The Mermaid of Brooklyn (41 page)

Finally, after twenty-plus hours of conversations in which I left out everything that was really happening, Sunday night arrived and found Sarah and me sharing a bottle of wine on my grimy couch, whispering to avoid waking Max, who lacked my city kids’ ability
to sleep through sirens. Now that she was about to leave, I was able to view her with kindness. She was prettier than I was, which had always been annoying, like looking into a magic mirror capable of showing you how you might look if your features were slightly different—the eyes more almond, the hair shining blond and naturally straight (seriously, how was it fair?), the lips fuller, the demeanor calmer. What made it worse was she always dressed as if she hadn’t noticed that she might be beautiful, where I—not recently but traditionally—had made an effort, probably too much of an effort, probably managing to look like a slightly pretty girl who was really trying, whose lips were shellacked with red and feet were encased in shoes that begged for attention of any kind, like the chatterbox the teacher’s always chiding about having something to share with the rest of the class. But Sarah wore blue jeans in the effortless manner of the long-legged (okay, relatively speaking—she was five-four), and faded T-shirts, and her hair actually looked pretty in a ponytail. She was the most annoying kind of sister one could possibly have, and of course she was mine.

“Well,” I said, “thanks for coming. Now it’s back to your perfect life, ugh, poor thing!”

Sarah stared into her wineglass. “Yeah. Actually, you know, I came here because I wanted to tell you something in person, and I think I almost chickened out.”

“Oh?” I was already punishing myself for resenting her. Dear God, she had cancer, Max had cancer, Mom had cancer, I had cancer, we all had cancer.

“This is so hard, especially with everything you’re going through, and you’ve been so strong and amazing, and I’m so proud of you, and I don’t want to add to your stress . . .”

She’d somehow found Harry, and he had cancer, too. Harry was hiding out with them, no, Harry was having an affair with her, no,
she
was
Harry’s secret other family, Max was their love child, that was why I found him so annoying and yet familiar—

“John and I are splitting up.”

John? I momentarily drew a blank. Oh, John? Her husband?
Oh, who cares.

“Oh my God. Really?” I managed to pull myself together and act, I hoped, like a semi-normal human being. I even reached out and patted her hand, something she was always doing to me. No wonder she hadn’t noticed I was on the verge of a complete psychotic break. John had always struck me as sort of a douchebag, though Harry liked to tell me that was only because I was at heart so evil that I couldn’t trust someone who was as blandly good-looking, polite, successful,
and
good at baking as my brother-in-law. That was why I had loved Harry, I think. He somehow always knew things like that about me, things that wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else, things like how I could always distrust my sister’s sweet husband because he once served us foie gras while playing a Dave Matthews CD, the combination of which had left me eternally nauseated. “My God, Sarah. Are you sure? Like for good or a trial thing?”

She wasn’t looking me in the eye, a bad sign. “I’m pretty sure it’s for good. He’s moving out this weekend, while we’re here.”

“Really? Does Max know?”

“We’re going to tell Max when we get home. We’re taking him to Chuck E. Cheese’s. It’s probably the worst idea ever. He’ll be so confused and grow up hating mice and not know why. But it’s the way John wanted to do it—I don’t know, to make it fun or something?—and I’d already vetoed too many things from him. I figured I owe him.”

“You owe him? Wait, Sarah, why? What happened?”

She made a little tent out of her fingers—I could just see her doing this with her patients, it looked so shrinky, and I distracted myself
momentarily by wondering if this was the kind of thing they taught at whatever school you had to go to in order to become an analyst. And if a couples therapist got divorced, was she still allowed to be a couples therapist? Could she be disbarred or something? She said, “Ah, well. This is so hard to say. To you. So weird. To admit.”

“Don’t even say it. I know. He had an affair. Sarah, that’s so awful—I’m so sorry—”

Sarah laughed, which I hadn’t expected. I stopped short. “He? No, no—John is just as perfect as he seems. That’s the problem! Jenny, it was me. I had an affair. With a patient.” She buried her face in her hands for an instant and then sat straight up, as if someone had pressed a reset button on her spine. The look on her face was not one I had seen before. Frank and embarrassed and shamed and . . . happy? Happy. “It’s awful. I know it’s awful. Do you hate me? I know everyone hates me. But I’m so—happy. I’m happy. He left his wife already, but there were no children, so it was simpler. Not that it was easy for him, but—we both want this. And it’s just— Life is too short, you know?” People were always saying this, it occurred to me, but that wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that life was long, far too long. I felt a hundred years old suddenly, a thousand years old, and as if all I wanted to do was sink to the bottom of some cool dark river somewhere and sift through bits of seashells and glass shards and never see another human again. I had to talk to Sam. I had to make sure he didn’t leave his wife, that I hadn’t done something worse than all the other crummy everyday things. Also, I wanted to go to sleep without Sarah beside me.

I sat there, chewing on the inside of my cheek, trying to figure out what a nice, normal human would do in such a circumstance. Part of me wanted to rage at her—how could she be so selfish? Think of Max! If everything had been unthrilling but fine with
John, then why break it all to bits? But what did I know about marriage? I had not seen or heard from my own prince in shining armor for months and much of the time I’d spent attempting to seduce someone else’s spouse. Sarah had studied the subject. Maybe she knew something I didn’t.

Instead, I rallied some force inside me—well, we know what force—and applied a smile that was somewhere between sympathetic and joyful and said, “Oh, Sarah. Well, if you’re happy, then I’m happy for you.” As I said the words, I realized how true they were, how this new whoever-he-was was making her happy, and that with Sarah, there was a chance the happiness would stick. That for her, it could be the single transgression that began a new, even more perfect life. That with me and Cute Dad, it was a different situation altogether.

As usual, the bright light of Sarah’s life revealed what was so flawed in mine. So, I’d been unhappy, then Harry had left, then I was still unhappy. He was gone, so I was unhappy, presumably because I missed him and was upset that he was gone. But I
had
been unhappy before, I knew I had been, and before, it had always been for a vague miasma of reasons and nonreasons and chemicals and such. Sometimes there had been a man to blame it on, and sometimes I’d had to get more creative with my justifications. It didn’t quite hold that if I was unhappy now because Harry had left, then the unhappiness would go away when he came back, if he came back. Of course it wouldn’t, because there would be all the anger and feelings of betrayal that he had left in the first place, not to mention how I’d been unhappy before, so it wasn’t like his leaving was the cause of the unhappiness. Maybe it was even a result.

So, Sam. If we dared to follow this through, let’s see: Maybe in the best-case scenario, Sam and I keep fucking. Let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be tender lovemaking or the efficiently pleasant sex of the
married. It would be groping, grasping, desperate, secretive fucking. And it would be exciting for a while, very very exciting, and actually pretty great. And then what? He would stay with his wife and we would stop eventually and I would find someone else or something. I would become
that
woman, the neighborhood prowler. Or he would leave his wife and we would be together and there would be angry exes and scheduled visits from confused children and we would be
those
people. And then I would probably, because I was me, still be unhappy, and he’d feel ripped off, and we’d fight, and he would leave soggy food bits in the drain trap or deposit besmirched Kleenexes in the bed when he had a cold or some other annoying thing, and soon I’d be slinking to bed at night begging off sex because I was so tired. In my free time, I’d want to sit by myself and sew, and I’d have to entertain him instead or, even worse, his kids when it was his weekend with them . . . and there would be the same old problem, like a jawbreaker lodged in the sweetness of wanting to remember who Jenny was, who Jenny is, of being Jenny while still being everything to everyone. Every mother’s same old boring problem. In other words, I was reasonably sure Sam would change nothing. That what needed to change was me, not any of the men around me. But this sounded
hard
. And I was
tired
.

I wanted to tell Sarah about Sam, about my whole fucked-up summer. But like I said, I was tired. Instead, I said, “I think this could be really good for you. It could be what was missing in your life, whether you knew it or not. I think it’s all going to work out somehow.”

She hugged me, eyes brimming with tears. “Oh, thank you, thank you, that’s exactly what I was hoping you would say.”

I poured her more wine and spent the evening being as sympathetic as I could muster. It seemed easiest to be nice to her—we avoided any difficult conversations, she didn’t feel the need to turn
the questioning back to me, and she was so relieved by my reaction that she snuggled up to me and gushed about her new love and their planned new life together, and everything stayed peaceful. I did want her to be happy, I did. It was cowardly, I knew, to trade a difficult but important conversation for a peaceful evening. But pleasant. Maybe that was the real story of my life: cowardly but pleasant. Maybe that was what taking Harry back would be. Well, I reminded myself, the question of taking Harry back hadn’t exactly presented itself yet. It was possible I’d never get the option.

The next morning they left, and our apartment seemed habitable again. Sarah! I felt like I needed an exorcism. Then came a couple days of what passed these days for normal life—the kids, the small uneventful events of our day, evenings spent sewing before collapsing into exhausted sleep. I avoided Sam, except that I also thought about him constantly. Was this how it had been with Sarah’s new man (I had forgotten to ask his name), an obstinate haunting?
I wonder if Sam likes green curry or red,
I’d think while scanning a take-out menu;
I wonder if Sam wakes up early or late,
my brain offered first thing in the grayish morning;
I wonder if Sam and his wife have sex
—the thought floated up as I squeezed a lumpy pillow to my chest. I did want it to stop, I just didn’t know how.

I’d thought sleeping with him might get it out of my system, like a Cute Dad vaccine. Turned out I was more infected than ever. Turned out that despite my vow to be done with Sam, to have ended our whatever-it-was, I found myself creepily stalking him in the park one day when I saw him walking alongside our mutual neighborhood acquaintance, a blandly pretty mom named Karen. We hadn’t talked about what had happened that night in my apartment. In fact, we hadn’t talked at all. I had ignored his texts
and calls, once pretended not to see him on the street. Every move (or non-move) was a battle against the rusalka, but I couldn’t face him, face what I’d done, what we’d done, what we would do next. Turned out I made a crummy mistress but an excellent coward. And now here he was with Karen. A flare of jealousy singed my hair roots.

That should have been awful enough, but the rusalka inched me forward.
Follow. Go. We need to see what they are doing, where they are going. He is yours now.

He is not. I don’t want him to be.

It’s a bit too late for that,
bubeleh.
March! Onward!

Sam and Karen were joining a picnic with, of all people, Nell and Evelyn. I pretended I’d happened to be passing by—“Oh, hi, you guys! Hi, Sam!”—and invited myself to join, texting Laura to come by if she could. Sam avoided my gaze. We played along like the others, patting down blankets and kicking off shoes and arranging cups of Cheerios, each of us halfheartedly chiding our children to share and use nice, soft touches instead of swiping at each other ferociously. Add that one to the list of things children dread and adults love, along with sleeping and bathing: nice, soft touches. I sent a psychic message to Betty—if she was going to bite someone, let it be Sophia.

Sam and I sat on opposite sides of the spread. I grinned nonsensically, laughed uproariously at everything, as if to prove how happy and normal and unruined and nonthreatening and totally not having sex with Cute Dad I was. I stretched out my legs, pressing my body down toward the slightly damp earth as if I might otherwise sail off into space. Betty and Emma disappeared behind a nearby oak. Rose crawled toward Sam, as usual. I should have at least tried, but I couldn’t stop staring at him. His hands reached for the sunscreen, and I felt them on my skin. He sipped from a water bottle,
and his lips were touching mine. He continued to avoid eye contact with me, probably embarrassed by my goony staring. I was confusing him. I was confusing myself. Or else the rusalka was. (Even as I started to find her presence ominous, I did enjoy blaming all misdeeds on her. A built-in scapegoat is, in its way, a wonderful gift.)