Don't Make Me Stop Now (9 page)

I twisted around to check behind me before changing lanes.

“You know your car has a whopping blind spot,” I said.

“You just never drive it.”

“It's there whether I'm driving it or not.”

“But I'm used to it. I know to look.”

“I'm just looking out for your safety, baby.”

“You didn't, did you?”

“Do what?”

“Annie. You never liked her.”

I turned off the parkway into the neighborhood. If I said no, I never really liked her, chances were that Jess would arrange to see her away from the house. I'd see her only rarely if ever, not because Jess wants to spare me from those friends of hers with whom I have some problem but because she doesn't have to listen to me complain. She knows it's not worth it. She knows I can maybe keep my mouth shut, but keeping my mouth shut doesn't mean I rise above it. When I'm around someone I have problems with, my frustrations come out in gestures and expression and posture and even gait: Jess claims I walk differently.

If, on the other hand, I said I liked her, Jess might see fit to bring her over to the house a lot, which would suit me fine except the more Annie was exposed to the both of us, as a couple (insofar as we behave like a couple, however couples behave), the less likely she'd be inclined to act on her long-smoldering desire.

“I don't really know the woman,” I said. “It's been over twenty-five years since I've even laid eyes on her. I was only around her a half-dozen times. Seems to me you guys drifted apart right after we started dating.”

“Mostly what Annie and I did together was go out,” said Jess.

“To sleazy bars?” I said. We were in the driveway, unloading groceries.

“That wasn't funny, by the way.”

“It wasn't meant to be funny. It was true. That bar was sleazy.”

“Of course it was meant to be funny. When you don't know what to say to people you try to make jokes.”

“It's called breaking the ice.”

“Okay,” said Jess. I started to unload the bags, but she sent me out to fetch the rest. “We'll finish this conversation later,” she said.

Of course, we didn't literally finish the conversation, though
our marriage is characterized by conversations truncated and carried on wordlessly. Perhaps every marriage is this way: You have a disagreement, one party clams up for the sake of peace, but the argument looms in corners and edges. Layers of unfinished business pile up so that everything — a dresser drawer left open, the click of a television remote — seems an embodiment of the impossible task of squaring two fiercely separate realities. I don't buy the notion of marriage — or any sort of love — as the merging of souls. I merge into traffic on the interstate, but I don't become one with the tractor trailer belching black gas behind me. Sure, I can get outside myself long enough to put my needs on hold, but I can't check out of my own skin to inhabit Jess's or anyone else's, for that matter. Man might not be an island, as the poet claimed, but we all receive, at birth, our very own zip code. The beauty of this life: we all get to govern our very own municipality.

Jess met Annie—or Ann, as she seemed to want to be called—for lunch a couple of times during the next three months. I pumped Jess for as much information as I could, but Jess wasn't very forthcoming about these lunches and it wasn't like I could come right out and ask the things I wanted to know. It moved glacially, but I couldn't very well ask Jess to invite Annie over to the house without arousing suspicion. Besides, I had grown used to the slow burn of my life. It took years for any significant
change to take place. There were things I wanted to change, but my ambition was suppressed by the dreary catalog of daily things that could, if not distract, occupy me, and I would look up and another year had passed, and I would accept the pace of my life, however dilatory, as my own.

Five months after we ran into her at the grocery store, Annie showed up at the house for drinks. When Jess told me that morning she was coming, I said, “Why'd you invite her over for drinks? Drinks is something you usually reserve for people you aren't sure about. Like neighbors or coworkers you don't want to spend a whole evening with.”

Jess was just back from the Y, dressed in spandex from some sort of class, aerobics, Pilates, I could not keep them straight. To be frank, she'd been working out three or four times a week for the past ten years and I could not see much of a difference to look at her. Middle age had settled weight around her hips, which was hard to hide. I'm heavier myself, and don't get nearly the exercise I need, but what woman expects a middle-aged man to have a flat stomach?

“Honestly? There's something sort of cold about Annie. It's like she's not quite there. Maybe it's just that we haven't seen each other in forever and we're different people now. At least I hope I'm a different person now than that night when I met you. Anyway, I just can't seem to be able to connect with her the way I used to.”

I made a noise—“huh” — which of course she translated into a paragraph or two.

“What? You think I never should have started up with her again in the first place? That was then, this is now? Or, I forgot, you never liked her, did you.”

“All I said was huh, Jess.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what time is she coming?”

We had drinks on the deck. Our neighborhood is old for Gaithersburg, so much of which exploded into repetitive cul-de-sac suburbia in the seventies, but that evening, looking across the neighbor's lawns at their ugly metal storage sheds, their concrete birdbaths and aboveground pools, I saw our place through the eyes of someone who had lived for years in Manhattan. What losers we must be to her, having stayed here in the place where we met. Everything in our lives seemed shabby or fourth rate. The clothes we wore. The cheap plastic stackable lawn chairs I'd bought from Home Depot. The wine we drank.

I don't know what Annie and Jess were talking about because I wasn't listening. I was watching Annie talk, studying her eyes, her arms, her long lovely legs. Her coldness, her distant attitude toward Jess, had been all the proof I needed. It was obvious on the deck how she was physically present but
emotionally elsewhere.
Clipped
would be the word to describe her conversation. We talked about Gaithersburg, for God's sake. People she and Jess used to know. I mostly sat there sipping bad wine and every once in a while tossing in an ironic comment.

She left after two glasses of plonk.

“See what I mean?” said Jess.

“Well, okay, she's kind of hard to talk to. But I think it's important to hold on to friends from ages ago. I mean, I wish I'd done that. I just burned through people. I don't keep in touch with anyone from high school or college or my old single hound-dog days.”

“So why should I?”

“Because you have the opportunity. I haven't run into anyone in the grocery store that I used to be best friends with.”

“They have telephones, I'm sure.”

“Not the same at all. It's awkward, calling someone up after twenty years. Much better to run into them on the street.”

“She exhausts me. Also, I think she's a snob.”

“Why? Because she lived in New York for so long? There are lots of unsophisticated idiots in New York, you know.”

“She's neither unsophisticated nor an idiot. She's just like up above everything.”

“She'll come down to earth once she gets comfortable
again. It must be hard for her, coming back here to take care of her mother after all those years away. Is she seeing anyone?”

“How should I know? We talk but we don't really talk. She's never really ventured anything about her private life, and I certainly got the feeling that it was not something I ought to ask about.”

This bit of information warmed my belly like a shot of whisky, radiating its heat outward through my veins until it reached my heart. Everything fit. All I had to do was figure out how to get her alone.

I should say here that I had never, in the twenty-eight years we'd been together, strayed from Jess. Despite my early barhopping, hoping-to-get-lucky days, I need to connect deeply with a woman, intellectually as well as physically, before I can truly engage. I've not felt that with anyone besides Jess. I don't think I ever considered that I'd fallen out of love with Jess when Annie came back into my life. It's just that Annie touched parts of me I had not felt in so many years, and I figured she was put there to bring those long-dormant parts of me back into play. I even considered the notion that it would be good for my marriage to have some passion reintroduced into my life.

Annie's number was in the Rolodex, so a couple weeks after she came over for drinks I made my move. I told Jess I had
business in the city after work, and I called Annie from my office around five thirty. She didn't seem surprised to hear from me—her voice was as arid and distant as always. I'd rehearsed a half-dozen dialogues, most of which involved Jess wanting me to drop something off—which I was counting on Annie recognizing right off as a ruse—but what if I was misreading the signals? What if she hung up the phone and called Jess immediately to thank her? Every reason I could come up with, every excuse, seemed shot all to hell with holes. In the end I decided to have a little faith. I called her up and told her I was in town late and would she like to meet me for a drink.

“Okay,” she said. “Where?”

I named a bar I knew in Bethesda.

“When?”

It seemed she'd been waiting for my call.

A half hour later we sat in a dark corner of an Irish pub, drinking Pinot Grigio. I confess the conversation was halted and awkward for the first five minutes at least.

“I wanted to see you alone,” I said after a torturous silence.

Her iciness had not melted, but she smirked a little at this, which I took as a good sign.

“I wonder why,” she said.

“You know why.”

“Tell me why, David.”

“I've always wanted you. Since that night.”

“Well, I can see why.”

“What do you mean?”

“Married to her.”

“Jess is her name.”

“Right. I knew her before you did, remember. She's just as annoying now as she was back when we used to hang out together.”

“So why did you hang out with her, then?”

Annie shrugged. “Seemed like the right idea at the time. Plus she always drove. And when I was too broke to go out, which was often, she always offered to pay. She had the means. But of course you know that.”

It was true. Jess's father's family owned much of what became the commercial strip of Gaithersburg. They'd been hand-to-mouth farmers only a generation before, and then the exurbs spread north from the city and the cornfields formerly farmed by Jess's forebears became strip malls with names like Oakfield Crossing and the Shoppes at Cornwallis Creek. We would never really have to worry about money, though this is not at all why I married my wife. I said as much to Annie.

“Why did you marry her, then?”

I twirled the stem of my wineglass around on the napkin.
It seemed that sleeping with Annie would be far less of a betrayal than the next words out of my mouth.

“Why are you here?” I said.

“Because you asked me to come, silly.” She'd warmed up a bit, seemed almost flirtatious, but I didn't like the way she looked at me. “Anyway, I asked you a question first.”

“Why did I marry her?”

“That's the question.”

“Can we go back to your place?”

“If we're going anywhere, we're going to get a hotel room. But first I want you to answer my question.”

“Why do you care? It would seem to me that the last thing you'd be interested in talking about would be Jess.”

“Well, you're wrong. What I'm interested in is how you could fall for someone so boring. Not to mention stay with her for, how long has it been?”

“Twenty-eight years.”

“How many of your wife's friends have you met in town for a drink during the last twenty-eight years?”

“None. You're the only one.”

She didn't need to speak, as her laugh let me know how bad a liar she thought I was.

“We can go get a room when you answer my question.”

“This is absurd, Annie,” I said.

“I go by Ann now. I have gone by Ann for years. But you don't want to accept that either, do you? You want it all to be like it was twenty-eight years ago, when we were all too young and dumb to know what we were doing to each other.”

I thought of my sons in a bar, minutes from last call, furiously chatting up the last two available girls, wondering how they'd let it get this late. All their friends had scored, were off in strange bedrooms or out in the parking lot, in steamy backseats. Jess at home fixing my dinner, listening to
All Things Considered
as she sipped her single glass of Chardonnay, still dressed in her workout clothes.

“You were supposed to fuck her, not marry her,” said Annie. “Wasn't that the plan? What went wrong, Dave?”

“I love her.”

“You were a lonely little boy who needed his mommy to cook his dinner.”

“She's right about you. You're wretched.”

“Well, I'm happy to hear that,” said Annie. “That actually makes me like her. She deserves to think ill of me. I fully admit my faults. In fact, I've never tried to hide them. I prefer people to be up front about such things. I do hate a phony.”

“So what are you doing here?”

She shrugged and finished her wine. “This is the sort of thing I do.”

I called for the check.

“You'll be going home now, I guess.”

“You'll be giving Jess a call, I guess.”

She reached for her purse and slid out of the booth. “I guess you're in enough trouble already.”