American Wife (53 page)

“No fair!” Wilbur shook his head, smiling widely. “It is
no fair
that you ended up with the best freakin’ job in the world. I’d give my left nut!”

“Funny, I never thought you had a left nut,” Charlie said, and Wilbur said to me, “Has he changed one iota?”

I smiled wanly. “If you’ll excuse me.” I headed toward the water tent and had just accepted a plastic cup when I turned and found Holly Goshen, Dennis Goshen’s wife, beside me. “You’ve got to stay hydrated on a night like this, huh?” she said. Dennis and Holly lived in New York, where Dennis was a trader on Wall Street and Holly was an aerobics instructor. We had been at their wedding in the early eighties, at the Rainbow Room, and Holly was, as one might predict of an aerobics instructor, thin and attractive, with wavy blond hair. We stood there sipping, observing the activity. To make conversation, I said, “I assume you two are headed back to New York in the morning?”

She nodded. “This is awful to say, but Alice, I’m so glad I’m not the only one here whose husband still does blow. You’re such a nice, normal person that seeing you is really reassuring.”

“Whose husband still what?” I repeated.

“I didn’t mean it like—” She laughed nervously, and I could tell she thought she’d offended me. “Boys will be boys, that’s all I meant. Some of the guys Dennis works with, they’re freebasing every night of the week, and he can’t do that anymore, thank God. He’s forty-two!”

“Are you telling me that Dennis and Charlie used cocaine tonight?”

“I thought—” She seemed increasingly uneasy. “I saw them headed off together before dinner, so I just assumed—I’ve put my foot in my mouth, haven’t I? Can we forget I said anything?”

I felt a strong desire to say,
Charlie wouldn’t use cocaine,
but as soon as I thought it, I also thought of his odd behavior this evening, his physical forwardness.

And it wasn’t Holly’s fault, she had nothing to do with it, really, but I’d been drained of the energy necessary to smooth over this moment. I set down my plastic cup. “I have to go.”

THOUGH I NEARLY
collided with Joe Thayer outside the tent, I didn’t recognize that it was him for several seconds, until after he’d said, “You’re just the person I was looking for. I caught sight of you in the P-rade, but I was being carried along with the current and I didn’t—Are you all right? Alice, my goodness, what’s wrong?”

I’d been trying very hard not to cry, but I didn’t succeed. It was the sympathetic expression on Joe’s face, the kindness of his features. People were steadily entering and leaving the tent, and I probably knew many of them. Though a few tears had escaped already, I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

“How about humoring me by making me think I can help in some way?” Joe said. “Shall we stroll for a bit?”

I nodded, still unable to speak, and he set one hand lightly at my elbow, guiding me down the stairs and through the arch that led to the dorm where we were staying, except that in front of Campbell, we veered left, heading toward Nassau Hall. The campus was dark, the night air warm; it smelled like early summer. A good ten minutes must have elapsed before either of us spoke. Early on in the silence, I felt that I needed to pull myself together and say something, but I realized at some point that Joe wasn’t waiting for an explanation—it was more that he was offering his presence, his company. I had stopped crying well before we reached Firestone Library when I said, “Have you ever tried cocaine?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I realize it’s trendy in certain places, but I just—I never thought—” Back in our twenties, Dena had told me that she’d done it a few times during her years as a flight attendant, but she and possibly her sister Marjorie were the only people I knew who had.

“Would it be forward of me to ask why this has come up?” Joe said.

We were between the library and the chapel, an imposing Gothic cathedral that looked a bit haunted in the dark, and I pointed at its steps. “Should we sit?” We took seats side by side. The moon was half full, the stars tiny and far above us. I said, “I think Charlie may be high right now, that he may have—You say
snorted,
that’s the terminology, isn’t it?”

“I believe it depends on the form of cocaine, but sure.” If Joe was startled by what I’d told him, he didn’t show it.

“You don’t think he’s in danger healthwise?” I said. “He isn’t about to have a heart attack, I shouldn’t call a doctor?”

“I’m out of my depth here, too, I admit.” Joe crossed his ankles. “But as far as I know, the real threat is overdosing, and if he’s upright and able to carry on a conversation—”

“He makes me feel so silly,” I said, and Joe did not immediately respond.

After a while, he said, “I don’t think you’re silly for being concerned. Is this a habit with him?”

“I wish I knew. I found out about tonight a few minutes ago, and he wasn’t the one who told me. I don’t think—forgive me, Joe, for saying this to you of all people—but I don’t think I can stay with him. Every day, every few hours, I go back and forth, as if everything he says or does is proof that I should either stick it out or leave. It’s starting to make me fear for my sanity.”

Again, Joe was quiet for over a minute before saying, “You never know the nature of another couple’s marriage, do you? I’ve always thought the two of you seem wonderfully complementary. But I’ll tell you what else—that weekend you and Charlie got engaged, we were stunned. My extended family, I mean. We heard about it, and we were only just getting to know you, but we thought, That sweet, sweet girl is marrying
Charlie
?”

Simultaneously, I felt my lips curve up and my eyes flood. With the back of my hand, I wiped my nose. “The engagement didn’t happen in Halcyon,” I said. “We were already engaged, but we didn’t tell people right away.”

“I met you down on their dock, remember that?” Joe said. “I came back from fishing with Ed and John, we puttered up, and you were standing there in a yellow dress”—(he was right, that yellow knit dress with the collar, I had forgotten all about it)—“and I thought—I suppose I’m only admitting this because it was so long ago and because I’ve consumed more than my share of Bud Light tonight—but I thought, Who’s that gorgeous girl? I was dumbstruck. Then Charlie took your hand.”

The truth was that I didn’t remember meeting Joe. I remembered meeting Charlie’s parents that day, and Jadey later that night, when I’d foolishly allowed myself to get drunk, and I remembered knowing Joe later on, talking politely to him, when he seemed handsome and reserved and maybe the slightest bit dull, when it never occurred to me that I registered with him more than anyone else’s wife.
Did
I register with him more than other wives?

“That was an overwhelming visit,” I said. “God bless the Blackwells, but—I’m sure you understand. That’s what’s so nice about talking to you, Joe, that I don’t have to explain.”

Joe shook his head. “Look at us,” he said. “Do you think we should find some undergraduates and warn them to be careful whom they pick to spend their lives with?”

“As if they’d listen.”

We sat there on the steps in companionable silence; we could hear the distant songs of a few bands playing at once in different tents. “I suppose I’ve always nursed a small crush on you,” Joe said. “In light of both our circumstances, it’s made me stay away. Not literally, I don’t mean, but to keep myself at a distance.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable.”

“Joe, I’m honored.” I patted his knee in what I meant to be a friendly way, though as soon as I’d done it, I realized it might have seemed flirtatious, and in fact it may have
been
flirtatious. I had lost my bearings—I had started losing them before, at some indeterminate point, and now they were gone entirely.

“I won’t try to advise you on what’s happening with Charlie,” Joe said. “That’s none of my business. But if there was ever a chance, and I know, with Halcyon and my family and his family, I know we’d be opening a can of worms, I’m well aware, but if you ever thought the two of us—”

I cut him off by kissing him. I leaned forward abruptly—gracelessly, I suspect—and I pressed my mouth against his, and we kissed hungrily, and at first it was all-consuming, it was forbidden and wrong and exciting, but very little time had passed before I became aware of an unflattering comparison between the way he kissed and the way Charlie did. Joe was not as adept. It had been so long since I’d kissed anyone besides my husband that I’d forgotten there could be variations on it, or skill involved, but Joe—I felt cruel noticing this—drooled a bit, there was an excess of saliva that accompanied his tongue and lips. I pulled away and quickly stood. I brought a hand to my chest. “Joe, I—I don’t—I need to find Ella.”

He stared at me with passion.

At a loss as to what else to do or say, I made a gesture that was not unlike curtsying. “Forgive me,” I said, and I hurried away. I did not even have the excuse of attributing my behavior to alcohol: Joe, by his own admission, had been tipsy, but I’d been perfectly sober.

BACK IN THE
dorm, once Ella was asleep, I packed—our flight out of Newark was at one on Sunday—and the questions that sprang up in my head felt clichéd and overwrought, as if perhaps I’d heard them asked by a naive wife in a movie, or a public service announcement on TV about drug addiction: How many times before and how often and why? Maybe when I said
why
to Charlie, my voice would quaver, and that would reveal just how betrayed I felt.

But no—I did not want to be that wife, did not want to have that conversation. It was beneath me; it would give his worst behavior an attention it didn’t deserve.

He returned to the dorm earlier than I expected, before midnight. More matter-of-factly than angrily, he said, “I didn’t know where you’d gone,” and I brought my finger to my lips, indicating Ella, now asleep. He lowered his voice. “Kind of a crappy band, if you ask me. Just the idea of a cover band is pathetic when you think about it, living off someone else’s glory.”

Did he have any idea? He had no idea. What other conclusion was there to draw? I was folding a pair of his pants, and I set them in our suitcase.

He stepped close to me, half whispering. “You’re not pissed about before, are you?” So he had some idea, but such a narrow, watered-down one—it was close enough to having no idea. “You know how being around these goons gets me riled up.” He leaned in to kiss me. “Brings out my inner eighteen-year-old.” He grinned, and I felt both astonishment—how could our experiences of our relationship be so grossly different?—and also a relief at having chosen not to confront him. It was the right choice.

He kissed me some more, my cheeks and neck, he set his hands on my hips, and I realized he wanted us to have sex. I pointed to the wall and said, “Ella’s on the other side.”

“We can keep it down. Well,
you
might not be able to.” He pulled the peach-colored blouse I was wearing (a nod to orange without being the real, aggressive thing) out of my white pants and stuck his hands beneath it. He reached around and unfastened my bra.

I acquiesced. It was easier than talking, it would be a balm to the discord of the weekend. The mattress springs were squeaky, which I found distracting, but I was distracted anyway. Lying on top of me, pumping in and out, Charlie gazed down and said, “You look beautiful, Lindy.” He smelled of sweat and beer and some essential Charlieness, the smell of himself, that I was very accustomed to.

I thought with shame of kissing Joe Thayer. Already, I believed that I had kissed him less out of attraction than pity—I’d meant the kiss as a consolation prize, a way to spare him the embarrassment of having confessed to feelings that were one-sided.
Under different circumstances,
I’d meant to imply, and even if the implication was a lie, it seemed a decorous one, an extreme version of being a polite and considerate person. But perhaps this was only a convenient story. Perhaps I’d kissed him for more selfish reasons—simply because I wanted to—and when the experience was not as pleasurable as I’d anticipated, I’d changed my mind.

Charlie’s breathing thickened, his mouth was next to my ear so I couldn’t see his face, and then his movements slowed, and he moaned softly. He collapsed against me, and I held him. “You want me to . . .?” he murmured (he always offered when I didn’t come during penetration, he meant with his hand), and silently, I shook my head. I felt at once as if I were protecting him from and steeling myself for the destruction he didn’t yet know that I would cause.

I WOULD GO
to Riley, I had decided, and I would take Ella with me, but there was one errand I needed to run before leaving Milwaukee, and it entailed stopping by my favorite bookstore in the world, which was called Thea’s. The owner, Thea Dengler, was about my age, a heavyset woman who paired loose black pants and sweaters with gauzy scarves or chunky turquoise necklaces, and her store was located in Mequon, two floors, with such tall shelves that even though it wasn’t large, you always felt like you could browse in private. Plus, there was an excellent selection, Thea read constantly (there was rarely a book I picked up that wasn’t on her radar), and if you wanted something she didn’t have, she’d enthusiastically order it, as curious herself for it to arrive as you were. She also sold periodicals, but none of that clutter that seems mandatory in bookstores today: mugs and picture frames and greeting cards, magnets, calendars, fancy chocolates.

I’d planned to buy three books for Jessica Sutton, but as I stood in the young-adult section, stacking them in the crook of my arm, I decided five would be acceptable, and soon I was holding more than a dozen, balanced so precariously that I had to steady them with my chin. I propped them one by one, face out, on the shelves so I could more easily cull:
To Kill a Mockingbird
(that was definite, no question);
Deenie
( Jessica was twelve—how could I not give her a Judy Blume book, and this was less controversial than some of the others);
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; A Wrinkle in Time; Anastasia Krupnik,
or else Lois Lowry’s
Autumn Street,
which I also thought was quite wonderful;
The Westing Game
(I imagined she’d like this, since she liked Agatha Christie);
The Outsiders; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Homecoming;
and then I’d grabbed the two others from the Tillerman series,
Dicey’s Song
and
A Solitary Blue; The Diary of Anne Frank;
and last,
Locked in Time
(I’d read Lois Duncan’s older novels during my librarian days, but this new one looked intriguing). Besides the fact that this was nine more books than I’d intended to purchase, there was already one—Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca—
that I knew I wanted to get her from the grown-up section, and I’d also considered
Pride and Prejudice.
I stood there trying to decide, and I eventually set back the Cynthia Voigt books; I also decided to forgo
Pride and Prejudice
and
Autumn Street
(maybe those could be saved for Christmas?). Was
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
too young for Jessica? But it was so good! Then I realized I’d neglected to pull
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
off the shelf, which was a must. I ended up carrying twelve books to the cash register. Eyeing them, Thea said, “That’s some ambitious summer reading for Ella.”