Lucy by the Sea

One 

i

Like many others, I did not see it coming

But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean. 

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William is my first husband; we were married for twenty years and we have been divorced for about that long as well. We are friendly, I would see him intermittently; we both were living in New York City, where we came when we first married. But because my (second) husband had died and his (third) wife had left him, I had seen him more this past year. 

About the time his third wife left him, William found out that he had a half-sister in Maine, he found it out on an ancestry website. He had always thought he was an only child, so this was a tremendous surprise for him, and he asked me to go up to Maine for two days with him to find her, and we did, but the woman - her name is Lois Bubar - Well, I met her but she did not want to meet William, and this made him feel very terrible. Also, on that trip to Maine we found out things about William's mother that absolutely dismayed him. They dismayed me as well.

His mother had come from unbelievable poverty, it turned out, even worse than the circumstances I had come from. 

The point is that two months after our little trip to Maine, William asked me to go to Grand Cayman with him, which is where we had gone with his mother, Catherine, many, many years before, and when our girls were small we would go there with them and with her too. The day he came over to my apartment to ask me to go with him to Grand Cayman, he had shaved off his huge mustache and also cut his full white hair very short - and only later did I realise this must have been a result of Lois Bubar's not wanting to see him plus everything he had learned about his mother. He was seventy-one years old then, but he, kind of, I think, must have been plunged into some sort of midlife crisis, or older man crisis, with the loss of his much younger wife moving out and taking their ten-year-old daughter, and then his half-sister's not wanting to see him and his finding out that his mother had not been who he'd thought she had been. 

So I did that: I went to Grand Cayman with him for three days in early October. 

And it was odd, but nice. We had separate rooms, and we were kind to each other. William seemed more reticent than usual, and it was strange for me to see him without his mustache. But there were times when he threw his head back and really laughed. There was a politeness to us that was consistent; so it was a little strange, but nice. 

But when we got back to New York, I missed him. And I missed David, my second husband, who had died. 

I really missed them both, David especially. My apartment was so quiet! 

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I am a novelist and I had a book coming out that fall, and so after our trip to Grand Cayman I had a great deal of traveling to do around the country and I did it; this was in late October. I was also scheduled to go to Italy and Germany in the beginning of March, but in early December - it was kind of odd - I just decided I was not going to go to those places. I never cancel book tours and the publishers were not happy, but I was not going to go. As March approached someone said, "Good thing you didn't go to Italy, they're having that virus." And that's when I noticed it. I think that was the first time. I did not really think about it ever coming to New York. 

But William did.