The Actor and the Housewife (18 page)

Becky wondered how long this giddy Felix would last and was relieved when he only made it through dessert. He had stepped out to answer a phone call from Celeste when the waitress returned with the bill. She set it down, then leaned over, resting her hand on the table, and asked conspiratorially, “You’ve got to tell me straight up—are they really both your husbands?”

“No,” Becky said with a sigh. “This superior specimen here is the husband, the other is my best friend.”

“But was that . . . was that Felix Callahan?”

“Possibly.”

“You’re saying Felix Callahan is your best friend? Holy—” And the waitress said a word that Becky wouldn’t want repeated.

Becky did her best not to
tsk
like an old lady, but she couldn’t help a pointed sniff . “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

Felix came up from behind. “I would.”

The waitress turned red and scurried away. Becky glared at him.

“What,” he said, “you don’t think our friendship merits a few expletives?”

“That kind of language shows a baseness of mind and lack of creativity.”

“Or a lust for life. You can feel your pulse beat in the harder words. Sometimes you just have to dig in and curse until you are blue.” His voice was rising, audible to the tables nearby, and he raised his hand in a fist. “Go on, cut your teeth on them. Say it with me now. Holy sh——”

She put her hand over his mouth. “Enough,” she whispered loudly.

She removed her hand.

He picked up the bill, glancing over it casually, then whispered, “——it.”

“You really are asking for it. We’ve talked about this—only Melissa is allowed to swear because her voice is so cute and because her life has been such that in my opinion she reserves the right. But from you it’s just crass and unoriginal. And if you use that language with me again, I’m going to announce to this entire restaurant that Felix Callahan is present and eager to give away free autographs.”

“You have my most humble apologies.”

“Good boy.”

“So, did I hear you tell our waitress that we’re best friends?”

Becky looked sheepish.

Mike raised his hand. “I’m a witness. She said ‘best’ before ‘friends.’ ”

“Hmm . . .” Felix rubbed his chin. “Is this upgrade going to cost me another pinky pledge?”

She sighed in exasperation. “I wish there was a better word for it!” If only she could label it, then she could treat it accordingly, and Mike and her family would understand. There were so many levels of love in this life, many more than the much-lauded Greeks had named. This instantaneously intense and evolving love she had for Felix was minuscule compared with that for her husband and children, but it was also significant and enchanting and mysterious. And she needed to give it a name.

“ ‘Metabuddies’ not working for you?” Felix said. “I suppose ‘best friends’ is a digestible term.”

“Though it’s still not right. I have other best friends, and this is different. Besides, Mike is my absolute best friend.”

“Yeah, I was going to say . . .” Mike nodded with mock gravity, clearly taking this as seriously as a Saturday-morning cartoon.

“That’s right, honey. Felix, you’re . . . something different.”

“Amen,” Mike said.

“You’re not like a good neighbor or a companion for Saturday shopping, and certainly not like my husband. But you are something more than what the word ‘friend’ can contain. Mike has my heart, completely, eternally, no second thoughts.” She grabbed Mike’s hand. “But you have my . . . say, my liver.”

Felix frowned, pondering that. “Livers are good. Positively essential, from what I remember of biology. And good eating, if the need arises. Very well. I will be your liver, and you will be my spleen.”

“No, no, no! We have to both be livers, or one of us will have two livers and no spleen.”

“That’s positively barbaric!” Felix exclaimed. “To think I almost sentenced us both to a horrifying death from organ scrambling.”

“Yeah, I’m liking this. See, your liver isn’t your heart, but you still need it. I’ve had appendix friends and gallbladder friends—but you’re a liver friend.”

Felix placed a hand over his heart. “And you said you weren’t a poet.”

Mike was laughing. She wasn’t sure at whose expense, but it didn’t matter. She loved his laugh. She patted his thigh under the table.

“You are so cool.”

“I know,” Mike said. “One day they’re going to build statues in my honor.”

Becky raised her water glass. “Here’s to Mike, the Understanding Husband.”

Felix raised his. “To Mike, the Nice Guy Who Finished First.”

Mike followed suit. “Mike, Who Chose to Laugh.”

Becky and Mike stayed in Los Angeles for two more days, sleeping in at their hotel (luxury!), walking the beach holding hands (romance!), even succumbing to the chauffeur-induced guilt by visiting an art museum (culture!). And of course, spending Felix’s free time sitting somewhere, basking and laughing. Celeste was back in town their last day, and while Felix took Mike golfing, the ladies went shopping. Really, it was more of an educational field trip.

“Now explain to me why this blouse costs three hundred dollars?”

“Feel the fabric,” Celeste said. “Sense how it moves through your hands like water. And the cut makes it drape just so. It will cling to you and yet hang so innocently it’s almost as if you are wearing nothing at all.”

“Nothing at all. Yeah, but my shirt is the same color and it cost two hundred and eighty-five dollars less.”

“Rebecca, I adore you, but sometimes I think you need a friendly hit on the head.”

Celeste didn’t click with Becky’s soul the way Felix did, finding an empty groove and fitting it perfectly. But it was the best kind of fun just to watch her move, the confidence that beauty brought to every part of her—the bat of her eyelashes, the lift of her fingers. She was a work of art in motion, a wonder of the world. Becky thought she’d rather pluck out her own eyelashes one by one than live in Celeste’s world, but for an afternoon it was fascinating. And the whole time there was the knowledge that somewhere, her heart and her liver were playing golf. She kept her fingers crossed that they were having a really, really great time.

The two couples met later in front of a restaurant, and Becky did a hop of happiness to see the glow in Mike’s face. He’d been golfing with Felix, and he looked happy. Progress was made!

And then Celeste approached Mike. Becky squeaked a laugh as she remembered Celeste’s promised kiss.

“Hello, Michael. I am overjoyed to see you.”

Mike twitched. He kept his eyes on Becky, pleading for help. But Becky was no match for a Frenchwoman with a promise. Celeste placed both her hands on his cheeks and pulled his face to her. Her eyelids fluttered closed (Mike’s didn’t) and she placed one very soft kiss on his lips.

“Hey!” Felix held up his hands as if to say, Am I not right here? Does no one see me standing right here watching my wife kiss another man?

Celeste still had her hands on Mike’s face. “Thank you. You are the best man. The very best man.”

“Hey!” Felix said again.

Celeste smiled at her husband over her bare, smooth, tanned shoulder. “Just because I am as sweet as the bee’s mouth doesn’t mean I don’t mind that my husband has a woman friend. I mind just enough to kiss her husband.” She laced her arm through Felix’s. “Now I am done. Now we are all even.”

Mike blinked several times. “Um . . .”

“If all it took was one kiss,” Felix said, leading her inside, “I call it a bargain.”

The restaurant served barbecue, but as Mike observed, it was weirdly swanky, and Felix seized the only menu and ordered for all. While Felix and Becky teased, Mike and Celeste kept their own conversation, commiserating pleasantly about having crazy spouses and even laughing a fair amount. Becky was so smug with happiness her cheeks hurt from grinning.

It was amazing to have Felix back, though it wasn’t quite the same. For months after, whenever they spoke on the phone, the first thing Felix said would be, “I missed you.”

He refused to forget the time they’d been apart and how his heart “was doing a fine imitation of an empty coffin.” And Becky didn’t forget either. Every night before falling asleep, she gave Mike six kisses—one for being her husband, one for each of their four beautiful children, and one for offering her back her best friend.

In which Becky experiences a scare of horror
movie proportions

Schedule changes made mornings better than the predinner hour for chats, and for months they never missed a weekday.

Often the calls were brief:

“Hey, it’s me. What’s your favorite color?”

“Am I supposed to have a favorite color? No one informed me.”

“Oh, is that something adults grow out of ? It’s just assumed in a house hold of children that every sentient creature must have a favorite color, and I realized I don’t know yours. I’m going to guess . . . gray. Or black.”

“In that case, it’s pink. Bright pink.”

“Polly will be thrilled! That’s her favorite color this decade. Gotta go, it’s family dentist-visit day.”

“Good-bye, you crazy dervish.”

Sometimes they spent twenty minutes chatting about nothing, while Becky balanced the cordless phone on her shoulder (she got a cordless for Christmas!) and folded laundry or mopped the linoleum, and Felix did who-knows-what on the other end.

“Did I hear ice cubes clinking?” she said. “You’d better not be imbibing while talking to me. The mix of purity and indulgence might explode your brain.”

“Ice water, I assure you.”

“Good boy! I worry you’ll get dehydrated with all that alcohol sucking the moisture from your cells. Are you taking those vitamins I sent?”

“They have replaced all other nourishment in my life.”

“Hmph. If you’re steward of my liver, I don’t want it returned to me gasping its last breath.”

“Simply solved—I’ll never return it to you. Speaking of, I’ve been playing with the letters—Lovers In a Very Enlightened Regard.”

“LIVER. Good one.”

“Also, how about Life Invasion Via Exceptional Respect?”

“Life invasion. Like it.”

“Or Lovelike Intensity Via Emotional Rapport.”

“Doesn’t that spell OLIVER?”

“What? Oh. Right. Well, I don’t know who this Oliver fellow is, but he lays a finger on my lady friend and it’s fisticuff s, mate, Queens-bury rules.”

Becky updated Mike that night. “ ‘Liver’ is an acronym now—stands for ‘Lovers In a Very Enlightened Regard.’ Hey, no wincing at the word ‘lover.’ It’s in the original sense—you know, people who love each other. Platonically.”

Mike stared.

“Isn’t that kind of cute?” she asked hopefully.

“ ‘Cute’ isn’t the word I would use.”

But Mike got some of mileage out of the nickname, mostly by creating new and awkward acronyms (often the “L” stood for “lunatics”).

Becky still thought it was a darling idea and tried it out on her friend Melissa.

“Felix is my liver. That’s—”

“Did you just say he’s your lover with a bad Irish accent? I didn’t think that word was part of your lexicon. Besides, Ryan’s the only one in your family who plays with bad accents—and look at him, living in your parents’ basement at age thirty-one. The whole accent-as-humor thing clearly isn’t working out for him, and I highly recommend you don’t go down that road. I know that—”

“No, I said Felix is my
liver
, as in that large, glandish organ. ‘Liver’ is an acronym, it stands for . . . um . . .” Becky was losing her nerve under Melissa’s aghast stare. “Never mind.”

In her ward, Melissa had been asked to be a counselor in the Relief Society presidency, the organization for women, and had decided her purple hair wasn’t appropriate for the position. So she’d buzzed it all off . Becky didn’t have the heart to tell her that while the purple hair had been a little dramatic, the buzz cut was downright fierce, and offered an unfettered view to the devil girl tattoo on the back of her neck. When Sam had seen it, he’d asked, “What’s that devil?” and Melissa looked back and forth, saying, “What devil? I don’t see any devil.” All this made Becky love Melissa even more. Especially when she spoke. Adorable.

“You’re telling me that you call Felix Callahan ‘liver’ and that’s supposed to mean something besides what my dad eats with onions?”

Becky winced. “ ’K, this conversation has helped me decide to never tell anyone about the liver part again.”

She and Felix still kept the name for each other. For her birthday in May, she received a gold locket in a blobby shape. Felix had a matching one, though he let her know that his wasn’t on a gold chain—“I wear it on a leather cord, and round my neck it looks shockingly masculine.”

When acquaintances asked about the unusual charm, Becky alternately claimed it was West Virginia, the profile of Betsy Ross, or a turnip.

“Wow,” her nephew Jayden said. “You must really love turnips.”

So Mike wouldn’t feel left out, for Father’s Day Becky got him a heart pendant on a leather cord.

“It’s shockingly masculine, hon. It really is.”

He had the good grace to wear it that day before tucking it away “where it’ll be nice and safe” in the back of a drawer.

And life was good. Sometimes in those rare pockets of calm, Becky would scratch at a creeping feeling that things were way too good and something would have to break. She ignored it. She loved her husband, she had her best friend back, and her days were filled to brimming with happily normal mommy dilemmas.

Then everything changed, fast as a snap.

Mike kept rubbing his lower back, sometimes wincing, and she accused him of hiding pain until he confessed. They wasted a couple of months going to a physical therapist and an orthopedic surgeon, until Becky happened to mention Mike’s pain to a neighbor.

“That’s how it started for my uncle,” said the neighbor. “Lower back pain. But it was cancer.”

Those words could’ve been the most annoying, doomsdayish, fl a-grant scare tactic ever applied. Instead, Becky came to believe, they were an inspired warning.

Becky made an appointment that afternoon. In two weeks Mike was being examined by an oncologist. He had cancer. Cancer cancer cancer cancer . . .

She couldn’t say the word aloud. It was the dirtiest, most vulgar, basest swear word imaginable. Pronouncing it seemed to scorch her lips, fill her mouth with filth. She hated it. Hated, hated, hated it, that word, that thing, that reality. She wanted to punch it. Really hard. No, worse. She was murderous. She would’ve taken a sawed-off shotgun to cancer’s middle and pulled the trigger. She frightened herself with the hot loathing that filled her for that evil creeping disease.

But only when she was alone—in the shower, in the car after dropping Mike off at a doctor’s appointment, wandering the house after the kids had gone to bed. When she was with Mike, she was a rock. She was undefeatable. She was calm and wise and meticulous and hopeful. She was Becky Jack.

“Don’t worry,” she said, snuggling next to Mike. “We’ll beat this. Easy peasy.”

“I’m not worried,” he said. “Well, I’m worried about you and the kids. This is a lot for you to handle. I feel fine, I do. I’m okay. I just wish I wasn’t putting you all through this.”

“
Pshaw
. Don’t you dare worry about me. And the kids are tough. The doctor said it would be good for you to avoid stress, so I’m creating a stress-free zone. This household is all about your constant peace. And what could be more calming, to a near-state of zombification, than televised golf ? That’s right, honey, you are the proud recipient of the PGA cable package! No, no, don’t argue. It’s the least I could do.”

“Wow, you must be preparing for my death if you stooped to that extreme.”

Even though she seemed to have adrenaline shooting through her body at all times and there were many nights when she lay staring at Mike’s sleeping face and whispering prayers in her heart, she wasn’t as worried as she thought she should be. At moments when she stopped to let herself sense for truth, there was a core of calm that ran through her, an assurance she associated with God that everything was going to be okay.

It wasn’t a picnic. Mike had one kidney removed, followed by radiation treatments. Sam was three and so easygoing and stinkin’ cute that Becky and Mike had toyed with the idea of a fifth child, if one happened to come along. But now there would be no more toying.

Everything was about Mike and the cancer. Everything. The entire world was turned upside down and shaken for loose change.

Imagine months of tests and treatments and anxiety over the unknown. Imagine them, because we won’t enumerate. It was depressing a lot of the time, and Becky really hates a downer. But she and Mike refused to succumb to the gloom.

“Now stand sideways and put your arms up,” the radiology technician said, trying to get a good angle for the X-ray. “Stretch them over, now hunch just a little . . . a little more.”

“Now I want to see pouty,” Becky said. “That’s right, fl irt with the X-ray, make it want to come back for more.”

The technician cut her eyes at Becky before exiting to the booth to take the shot. After a few more poses, she left them alone while she developed the film. Mike sat on the edge of the bed. Becky sat across the room on a stool. They were waiting to hear if there was postsurgery pneumonia or (the doctor didn’t say this part but they were both aware) there were unpleasant dark areas that might mean the cancer had spread to his lungs and might kill him within the year.

Becky took a breath. “I want to acknowledge the artistic choices you made in that last round. I don’t know a handful of men in all the world who can pull off the sexy zombie pose.”

Mike nodded sagely. “Did you notice what I was doing with my feet?”

“The parallel-with-jaunty-angled-toe? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You take the impossible and make it look easy.”

Lately when Becky made Mike laugh, he sounded
grateful
—that’s what almost broke her heart.

In the middle of this cyclone, Felix drifted away. There was nothing she wanted besides being with Mike and making sure those kids felt love and stability in every cell of their bodies. At first she let Felix know what was going on, but soon she stopped calling, and sometimes she couldn’t answer when he called. Eventually he stopped calling too. The world outside their home seemed irrelevant. All that mattered were the test results, treatments, and the kids’ happiness. Tests, treatments, kids. Mike beside her, holding her hand. Family. Oh, it was so good, that family. Pain came with goodness, she realized now as she never had before. But even inside that shocking pain, that worse-than-labor pain, that nearly frightening-to-death pain, still, her family was so, so good.

And right now, Felix just didn’t make sense.

Becky was in crisis mode perhaps, and all her peripheral needs shut down. So is that what Felix had been—just a side dish? Nice to have around but nothing necessary? After the trauma of losing his friendship, how was it possible that he could slip away so easily? Becky didn’t ponder it long. She just kept that house hold running, kept loving Mike, kept each day moving forward.

At last, the definitive word from the radiation oncologist.

“It wasn’t too bad. It was localized in the kidney, and anything left we zapped to bits. Congratulations, Mike. Your cancer is officially in remission.”

Remission. Remission! There should be a parade for remission, a ballad to remission—no, a marching-band number, something proud and excited and full of life. She made up a song called “Remission,” sung to the
Fiddler on the Roof
tune “Tradition,” and taught it to the kids.

Becky was dumbfounded by the normalcy around her. Why wasn’t there a nationwide gala for remission? At the very least a bank holiday? Maybe it was the word itself. “Remission” just didn’t convey the feeling for such a beautiful, graceful, hopeful thing. They should call it “rapture” or “bliss.” The cancer wasn’t in remission—it was struck down, decimated, defeated, obliterated!

Every day was a party at the Jack residence. Balloons and banners filled the house, carols sang out from the speakers. “I don’t care if it isn’t Christmastime,” Becky said. “I’m in the mood for some hallelujahs.” She wrote a little play that the kids performed at a family reunion. They donned armor and swords and fought a cancer monster, played by a one-eyed teddy bear that Becky had always found creepy. They slew that teddy bear. They tore its stuffing out.

Mike returned to work but was home by five each night, throwing a ball to the kids in the backyard, grilling burgers, coming up from behind and wrapping his arms around Becky for a quick kiss.