In Stereo Where Available (35 page)

“I believe that,” I told him, “but it’s got something to do with
you.”

He set his jaw and looked away from me, over to where my cats were curled up together under a chair. The dismal silence settled over us like a sticky layer of pine tar. I could feel my disappointment in him spreading inside my chest, flat and hopeless, covering all the spaces where I filled in what I didn’t know about him with a giddy dose of optimism. He was a good guy, in a lot of ways, but he was still just a guy. Like every other guy I’d ever met, there was a part of him that was a pure and self-centered jerk. Like every other guy, the civilized self that he presented to the world was only half of who he was; there was still that primitive animal inside him that only wanted to hunt and copulate and shake itself free of the leash. I had to decide if my love for the first part of him could live in the presence of the second.

“I’ll stay,” I said, finally, “but only while I make up my mind. And downstairs, where Stella was. Not in your bed.”

“I’ll do whatever I need to do to keep you here,” he said. “Just give me plenty of space.” I plunked my keys on the table and got up listlessly. “I’m not making you any promises.”

I made up the creaky twin bed that was tucked into a corner of the damp basement and slept there that night, the silence strange and solid around me, tomblike in the unsettling darkness. The muted ticking of the water heater and whirr of the furnace made the silence seem louder when it did come, like an awkward pause in a conversation, the discomfort growing by seconds. Jerry had made dinner that night, fixing up a plate for me and setting it on the counter; I hadn’t noticed until afterward, once he was already done. By the next night, when I came upstairs to find that he’d done the same thing again, I was starting to be sorry that I hadn’t stayed at Lauren’s.

He was trying everything—making my favorite foods and stocking the freezer with my favorite ice cream and cleaning out the animal cages for me. In the morning he filled the coffee machine with the hazelnut coffee that he hated and I loved. He renewed my library books and picked up my clothes from the cleaners. And every time I looked at him, all I could think about was how magical it had seemed the first time I felt that shudder run through his belly, how sweet his gratitude when he’d curled up with me afterward, and, in the end, how meaningless it all had been. Whether I loved him enough to fill the measure of my soul or didn’t even care what his name was, it made no difference at all. I could have been anybody.

The second night I turned sleeplessly under the blanket tucked hotel-tight against the mattress, the basement dampness touching the sheets with a clammy humidity. Finally I sat up and wiggled my feet into my slippers, rising up from the bed’s squeaky protests, and pulled on my bathrobe. The upstairs light framed the closed basement door in a dim halo. As I shuffled up the stairs, I could hear Jerry still awake in the living room, the TV turned down low. I microwaved a cup of water and dropped a chamomile teabag into it, tapped in a teaspoon of sugar, and peeked out into the living room as I walked back over to the basement stairs.

Jerry was lying on the sofa in a gray T-shirt and plaid PJ pants, a few inches of his hairy stomach visible between the two, his cheeks sandpapery with stubble. His gray-blue eyes looked oddly pale in the reflected light from the TV. One of the sofa pillows was tucked between his head and his arm; open on the floor was a bag of swirly red-and-white Starlight mints, one of which was tucked into his cheek. He flicked it down with his tongue, and I could hear it clicking against his teeth as he sucked on it. I hesitated, then stepped into the space between the kitchen and living room, leaning my shoulder against the wall.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He glanced over at me and for a moment his eyes went back to their regular color. It was the first thing I’d said to him in two days that I didn’t have to say.

“I’m not getting drunk,” he said.

“I know.”

“I mean that’s what I’m doing. There’s no verb for it. There ought to be.” He shifted the Starlight mint to his other cheek. “You don’t eat, you can say you’re dieting. You don’t spend money, you can say you’re saving, and if you stop jerking off, you can say you’re abstaining. There’s no verb for not drinking. Language fucks up sometimes.”

I looked at him strangely. He never talked like that; if he wasn’t making a point of the fact he wasn’t drinking, I might have suspected he was drunk.

“Well, I’m glad you’re not drinking, anyway,” I said.

“Cool.” He dropped the mint down into his mouth and clicked it against his teeth again. “Funny, huh? I know a hundred ways to say I’m getting drunk and none to say I’m not. Maybe that’s our version of how the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Cultural priorities. They probably don’t have any word for saying it’s hot outside.”

For a long moment I stared at him watchfully, then glanced over at the TV. “What are you watching?”

“Lord of the Flies.”

“Again? It’s eleven o’clock. There’s probably something good on regular TV.”

“There’s booze commercials. This movie’s safe. It’s on my list.”

“Your list?”

“Yeah, my mental list of movies where nobody’s drinking. Now’s not the time for me to trip over a Miller Lite commercial. I’ve already got my car keys in the icemaker.”

I set my cup down on the side table and sat down beside him on the sofa, rubbing his thigh with my full hand. “You want me to come upstairs with you?”

“No. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re doing very well. I don’t want to make things any harder for you.”

“It’s not on you. It’s my problem. God’s problem. Whatever. Anyway, I’m doing fine.” With a flick of his index finger he gestured to the bag of mints on the floor. “It’s hard to imagine how a beer would taste when your mouth tastes like these things. You ought to see what I can do to a jar of pickles when it gets like this.”

I slid my hand up his arm and rubbed his shoulder in circles. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jer.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything. Getting drunk wouldn’t change anything, anyway. All it would do is convince you I’m even less worth your while. That’s not my goal.” He sat up and clicked off the TV, then folded his hands against his face, his elbows balanced on his thighs. “See you in the morning.”

“Are you going to bed?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to get your keys out of the icemaker first?”

“No, it’s too early. The bars don’t close until two. I’ll defrost it in the morning.” He stood up and kissed the top of my head. “I love you. Sleep tight.”

“Jerry…I’ll come to bed with you, okay? I don’t like sleeping alone, either.”

“I’m fine sleeping alone. I’ve done it my whole life.”

I tucked my arms, folded, close against my body. “You don’t even
want
me to come to bed with you?”

He sighed and turned at the foot of the stairs. “If you get in bed with me, either we’ll end up making love and cluttering up the problem, or else we won’t make love because of what’s going on and we’ll both just end up feeling even more alone.”

“Not necessarily. If we’re just next to each other, at least, we won’t be as lonely.”

He smirked. “That’s exactly what got me into this mess. I think it might do me some good to have a good goddamn dose of lonely.” Alexa called the next afternoon, almost the moment I got off work. From the background noise, I could tell she was on the school bus. Her hesitant whisper was barely audible over the din.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked, in answer to my “hello.”

I sighed as I hurried through the parking lot to my car. “No, but it wasn’t really your place to meddle. It’s between me and Jerry, Lex. We’re grown-ups. We can handle it ourselves.”

“He’s being
pathetic
, Phoebe. He had this picture on his desk of you and him in some restaurant, and now it’s just gone. He couldn’t have done anything
that
bad. I mean, he’s Mr. Sullivan. What did he do, correct your grammar? Or, like, make some really bad puns? Because he does that sometimes, but I mean, it’s nothing to dump him over.”

“Honestly, it’s really not your business, okay? I can handle my own relationship. I don’t need advice from a girl who’s never even had a boyfriend.”

“Well, neither have you. Not a decent one, anyway. Dad said you and Madison were in a contest to see who could bring home the biggest loser. She’s totally got you this time, Fee, but boy, you had us all going for a while.”

I fumbled in my purse for my keys. “Alexa…you’re really starting to get on my nerves.”

“So, are you guys all patched up now?”

“No. I’m thinking about my options. And they’re
my
options, all right? So stop trying to involve yourself. It isn’t going to make any difference one way or another.”

“Whatever. If a guy was totally puppy-dogging over me, I wouldn’t just sit around torturing him. He’s
so
nice, Phoebe. He’s really boring, and he’s not all that cute, but he totally thinks the universe revolves around you. To be perfectly honest, I’m going to think you’re the world’s biggest dork if you dump him. And it’s not just me, either. There’s a whole group of freshmen who’ve started a petition that you should get back together.”

“Oh, well, make sure you turn that in. Every vote counts.”

“Fine, dump him if you want. I swear, you and Madison. She’s madly in love with a total freak and you’re ditching the nicest guy you’ve ever hooked up with. Were you guys, like, Siamese twins connected at the brain or something? Where you each only got half when they separated you?”

I threw my purse forcefully onto the passenger seat. “Hey, watch it. Show a little respect. Who came to your rescue when you and your little friends screwed up your rat-liberation attempt?”

“Mr. Sullivan did. You see what I mean? I’m totally not speaking to you until you kiss and make up. So there.”

She clicked off her phone and left me standing in the parking lot with the silent phone against my ear, the wind rippling in my skirt. Alexa was naive if she thought her temper tantrum could make any difference at all in how I weighed my options. My mind was already made up. Now all I had to do was wait for Jerry to come home, and then break the news.

Jerry came home from work with flowers. He’d done the same thing the day before. Today, instead of chickening out and laying them on the table, he stood across from me in the kitchen, holding them out to me. I looked at him for a few seconds, my arms crossed, before I took them.

“How was your day?” he asked guardedly.

“Fine.”

He bit his lip. “Do you want to go out to dinner?”

“No. I want to talk to you.”

“All right,” he said, perking up.

“If there’s anything else you need to come clean with, now’s the time to do it. I don’t want to find out a month from now that you’ve got herpes or slept with somebody else’s wife.”

He shook his head quickly. “You’ve got all my dirt.”

My eyes drifted past him, out the window, to that orderly yard with its stacked chairs and tomato cages and garden hose rolled up neatly against the garage. “There’s nothing okay about what you did,” I told him. “Either the lying or the thing you did to get arrested in the first place.”

“I know.”

“No, you
don’t
know. If you knew, you wouldn’t be comparing it to Burger King and making it clear enough that you could have kept doing it forever if you hadn’t gotten caught.”

Tapping the counter with the backs of his fingers, he looked down at the floor, his skin turning pink beneath his thinning hair. “I don’t know what else I can tell you, Fee.”

“But I’m going to let it go anyway.”

He looked up at me. “You are?”

“Yeah. I’m going to forget that you did that, and I expect you never even to think about doing anything like it again. Deal?”

He put his hand against the counter and laughed in relief, just once, that kidlike delighted sound that I’d loved from the first time I’d heard it. “Deal. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I appreciate that.”

“Don’t screw up,” I warned him.

Shaking his head, he put his arms around me and squeezed me so hard that I couldn’t draw a breath. “I won’t.”