The Silver Linings Playbook (32 page)

“Don’t you love me anymore?” Tommy asked me with this wounded-little-boy look I still see whenever I close my eyes at night.

Of course I told Tommy I loved him more than ever, but I just wanted to slow down a little with the sex. I told him I wanted to talk with him more, take walks, and find some new hobbies, so sex could be special again. “Having this much sex,” I told him, “sort of takes the magic out of it.” For some odd reason, I remember suggesting that we go horseback riding.

“So you’re telling me the magic is gone?” he said, and that question was the last thing he ever did say to me.
So you’re telling me the magic is gone?

I remember talking a lot after he said that, telling him we could have sex as much as he wanted and that this was just a suggestion, but he was wounded. He was looking at me suspiciously the whole time, as if I were cheating on him or something like that. But I wasn’t. I just wanted to slow down a little so I could appreciate sex more. Too much of a good thing, was all I wanted to tell him. But it was clear I had hurt him, because before I could finish explaining, he stood up and went upstairs to take a shower. He left the house without saying goodbye.

I got the call at work. All I remember hearing was that Tommy was hurt and had been rushed to West Jersey Hospital. When I got to the hospital, there were a dozen men in blue uniforms, cops everywhere. Their glistening eyes told me.

Later I would find out that Tommy had gone to the Cherry Hill Mall during his lunch break. They found a Victoria’s Secret bag full of lingerie in his cruiser—every piece was my size. On his way back to Meadowville, he stopped on the highway to help an elderly woman whose car had broken down. Tommy called her a tow truck,
but then he stood at the nervous old lady’s window chatting with her, keeping her company while she waited. Tommy was always chatting with people like that. The cruiser was behind him, the lights were going, but he was standing at the edge of the highway’s breakdown lane. Some driver who had drunk his lunch dropped his cell phone, and when he bent down to pick it up, he pulled the wheel to the right, crossed two lanes, and …

The lead in the local paper read “Police Officer Thomas Reed—who was responsible for starting Meadowville High School’s Anti-Drinking-and-Driving Club—was killed by a drunk driver.” It was all so ironic, almost funny in a sadistic way. There were so many cops at his funeral. Kids from the high school made our front lawn into a living memorial—they stood on the sidewalk with candles and flowers. When I refused to go outside, these teenagers sang so sweetly to me through the first few evenings, a chorus of sad, beautiful voices. Our friends brought food, Father Carey talked to me about heaven, my parents cried with me, and Ronnie and Veronica stayed at our house for the first few weeks or so. But the only thing I could think about was how Tommy died believing I no longer wanted to have sex with him. I felt so guilty, Pat. I wanted to die. I kept thinking he would not have gone to Victoria’s Secret on his lunch break if we had not had the fight, and then he would have never passed the old woman in the broken-down car, which meant he would not have been killed. I felt so guilty. I still feel so fucking guilty.

After a few weeks I went back to work, but everything in my mind got switched up. My guilt turned to need, and suddenly I was craving sex very badly. So I started to fuck men—any man who was game. All I really had to do was look at a man in that certain way, and within a few seconds I knew if they were going to fuck me. And when they did, I would close my eyes and pretend it was Tommy. To
be with my husband again, I’d fuck men anywhere. In a car. In the coatroom at work. In an alley. Behind a bush. In a public restroom. Anywhere. But in my mind, it was always under the kitchen table, and Tommy had come back to me, and I had told him I wasn’t tired of having sex, but would make love to him as many times as he needed, because I loved him with all my heart.

I was sick. And there was no shortage of men who were eager to capitalize on my sickness. There were men everywhere who—with glee—would fuck this mentally ill woman.

Of course this led to my losing my job, therapy, and many medical tests. Luckily, I did not contract any diseases, and I’d be happy to get tested again if that ever becomes an issue for us. But even if I had contracted AIDS or whatever, it would have been worth it to me at the time, because I needed that closure. I needed that forgiveness. I needed to live out the fantasy. I needed to fuck away my guilt so I could break out of the fog I was in, to feel something, to feel
anything,
and begin to start my life again, which I am only now beginning to do—since we became friends.

I have to admit that during Veronica’s dinner party I only thought of you as an easy lay. I sized you up in your stupid Eagles jersey and figured I could get you to fuck me, so I could pretend you were Tommy. I hadn’t done it in a long time. I no longer wanted to have sex with strangers, but you weren’t a stranger. You were handpicked by my own sister. You were a safe man with whom Ronnie was trying to set me up. So I figured I would begin to have sex with you regularly, just so I could fantasize about Tommy again.

But when you held me in front of my parents’ house, and when you cried with me, things changed—in a very dramatic way. I did not understand it at first, but as we ran together and ate raisin bran at the diner and went to the beach and became friends—simply friends, without any sex to complicate things—it was sort of nice in
a way I hadn’t anticipated. I just liked being around you, even if we didn’t say anything.

I knew I had feelings for you when I began to cringe inwardly at the sound of Nikki’s name. It was obvious you were not ever going to get back together with your wife, so I called your mom and got her drunk at the local bar, and she told me everything about you. You didn’t see me, but I was in the driveway when she came home so loaded and you helped her into the house. I drove her home that night. After what happened to Tommy, I don’t drink at all. We’ve been meeting every week since, Pat. She needed a friend; she needed to talk to someone about your father. So I listened. At first I was just using her for information, but now we are sort of girlfriends. She did not know about the letters I was writing as Nikki, and she was really mad at me for a while after the Christmas episode, but she knows about this letter obviously, since she delivered it for me. She is a very strong and forgiving woman, Pat. She deserves better than your father, and maybe you deserve better than me. Life is funny like that.

I wrote those letters hoping to provide you with the closure I somehow found through casual sex after Tommy died. Please know I began the liaison scheme only after I was certain that Nikki would never agree to talk to you again under any circumstance. Maybe you will never be able to forgive me, but I wanted you to know I had the best intentions—and I still love you in my own fucked-up way.

I miss you, Pat. I really do. Can we at least be friends?

Tiffany

When Danny finishes reading Tiffany’s latest letter, he sighs, scratches his Afro, and looks out my bedroom window for a long time. I want his reaction because he is the only person I know who doesn’t already have a strong opinion about Tiffany. Everyone else is obviously biased—even Cliff.

“So,” I finally say from my bed. I’m sitting with my back against the headboard and my cast propped up on a few pillows. “What do you think I should do?”

Danny sits down, opens up the Parcheesi box, and takes out the hand-painted wooden board and pieces my mother gave me for my birthday. “I feel like being red today,” he says. “What color you want?”

After I pick blue, we set up the board on the little table my mother put in the room for us when I first came home with a broken leg. We play Parcheesi like we always do when Danny visits, and it becomes obvious that he isn’t going to weigh in with an opinion regarding Tiffany, probably because he knows that only I can make this decision—but maybe because he just wants to
play the game. He loves Parcheesi more than any man I have ever met, and when he lands on one of my spots and sends one of my pieces back to the start circle, Danny always points at my face and yells, “Booyah!” which makes me laugh because he is so goddamn serious about Parcheesi.

Even though I don’t really enjoy playing Parcheesi as much as Danny does—and he won’t answer any of my questions about Tiffany—it’s nice to have him back in my life again.

We play Parcheesi for so many hours—days pass, and my record against Danny grows to 32 wins and 203 losses. Danny is a supreme Parcheesi player, and the best dice roller I have ever met. When he says, “Papa needs a doublet,” he almost always rolls two sixes. Whatever Papa needs, Danny rolls.

A week after my cast has been removed, I stand alone on the footbridge in Knight’s Park, leaning my weight on the railing, gazing down at a pond I could walk around in less than five minutes. The water underneath me has a thin layer of ice on top, and I think about dropping rocks through it, but I do not know why, especially since I have no rocks. Even still, I want to drop rocks through the ice so badly, to puncture it, proving that it is weak and temporary, to see the black water below rise up and out of the hole I alone will have created.

I think about the hidden fish—mostly those big goldfish people stock the pond with so old men will have something to feed in spring and little boys will have something to catch in the summer—fish now burrowed in the mud at the bottom of the pond. Or are these fish burrowing just yet? Will they wait until the pond freezes completely?

Here’s a thought: I’m like Holden Caulfield thinking about ducks, only I’m thirty-five years old and Holden was a teenager. Maybe the accident knocked my brain back into teenager mode?

Part of me wants to climb up onto the railing and jump off the bridge, which is only ten yards long, only three feet above the pond; part of me wants to break through the ice with my feet, to plunge down, down, down into the mud, where I can sleep for months and forget about all I now remember and know. Part of me wishes I never regained my memory, that I still had that false hope to cling to—that I still had at least the idea of Nikki to keep me moving forward.

When I finally look up from the ice and toward the soccer fields, I see that Tiffany has accepted my invitation to meet, just like Cliff said she would. She is only two inches tall in the distance, wearing a yellow ski cap and a white coat that covers most of her thighs, making her look like a wingless angel growing and growing—and I watch her pass the swing sets and the large pavilion with picnic tables inside. I watch her walk along the water’s edge until she finally reaches her usual height, which is five feet and a few inches tall.

When she steps onto the footbridge, I immediately look down at the thin layer of ice again.

Tiffany walks over to me and stands so her arm is almost touching mine, but not quite. Using my peripheral vision, I see that she too is now looking down at the thin layer of ice, and I wonder if she also wishes she could drop some rocks.

We stand like this for what seems like an hour, neither of us saying anything.

My face gets very cold, until I can no longer feel my nose or ears.

Finally, without looking at Tiffany, I say, “Why didn’t you come to my birthday party?” which is a stupid question to pose at this time, I realize, but I can’t think of anything else to say, especially since I haven’t seen Tiffany for many weeks—not since I screamed at her on Christmas Day. “My mom said she invited you. So why didn’t you come?”

After a long pause, Tiffany says, “Well, like I said in my letter, your brother threatened to kill me if I made contact with you. Also, Ronnie came to my house the day before your party and forbade me to go. He said they never should have introduced us in the first place.”

I had already talked to Jake about his threat, but I have a hard time imagining Ronnie saying such a thing to Tiffany. And yet I know Tiffany is telling the truth. She seems really hurt and vulnerable right now, especially because she is sort of chewing on her bottom lip as if it were a piece of gum. Surely Ronnie said these words against Veronica’s wishes. His wife would never let him say something so potentially ego-damaging to Tiffany, and the thought of Ronnie keeping Tiffany from attending my party makes me a little proud of my best friend, especially since he went against his wife’s wishes to protect me.