Still Life with Husband (7 page)

Well, this is true: I wouldn’t mind making a new friend. I’d like to have a buddy in the journalism world, someone to talk to about the frustrations and pleasures of writing. Can’t I just be here, do that? Can’t I just connect with David Keller on that level, maybe start up a friendship, possibly even somewhat of a
charged
friendship, but leave it at that? My mom used to tell me that if I liked a boy, I should just march right up to him and say, “Whaddya say we start up a friendship?” Of course, I scoffed at that, and anyway I always favored the flirt-so-subtly-that-it-was-unrecognizableas-flirting-and-then-pine-in-vain approach, the nurse-a-festering-obsessive-crush approach, but now, why not? I’m not some kind of hyena, lacking control of my instincts, unable to resist the lure of another pheromone-emitting hyena, for God’s sake! I can allow myself to establish a relationship that may even
contain
some physical attraction, that may not include, for example, long discussions about my marriage, without letting that relationship spiral out of control. Yes, I can! I’m too conscious of my motivations to embark on an affair. In my life, one thing never just leads to another. But a friendship? A friendship I could do. A friendship might even be easy.

About two miles from my parents’ house, just off I-43, there is a place called Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese. In a sea of strip malls, it stands bravely alone and unchanging, set back from the road, protected by the moat of its oversized parking lot. When I was growing up, we would drive past Jupiter’s Palace, sometimes as often as two or three times a week—on the way to the grocery store or to Heather’s violin lesson or to the ice cream parlor nearby. It’s still a regular part of my geography: every time I visit my parents or go to the dentist or do an errand in their part of town, I see it. But I’ve never been inside. As a child, on every car ride, I would stop bickering with Heather as we’d approach Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese, and I’d watch its spires and colorful flags loom closer, tiny in the distance and growing larger, until we’d zoom past, and I’d crane my neck as the turrets and minarets receded in the distance. Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese! I pictured a fairy tale world full of dazzling, dairy-rich interplanetary surprises: a fabulous fortress of cheese, soft mozzarella stars gently twinkling in the sky and—naturally—a green cheese moon shining. I imagined a Brie princess trapped in one of the towers, while all sorts of complicated magical passageways paved with dangerous Swiss, or maybe more solid Gouda, led to her prison. And a cheddar king ruled over his fantastic galactic domain with a string-cheese scepter. I was a strange girl with an active internal life and many imaginary friends with whom I conversed under my breath and exchanged complicated jokes.

We never stopped at Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese. We could have, easily; my parents would have been happy to indulge me in this, as they did in every other way. But as a child, it never occurred to me to ask. It was as if I knew, on some level, that Jupiter’s Palace wasn’t real, and not just the universe of otherworldly cheese, but the part I could
see,
with my own eyes. How could anything so wonderful be true? And then, as I got older, I developed a nostalgia for it, even though it continued to exist, even as we continued to drive past it on our journeys. I realized that Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese would probably turn out to be a tacky little store, a flimsy prefab hut full of displays of cheese molds in the shape of castles and, well, I couldn’t bring myself to conjure what other fantasy-killing products would be plied there. Martian Muenster? An assortment of cosmic jams and jellies? These days, I pass by it with a pleasant longing: I both want to, and never want to, step inside. Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese has become for me the one fantasy I can harbor boldly because it will never bludgeon me with its lumpy reality. Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese is all the things that will never disappoint me, all the things I will never do.

But what if I do, someday, venture inside? Who knows what will greet me? It may turn out to be everything I dreamed of. That’s the thing. The shiny mystery of it.

David Keller walks through the door and unwraps his long scarf from his neck. He’s tall. His longish dark hair flops just a little bit in his eyes. He looks like someone I’ve known forever. I close my eyes for a second. My hands are in my lap. I slip my wedding ring into my pocket, and then I wave.

“Hi!” he says, before he’s even made it all the way over to me, and a wide smile colonizes his face. Something inside me gives way—like a mudslide, like when you are very happy, or about to throw up.

“Hi!” I say back. I feel goofy, overcome. He stands near me, pulls out a chair and drapes his blue wool jacket over it. He smells like outside, like air, like wind. I have never, ever felt like this before: I’m collapsing in on myself. I’m the universe, expanding, contracting. I see him in front of me, and at the same time I see myself in his arms, feel his rough cheek on my neck. God, I want him inside me; I want to be inside him. I want to wear him. What
is
this?

He sits down, then bounces right back up, nervously. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. Can I get you one?” he asks. I smile, tilt my head toward the cup in front of me. “Oh, right, you have one. I’ll be right back.”

I have always fallen for guys the way smart girls do, the way not-beautiful girls do, with my brain. My first boyfriend was a revelation. We met at the end of high school, at the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Debating finals. His team was in favor of the death penalty, ours was against it. When we talked on the phone, late at night, after our parents were asleep, we whispered about our SAT scores and the AP classes we were taking. In college, the first boy I loved sat next to me in Pre-Eighteenth Century Lit, and he asked me out after reading my essay on the Wife of Bath (the First Feminist!). A year later, I met boyfriend number three, the one before Kevin, at a political rally. Mark and I leafleted against our local Republican councilman together and argued politics before, after, and sometimes during sex on the single futon on the floor of his bedroom at the co-op. And Kevin, well, Kevin. This is different from that, different from love, of course, but different, too, from the brainy entanglements of my past.

David sits down across from me. He takes a sip of his coffee, puts his cup down, and meets my eyes. We look at each other for a long second. As my brain seizes up, I realize that I should have prepared something to say.

“I’m really glad you e-mailed,” he says.

I have a husband.
“Thanks,” I say. “Me, too.” Now that that’s finished, we stare at each other in silence again. I look down at my hands, my pale, naked hands. I have a flash of Meg in the hospital waiting room, the way she looked drowned, wrung out. I called her yesterday and left a message. Nobody answered, but I’m sure they were home.

After a few moments, David finally breathes life into the dead air between us. “So, what kind of writing do you do?” I want to lick him.

“Well,” I say, wondering what will come out of my mouth, “I write about relationships, I guess, and I happen to have just finished a short piece for
Me,
the magazine
Me,
not
myself
me, on hats…but really what I try to do, when I can, when I have some free rein, is show evidence that the world is as weird as I think it is.” I’m a tiny, strange bird, chirping nonsensically at the sky. For some reason I hear myself continuing to talk. “I wrote a review a few months ago of this new book that argues that your astrological sign determines your interior decorating style.” I stop, abruptly, mortified at the stupidity of it all.

David laughs, but gently, I think. “I’m a Taurus,” he says. “What does that say about my living room?”

That I am suddenly imagining us on your plush sofa, you on top of me.
“You’re into natural materials and natural colors, like sky blue, and textured fabrics. You’re tactile.” I feel myself blush immediately. Tactile! I might as well just have asked him to run his hand up my thigh!

He smiles. “It’s true, actually. I am kind of tactile! But, you know, my decorating style is more old stuff left behind by former roommates than anything else. Well,” he continues, “if I’d ever given a second’s thought to it, I guess I
would
be into textured fabrics.”

“I think it’s really great that you can talk about interior decorating without feeling that your manliness is compromised,” I say, and wait three long, horrible seconds before he laughs.

“Yes, I’m very secure that way. I could go on for hours about flower arranging, too.”

“Not many guys can say that.”

“What’s your sign? What’re your interior decorating inclinations?”

“I’m a Leo, and actually this really fits. We’re supposed to be all about bright colors and creative decorating.” I have a vision of Kevin’s and my bedroom, of the abstract print I bought at the museum last year, all splashy purples and greens. Hanging above our bed, our bed that is covered with a sunny yellow quilt. “It’s true,” I mumble. “I really go for bright colors.”

“I had an aunt who was an astrologer,” David says. “I used to spend summers with her. Until she started baking birthday cakes for her plants. But, before that, she was really into all of it, astrology and tarot, and she made it seem very legitimate. Almost scientific, in a weird way. Or, prescientific, but somehow valid.”

“That’s funny. I have an aunt who always says, ‘I don’t believe in astrology, but I’m a Sagittarius, and we’re very skeptical.’”

David looks at me and laughs again and all of a sudden I know, if I had any doubts before: the deal is sealed. He’s gazing at me like I’m the cleverest person he’s ever met, like I’m a jewel he’s discovered buried in the sand. I see it in his eyes, and it turns me into liquid. Whatever this is, I’m going to have to face it.

“How did you get into this racket?” I ask him, a traffic cop of conversation. Yield! Avoid intimacy!

“My degree was in journalism. After college, while my friends were becoming Internet zillionaires, I decided to go the
really
lucrative route and write a novel,” he says, still not dropping his eyes from mine. “It was a comedy about three unlucky mercenary soldiers in Central America. I wrote a hundred-fifty pages of it before I realized I knew nothing about mercenary soldiers or Central America. Although I had been to El Salvador for a week in high school. But…oh, and I called it,
Soldiers of Misfortune.
I could actually see it on the
New York Times
best-seller list. That was how I’d lull myself to sleep at night, visualizing it. Number one, three weeks running. Sometimes it was number two, if I didn’t want to seem greedy. Anyway, I was having these vivid fantasies about my success, but I was living on ramen noodles. I woke up one morning and realized it was time to call it quits.”

“And then what?” I ask, enthralled. David’s career search mirrors mine, and makes me feel legitimate. In spite of himself, the example set by Kevin—disciplined, rigorous, career-oriented Kevin—has always made it seem like you either have what it takes or you don’t. No in-betweens.

“I got a job at a suburban paper in Chicago. I was living in the city, and it was a ninety-minute commute. And I sat through more school board meetings in three years than most school board members did. But then this came along five years ago, so I moved here.”

“Do you ever wish you’d stuck it out with the novel?”

“Sure. Sort of.” He sips his coffee, which must be cold by now; mine is. It doesn’t seem like he cares. “I wish I’d been able to persist and write a
good
novel.
Soldiers of Misfortune
wasn’t. But, I figure, I’m young. There’s still time.”

If you walked into White’s Bookstore/Café on this particular chilly Friday morning and you saw us, David Keller and me, sitting at the table in the corner near the window, both of us occasionally sipping from big green mugs, talking, laughing, our bodies leaning forward, dark heads close together, you would see a small solar system, closed, impenetrable; you would see two people on a date—possibly, you would muse, a first date; undoubtedly, you would think, an excellent date. Unless you knew me, of course. Then you’d think,
What’s Emily doing with that guy who’s not her husband?

We talk for two hours that feel like ten minutes. We divulge silly, intimate things to each other. David blushingly admits that his favorite thing to do is to watch Woody Allen marathons and pick out all the references to Bergman. He tells me that he’s been researching Irish history, planning to take a walking tour of the country someday. I confess that I’m a closet fan of cheesy science-fiction novels, explaining in detail the plot of my favorite one, about two modern-day sleuths who time-travel to ancient Peru. We tell each other our life stories, magnified and heightened for maximum punch—
I fell off the jungle gym when I was seven and broke both wrists! My sister convinced me that she and our parents found me in a junkyard one day when they were getting rid of their old refrigerator!
I can practically feel sparks shooting off me and landing in his lap. And then, without warning, David glances at his watch and actually jumps.

“Oh, no! Emily, I was supposed to be back in the office an hour ago. I have to go!”

“I’m sorry,” I say, wondering if he blames me, if he’s going to go all Type A and anxious and fly out of here.

Instead he rolls his eyes and smiles and says, calmly, “Do you think my boss will believe me if I tell him I was interviewing a confidential source?”

“I don’t know. What kind of story are you working on?”

“A history of the Nirvana Chocolate Company.”

“Any chocolate-related scandals that would require top-secret interviews?”

“There was the hot fudge debacle of 1957.”

“Really?”

“No….” He shifts in his chair. I’ve managed to pass two hours without mentioning Kevin. I edited him right out of my life story. I never lied, never said I was single, but I sure as hell sinned by omission. “But, look,” David continues. “Before we go, I should tell you something.”