Still Life with Husband (2 page)

“Do you have any idea how I feel right now?” I had asked her coldly, surprising myself with the degree of my anger. “Do you know what it’s like to be your closest friend, when every single time we’re out together, some guy is ready to fall at your feet in adoration? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be the moon to your sun?” While Meg had been pretending to be Slovatarkian, I had been practicing my speech. “You make a joke out of it every time,” I said. “A comedy routine. I don’t want to be your goddamned straight man.”

Meg was shocked, and defensive. She told me I was being crazy, oversensitive, and mean. “You go on as many dates as I do!” she’d insisted. “How about that guy in your Shakespeare class who’s obsessed with you?” (It was true; there was a skinny, somber sophomore who kept trying to get me to come watch him perform at the Renaissance Faire and who had, in fact, once written me a sonnet.) Then Meg ticked off a list of all the boys who’d ever asked me out, and, for emphasis, a second list of all the favors she’d ever done for me. “And I’ve never gone out with any guy you’ve been interested in!” By then even she knew she had missed the point. “You’re my best friend!” she finally said. “I would never do anything to hurt you. I thought…these creeps…” She waved her hand around at an imaginary assembly of all the skeezy guys who’d ever wanted her phone number. “I play it up so that you and I can laugh about it,” she said softly. Then she started to cry. Then I started to cry. Then we hugged, and, although in the ensuing years Meg has not grown less beautiful, and I have not become a man magnet, the issue settled between us into something chronic and manageable, less like an angry rash and more like a minor bunion. And besides, we each grew up, fell in love for real, and got married. The things that matter when you’re barely in your twenties seem ridiculous, childish from the other side of thirty. Still, certain patterns in a friendship hold true. What’s more, in a coffee shop with my best friend, without my husband, certain other, harmless feelings can be indulged.

“Nobody’s staring at me!” I say again. “What are you talking about?” But then I see him, the young, dark-haired man sitting alone across the room. He is unshaven in a sexy, can’t-be-bothered way (but also potentially in an unemployed way); he’s stuck a pencil behind one ear, and a thick book lays open in front of him. Surprisingly, he is staring at me. There’s no doubt about it. I look away and my hand darts automatically to my mouth. I wipe nonexistent crumbs from my lips. “Is there something hanging off my face?” I whisper. “A
booger
?” I rub my nose surreptitiously.

“No, Em!” Meg stage-whispers back. “He’s staring at you because you’re a babe!” In fact, I get the ones who are interested in faces with “character.” I’ve been described as dramatic-looking, striking, interesting, and once, “Venezuelan.” I have a mop of shoulder-length curly brown hair that is often more frizz than ringlets, dark brown eyes, and a large nose with a bump on the bridge. I get the ones who want exotic-lite. I get the ones who, for whatever reason, don’t want Meg.

As I glance back at mystery man, he flashes a shy smile and turns back to his book.

“He’s blushing,” Meg says. “You’re making him blush!”

In spite of myself, I’m loving this. I have no qualms about harmless flirting, and I would never do anything beyond it. If a situation like this, which is rare for me to begin with, progressed past smiling and blushing and a little small talk, I’d cut it off. I think about Kevin and what would humiliate or embarrass him if he knew about it. In the unspoken code of ethics of our marriage, that’s as far as I would go. I presume Kevin behaves the same way, and I don’t mind. After all, he lives in the world, too. I’m glad that we’re both young, that we can attract attention. It makes us more attractive to each other. Not long ago I idly mentioned to Kevin that a guy at the library had asked me out. We were in the middle of cooking dinner. Suddenly, Kevin was all over me. “What did he look like?” he asked, pressing himself against me from behind, nuzzling my neck while I chopped carrots. “What did he say to you?” He ran his hands up and down my sides, reached around for my breasts. Is it some alpha-ape thing? The idea must flip a primal switch in a man: if other apes want my female, then I am the prizewinning baboon. For my part, I think about Kevin’s young female coworkers, how they must nurse terrible crushes on their shy, handsome young colleague, and it excites me, too. After all, they don’t get to have him; I do. Maybe that makes me some kind of territorial monkey, too.

Meg takes things a half step further than I do, but that’s it. She, for example, would accept a man’s phone number if he gave it to her. But she wouldn’t call him. Steve is the most mature of us all; utterly devoted to Meg, he pays no attention to the writhing world of human sexuality that still breathes around him. It’s as if it disappeared when he met her. I can understand that, actually. But it’s boring.

“I’m going to get a refill,” I say, grabbing my cup. “Want anything?” Meg is working on her second muffin. She shakes her head and winks at me. “Did you just wink at me?” I ask. Meg is laughing as I walk up to the counter.

I wait in line as surly-girl takes her time with another order. After a few minutes, I sense someone behind me, a rustle of clothes, soft breathing. I know it’s him, and my palms actually begin to sweat. He clears his throat, and I turn around.

“Hey,” he says, meeting my eye for a second and then looking down. He’s adorable up close, darker than he looked from across the room, and a little bit younger: no older than twenty-eight.

“Hey,” I answer. It’s all I can think to say.

“I, um, I’ve seen you here before.” This is awkward and, at the same time, it feels scripted. But I haven’t acted this part in a long time. “I come in here some mornings,” he continues, “for a break from work.”

“Oh. What do you do?” I’m trying to act interested but not too eager, cute and mature, but not too mature, all at the same time. But it’s taking up all my energy, diverting the blood flow from my brain.

“I’m a writer,” he says, loosening up. “I’m a reporter for
The Weekly.
Have you heard of it?”

“Of course I have. I read it all the time.” Right,
this
is how you do it.

His face lights up. “I write the ‘Local Beat’ column, and I write the cover story about once every two months or so, and I fill in as features editor.”

“Well, that’s…So you’re…” I’m trying to picture the byline underneath his column, but I can’t. The truth is, I only occasionally glance at the paper. We pick it up mostly for movie listings.

“David,” he says. “Keller.” He offers me his hand and I have to shake it, which ruins my advantage, because my palms are still sweaty.

“Emily Ross,” I say, sounding more formal than I mean to. “Actually, I’m a writer, too.” He’s staring at me now as if I’m telling him I’ve just won the Pulitzer and, in my spare time, have worked up the cure for cancer. “But freelance. For magazines. Women’s magazines.” Oddly enough, although this fact embarrasses me, it seems to impress him.

“Wow, that’s a hard market to break into, I’ve heard. Which ones do you write for?” We’re like old friends now. Except that we’ve just met, we’re having an incredibly awkward conversation, and if I weren’t married, I’d want to sleep with him. I mean, I
do
want to sleep with him, or at least kiss him, but I
am
married. It’s the strangest thing.

“Hi!” Without warning, Meg has appeared at my side. I hadn’t noticed her approach, I’d been so wrapped up in our brief conversation. She’s smiling at us, but it’s not the same conspiratorial smile as before; she seems slightly irritated, so very slightly that only her best friend could read it. “Emily, sorry to interrupt, but didn’t you say you had a meeting at ten today?” It’s nine forty-five. I don’t, of course. I give her a little shrug. She narrows her eyes back at me.

“Oh, hey, yeah, I do. Thanks.” I set my mug down in one of the gray tubs reserved for dirty dishes. “David,” I say, as we maneuver awkwardly, the three of us, away from the counter and back in the general direction of our tables, stopping in the middle of the coffee shop like a disoriented herd of elk. “This is my friend Meg.” They shake hands.

“So, Emily,” David continues, still focused on me; I’m completely sucked in. He reaches into his front pocket, pulls out a pen and a scrap of paper, and scribbles something on it. “Here’s my number and my e-mail address. Give me a call sometime. Or send me an e-mail. It’d be nice to talk more. And, if you’re interested…we don’t pay as well as what you’re probably used to, but maybe you could write for me. For us. For the newspaper.” He’s blushing again. I take the paper and our fingers touch. I pull my hand back fast, as if I’m recoiling from a flame.

“Thanks,” I say. Meg takes my elbow and leads me toward our table, where we gather up our things and head for the door. Suddenly, my long-lost bat radar is activated; I know that he’s watching me as we leave. Fortunately, I have excellent posture.

Outside, Meg is quiet. We start walking back toward my apartment, where her car is parked.

“Well, that took an odd little turn,” she says finally, halfway down the block.

“What do you mean?” I keep my voice light.

“Emily, that was…you were…I heard you. That guy asked you out and you basically said yes.”

“Meg! That is not what happened. First of all, he’s a writer for
The Weekly,
and we were talking shop. That was harmless flirtation!” I stop for a second, turn and face her. “Do you really think I’d…what are you thinking? It was
harmless,
” I repeat. “Why are you being so judgmental?”

“Sorry.” She starts walking again, links her arm through mine as a peace offering. “There’s a line, you know, and it seemed like you crossed it. But I guess you didn’t. Sorry,” she says again.

If I wanted to, I could take this further, make it escalate. Look who’s talking about line-crossing! I’ve seen you take men’s phone numbers lots of times before! But I don’t. “That really was nothing,” I say instead. “I would
never.
” We walk in silence for the next few steps. “Why didn’t he notice my wedding ring, I wonder.”

“Because you’re not wearing it, sunshine.”

I unhook my arm from Meg’s and stare down at my left hand. It’s true. I’m not.

LAST YEAR, KEVIN AND I TRAVELED BY TRAIN FROM MILWAUKEE
to Minneapolis to visit my sister, Heather. On the way over, Kevin sat in the window seat, and I took the aisle. We sat across from a couple, about our age; the woman also sat in the aisle seat, and her husband had the window. After about an hour, as we rattled through the Wisconsin countryside, both Kevin and this man (Marcus, I learned later) had fallen fast asleep, lulled by the rocking of the train. So, leaning across the space between the seats, the woman and I began to talk.

Amy and I became fast, if temporary, friends, and we exchanged our stories, the way people do who vaguely look alike, who carry the same brand of handbag and wear the same kind of shoes, who know they will have pretty much in common. Still, we were astounded by just how specifically our lives resembled each other’s. Amy and Marcus had met, just as Kevin and I had, at school in the Midwest. Marcus was from a small town, just like Kevin, studying architecture in Chicago. Amy, who was from Ann Arbor, had changed her major six times before she finally settled on political science, mostly because her parents had threatened to cut off her tuition money. Right after college—quickly, too quickly, Amy said—they had moved in together, and, because they’d been in such a rush, they ended up struggling over when to get married. But then they did get married, and now, Amy confessed in a whisper, they were busily trying to get pregnant, which immediately and unfortunately caused me to picture them having sex. Marcus was building a reputation for himself as an architect in a large Chicago firm, and Amy was an assistant to the assistant director of a small nonprofit consumer advocacy foundation. They went to Nebraska every summer, she told me, to visit his family.

Naturally, we overdisclosed to each other. It was as if we had met the physical manifestations of our own private diaries, and we knew that, for the next four-and-a-half hours, or at least until Marcus or Kevin woke up, we could divulge anything to each other. Anyway, try as we might, we weren’t the sort of girls who had all that much to reveal. We told each other about our families (both overprotective, both loving), our jobs (unfulfilling), and we giggled about ex-boyfriends (I tried to make the most out of my three dull former relationships, one at the end of high school and the other two in college). We cast glances at our sleeping mates as we told our secrets.

After an hour and a half, near Tomah (the Cranberry Capital), we started to wind down, began to grow a little bit bored with each other, as much as we were probably both a little bit bored with ourselves, and our conversation circled back to when we first met the men who would become our husbands. I was trying to remember what it felt like to know that Kevin and I were going to be together. I was thinking, trying to call up the emotional details of it, from our first kiss (which was unspectacular and concluded with Kevin telling me he knew I’d had onions for lunch and me not telling him that tongues were not meant to be used as plungers), to the first time we said “I love you” (which was somewhat more spectacular, and involved fireworks, occurring as it did on July Fourth).

“I always thought I’d get married,” Amy said, interrupting my daydream, “to whatever man I happened to be dating when the time felt right.” She glanced again at her sleeping husband, but affectionately, not surreptitiously; if he happened to wake up and hear this, she obviously wouldn’t have minded. “I thought I’d be twenty-five or twenty-six, or maybe a little bit older, be involved with a guy, someone decent and nice enough, and it would be time. And we’d get married.” She took a slow pull from the bottle of iced tea she’d been nursing for the past two hours. “But what I never predicted was that I’d fall so crazy in love. In college! I never thought I’d meet my soul mate.” She laughed, a little embarrassed, turned again to still-sleeping Marcus. “I never even believed in the concept. But there he is.” She paused, waited. Was I supposed to say something now? “You know what I mean,” she said. It wasn’t a question.