Max West was a rock star, yes. He had played for the sultan of Brunei, the Dalai Lama, an amphitheater full of Buddhist monks. He had won Grammys and met presidents. But he was her childhood, her adolescence; he was a part of her, he was who she used to be, and he was who she still was, somewhere deep inside. Back when they were friends, before they were lovers, he would come to her house on Saturday mornings and help her with her chores: dusting and vacuuming the front of the house. Before he had his growth spurt, he would stand on top of the vacuum, and Claire would push him around the living room. He showed up, one time, in the middle of the night and found Claire asleep with her hair wrapped in treated paper to straighten it, and they both laughed until they nearly wet their pants. His junior year, he drove a 1972 yellow Volkswagen Bug that had no turn signals and no ignition, and even in February when it was fifteen below zero, he had to crank down his windows and stick his arm out so that oncoming traffic would know he was turning. He had to run alongside that car to get it started, and Claire was right there with him, running, pushing, hopping into the passenger side. He worked as a busboy one summer at a seafood restaurant on the boardwalk, and Claire would meet him after his shift, and once in a while he would pull lobster tails from behind his back. They were extras. A gift from the cook. They used to eat the lobsters with their bare hands in the dunes, looking at the black ocean. On those nights of the pilfered lobsters, the breeze in her face and Matthew’s bare leg knocking against hers and the hour growing so late that the lights of the boardwalk were shutting down behind them, she felt something rare. She thought to herself: I never want my life to change.
But change it did.
“I’m okay,” Claire sobbed. How had she gotten here? So far away from that dune in Wildwood. She lived somewhere else now, and she had four children and a husband and a career and a house and a best friend and a lover and this unwieldy commitment that was causing her so much angst—but the gala was also bringing Matthew back to her, and along with Matthew, these memories. They gave her strength, if only because they were reminding her of who she was at her core. But this second, she was like Zack; she couldn’t stop crying, despite the sunshine. “You talk first. You tell me.”
“I’m drinking again,” Matthew said. “I’m drunk now.”
“Ohhhhhhh,” Claire said, through a blockage of teary snot in her nose. “Oh no.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was away for months, on tour. I was in Asia—remote Indonesia, far-flung islands with dragons—and I was in wildest Borneo, where there are still cannibals. It was a freak show. I thought I could handle it. But then my sponsor got sick and left me on top of a volcano in Flores, where the lakes were pink, purple, and turquoise because of mineral deposits. The lakes were mind-blowing, they were like something Disney came up with, but they were real—and then my sponsor, Jerry, Christian fellow, got really fucking sick, and I could tell you that that was when I lost my way, but the fact of the matter is, I lost my way well before that. I started drinking in the airplane bathroom before we even left LAX, and basically never stopped.”
“No.”
“Yes. When I came home to California, Bess divorced me. I let her down, she said. She wasn’t willing to do it anymore. And I said, ‘You knew I was vulnerable. You should have come with me.’ ”
“Yes. Why didn’t she?”
“She hates touring. Hates it. She’s a homebody. She didn’t want to leave the dogs.”
“Ahhhh,” Claire said, sniffling. “The dogs.”
“So we’re done. It’s over. She’s going to marry my accountant and have children. I’m giving her three million dollars, even though she claims she doesn’t want it. And she doesn’t want the house, even though she helped design it and decorate it in that Zennish Bess way, but I can’t live in it—it’s her house—so we’re selling it. But she’s there, for the time being, with the dogs—she’s taking custody of the dogs, of course—and I’m renting a place in the hills, trying to keep myself to two