All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (4 page)

She could have gotten an abortion—there were girls who did, even some who treated it like a badge of honor—but the truth was that she never even considered it as an option. When she got the test results back, she was surprised by the pang of pleasure she experienced: Here it was, her future as a wife and mother, the mistress of a beautiful home overlooking a lake somewhere, decided for her just like that; and it was strangely, comfortingly, familiar, like slipping on an old favorite dress she had forgotten she owned.

She knew Paul wouldn’t flee when she told him she was pregnant, just as she knew that she was relinquishing herself into good hands. And maybe she would be giving something up, but wasn’t this comfortable life of the potential Mrs. Miller far more promising, long-term, than any impulses she might have followed on her own?

The day after she told Paul she was pregnant, he took her out to the park overlooking the bay, where children were flying kites in what felt like hurricane-force gales. The setting sun caught in the fog over the city and rimmed the gray clouds with nuclear hues. Spring was late, and the temperature was just slightly above freezing. They walked to the retaining wall to look out at the water, and he dropped to one knee.

The grass was muddy but he gamely let his khakis sink into the dirt. He pulled out a black velvet box and held it in his hands. She broke out in goose bumps at the sight.

“I know it’s been hard lately,” he said, each hoarse word rising stiff and slow. “And I’m really sorry about that. But Janice, you have to know that from the very first moment I saw you, I knew you were a very unique woman, someone who is just so full of life. I can’t think of anyone I would rather have as the mother of my children. So maybe this is all very sudden—sooner than we’d wanted—and we have a lot to figure out, but I’m really optimistic. Optimistic about us. We’ll make a great team.” He paused. The wind lashed hair across Janice’s cheeks. “I love you.”

Janice had started crying when his knee hit the grass, from relief and joy, and in part because of the sea salt that was being whipped into her eyes by the wind. He opened the box, revealing a simple gold band with a tiny chip of a diamond. Modest but tasteful. By the time he said the words “Will you marry me?” she was sobbing so hard she could barely hear him.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “Of course I will. I’m so glad you want me.”

She let him slide the ring onto her finger and smiled, feeling strangely split, as if she’d triumphed and failed at the same time. Was this supposed to be the happiest moment of her life? She mostly felt dizzy, as if she’d just been sucked into a cyclone and was floating there in circles above the ground. Paul must have noticed the strange expression on her face as she looked at the ring on her finger, because he stood up and took her hand, covering it with his.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to get you a bigger one soon,” he said. “If we’re going to do this, we’ll do it right.”

Twenty-nine years later, she can track the progress of their marriage—and Paul’s rise through the corporate ranks—by the stack of velvet boxes in her armoire. He did get her a bigger ring, four years later, after her first miscarriage (the second and third miscarriages merited a peridot necklace and a pair of garnet earrings, respectively). And a 3-carat princess-cut diamond arrived nine years after that—long after she had taken her doctor’s advice and given up trying to have another child—when they were surprised by her pregnancy with Lizzie. And lastly, for their twenty-second anniversary, seven years ago, a 5.1-carat Asscher-cut diamond, with 1.5-carat baguettes, set in a platinum band—a stone that matched Paul’s latest position as CEO of an Internet start-up, their new four-bedroom house, and the Porsche SUV in the driveway. This was a diamond so big, in fact, that at first she found herself embarrassed by its ostentatiousness and nostalgic for the modest diamond she had once worn—until she saw Beverly’s fortieth-birthday present from Louis, a 7.8-carat Harry Winston shocker that drooped off her finger, and realized that size was always relative.

Janice wonders, abstractly, what this new success will merit.
Maybe,
she thinks,
he’ll arrive home tonight with another velvet box to install in the armoire,
and she tries to muster the excitement for this, but mostly she just wants him to come home.

The doorbell rings before the phone does. From the kitchen, where she is disassembling the duck for the confit, she runs to the door, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She finds a young man about Margaret’s age standing on her doorstep, with a faded rainbow fringe of hair that’s been smashed down by his motorcycle helmet. His motorcycle boots are covered in mud, and she wishes that he hadn’t stepped on her handwoven “Welcome to Our Happy Home” doormat, which she made out of dried lavender from the garden earlier in the spring. In his black leather jacket and jeans he reminds her vaguely of Bart, Margaret’s boyfriend, who also rides a motorcycle; at least Bart doesn’t dye his hair pink, though that’s about all she can say on his behalf.

In one hand, the man holds a manila envelope; in the other, a clipboard. “Messenger delivery,” he says, and shoves the clipboard at her. “Sign here.”

Janice wipes her hands dry in order to sign on the dotted line and tries to remember anything she might have ordered. Tearing the manila envelope open, she finds a white envelope inside with a familiar return address: Applied Pharmaceuticals, 220 Analgesic Loop, Millbrae, California. She stands there, just looking at it, and is suddenly terrified to open it. She resists this feeling as she breaks the seal of the envelope, but when she extracts a note written on Applied Pharmaceuticals letterhead (she immediately recognizes, without even looking at it, Paul’s signature on the bottom) she registers no surprise at all.
Of course,
she thinks, as a cloud of doomed inevitability descends over her.

The letter, typed on cream-colored paper, reads:

Janice,

As you know, today is a day of big changes for me. And so it seems as good a day as any to start fresh. There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just going to be blunt: I think we both know that our marriage has become a sham. I haven’t been happy for years and, though I’m sure you would never admit it, I don’t think you’ve been happy either. We need to escape this claustrophobia, have the chance to find real passion before it gets too late. That’s why I’ve decided to file for divorce. My lawyer will be in touch. I’m confident that you’ll come to agree with me that it’s for the best.

Paul.

He has signed it in bright green ink, a green that she recognizes as coming from the fountain pen she bought him to match the green of the Coifex logo, the same green as those pills.

Janice clutches her dish towel in one white-knuckled hand. She looks down at the word “Happy,” woven in lavender buds on the doormat. (“So happy
together
!”) She looks up again at the messenger, still loitering on the doorstep, and realizes that he is hoping for a tip.

“One minute,” she says. She turns blindly back into the house, bumping into a chair en route to the kitchen, grabs her purse from the counter, and returns to the front door. As the messenger watches her, she pulls out a Prada wallet and finds only twenties.

“Here,” she says, and shoves one at him.

“Hey, thanks!” he says, palming the bill into the pocket of his motorcycle jacket. He smiles. “Thanks a lot.”

As the messenger’s engine coughs to life, Janice scans the letter again, her hands vibrating so that the words smear before her. Janice is not sure where Paul has learned these turns of phrase, which sound like they were cribbed from a romance novel: How did Paul, who composes only business plans, who reads nothing but biographies of billionaire corporate executives, come up with florid ideas like “find real passion” and “escape this claustrophobia”? What on earth does that mean?

For a few crucial seconds, her mind seizes up around these anomalies, refusing to consider the bigger matter: that her husband has just left her. She is dizzy, and black spots spin in the sun before her eyes. She looks down at the ground again, trying to focus herself, and can’t help noticing through her blurring vision that the messenger has left a shiny smear of mud across her mat.

her hands are shaking so hard that she can barely dial. And even then, she has to call his cell phone five times before he picks up. Surely, she tries to convince herself, she is misinterpreting his note; it’s some kind of mistake. But when he eventually answers his phone, he does so with two simple words: “Hello, Janice.” A statement of fact, a tribute to the magic of caller ID, and with the blank utterance of those four syllables she knows that it is, in fact, true. Her husband is leaving her, because only that would explain the total lack of affection in his voice. “I assume you got the letter,” he says. “I’m sorry, but I thought that would be the easiest way…”

“I don’t understand,” she says, reeling from the finality in his words. Her own voice cracks unattractively. “Where did this come from?”

“It had to be this way,” Paul says. Janice is bewildered by how mild and rational he sounds, as if he were a dentist informing her that he is about to extract her molars. “But this isn’t the time to talk about it. I’m still at work.”

“Find a private place to talk then,” says Janice. “This is important, Paul. This is our
life.
What do you
mean,
a sham?”

“I think you know what I mean,” he says.

Janice walks to the doorway of her dining room and stares at the table, at the centerpiece of stargazer lilies erupting like fireworks, at the crystal stemware ascending across each setting. Somewhere behind Paul, she can hear the pop of a champagne cork. She thinks of the champagne chilling in their own refrigerator and swallows. “No. I don’t know what you mean,” she says, and although this isn’t quite true, she also isn’t ready to admit this to him, especially now. “I mean…I
need
you.”

“You don’t need me,” Paul says. “You’ve never needed anyone in your life. That’s half the problem. The only thing you seem to
need
from me is to pay the bills.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re not making any sense.”

“Look,” says Paul. “Tell me the last time we had an actual conversation about anything of significance. We’ve been on autopilot for years, and, frankly, I don’t see why either of us should have to settle for that.”

“I’m perfectly capable of an actual conversation, Paul,” says Janice, horrified by the pleading in her own voice. “Just because we haven’t had one lately doesn’t mean we can’t. Let’s talk now. Or later. We can get a counselor to help us talk.”

“It’s beyond that,” says Paul. “We moved beyond that years ago.”

Janice tries to say something, but all she can do is breathe shallowly into the phone. Her own damp inhalations echo in her ears. “Who are you?” she says, furious. “I don’t know this Paul.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Paul says, and his logic silences her. Behind him, she hears a woman’s voice, muttering something. In this context she can’t quite place the voice, but the tone is familiar.
Someone from Paul’s office,
she thinks.
How horrible, that a coworker might be overhearing this.
Paul covers the mouthpiece with his hand, so that all she can hear is the muffled vacuum of a receiver pressed against flesh.

Paul comes back on the line. “Janice,” he begins, but then from the background the woman’s voice cuts through his words, louder now, almost shrill. “You have to tell her,” the woman says. “She needs to know.”

Recognition hits her abruptly, and when it does, it’s as if a bucket of ice water has been thrown in her face. All the premonitions of the day total together, finally, and she is stunned by what they add up to, by her inability to have seen it sooner. “Is that Beverly with you?” She can barely get the words out.

There is a telling void on the other end. Paul clears his throat and says nothing.

Janice drops the phone like a hot dish and stares at it, lying there on the floor, her heart pounding frantically. After a minute, the line disconnects itself and starts to beep insistently, in time with the throbbing vein at her temple.

a few minutes later, when she is sitting stiffly on the couch, frozen in shock, she finds herself staring fixedly at their wedding photo framed in crystal on the side table. It was taken after the brief ceremony they had in South Lake Tahoe two weeks after Paul proposed: a snapshot of herself, in gloves and a borrowed white sheath dress just a little too tight around the stomach, looking up at Paul with her arms flung around his neck, and Paul in his suit, looking into the camera with a startled expression, as if someone behind the camera had just said, “Boo!” She thinks of the words of their vows: “In sickness and in health. For richer and for poorer.”

That
is what marriage is, she thinks; it’s not about some sort of childish notion like “passion,” because the grown-up truth is that life, partnership, love, is
hard.
It takes work, in good times and bad. It takes
sacrifice.
She had thought Paul felt that, too: a respect for the institution of marriage, the center and stability it provides. And yet he’s throwing all that away because, why? For
Beverly
?! Divorce: just the thought of it makes her ill.
It’s the lazy way out,
she thinks. It’s not like she’s been blissfully happy all the time, either, but you are
supposed
to keep trying, even when your husband looks like a chilly balding stranger on the other side of the dinner table, even when you hear him talk impatiently on the phone to his ailing mother and realize that he is capable of cruelty, even when he leaves you alone night after night and doesn’t even try to make it up to you. You stick with it, because marriage and family are sacrosanct. A fortress against a difficult world. Maybe things haven’t been perfect lately—she’ll grant Paul this—but why is he so quick to give up? She thinks of Beverly, her
best friend,
coaxing her husband away with open arms and open thighs, and feels ill—ill that Beverly could do this, and ill that Paul would succumb so easily.