The Actor and the Housewife (15 page)

He sighed, a pitiable moan, as if he hurt somewhere, and she knew she’d been right. Best friends, whatever that meant, that’s what was ending.

There was nothing else. They didn’t need to assure each other how they felt or make any just-call-anytime-and-I’ll-be-here statements. They didn’t need to say good-bye. But they did that much.

“Good-bye,” Becky said “Good-bye,” he said.

They both hung on for a few minutes more. Becky didn’t know which of them hit the hang-up button first.

She let go of the phone and lay there listening to the dial tone. Sam’s blankie helped. At least she wasn’t shivering anymore. She held it to her face and breathed in the homey smell of fabric softener and that other scent that was Sam, still full of babyness but also the slightly sharper smell of little boy. The scent filled her, made her smile.

She got up, rocking unsteadily with exhaustion, lurched into her bedroom, and crawled under the covers next to Mike. He rolled over and pulled her in close. He was so warm, so wonderful, she started to shiver again just to feel so good.

He kissed her head. “I love you,” he said sleepily.

“I love you too.”

She drifted, then dreamed. And by some miracle, the power went out, killing the alarm setting, and all the kids slept in, allowing Becky two perfect hours of sleep.

In which someone offers to commit adultery

She’d thought the hardest thing about the split-up would be missing Felix—harboring things she would’ve said, those fraying sentences filling her up to bursting like an attic drawer. But as it turned out, the hardest was not being able to talk about it with Mike.

He’d say, “Are you okay?”

And she’d say, “Fine,” because she was determined not to hurt him again, so it was out of the question to say “Not completely. There’s a pinprick in my heart, as if a thread’s tied to it, and Felix is tugging on the other end, reminding me that we’re apart, and that’s the way it needs to be, but it doesn’t keep me from wanting to let my chin quiver in pathetic gloom.”

Besides, she didn’t think she
should
feel so much. Felix was just a friend, she told herself. It hurts to lose friends, but there’s no need to be so dramatic about it.

She didn’t tell anyone about the breakup. She didn’t want to make a commotion, and on top of that, in the retelling Mike looked like a jealous husband and she like a flirtatious house wife, which she thought was a little unfair to both. But when her mother asked about Felix during their monthly mother-daughters day, Becky couldn’t lie. Not to Mom.

“How is Felix Callahan doing?” Alice Hyde always referred to him by first and last name. She’d never seen any of his movies. Though Becky’s parents were lifelong thespians, they preferred live theater, preferably of the golden-age variety. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” was Alice’s personal theme song. Becky supposed it beat “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

“I don’t know,” Becky said. “I haven’t spoken to him in a while. We’ve decided not to stay in touch.”

Alice leaned back and hooted a sigh. “Thanks be for that!”

“Oh. You weren’t a fan?”

“Honey lamb, you know . . .” They were sitting in Alice’s trim backyard, assaulting a cheese ball with crackers and turning five hundred jigsaw pieces into a Japanese bridge under cherry blossoms. “I don’t think it’s ever a good idea, men and women as friends. It leads to other things.”

Becky stifled a harrumph. Maybe with other people that was true, but Becky believed she was impervious to the threat of adultery, with Felix or anyone. Even if she was hit on the head and forgot that she was in love with her husband, even if all her moral convictions and sense of basic human decency were surgically removed from her brain, she always had that post-pregnancy body as a very last resort. No chance she’d allow any man to see her naked besides the one who’d gotten her pregnant four times. You broke it, you bought it, baby.

“What did I miss?” Becky’s older sister, Diana, came onto the patio with her two-year-old, Robert, under one arm. He wafted the powdery scent of freshly changed diaper.

“Becky and Felix Callahan are splits,” Alice said.

Diana nodded. “I guess that’s for the best. I’d been worried about you.”

Becky’s stomach clenched, but she just asked kindly, “You had?” because she’d been working on being more humble.

“I didn’t want to say anything.” Diana set Robert on the lawn, and he took off after Sam. “I don’t want to be the bossy, self-righteous older sister—”

“What, give up after all that practice?”

“I know, I know. But really, being so familiar with another man, I think that crosses a line.”

“Steve wouldn’t like it, huh?”

Diana gave an alarmed smile. “Steve? Uh, no. But how would you feel if Mike brought home some woman from work who was his new confidant? If they chatted on the phone every day, laughing with each other?”

“I think about that, and it would be weird, no question. But I like to think I’d be understanding, if they were both respectful of me.”

Alice was holding a puzzle piece with some cherry blossoms and scanning the table for a match. There were approximately three hundred potentials. “Maybe it’s different with men. Maybe some women can have friendships like that. But if there’s a line you shouldn’t cross, it’s wiser to stay far away than try to get as close as possible without actually crossing.”

“We know, Mom,” Becky and Diana said together.

“Good,” Alice said, cramming two pieces together. “Glad I raised you right.”

Becky sighed. She wasn’t at all sure anymore about which lines she shouldn’t cross.

2. Being physical in any way with another man

3. Sharing intimate secrets with another man

4. Having a best friend who is a man

5. Having a close acquaintance who is a man

6. Being alone with another man

7. Daydreaming about fictional men

8. Having any close friends besides Mike, even other women

9. Being friendly with any adults besides Mike

10. Talking ever with anyone besides Mike

As weeks and then months went by, it got easier. Her addiction to hearing Felix’s voice ebbed. When people (besides her sister and mother) inquired about him, her evasive answers became automatic. She avoided his movies, averted her eyes from the grocery checkout magazines splattered with celebrity photos. She wasn’t numb yet, but the missing became dull and more ignorable. Why was this so hard? If her friend Melissa went away, Becky wouldn’t pine like this. She no longer felt mysterious. She felt stupid.

Fortunately, there was little time to sit idly by, playing the romantic poet and taste-testing her own melancholy. Summer did come, and summer was the season of Becky Jack. The kids were free (free!) from the constraints of homework and school days. And they would go stark raving insane with nothing to do, so the Jack home became a summer camp: summer projects (raising insects, quilting, coin collecting, studying kinds of clouds, family read-a-thons), sports (swimming, rafting, hiking, Little League), field trips (zoo, amusement park, bird preserve, lakes, mountains, rivers, meadows), service projects (neighborhood widow’s yard care, food bank drives), and just good hard play from sunup to sundown.

Daylight lasted for hours after Mike came home from work, and they played softball in the backyard, went for bike rides to ice cream parlors, organized neighborhood games of kick-the-can. As Mike flew Sam over his head and swooped him down to kick that can, Becky’s heart nearly exploded in joy. There was no question. In Mike vs. Felix, Mike would win every stinking time.

(Here a quiet thought: Did there have to be a competition?)

Then school started and with it came that mania of reestablishing schedules, which after the loosey-goosey good times of summer felt both tragic and necessary.

September did not bloom easily in the Jack home. Polly was diagnosed with asthma aggravated by multiple allergies, requiring the house be completely cleaned of all cats, cat hair and dander, down pillows, and dust. Becky wasn’t too sorry to bid farewell to Mr. Bojangles, the family’s aged and diarrhetic cat, but sending Edgar Poe to a new home was traumatic for all—even Nubbin. And dust was another matter altogether. Becky and dust had maintained an affable truce for many years—she gave a cursory dusting every few weeks and the dust agreed not to draw much notice. Now that luxury was gone. What would she have to start doing next—
ironing
?

Then Sam chose this period to dabble in two-year-old tantrums (after all, the other kids were doing it, so why couldn’t he?), and Fiona asserted her twelve-year-old in dependence by abhorring everything about her mother. Sometimes when no one was looking, Becky grabbed Hyrum and overwhelmed him with hugs and kisses just because he was the only one who remained constant. He was still his grumpy, six-year-old self, but at least he was constant.

Becky and Mike continued with their Ignorance Is Bliss silent agreement, though sometimes Mike revealed that he still thought about the missing Felix too.

“Do you regret not having a diamond engagement ring?” he asked her one evening, touching her plain gold band.

“Never. Do I look like a diamond girl to you?”

“They do say diamonds are a girl’s—”

He stopped himself, as if realizing halfway through the phrase what thoughts it would dredge up. But the halting made the words even stronger, and they seemed to scream in the pause, “Best friend! Best friend!”

Becky spoke quickly to kill the discomfort. “Diamonds are a serious waste of cash. Think of the cool playset we could buy for the cost of one little diamond.”

About six months into the Epoch of the Dull Ache, Becky was reading with Hyrum. He’d woken up early and crawled into her bed with the book. She didn’t think what it was about until she was halfway through.

“It’s too cold for me here in the winter,” said the little bird, ruffling her feathers. “I need sun and warm wind under my wings. But I’ll be back soon!”

The squirrel waved good-bye from his tree branch and shivered under a snowflake. It was going to be a long winter.

Mike was leaning against the counter, holding his cereal bowl but not eating. He was looking at her in that way, those brown eyes warm and knowing, and she groaned internally, sure he could see right into her soul.

“What do you think about that book? The one you were just reading to Hyrum.”

“It’s great. Hey, would you mind swooping by the grocery store on your way home from work? I’ve got no breaks today, and we’re almost out of milk.”

“Sure. Honey, are you missing—”

“Oh, and some cottage cheese too, and grapes please. That’s all Sam wants lately, cottage cheese and grapes.” And suddenly she was washing dishes. Hand-washing cereal bowls and water cups when the dishwasher was standing there empty. Duh, Becky. Mike knew her too well—she was clearly being evasive.

She could feel him watching her. Her back tensed, and she waited for him to accuse her of secretly feeling more grief than she should for just-a-friend. Really, the pain was so minor, she didn’t begrudge it. A simple sacrifice to make for her husband’s happiness. But she was mortified to feel it at all. And under the pain, she couldn’t bury the worry—Felix was out there somewhere. A tick in her mother’s intuition warned that he needed her.

She heard Mike take a breath—he was going to speak, he was going to air out the silence of the past months, and it was going to be so uncomfortable! But then Fiona and Polly came running in, arguing about clothes. Becky didn’t catch the core argument but told Fiona to let Polly borrow whatever it was, and as Fiona sulked and Polly skipped, she had apparently guessed the problem.

Then Mike was gone to work.

When he came home that evening, milk in hand (no grapes or cottage cheese), he asked, “Where is our address book?”

“The little brown one? In my side table.”

He went upstairs. She saw the light flick on the kitchen phone, indicating that someone was making a call.

“Fiona, will you make sure Sam doesn’t kill himself for a few minutes?”

Becky absconded to the family room, carefully removing the receiver without making a clicking noise. Muffling the speaking end with her hand, she listened. We should clarify that she did feel a little nickering guilt, but she suspected who he was calling and wild horses couldn’t have kept her from that conversation.

“. . . on Thanksgiving break from school next week,” Mike was saying. “We had some flooding in the basement this fall, but other than that, we’re doing great. Uh, how are you guys?”

“Not so great, to be honest, Michael.”

It was Celeste.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mike said. Becky could hear the discomfort in his voice and knew he wanted nothing more than to end the conversation. “Uh, is Felix there?”

“No, he is in Mexico for a week. He will not come back to Los Angeles until the end of the month. I’m lonely, but not so lonely as he is, and it is for this reason that I am so happy you called, Michael, because I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”

Becky wasn’t surprised at Mike’s shocked silence. She was rather shocked into silenter silence herself.

“You . . . you have?” he said at last.

“Yes, it’s about Felix. He tries to be brave. He is such a brave man! That is what first made me love him, did you know? There are so many flimsy men, so many weak men. Felix is strong. That is important, don’t you think? I think so. And he continues to be so strong, but I see something new in him now. He’s homesick even when we are home. Do you understand? He’s homesick for his friend. And so I have been wanting to know, why must you break my husband’s heart?”

Celeste waited for a response, and Becky cringed for Mike.

“I’m sorry, Celeste,” he said. “I didn’t want to, uh, break Felix’s heart, or anyone’s. It was Becky’s decision. I was actually calling because—”

“So you say, Michael, but your wife made this sacrifice for you. I know women. Men are a mystery to me, a delightful mystery to be unwrapped, but women I know, and Rebecca did this for you. Why do you cause her to do this?”

He sighed. Becky thought he might be sitting down.

“So you never had any problem with it? With your husband having another woman as a friend, calling each other and planning weekend trips?”

“
Ma bichette
, of course I did! But I met Rebecca. She’s a woman of large heart, Michael. She has many ways to love. She loves you, she loves her children—all four of them, somehow, and equally. I don’t think the way she loves Felix takes away from her love for you, any more than her children do.”

He was quiet.

“You are thinking about it, aren’t you, Michael? You see truth in what I say. You see, I know women. And I know my Felix. He needs to be with her. God has made them for each other. You believe in God, don’t you? So do I. God is love, Michael. Love! And so I say it—God made them to love each other. There’s no other explanation. But it is still hard for you, isn’t it? You are strong but you fight your strength, don’t you?”