A Small Indiscretion (4 page)

I
T WAS EIGHT MONTHS AGO
, last Fourth of July. Emme had been living and working in the store for just over a month. I’d extended her a last-minute invitation to join us for the day, and I’d promised her we’d pick her up on our way out of the city. We all piled into the Suburban and set off, and when we reached the store, I knocked on the glass door, then returned to the car to wait.

“ ‘The Salvaged Light,’ ” you read. “Did you repaint the sign?”

“Yes,” I said. “The old one was getting faded.”

“I used to call it ‘the Savage Light,’ ” you said.

“Because you had a lisp.”

“It wasn’t the lisp. I really thought it was ‘the Savage Light.’ Because of that book we had, remember? About the savage.”

“I remember that book,” your father said. “We must have read it to you a thousand times. It was about a boy who writes a story about a monster, right? Then the monster comes to life.”

“It wasn’t really a monster,” you said. “It was just a person who went wild. The boy starts writing the story when his father dies, to distract himself. When the savage comes to life, he can’t tell where he ends and the savage begins.”

“I always wondered what the writer was trying to say, metaphorically speaking,” your father said.

“Something about the power of the stories we tell ourselves to fend off despair,” I said. “Or am I being too literal?”

Polly piped up from the third row of seats. “I know that story. I remember it. We still have that book.”

“No, we don’t,” Clara said.

“Yes, we do,” Polly said.

“No, we don’t. Mommy gave it away to the library with all the other books.”

“I didn’t give all the books away,” I said. “Just the ones nobody ever reads.”

Emme emerged from the store, cutting short the argument. She was wearing very short shorts and her combat boots, and she carried an enormous fringed bag over one shoulder. Her legs were thin and pale and her hair was so thick and blond and long it was more like a Barbie’s hair than a woman’s. I had never seen it down before. I’d only seen it tucked beneath a hat or a scarf or pulled back in a headband or wound around her head in a braid, like a crown.

She stepped toward us in the fog. Did it shoot through the air between you right then—the speeding bullet of recognition or desire?

She climbed into the car next to you. She was holding a book, which she dropped into the side pocket of her bag so she could shake your hand.

“Robbie, this is Emme,” I said. “Emme, this is Robbie.”

“Nice to finally meet you, Robbie,” she said.

You lifted the book out of the pocket of her bag and examined the cover.
“Zen Koans?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“What’s a Send-Going?” Polly asked from the back.

You laughed. “Zen ko-an,” you said slowly. “It’s a paradox, or a puzzle, used to teach enlightenment. For instance, ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ ”

“Why do you know this?” I said, turning to look at you.

“My department chair is interested in the link between physics and enlightenment.”

Jonathan glanced back. “He is?”

“Yep.”

“Wow,” your father said. “Interesting. So if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”

“Actually, when a tree falls, it creates shock waves. And when the shock waves reach an ear or an artificial mechanism like a microphone, they’re transmitted into what we call sound,” you said. “The shock waves themselves are not sound.”

“But does it make a sound or not?” Clara asked.

“We don’t really know,” Emme said. “That’s the mystery we’re intended to sit with.”

“Are you a Buddhist?” you said.

“Oh, no,” Emme said. “I just saw the author speak at a bookstore in the Mission. He made it all seem so simple. He said we can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness. By throwing it overboard.”

“I like that,” Jonathan interjected enthusiastically. “Let’s all throw unhappiness overboard.”

“But you’re already happy,” I said to him, not altogether kindly. His optimism and good humor occasionally struck me as bordering on delusional. “You don’t need to throw it over, because you never invited it on board in the first place.”

He looked at me and grinned. “Nothing wrong with happiness.”

I
T WAS SEVEN
months later that he announced he was moving out. You had been gone from the house for a week. It was a bright February afternoon, and we were driving in the car. The sun was making metallic streaks on the windshield. The girls were at home with a sitter. We were returning from Sunday brunch at Mel’s, a tenuous
reenactment of what had often been our version of date night. It had been a relief to escape the relative quiet of the house since the holidays had ended and the leavings had begun. First my brother had returned to L.A. and my father to Maine, inviting us all to come visit him there soon. Then my mother left, and finally, Robbie, you did. Things were still strained between your father and me, but he had been the one to suggest the date, and I was encouraged that he was making an effort.

He squinted forward and lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the glare. Then, without a preamble of any kind, he announced that his author friend who lived in Gold Hill, the one who’d invited us all over on the Fourth of July, was leaving in a few days for a year abroad. He’d offered to let your father move in as a house sitter.

“You’re moving out?” I said.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“As soon as I pack up.”

He told me he planned to work in partnership with a team of researchers he’d met in the fall on a major new initiative at the Stanford University Medical Center—the development of content on health-related topics that could be packaged and sold for digital distribution. He was giving up the office space he’d leased in the city for fifteen years. He intended to work directly out of the house in Gold Hill. It made sense professionally and economically. Also, Stanford had made a sizable investment, which would pay all the hospital bills. And he could take a higher salary than he ever had before. We would no longer need to worry about money, at least not in the short term. We’d be fine without the salary I’d been paying myself since the store turned profitable a decade earlier. I wouldn’t have to rush to reopen as soon as the damages from the flood were repaired. I could wait until I was ready.

We had reached the business district, almost deserted on a Sunday afternoon. The street was deep in the shadow of downtown. He pulled over and parked. He didn’t look at me.

“You did all this without telling me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?”

“I guess I feel like we need some time apart.”

I sat in the seat beside him, stunned. I should never have confessed. I should have wiped my one indiscretion—one indiscretion in more than twenty years—from my conscience, and our marriage would still be intact.

I started to cry. Then I groveled. I pleaded. I grew angry. But his mind was made up. He’d thought it all through. He figured the girls could stay with him alternating weekends and an evening or two a week until school got out. Then, in the summer, they could split their time between us.

He had been facing straight ahead, looking out the windshield, but now he turned to me, and I could see in the relentless blue of his eyes that he was not going to change his mind.

“Are we getting a divorce?”

“No, we’re not getting a divorce,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. We’re just … I don’t know what we’re doing.”

“You don’t know what
you’re
doing,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”

“You’ve done enough.”

“It was one night, Jonathan. It was stupid. It was pointless.”

He said nothing. Because the thing that had broken him was not the thing I was trying to explain away.

S
ATURDAY
, M
ARCH 17
. St. Patrick’s Day. Seven weeks since you left this house, six since your father did, too.

O
N
T
HURSDAY NIGHT
, your father came to collect the girls for an overnight in Gold Hill. I had been crying earlier, and before he arrived, I looked at myself in the mirror—really looked—for the first time in months. I smoothed the wrinkle between my eyes. I put drops in to clear away the red. I put on lipstick and mascara. I ran a brush through my hair, wishing I’d taken the time to wash it. I studied my profile, then my back side, in a hand mirror—the curves I’d always tried to camouflage, which your father had claimed to love, and the hair he’d claimed to love as well. Welsh hair, from my mother’s side, straight and long and still a dark brown, except underneath, where the gray threatened. The face was my mother’s, too—thick black arched eyebrows, the eyes beneath the same as yours, a fiercer, lighter green than people expected to find in our olive-skinned faces. A narrow nose flanked by what your father had once called “discriminating” cheekbones. Fullish lips and straight front teeth. Crooked bottom teeth I’d long ago learned to hide when I smiled.

I forced my face into a smile now, looking to see if whatever your father had first fallen for was still there, but my relationship to my overall appearance was as erratic as ever. I looked once, and glimpsed the old prettiness, but when I looked again, from another angle, it seemed to have been a trick of the light, and I could find only a series of small but certain flaws—in the skin, the shape, the hair—that were growing in strength and number as time marched on. I fell back into the tired script I’d been running all my life: If, when I looked, I was not perfect, how could I be beautiful? And if I was not beautiful, how could I be loved? I was not the only woman who ran that script. A worldwide industry promoted and supported its story. But since last summer, it had reached deeper for me. It had moved from the skin and the shape and the hair straight to the heart.

Polly appeared in the doorway as I was staring at my face.

“What are you looking for?” she said.

I turned away from the mirror. How ridiculous to indulge in vanity with the question of your well-being hanging in the balance.

“Nothing,” I said to Polly. “Nothing at all.”

J
ONATHAN DID NOT
ring the bell or knock. He opened the door with his key and came in. Polly pushed past me down the stairs. Clara emerged from her room and followed. I watched as your father embraced them.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

The girls went to collect their things, and your father stood for a minute with his hands in his pockets, surveying the room as I came down the stairs. He walked into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water.

“What’s that whirring noise?” he said.

“It’s the refrigerator.”

“Why is it making that sound?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long has it been doing that?”

“I don’t know. Awhile.”

His tone was vaguely accusing, vaguely annoyed, which I took as a good sign—he was still territorial about this house. He dragged a chair over and lifted a panel at the top of the refrigerator and peered inside.

“Do you have any tools?”

“I guess I have whatever you didn’t take.”

He found an old toolbox in the garage and stood on the chair again and lifted off the panel. He stuck one tool in, then another.

“There,” he said, putting the panel back and returning the tools to the toolbox. He was so appealing, standing there, so useful and solid and familiar, I wanted to fall into him and demand to be forgiven. But Polly and Clara came into the kitchen with their backpacks, and Polly wrapped her arms around your father’s legs and he laid his hands on her head. I could tell he was taking sustenance from Polly’s embrace just as I so often have, especially since your accident. Even before it, in August, when I dragged myself downstairs the morning after my return from London, and Polly looked at my face and opened her arms and squeezed me while I cried. Which is not to say that Polly is always kind. Or that Clara is, either. What six- and nine-year-old girls are always kind to their mother?

I
FORGOT THAT
it was St. Patrick’s Day today, and when I picked the girls up from soccer practice, Polly reached up and pinched the flesh at the back of my arm.

“Ouch,” I cried. “What was that about?”

“It’s about you’re not wearing green,” she said bitterly. “And it’s about you didn’t tell me I was supposed to, and I got pinched.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Polly, but you shouldn’t pinch me like that. It hurt me.”

“She’s right, though,” Clara said. “You should have told us.”

I turned to look at Clara, suddenly angry. “You know what? I’m doing my best,” I said sharply. She blinked up at me, and I continued. “Mommies can’t always be perfect.”

She took a step backward, away from me, and Polly burst into tears. I picked Polly up, and she laid her head on my shoulder. I reached toward Clara and held her against me, but I could feel the resistance in her. At nine, she had begun to see a truer picture of me than Polly could. She had begun to see what I saw—not beauty, but imperfections. I let her pull away from me.