. There was just this. She had the original reviews packed away somewhere in a box, the collected array of her misery stored together with other similar artifacts that brought her shame: bills from her credit card company, the impossible-to-open case for the diaphragm her mother had ordered for her before her first semester at Barnard, her humiliating attempts at landscape painting.

Henrietta watched Oona flip through The Inseparables with something close to genuine enthusiasm, relishing, somehow, every page. It was one thing to have written a book like this; it was another thing entirely to have a daughter who enjoyed it so much.

“Oh!” Oona cried. “It has the diagrams. Still!”

“You’re handling this all wrong,” Henrietta said. “I need compassion from you. Or at least some genuine disapproval.”

“You were a genius,” Oona said, turning the book around so that Henrietta could see. “What kind of drugs were you smoking when you decided to do this?”

“Oona—”

“My favorite part?” Oona said, pointing to the most famous diagram. “Is the fact that you felt it necessary to include a label for pubic hair. As if we can’t tell what this is.”

“Okay,” Henrietta said, turning away. “Now you’re just being coarse.”

Henrietta would not touch the book. The truth was that she had not physically handled a copy of That Motherfucking Thing for a decade. Perhaps two. This went beyond superstition. She detested it. The first sentence, the second sentence, the last sentence—every sentence. The cover. The back cover. The concept. The pictures. She had burned a few copies once, this having been the seventies, and a therapist of hers having advocated some combination of primal scream therapy and pyromania. Not surprisingly, it had not been very helpful to feel a kinship with Joseph Goebbels.

“You don’t understand,” Oona said. “It’s a cult sensation now.”

“Cults are not good things, Oona. Why should I feel good about this?”

Oona smiled. “Because it’s wonderful and trashy and fantastic.”

Henrietta took a deep breath.

“I know,” Oona said. “You thought it was actually smart.”

“That’s not—”

“The trashiness was unintended, I know. But accidental trashiness can still be exquisite. The trash can age and ripen.”

“I left the box out there to get ruined,” Henrietta said. “That was intentional.”

“What fun is that?”

“You were an infant when this was published. You don’t remember.”

“I’ve heard a million times about the cat on the porch,” Oona said.

“Girls from Radcliffe brought a dead cat,” said Henrietta.

“Women from Radcliffe, Mom.”

“That’s the wrong part of the sentence to be concerned with!”

“I know. You were an academic. A serious thinker.”

Henrietta smirked.

“What was your lecture? The gendered economy of housework?”

This was true. She met Harold when he catered a lunch for her department at the university. Because there were empty seats, she invited him to sit and, surprisingly, he accepted the offer. There were charts, she remembered, registering the declining wage per hour of various domestic jobs before and after women began doing them. Days later, Harold invited her to the restaurant where he worked. He was slender, with long brown hair that he kept tied up above his head with kitchen twine. He worked at a small bistro in midtown, near the theaters. She went thinking that they would eat together in the dining room, that it was his day off, maybe, that he would, at best, politely disregard her lecture, or, at worst, confront her with the same tired invective she’d heard ever since she started teaching: Why don’t you talk about something more pleasant? Or: What’s a pretty girl like you have to be upset about? Instead, they ate out in the alley behind the kitchen. He had twenty minutes off, he told her. He had set up a makeshift table on the steps of the fire escape. He told her what he’d made. Escargots à la bourguignonne. Fricassée de poulet à l’ancienne. She didn’t know what any of the food was. She’d grown up poor, eating the cheapest cuts of meat, boiled potatoes. He had Sancerre in stemware that he’d carefully unwrapped from cloth napkins. It was fall. She wore a sweater. She had never drunk Sancerre before. He had lined up flowers and candles, she remembered, along the rusted steel staircase. Earlier that week she had lectured for forty minutes on the insipid mass-market depictions of men trying to woo women. He served the chicken in a shallow bowl. While she ate, he watched her, nervous that she would not like it. “You can tell me,” he said. “You can tell me if it’s awful.”

For a small moment in time, she and Harold were both famous. Unlike for her, for him fame was local and fleeting and generally painless. His restaurant, the Feast, opened nine months before the publication of The Inseparables. Nestled in a wasteland of inedibility between Symphony Hall and the Christian Science Plaza, the Feast served real French cuisine: boeuf au poivre with a dollop of hand-churned butter adorning the meat like a piece of jewelry; a coq au vin that had made Julia Child weep in appreciation; a small but excellent cellar of Burgundy unrivaled in a city parched for good wine; and the Cabernet Franc glaze that Frank Sinatra, in town to sing at the Garden, had once said was the single greatest thing he ever put in his mouth—and that included Ava Gardner’s tit. Nearly everything Harold could raise here he raised. Vegetables on the part of the land that abutted the river. Stone fruit in a small orchard that had only just begun to show maturity. And animals. So many of them that it was sometimes a shock to see it now, the hills bare, the grass snowed over, the stalls and pens empty except for ghosts. That first night together, in the alley behind his restaurant, she had asked him about her lecture. “What did you think about my class?” she asked. She remembered that she thought he was lying when he told her he thought it was fascinating. Were there groups he could join? he asked her. What could he do to help? Were there any books he should read?

Oona flipped through the pages until she got to the back. “This is my favorite,” she said, holding up the author photograph. “This picture of you is wonderful.”

“Chocolate is wonderful. The ocean is wonderful. That picture of me is ludicrous.”

“Come on. That’s your problem with this thing. Embrace it!” Oona tried to get her to hold the book. “Embrace it! Embrace this woman!”

They had kept the same picture. Hubbard had wanted everything in this new edition to stay the same. Vintage typeface. Vintage sexual outrage. Vintage Henrietta. Since she was doing this for the cash, she had not put up a fight. It was the most contrived, most outrageously foolish photograph ever taken of her: the ecru turtleneck; the collection of dangling silver amulets; the white evening gloves up to her elbows; a tumbler of iced tea in her right hand; flared gray corduroys rising a foot above her navel; mustard-colored sunglasses; her old Himalayan pussycat, Albert Camew, asleep beside her. In her left hand, she held that stupid silver teapot. She had forgotten the photographer’s name, but he was German, tall, delicate, blond, a little deaf. He loved the book (all the hysterical women!) and was thrilled when he saw the teapot across room. Ooh. That is vonderful. I love it. Go! Now! Hold it up to the light! They’d taken the picture here in the living room, in front of the mantel. She remembered Harold standing off to the side, holding Oona against his chest. She was nine months old then, maybe ten. Harold had always claimed to love the book, even amid the outrage, even as everyone wanted to know which of Eugenia’s lovers was actually him.

Crossing the room, Oona gave off a small, quiet sigh at the mess the house had become. Boxes cluttered the whole first floor, as well as the barn and the garage. Now that Harold was gone, Henrietta needed to move. The intricacies of her financial distress were not complicated. The accounts were drained. The credit cards were at their limits. She had not saved enough. She was underinsured. She had come perilously close to bankruptcy. Death, it turned out, was very expensive. Because of this, she had packed everything these last few weeks, put forty years into boxes, watched as her husband’s closets were emptied, his sock drawers discarded, his car sold, every trace of their life together dismantled and put away. So many rooms were crowded floor to ceiling with cardboard that the windows were blocked and the light could not get in. Bit by bit the house began to feel less like a home and more like a gloomy, light-starved storage locker. Oona wanted to help, to pay, to write checks, to rent her an apartment, and whether it was maternal pride or some deeper stubbornness, Henrietta cut off the discussion whenever it came up. With Oona it was more complicated. With your children it was always this way.

Coming back from the kitchen with a tall cup of coffee, Oona noticed a black suitcase wedged in between two large boxes.

“What is this?” Oona said, not as a question, but as an accusation. She put her hands on her hips. “I can’t believe you still have this, Mom.”

“Can we skip this part, please? Can we go back to when you were excited about my awful book? When you were spinning and talking about cults and pubic hair and bone dust?”

Oona flung the suitcase up onto the counter and began to unzip it.

“Please don’t,” Henrietta cried. “Please.”

Before Harold died, they had a vacation to Barcelona planned. They were set to leave a week after he passed, and for some reason he had already packed, and put the suitcase by the back door, which, for the past eleven months, was where Henrietta had left it, despite Oona’s constant protests. This kind of behavior, Oona kept telling her, was unhealthy and emotionally damaging, not to mention wholly atypical of the kind of woman Henrietta had always prided herself on being, which is to say not the kind of woman who kept her dead husband’s packed suitcase still intact all this time.

“This is not okay,” Oona said, which was probably the hundredth time that Henrietta had heard her say this.

“I’m aware, honey, that you don’t consider this to be the most emotionally restorative thing to do,” Henrietta said, using a phrase her daughter had popularized in the house these last eleven months.

“Oh, it’s far from emotionally restorative,” Oona said.

“As are most things in life,” Henrietta said.

“Why don’t you let me take you to therapy? We can go together,” Oona said.

Henrietta smiled. “That sounds like a recipe for a delightful and productive afternoon.”

“Or let me bring you some books to read,” Oona said.

Her daughter was a surprisingly avid devotee of self-help literature. This had been a secret until Oona moved back in, and Henrietta had discovered the considerable library she’d amassed over the years. Books on so many varied subjects—on nutrition (The Last Diet Ever, Part Two), on leaving your husband (A Workbook to Regain Dignity), on grief and death (Believing in Heaven but Not in God). None of this should have stunned Henrietta as much as it did. Oona had always distrusted abstraction and gravitated instead toward the simple fix. This was what made orthopedics so attractive to her: you cut, you repair, you close the body. “I have my own books,” Henrietta assured her.

“But your books are all probably about the depravity of mankind and the imminent cultural apocalypse.”

“They are very good books.”

Oona rested her hands on the suitcase. “I don’t know what to do with you,” Oona said.

“You shouldn’t feel the need to do anything with me. It’s just a suitcase, Oona. Eventually I will get around to opening it. And eventually, after that, I will get around to finding some restorative balance, or whatever you call it. I promise you.”

Oona took a large breath with the same theatrical flair she’d used as a toddler, fuming over whatever was wildly unfair in her life at that time—going to sleep or bathing or being deprived of cake. The fact was that Henrietta had pretended months ago that she’d opened this suitcase, and had told Oona that she’d reckoned with the mundane things that were inside it before packing it all away. Afterward, they’d split two bottles of wine and had a wonderful and sad evening together in which they were united miserably in their grief. They had listened to an entire Leonard Cohen record. Oona had told her the next morning that she was proud of her, saying so without a trace of condescension or self-help sappiness.

“But you told me you opened it!” Oona said. “Remember?”

“I do remember.”

“What happened?”

“What happened is that I lied to you.”

Henrietta knew what was coming: Oona liked to console her by relaying some grievously awful story from the hospital, as a way to let her know that she was familiar with the trauma of death, and also with the loving family members of dead people whom she and her colleagues had to comfort in the waiting areas of their emergency room. As far as Henrietta could tell, this was either a woeful attempt at tough love or a terrible advertisement for Oona’s hospital.

“Last week at the hospital—” Oona started.

“Please don’t tell me something horrible.”

“—we had a young woman in the emergency room. She had overdosed on cocaine and had done so, for some stupid reason, at the top of a staircase.”

“I know you see death all the time,” Henrietta said, her voice cracking.

Oona stopped. “You really don’t want to hear the rest of it?”

“Let me guess,” Henrietta said, her shoulders falling. “At the end of the story, she dies.”

Oona nodded. “Yes,” she said, sounding only a little disappointed. “She does die.”

“See? This is not helpful. These stories of poor cocaine addicts are not helpful for me.”

Oona had two hands on the suitcase. It was a small black thing, bought for thirty dollars at a discount store, nothing great. She had thought it was ridiculous that Harold would have packed so far ahead of their trip, especially considering that he was a famous procrastinator, always leaving these most crucial tasks for the last moment.

“I’m afraid to open it,” Henrietta said. “That’s why it’s still here.”

Henrietta thought she saw Oona readying a response, something typical for her. “Afraid? But why?” Oona might say. “What could possibly be inside that you would be afraid to find? It’s probably just what’s normally in a suitcase. With Dad, it’s probably just, you know, an extra pair of underwear. Or, at best, a boring book about the history of butter.”

Instead, Oona walked across the room and hugged her.

It wasn’t what was probably inside, Henrietta felt like saying. It was what was potentially inside. This was an important distinction. All this time she had allowed herself to think that there was something special, or something surprising that had made Harold pack it up two weeks early. At first, after he was gone, she figured he did it because he was bored. With the restaurant closed he was home with nothing to do, so why not pack up early? But Harold did not do these kinds of things. Her Harold—the same Harold who that last year had grown a white beard, who had attempted to teach himself Ancient Greek, and had expressed an interest in learning how to play the banjo—this Harold simply was not practical enough to have done something like this. And so she’d begun to think that there must have been a different reason why he’d done it.

The coffeemaker chimed. Oona poured herself a cup, drank half of it, and then refilled it just as quickly.

Henrietta shook her head. “How long have you been awake straight?”

Oona looked at her wristwatch. Usually she worked nights. Now that she was in the middle of a divorce she worked days and nights. “Many, many hours,” she said.

“How much caffeine have you had?”

“Tankards’ worth,” Oona said. “Gallons, probably.”

“You need to sleep. It’s not good for you to—” Henrietta stopped herself. She had fallen back into this recently. Motherhood for her had always been a conflict between proper concern and far too much worry. Widowhood had only made this worse.

Oona looked down at the suitcase. “Maybe we could open it together.”

Henrietta took a deep breath.

“Just let me know, Mom. I can do it with you. Whenever you want. I can help.”

Across the room, Oona’s phone began to ring. She gave off an exhausted sigh. “One sec, Mom,” she said. Over these last six months Henrietta had learned that the noise of her daughter’s phone corresponded with another human’s injury. This was how it went: someone’s bones broke, the phone rang, and then Oona rushed off to repair the mess. Oona walked slowly toward her phone, which was on a table across the room. It was an old house and it loudly bore the weight of every step inside it. Henrietta used to be able to differentiate between her daughter’s feet and her husband’s. From the living r. . .