Excerpt from Necessary Sins by Lynn Darling. Lee Lescaze has left his wife, his three children, and moved in with Lynn, his mistress. She has lost her position at the Washington Post. The two of them barely know each other, truth be told. He’s the big-wig, she’s the former “Style” writer. He’s much older than she, there’s a father-figure aspect to the whole thing, which makes her aware of her own immaturity, even though she’s 30 years old. She lives in a tiny apartment, with ice cream in the freezer, and no proper cookware. She suddenly looks around wondering what the hell she has done. Work is unbearable, for both of them, although his position remains intact. They buy some second-hand furniture together. They buy a parrot. They drink martinis. They learn, for the first time, how to fight with each other. Things are awkward. Their relationship began in stolen passionate moments, now they are in the muck of the everyday, and pretty much everyone on the planet is annoyed with them.
Work made Lee tense, withdrawn. He was grumpy and hard to like. The time he spent with his children, whom I was not yet allowed to meet, was usually a disaster. He would come back angry and unwilling to admit it, which in turn angered me: I was sick of trying to guess his moods. “Great,” he muttered, as he disappeared into the Sports section of the paper. “My children, my mistress, my boss, they all hate me.”
One night Lee went out to a black-tie dinner, the fortieth birthday party of one of his closest friends at the paper. He came home very late and very drunk, so drunk he could barely walk, or talk for that matter. He needed to be undressed and put to bed, but I didn’t understand that. Instead, I watched him coldly as he stood swaying in the doorway, a look of dopey curiosity on his face. His eyebrows arched the way they did when he was about to say something light and witty, but something short-circuited, and suddenly he fell, rather gracefully under the circumstances, flat on his face, his tuxedo starkly elegant against the scuffed planked wood of the floor.
The next day he slept late, and I left the house early, determined to find fresh sorrel leaves. I had recently bought a cookbook, my first, and in it I had come across a beautiful photograph of cream of sorrel soup, green and elegant in a gilt-edged cream-colored bowl. I had never even heard of sorrel. I can’t explain it now – I couldn’t explain it then – but I had this idea that if I could just make the perfect bowl of cream of sorrel soup, then I would be the kind of person who could fit in to this new life, I would be competent and know the things it was important for adults to know.
When Lee finally woke up, red-eyed and unshaven, I was in the kitchen struggling with a pot lid, a large domed thing that had long ago lost the little knob on top, making its removal from a hot skillet an operation for the nimble and the brave. He left the house without a word, which was all right, since I wasn’t speaking to him.
But as soon as he was gone, I missed him. I had wanted to be revolted, to find in this sorry sodden mess of a man the wick to my indignation and regret. Instead I saw something else. I saw how hard this year had been, not for me, but for him, how much it had cost him, how terrible the bonfire that was burning all around him. Then I wanted him back, to hold him and comfort him, to apologize for not understanding. But I didn’t know where he had gone.
He came back about twenty minutes later, with a small brown paper bag. Inside was a wooden knob and a screw, and before long he had fixed it to the pot lid. I was charmed; in my world, broken things stayed broken, until you threw them away.
That’s when I knew that neither one of us was leaving, that we would fight and the walls would stand. I knew this, not in the way that you know you love someone, but in the way you learn, for the first time, that you are finally in a place from which you will not walk away.
It’s been over twenty years since that morning in the kitchen. Everything has changed and most of it is gone. But I still have that lid, and the wooden knob still holds.
