Infidelity (7 page)

( CHAPTER EIGHTEEN )

“You know how much I hate these things,” said Ronnie, smoothing her hair flat in the bathroom mirror. She frowned at her appearance: she looked overtired.

“Yeah, but they're our friends. And if we were having a baby, you'd expect them to come, wouldn't you?” Aaron was already dressed and ready, leaning against the doorframe and impatiently watching Ronnie fuss with her appearance for what he hoped was a final time.

“No, Aaron, they're your friends,” she said, now applying mascara with slow, methodical precision.

“Since when?”

“Since all our friends are your friends.”

Aaron had little interest in arguing. He knew better than to engage in a fight with Ronnie when she was being irrational, and attributed her irritation to a lack of sleep or possibly a hangover from the half bottle of Merlot she had consumed with their steak dinner last night.

“Listen, we need to be there in ten minutes. You could have stated your objections to attending the shower when we got our invitation over a month ago.”

“Maybe I didn't have objections a month ago. Maybe my objections stem from cervical biopsies and negative pregnancy tests. Ever consider that?”

“Oh Jesus, Ronnie. Why do you always have to be so fucking difficult?”

“Difficult? Me being sick and barren is not being difficult. It's being sick and barren.”

“Now you're being overdramatic. You can't use this as a crutch all the time, you know. It won't get you anywhere.”

“Fine. Let's just fucking go.” Ronnie pushed past Aaron and into the front hall, where she grabbed her purse and jacket and angrily swung open the front door.

Aaron picked up the large, brightly wrapped gift from the kitchen table; a finely carved and painted wooden mobile, made up of stars and planets, that he had picked out and purchased himself.

The baby shower in Roncevalles was typical in every respect; the décor frosty cupcake colours and the attendees bright and cheery, clutching their champagne flutes of mimosa and snacking on crustless finger sandwiches. The mother-to-be lumbered around the packed living room with the glow of pride, even victory, as well-wishers threw their arms around her and told her how beautiful she looked at every opportunity.

Ronnie carefully avoided any conversations that involved motherhood, whether potential or current, but every instance of small talk tended to lean toward babies. She felt the creep of nausea overtake her and skulked off to the bathroom, where she found an array of children's bathtub toys prematurely installed in neat containers lining the tub. Ronnie sat warily on the closed toilet lid, wondering how people could be so committed to their choices, so sure of their monumental life changes as to celebrate them with lavish gatherings and too early purchases of tub toys.

She returned to the living room to seek out Aaron, who was laughing and punching the arm of the future father in a masculine gesture of congratulations that made her wince. The genuine pleasure and awe on his face momentarily crippled her, and she steadied herself on the back of the couch before draining an entire glass of champagne from a passing tray.

“Veronica?” a shrill voice called from behind her. She turned to see a woman she only vaguely recognized, her soft yellow hair pulled back into a buoyant ponytail that seemed to swing back and forth of its own volition. “Oh my god, Veronica! It's so wonderful to see you.” The woman then leaned in for a hug that Ronnie accepted meekly. “I haven't seen you since high school,” the blonde offered as a much-needed clue. “How are you doing?”

Ronnie searched her mind to place the woman's face, but only got as far as high school, incapable of finding a name or any other distinguishing characteristic. She continued the charade regardless, too exhausted by the entire scenario to do otherwise.

“Great. Really great.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I'm a hairdresser.”

“God, that's so interesting. You always were so different.”

“So. How are you?”

“Oh wonderful. Me and Richard—you remember Richard, right?—we just bought a house in the east end. We were going to get a condo, but then I got pregnant with our second,” she paused to make a gleeful gesture to her midsection, “and we just thought, why the hell not, right? Kids need a backyard, that's what they always say.”

“Yup, that's what they say,” Ronnie replied absently, desperately scanning the room for a fresh tray of champagne.

“And then Richard got promoted, and we were doing really well, so we decided just to go for it. And I don't even have to work anymore, which is fantastic, because all I really ever wanted to be was a mom anyway.”

“That's great for you.”

“So what about you? Married? Kids?”

“No. Neither.”

“Well, certainly you at least have a boyfriend.”

At least.

“We are getting older, Veronica. We can't go bar hopping our entire lives, now can we?” The woman erupted into laughter, patting Ronnie on the arm as if she was sharing in the joke.

With this Ronnie felt the nausea return, and what could have been the onset of hives.

“Listen, you'll have to excuse me. I've got an appointment this afternoon so me and my, um, Aaron, can't stay for long.”

The blonde with her swinging ponytail seemed unfazed. “Well it was delightful to see you again, Ronnie. So nice to see you turned out okay.”

What the fuck did that mean?

Ronnie unceremoniously beelined for Aaron, who was now locked in conversation with a group of men on the front porch. One of them was smoking a cigar and talking disdainfully about his overbearing wife. “You know, if it's not one thing with her, it's another. You know what I mean?”

Ronnie reached for Aaron's arm, interrupting the boisterous talk. “We have to leave,” she managed to say.

“But we just got here.”

“Please. Aaron. I can't breathe.”

The other men on the porch averted their eyes.

Without saying anything, Aaron took Ronnie by the arm, down the porch steps, away from the blonde whose name she couldn't remember.

( CHAPTER NINETEEN )

At the end of the first week of February, Ronnie came to Charlie's office in the middle of the afternoon wearing a dress. A lemon-yellow dress, a strapless gauzy thing clearly meant for summer, a dress worn under her navy blue peacoat with knee-high black leather boots. When she came in, she locked the door behind her, then leaned back on it and breathed a heavy sigh. After a lengthy pause, wordlessly she walked to him, then sat down on his desk, facing him, her knees slightly parted, one on each side of him.

She let her coat slip from her shoulders slowly.

She said nothing, simply stared at him, his confused expression, her body slowly shifting weight from one pale, bare thigh to another.

“Ronnie—”

She put her fingertips on his mouth, gesturing for him to be silent. Charlie obliged and closed his eyes for a moment.

Charlie had never fully considered the reality of infidelity before Ronnie. He had of course fantasized about it, in the same way most people fantasize about dramatically quitting their jobs, selling their belongings, and wandering the world. Like anyone would, he had considered tearing off the clothes off a dozen or so beautiful undergrads, his mind wandering to places where they begged for a good grade, took him in their pink, glossy mouths, moaned while he thrusted, but it was never truly infidelity. Fantasizing about the nubile, tight flesh of vaguely intelligent, narcissistic undergrads was natural, and a world away from Ronnie on his desk in the middle of the afternoon.

Ronnie wasn't a girl in the third row of a classroom. Yes, she was pretty and earnest and at times naive, but a woman nonetheless. She had agency the girls in his fantasies didn't have.

Ronnie swung her legs onto the desk, closed her eyes, and lay down amongst his papers and books. Her right leg was bent and her left extended, her dark hair pushed back from her face, her mouth slightly open. Charlie, speechless, still seated at his desk, put his hand lightly, tentatively, on her knee, running his fingertips slowly along the inside of her thigh just as he had that night at the party.

The skin, the feel of it, was just as he remembered. Just as he had written.

He kissed the outside of her right knee first, his mouth lingering there while he took in the scent of drugstore body lotion and bar soap. Her skin was cold, and he was overcome by an urge to gently bite the flesh. He slid his hand up her thigh, pushing the hem of her dress up to her waist with it.

She arched her back and let out an encouraging sigh.

( CHAPTER TWENTY )

“You look different.”

“Different?” Ronnie shifted uncomfortably on the couch while Aaron studied her expression with interest. She had been careful to shower and change when she had come home from Charlie's office, long before Aaron returned from errands and the gym. She had scrubbed every inch of her body carefully, buried her lemon-yellow dress in the bottom of the hamper, practiced her expression in the bathroom mirror to conceal any evidence that she had changed. Despite this she still felt the afternoon coated every inch of her, that if Aaron leaned in too close he would be able to smell the presence of someone else on her skin.

“Yeah. Different. Sunnier. I guess.”

Ronnie laughed nervously. “Really?” The idea that she ever looked sunny was comical.

“Yeah.” He paused thoughtfully. “It's really nice to see you happy. I've been worried about you lately. You've seemed distant.”

“Yeah. You mentioned.”

“And after the baby shower, I realized I haven't been all that fair to you.” Aaron took a swig of his beer and casually looked back toward the television. He was being uncharacteristically attentive, and it immediately put Ronnie on edge.

“I guess I have been. Distant. Things have been hard.”

“I'm sure you've been preoccupied with the baby. The tests. Glad to see you've come around to realizing that everything is going to be fine. That a lot of this stuff is in your head.” He said this as if he were trying to convince himself that it were true.

When she was with Charlie she didn't think about babies or doctor's phone calls or cancer or failings. It was not true that she thought everything was going to be fine.

“Everything is going to be okay, Ronnie. We're going to be okay,” he said sympathetically, reaching for her hand and stroking it lightly in the flicker of the television.

“I'd rather not talk about it if that's okay. I'm not trying to be difficult. I just think sometimes it's better to not talk about it.”

“Okay.” Aaron looked disappointed, but then perked up with a new idea. “Would you instead like to—” He looked at her suggestively, removing his hand from hers and running it up the side of her leg from his position on the couch. “You know. Take your mind off things?”

“Actually, Aaron. I'm really tired. I had a long day.”

He looked wounded momentarily. “Yeah, really, what did you do?”

Ronnie was startled by the question, but managed to respond without flinching. “There were just some things I'd been putting off that I was meaning to take care of. They're done now.”

Aaron didn't pursue this. He leaned in to kiss her softly, stroking her hair back from her face.

When Ronnie kissed Charlie she wanted to climb inside his mouth and sleep on his tongue. When Ronnie kissed Aaron she kept her eyes open.

Aaron returned his hand to his lap and his gaze to the television as a silence fell between them that would linger until both of them fell asleep on the couch.

( CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE )

The first time Charlie ever saw Tamara she was in a heated discussion with some fellow students at the back of a university bar. He was onstage, reading a poem with some difficulty, stumbling over a few lines, the crowd disinterested and barely noticing. Despite his nerves and hatred for public readings, he began to read in order to get her attention, as if the effort was only for her.

In large part the effort was unnecessary.

He had just retreated from the stage and back to his table of supportive if competitive friends, when she approached him.

“I really like that last poem you read,” was Tamara's opening line.

“Oh yes?” Charlie smiled at her and handed her a glass, filling it with beer from his table's pitcher. His male companions looked at him knowingly, grinning their approval at the petite blonde who'd made her way over to compliment him.

“I didn't think you were all that interested. Whatever conversation you were having back there seemed pretty important,” he said.

“What, you think a girl can't do multiple things at once?” She smiled widely, running her fingers through her wavy blonde hair in what could only be a flirtatious gesture.

“Why don't you have a seat,” he said, motioning for a fellow writer to get up from his chair. He kindly obliged, and she sat snug against Charlie, taking a long gulp from her newly acquired glass. “So you like poetry, then?”

“Some of it.”

“Do you study it?”

“No. I'm an economics major.”

“Then what the hell are you doing here?”

“Drinking with you, apparently.”

She raised her glass. He liked her confidence, the way she could easily walk away but chose not to.

“Well I'm glad you liked it.”

“I did. Some poetry can be so pretentious.”

“I think it depends on the person who's writing it.”

“You seem nice enough,” she said, offering another smile and then her name. “I'm Tamara.”

“Charles Stern,” he said, reaching out his hand.

She shook it slowly. “Maybe one day you'll write a poem about me as one of your many conquests, Mr. Stern.”

“Oh, so you've heard about me.”

“Everyone's heard about you. You're the anointed one, aren't you? The prodigy, I'm told.”

Charlie hated that his reputation preceded him in so many circles, but Tamara seemed unfazed. “I imagine I'll write a whole book about you.”

“And then I can be your only conquest.”

“Well then I suppose you'll have to be my wife, no?”

Charlie's anxiety was pervasive. It was not the kind that people speak of when they say, “Oh, he has an anxious disposition.” It was the kind that got people hospitalized. It was the kind that caused him to purchase endless hours of therapy and fistfuls of Ativan. It was the kind that made his jaw clench and his fists shake.

His anxiety was common knowledge in literary circles. Part of the charming writer identity he'd so successfully cultivated over the years. His publisher planned for his attacks on tours, booked hotels in close proximity to hospitals, and arranged exit strategies. Charlie was a problem on planes, at parties, in grocery stores. Meals at restaurants were delicate endeavours. And despite Charlie's constant yearning for escape from his life, remote locations were completely out of the question. The architecture of Charlie's mind could not be trusted to be stable.

Charlie failed at enduring the small details of life that most people found simple. Milk runs and subway rides. Ordering takeout and trips to the post office. Charlie was adept at locking himself in discreet bathroom stalls, vomiting and panting out his fears while curled up tightly on linoleum floors. His therapist assured him it was a product of his genius. Of his creative disposition. But Charlie felt that it was only his weakness that kept him out of the regular details of life. Anxiety in men was always a sign of a weakness they were incapable of mending with manly activities. The flesh around his middle suggested that athletics were not his chosen activity, and his reasonably happy and supportive wife was a sign of her resignation to his helplessness.

The anxiety arrived with the publication of his first collection of poems when he was merely twenty, no small feat for a boy barely a man, still in university, who charmed a small press publisher with his erotic musings on the girls he managed to meet in various literature classes and bed in various dorm rooms. Three days before it was to be printed Charlie threw up on a subway car, paralyzed by a convincing fear that he was at death's door.

The vomiting and dizzy spells came first. Then the sweaty, hyperventilating fits. Numbness in the extremities, increased heartbeat, depersonalization, a fear of losing complete control. Charlie became obsessed with exit strategies and hospital proximity. The subway, enclosed and deep underground without any reliable escape, became completely out of the question. The poisonous thoughts, irrational and pervasive, then ate at his brain and circled relentlessly, conjuring the wildest possibilities of his imminent demise—walls collapsing, dogs attacking, his insides riddled with disease. The characters in his book were sexy, reckless, fearless creatures, intent on the most enjoyable road to complete self-destruction. Charlie on the other hand became obsessed with intense self-preservation, every minor decision a possible doorway to complete disaster.

The only escape from the vice grip of doom was his ability to self-medicate, alcohol and marijuana having the uncanny ability to provide him with an intoxicated window of reprieve where, although still sure his degradation and demise were imminent, he did not give a shit.

Labouring under the misapprehension that he was indeed dying while still only a teenager, he went to the walk-in clinic at the university only to find he was “troubled” and should be carted off the school counsellor.

A few years after he was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, he met Tamara, who adapted to taking care of him quickly, in a way that suggested she actually took pleasure from it. She seemed to be looking for a wounded bird to care for, and Charlie launched into his twenties clinging to a diagnosed mental illness that excused his fragile nature.

“You were just made too sensitive for this world,” she said when he confessed his panic attacks and obsessive thoughts to her one night over champagne post-sex. “That's what makes you beautiful.”

The collection of poetry about all the girls that came before Tamara won acclaim and some small awards, and then a two-book deal, back when you could garner a two-book deal from a poetry collection. His success meant that Tamara began to cultivate a sense of pride that she knew all of the beloved poet's failings.

Tamara had been stunning then. She was petite and blonde and more intelligent than any woman he had ever met. She had a quickness about her, as if she was impossible to pin down, and impossible to intimidate. Her body was firm and curved and Charlie would run his fingers gingerly from knee to ribcage to drink her in. She laughed endlessly with her big beautiful laugh, managing to charm all of the same people Charlie managed to repel. She also had a stability about her, a firmness that echoed her solid, unyielding body, and Charlie clung closely to her in those early years of his illness. She acted as an anchor, and he would grasp her arm at events and readings, navigating those first flashes of success under her careful guidance.

While most assumed it was Tamara who benefited from Charlie's suddenly found fame, his private shame was that she was the only reason for it. She was the one who was able to push him through the tight spaces of life, to find him all the exits, to convince him that it wasn't cancer, that no one hated him, that the reviews were good even when they weren't. And when he couldn't be convinced, she coddled him, told him that it didn't matter, that there was much more to be done.

The ongoing, crippling anxiety was finally assuaged with a rather costly investment in intense cognitive behavioural therapy, a fee that Tamara's blue blood, WASPy parents had quietly paid when Tamara convinced them that this was the man she planned to marry, whether they liked it or not. They viewed it as an investment. It was important that he was well. Charlie would have bobbed along on an endless sea of despair—despair of his own making—if he hadn't met Tamara so early in life.

So naturally, he married her.

After he had been pulled from the worst, no one ever acknowledged the investment her parents made in the partial cure, and their marriage was blessed, however unenthusiastically. They married at city hall on a Friday afternoon in October. The bride wore grey and the groom threw up beforehand.

Charlie was loath to admit to himself that he married Tamara out of that sense of obligation and repayment.

It was because of Tamara that Charlie tattooed a small anchor of the inside of his wrist, right after they were married, a reminder that she was rooting him to earth. The tiny totem mocked him now with its early romanticism, its inability to predict a mundane future.

Noah was conceived more than a decade after they first met. They had had no intention of having a child, initially because both were focused on their careers and then later because their relationship had soured. He was an accident, but an accident that was never acknowledged because marriage made calling a child a mistake impossible. There was money, stability, and no reason not to have Noah beyond crippling fear, so they went ahead.

When he was born, Noah had the immediate ability to bring Tamara and Charlie closer together. Ten fingers, ten toes—this squirming pink mass that proved they could make something together that actually
worked
. He was a perfect, beautiful child, and Tamara was suddenly beautiful again, her bitterness subsiding. Charlie stayed home with Noah when Tamara went back to work after a brief mat leave. The newborn gave Charlie purpose, made him feel like he was finally contributing to a marriage that had risked falling apart via pure malaise. His anxiety dissipated because he had something real to worry about, something that depended on him to be fearless.

And Charlie was excited to discover that while he was generally terrible at being alive, he was actually very good at being a father.

But as Noah grew older and missed the developmental milestones, Charlie's anxiety returned. It came at first like a slight tap on the shoulder, tiny waves of doubt that slipped in, and Charlie knew the paralysis would come again. It was only a matter of time. He watched his child, the one that had been a symbol of so much false hope for both of them, and knew only doom would come.

Noah was late to walk and speak, refused to smile, and didn't have interest in other children. He would scream and cry without reason, organize his toys methodically, and although he could count beyond a hundred at only twenty months, he couldn't create sentences or respond to his name. When Noah was finally diagnosed with autism, Charlie learned the statistic that eighty percent of parents of autistic children divorce, and he took that as a challenge.

In crowded spaces and dark theatres, Tamara had become adept at pulling Charlie out of the tight corners of life, but it was Tamara who wept uncontrollably for days when they learned Noah's fate. Charlie held her, and though he felt guilty for thinking it, he was happy that for once she was the wounded bird and he would be forced to take care of both of them.