Page 39 of Saltwater

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Richard’s father died whenSarah was two months pregnant and they had already been in Los Angeles for a year. Initially, she had tried to keep one foot in New York, but every time she made plans to travel back and meet with a producer or friend or even her agent, Richard would beg her to stay. So she did.

In Los Angeles, she had no friends. No theater. No work. There was onlythe family:Marcus and Naomi and Richard’s ailing, ill-tempered father, the brothers’ mother having died when they were in high school.

Prep school,Marcus called it.

After ten months, she began to consider a separation. She wanted tosuggestit. The word alone might snap Richard out of the spell his family had cast over him. Richard never seemed to mind the waytheir world had shrunk. He started to remake himself as a patron, a figurehead. Static and unmoving. Like his father. But before she could find a good time to talk about it, she found out she was pregnant.

Sarah stayed for the baby. She promised to work on her marriage for the baby. She became the kind of woman she had always pitied: dependent, weak,doing it for the children.Meanwhile, every day, Richard disappeared. He came up with plans he had no intention of seeing through—a production company he was going to start, a gala he hoped to host. She wanted to be angry. Shewasangry! But then her feet swelled and her body changed, and her energy slipped away. It became impossible to think about anything but the pregnancy. All she could do was complain about the heat, the constant California sunshine that seemed to beat down, unrepentant, into the late fall.

She focused on the delivery. It was her milestone. But when Helen came, things only got worse. It was strange to love someone so fully. And yet she felt like she was always at a remove from Helen, from herself. Like she couldn’t reach either of them through the haze of early motherhood. Sarah never held it against Helen; she held it against herself. That she could feel that way about her own child.Theirchild.

“You don’t really need to work,” Richard said when Helen was three months old and Sarah was a wreck. Despite a nanny, despite a night nurse, despite Naomi lending them her housekeeper three days per week, despite the house, the flowers, the cashmere baby blankets and silver rattles, the monograms and blissful whitewashed adobe walls—the old her felt inaccessible. She was too tired to work anyway.

Sarah let the Lingates pull her under.

Naomi took her shopping and to lunch at the polo club. She dressed for dinners and fundraisers and clinked champagne glasses with women who had painted their lips larger than they really were. She consulted on Naomi’s flower arrangements, her party planning, her charitable giving. She tried desperately to find a good bagel, a place to smoke, but she only ended up picking at salads under no-smoking signs. They had been gone so long there was nothing left for her in New York. Her peers moved on, her agent signed other talent.And meanwhile, she sat in the California sunshine, smiling. Smiling, nursing, babbling, watching the walls close in.

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Sarah brought two glassesof Tempranillo into the living room, a stack of loose papers held in her hand.

“Just read it,” she said. “It will only take an hour.”

Richard swirled the wine and looked at the title page—Saltwater—before he took the pages from her. There was a time, once, when he wanted to read everything she worked on, every scrap of writing, every draft. Now he only thumbed through the stack.

“You didn’t tell me you were working on anything,” he said after the silence had stretched thin.

“Ididn’t know I was working on anything,” she said.

It was the truth.

“That sounds like semantics,” he said, taking a sip of the wine. Then he looked at her. It was the same blank expression he had worn when she left the room, the kind that was always intended to strip her of her humanity. The look that said:Why do you bother?

Sarah thought of Helen in her crib, of the fact that everything Richard said about her work these days sounded like a sneer, an afterthought, like a reminder to leave petty cash for the nanny.

“The truth?” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you.”

He didn’t push. They both knew why. Sarah wanted to say it had happened gradually—the way their relationship twisted into a set of roles neither one of them had signed up to play.

“Could you not sit here while I read?” Richard said, looking up from the fourth page of the play. “I don’t like you looking over my shoulder.”

Sarah went to the kitchen, and then out into the garden, which at night smelled of jasmine and gardenia. She wasn’t nervous; she knew he would hate the play. He would have hated it whatever it was. Because it was hers. Because it was a reminder of who he used to be, too. The person it seemed he had lost when they moved to the West Coast. Or didn’t want to be. Or worse, neverhadbeen.

Sarah followed a stone path that wound around the back of the house, the grass between the pavers dewy, slicking the soft in-betweens of her toes. She stopped at a large picture window. The panes were rippled and old, like the house, but through them she could see her husband dropping pages of the manuscript onto the floor, a small pile growing next to him.

Sarah watched until he was halfway through, when he stood, knocking his wineglass to the floor. It stained the pages red. Even through the glass, Sarah could see them curl. She knew his answer then, but went inside anyway.

“Absolutely not,” Richard said.

“Just think about it,” Sarah said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“It’s aboutus!”

“Don’t be so loud. You’ll wake the baby,” she said through her teeth. “And it’s not about you.”

“Everyone is going tothinkit is.”

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