Still Life with Husband (25 page)

I swallow the lump in my throat and flash what I hope resembles an assured smile. “Okey dokey,” I say, which is a phrase I don’t believe I’ve ever used before. The boulder in my chest that had begun to break apart starts to re-form. I roll over, feel the strange expanse of this bed without David in it.

“I’m really sorry about your boss,” he says again, and it looks as if that sentence, along with the last half hour, will have to be enough.

When I get home, feeling strangely removed from myself, Kevin and Heather are sitting on the couch together. This is a somewhat unusual sight, given Heather’s intolerance of my husband’s deadly slow conversational pace. Kevin is leaning slightly toward Heather. A somber-looking gray tome with a cookbook title,
The Blended Family,
lies open on her lap. They fall silent when I walk through the door, then turn their faces to me simultaneously; Kevin reddens, and Heather quickly looks down at her book.

“Heather was just telling me, um, how cute Silas is,” Kevin says sheepishly. He shifts on the couch cushion, leans away from her.

“I was telling Kevin about the
cutest
thing Silas said to me the other day,” Heather confirms, closing her book and turning it over in her hands. “He said, ‘You’re almost as pretty as my mommy.’” Her fingers tap-dance on the book’s spine.

“Right,” I say, unzipping my coat. “Cute.” Heather and Kevin glance at each other, silently confirming that they’re the worst liars on the planet. They were talking about me. I turn back toward the kitchen. “Who wants lunch?”

“Emily,” Kevin calls after me. “Can you come back in here?”

“Who’s hungry?” I ask cheerily. Are they conspiring against me? “Where’s the blender? I’m in the mood for a blended family!”

“Please,” Heather says. “Can you just come here?”

When I was seven, Karen Krakowski and I tried to flush two bologna sandwiches down the toilet in the girls’ bathroom. When it overflowed, a sycophantic kindergartner, witness to our crime, turned us in, and we were called into Principal Vanderbilt’s office to be reprimanded. I was terrified, but I remember feeling defiant, too. This is how I feel now.

“Yes?” I say, returning to the living room. “At your service.” I rest my hands on my hips.

“Kevin and I were just talking,” Heather says, studying the back cover of
The Blended Family
as if it holds the secrets of eternal happiness. “We were just saying how you’ve seemed kind of…I don’t know…weird or something, or…” She looks at Kevin helplessly.

“I know things between us have been…um…” he says, letting the rest of the sentence drift off. “But something else is going on with you.” His tone is neutral, inscrutable. He crosses and uncrosses his legs. “You haven’t been yourself lately. That much I know. Is there something you want to tell us? Or me?”

I look around at our cozy living room full of books and plants and things that I love, my grandmother’s candlesticks on the bureau, an array of colored glass bottles on the coffee table. The sunlight is making shifting patterns on the walls that Kevin and I painted together. I think about my double life, my affair with David, the way I’m deceiving Kevin every single day, how I’ve lied to him, to my friends, to my family, how I continue to lie to them. I think about Meg and Heather having families, opening up their generous hearts to new little people, huge changes. I think about how Kevin wants to start that phase of our life together, too, how he deserves to. And now the room is spinning, and I have to sit down, but three feet to the rocking chair seems like an impossible distance, from here to Alaska, so I sink to the floor, and I just sit there for a minute. When I imagined myself at thirty, this is not what I saw. I’m in a deep hole that I’ve dug for myself, and I can’t get out. I let my head fall forward into my hands, because, truly, I can’t look at Heather or Kevin. “Dick died,” I say from behind my hands. It comes out muffled.

“Fish fry?” Heather asks.

“Pigs fly?” Kevin suggests, a half beat later.

“Are you guys serious?” I lift my head. They look serious. They look serious and utterly baffled. My face feels hot and wet. “Dick died. Dick died. Dick died!” It does sound strange, actually, the more I say it.

“Oh, Em.” Kevin’s voice is full of sympathy. He slides off the couch and reaches for me. He has to crawl past the coffee table.

“Who’s Dick?” Heather asks, still trying to catch up. “Wait, who’s Dick?!” She’s on the floor now, too, trying to push past Kevin to give me a hug, but Kevin’s fighting her for hugging rights, they’re shoulder to shoulder, both still a foot away from me, and the sight of it is so absurd, my sweet husband and my eager sister in a scuffle on the living room floor, that I start to laugh, which confuses them both again; they look up at me, and now I’m laughing and crying, because Kevin and Heather resemble nothing more than two big pale crabs thrashing about on the carpeting, and Dick is dead, and I’m having an affair, and I think Kevin knows.

ONE NIGHT TOWARD THE END OF OCTOBER, A WEEK OR SO AFTER
I’d started sleeping with David, Kevin turned to me in bed. We hadn’t made love since before David, and I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to touch my husband again. It was bad enough to be cheating on him. I couldn’t fathom actually having sex with Kevin, doing it with two men—making love with one in the afternoon, only to go home and have sex with another in the evening, the memory of the first one, the
feel
of him, still lingering. How was a person supposed to do that? I had no idea. And, less abstractly, would Kevin know? Would there be subtle clues? Would I move slightly differently, respond to certain of his familiar touches in ways that surprised him just a little, ways that felt just a tiny bit peculiar? Would my body have absorbed David without my even knowing it, and would it then, despite my intentions, spill my secret?

So I had been avoiding Kevin, going to bed early and then feigning sleep, complaining of cramps or a headache in the late afternoon so that, if the situation presented itself, I could say,
No, Kev, remember?
I figured Kevin would just think I was still traumatized about our conflicts, and that he would, as usual, leave me to my own emotional devices. For his part, Kevin hadn’t exactly been smoldering with passion for me. On the rare nights we were in bed together and both awake, he usually buried his face in a book and acted like I wasn’t there.

That night, though, Kevin rolled toward me and rested his hand gently on my cheek. I looked at him, at the lines and curves of his pale face, the shape of his nostrils, the pores on his nose, the arch of his blond eyebrows. His face was a collection of parts, some assembly required.
Insert nose roughly in middle of face. Attach pale eyelashes sparingly to eyelids.
He inched up close to me and kissed me. Immediately, I started thinking about kissing David; just as suddenly, Kevin’s lips felt like suction cups I couldn’t detach from; his tongue was a squirming fish in my mouth. I pushed him away. “Um, Kevin, I’m just, I’m really kind of exhausted.”

Kevin was not swayed. He pulled me close and pressed his hand against the small of my back. “I’ll do all the work,” he said, low in my ear, still holding me against him, his breath hot on my face. I wanted to shove him away from me, hard, and retreat as close to the edge of the bed as I could without falling off. I wanted to roll out of his grasp and jump up, claiming urgent stomach troubles. I wanted to shout, “Get OFF me!” I thought of how David explored the bend in my elbow with his tongue, the soft skin behind my knee with his fingertips; I thought of the way we held on to each other when we made love, pulling closer and closer until sometimes, in the heat of it, I would look at a body part and think,
Whose leg is that? whose hand?

Kevin slid his fingers up my back and whispered, “Come on, Emily,” and it was Kevin’s voice, urgent and pleading, but it was a voice I had never heard before; it was as if he were inside out, as if I was listening to his blood and his bones.
Okay,
I thought,
okay.

I went limp. I tried to detach from my body. I tried to separate from myself. I thought that the only way to reconcile making love with the man I was cheating on was to rise above my body, to watch two people move together in my bed. But as he touched me, as he whispered to me and kissed me, I was jolted back to a horrible tenderness. His soft voice in my ear recalled our decade together, our hikes through Oregon, Kevin quietly pointing out the native plants he grew up knowing: bearberry, bitterroot, wild ginger; our language of jokes and references, his likes and dislikes as close to my heart as my own; the knowledge of him, of every inch of him. His hands on my body reminded me of all of the times we’d made love, all the places—the first time, in his twin bed, almost silently, his roommate asleep on the other side of a flimsy wall; in a tent next to a still lake in northern Wisconsin; on the kitchen floor, the first night in our apartment; on an air mattress in his parents’ dark basement; in our bed, our bed, again and again and again. I felt him then, and I thought,
I am cheating on this man. This is the man I am cheating on.

When it was over, Kevin whispered, “Love you,” and he held me, and I lay there, hunched inside myself, silently, with the useless, unbearable knowledge that I loved him, too.

“
SILAS SAID ANOTHER ADORABLE THING THE OTHER DAY
,” Heather gushes, swatting a bug away from her peanut butter sandwich. It’s the morning of Dick’s funeral, and Heather and Meg and I are sitting at a picnic table in Lake Park. It feels strange and incongruous to be here, as if my sad, confused autumn self has tumbled down a black hole and emerged into carefree summertime. I was awake for hours last night, tossing and turning, hotly kicking the blankets off and then, ten minutes later, just as desperately rooting around in the dark to cover myself up again. Kevin barely moved all night, breathing evenly, his back to me, and I never knew if he was awake or asleep. When it was finally morning, I fully expected to greet a day that would reflect the sadness of Dick’s funeral, a day to mirror my turbulent soul: I opened the shades anticipating great dark clouds billowing across a slate gray November sky. But today is glorious and warm, Indian summer, and the heavy, sweet smell of wet fallen leaves is the only reminder that it’s late November, not late August.

Heather tears off a hunk of her sandwich. “He said, ‘Hevver,’ because he can’t quite pronounce my name, but that’s not the adorable part. He said, ‘Hevver, do you know what rhymes with sugar?
Booger
!’” She looks first at me, then at Meg, proud, grinning. “Don’t you think that’s adorable?”

“Adorable,” I repeat, incredulous and no longer hungry.

“Sweet!” Meg echoes pleasantly, digging into her own sandwich, obviously not conjuring up the same disgusting image that’s in my head.

I take a big gulp from my water bottle, squint up at the blue sky. This cheery wife- and stepmother-to-be is my cynical, hard-edged little sister. This is my sister who, just last summer, stared back at a little boy on the sidewalk who was gaping at her, the way toddlers do, and muttered, “Take a picture, kid; it lasts longer.” This is the girl who at
fifteen
tried to convince my parents to let her get her tubes tied.

“I mean,” she says now, grabbing her napkin as it’s about to blow away, “I just think it’s so unusual for a three-year-old to be able to come up with a rhyme like that!”

“
So
unusual,” Meg agrees, without sarcasm. She rifles through her bag and pulls out one of the pregnancy bibles she now carries with her at all times. Most of Meg’s pregnancy books look like they’re geared toward mothers-to-be with questionable IQs, or maybe pregnant teenage cheerleaders; they have bright covers, zippy illustrations, and titles like
You Grow, Girl!
She flips through the pages of
No Thanks, I Gestate.
“Gosh, I hope peanut butter is okay!” she says to no one.

Kevin went to work this morning and is planning to meet me at Dick’s funeral this afternoon, so I suggested to Heather and Meg an impromptu picnic in the park. I needed a way to pass the time today that didn’t involve David. Although he was my first choice, he e-mailed me this morning to say that he wouldn’t be able to get together until the middle of the week at the earliest. It felt like a preemptive strike. “I’ve got a crazy deadline again,” he wrote. “Should we plan on seeing each other Wednesday or Thursday? Friday might even be best.” I was so close to writing back to him: “Why can’t you see me? What have I done wrong? Are we through? Do you want to end this?” I actually had to sit on my hands to prevent them from putting on such an embarrassing display. So I sat there, staring at David’s message, my throat dry and my hands numb, and I thought,
What now?
And then I heard my father’s voice in my head. “When life gives you lemons,” Len is fond of saying, “take them back to the supermarket. What do you need lemons for?” I called Meg, and by the time Heather woke up, I had already packed the picnic basket.

“Emily,” Heather says. She flips her hair back with a toss of her head, like a pony. “Isn’t it wild? You’re going to be a step-aunt!” which immediately makes me think of something small and squished on the sidewalk.

Meg laughs and squeezes Heather’s arm. They’ve been talking about babies and toddlers for the past twenty minutes. I sigh, then stuff a carrot stick in my mouth to cover it up.

“Rolf and his ex-partner practiced attachment parenting with Silas,” Heather tells us with a serious nod, “which I think has made him
extremely
self-confident.” I imagine a self-confident three-year-old, a tiny Napoleon. Aren’t toddlers too self-confident to begin with? Isn’t that the problem?

“I completely agree!” Meg practically shouts. “Steve and I are going to co-sleep, and I fully intend for one of us to be holding the baby at all times!” She crunches happily on a pretzel.

“That’s
so great,
” Heather says, intense as a recent convert, adamant as a cult member.