Little Children (11 page)

His daughters were sophomores in high school when this bomb-shell struck; Richard and Peggy agreed to stay together until they graduated. Oddly, those last two years were their happiest as a couple, though they rarely slept in the same bed and kept their social calendars as separate as possible. Something about the expiration date on the marriage made each of them more generous than they’d been in the past—your spouse’s annoying habit becomes a lot less oppressive if you don’t have to imagine putting up with it until the day one of you dies. By the time they split, he’d developed a real affection for her, and still called once or twice a week to see how she was doing.

The envelope in the bag contained not one but three Polaroids of Slutty Kay wearing the polka-dot thong, each of them bearing a scrawled inscription. In the first one (
Hi, Richard!
), she was standing otherwise naked in front of what must have been her bedroom closet, looking unusually contemplative as she brushed her hair. In the second, she was wearing a sleeveless turquoise minidress and sitting in a car in such a way—open door, one leg in, one leg out—that you got a very clear glimpse of her crotch (
Hope this gets you hot!
). The trio concluded with a rearview shot of Kay bending over and smiling up at the camera from between her knees (
Love and Kisses, S.K.
). The enclosed sex log was written in the same girlish cursive on a sheet of plain yellow legal paper:

Richard had been divorced for almost two years when he started seeing Sarah. They hit it off right away, though he suspected later that this instant intimacy had less to do with any real connection between them than it did with the fact that they were both desperately lonely and waiting for someone to rescue them. At the time he’d been drawn to her bitter sense of humor, her youthful body, and her enigmatic sexuality (she claimed to be “basically straight,” but spoke frequently about the Korean woman she’d been in love with in college). She seemed to appreciate his social ease, his liberal politics, and, though she never actually said so, the promise he held out of liberation from Starbucks and long-term financial security, at least once his daughters graduated from college.

They’d been married for less than a year when she got pregnant. This time around Richard had no mixed feelings—he was thrilled with the idea of bringing a child into the world, consciously and without regret, correcting the mistakes he’d made with the twins (they blamed him for the divorce and were no longer speaking to him, though they were happy to accept buckets of his money). He vowed to himself and to Sarah that he would be involved and available in this new child’s life. He would work less, spend more time at home. He would coach soccer, sing songs in the car, organize memorable birthday parties. He attended Lamaze classes, read a slew of child care books, and coached Sarah successfully through labor and delivery, a miraculous (but also disturbing and horrible and nearly endless) event that he had completely missed out on with the twins, whose birth he’d spent pacing the hospital waiting room like Ricky Ricardo, and then passing out cigars to the other expectant fathers when the doctor gave him the thumbs-up.

He tried, he really did, at least for the first year. He said all those things new fathers are supposed to say and changed his share of diapers. But sometimes he found himself wishing that Lucy was a boy. He’d had two girls already, why did he need a third? And sometimes, when he was stuck at home with the baby on a rainy weekend, he found himself overcome by a familiar sense of claustrophobia and resentment, as if he were once again a young man throwing away the best years of his youth.

His sex life suffered, too, of course. How had he forgotten about that? Sarah was too tired, her nipples were sore, she couldn’t even think about it. When he suggested leaving the baby with her mother for a few days so they could take a quick getaway to the Caribbean, she looked at him like he was crazy.

“My mother can barely take of herself,” she said. “How’s she going to care for an infant?”

It was around that time that he started logging onto swingers’ web sites and thinking,
Why not? It looks like fun
. He printed out a list of “house parties” in their area and decided to approach Sarah about the possibility of attending one, just to see what it was like.
They love bisexual women,
he would tell her.
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.
But when he went downstairs to talk to her, she was sitting at the kitchen table, expressing milk from her engorged left breast with a loud electric pump, looking pale and haggard as she flipped through the newspaper, and for a second or two, he felt an emotion toward her that was a little like contempt.

He still hadn’t gotten over how completely he’d misread his own needs. He’d assumed he was evolving and improving as a person, but all he’d really done was repeat his own failure, this time with his eyes wide-open and no one to blame but himself.

The panties weren’t working as well as he’d hoped. It wasn’t that the thong wasn’t as fragrant as Kay had promised—that was definitely
not
the problem—it was just that the fragrance wasn’t as distinctive or evocative of Kay’s unique sexuality as he’d expected. For all he knew, it could have been worn by any woman in the world, including Sarah.

Which got him thinking, at a very inconvenient time, about a troubling possibility: What if Kay
hadn’t
worn it? On her web site, she claimed to provide the panties to her devoted customers as a labor of love, but Richard wasn’t sure he believed her. After all, didn’t Kay have an advanced degree in business? For the panties to be really profitable, she would have to deal in bulk. She couldn’t just wear one pair per day, as the sex log suggested.

If I were Kay
, he thought,
I’d subcontract the panty-wearing.
It was all too easy to imagine a sweatshop full of bored women—Chinese and Latina seamstresses—all of them wearing polka-dotted thongs as they worked their sewing machines, then wearily slipping them into plastic bags at the end of the day, along with a completely fictional “sex log.” What kind of fool would that make Richard?

He pressed the thong over his mouth and nose and inhaled deeply, trying to banish these inappropriately commercial considerations. This was no time to be thinking about business, his pants around his ankles, his palm slick with Vaseline Intensive Care.
These are Kay’s panties
, he chanted to himself.
These panties belong to Kay
. But then, just when he got himself going, he’d think,
Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re outsourced.

It was hard to know how long he’d hosted this dialogue in his mind before the whole issue of authenticity suddenly became moot. His eyes were darting in a regular pattern from the sex log to the Polaroids to an image on his computer screen of Kay leaning on a guardrail overlooking Niagara Falls, discreetly lifting her dress to give the camera a glimpse of her bare ass. He was breathing deeply, taking her essence deep into his lungs, into his bloodstream—

“Ahem.”

He whipped his head around, the panties still pressed over the lower half of his face. Sarah was standing in the doorway, her expression wavering between revulsion and amazement.

“Is this going to take much longer?” she asked. “I’d really like to go for my walk.”

Richard understood that something terribly embarrassing had occurred, but all he felt just then was a profound annoyance at the interruption.

“You could have knocked,” he said, his words disappearing into the undergarment.

“I did.”

It took an effort of will for him to remove the thong.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This will just take a minute.”

“I think we need to talk,” she said, but to his immense relief she backed out of the room without another word, pressing the door shut with the gentlest of clicks, not unlike the sound your tongue makes against the roof of your mouth when you think something’s a shame.

SARAH AND TODD MADE LOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME DURING A LATE-AFTERNOON
thundershower on the scratchy rug in her living room, the bed upstairs being occupied just then by Lucy and Aaron, both of whom had conveniently dozed off on the way home from the pool.

“This is incredible,” Todd whispered as he thrust himself into her with a vigorous yet artful corkscrewing motion that she would soon come to recognize as his trademark sexual maneuver.

“We smell like chlorine,” she replied. Despite her fervent wish to remain in the moment, to block out all extraneous information and sensation, she found herself thinking sadly of her husband as she gripped the taut muscles of Todd’s ass. At forty-seven, Richard was still reasonably thin, but his butt had gone flabby. Even when they’d had a halfway decent sex life, Sarah had preferred not to think too much about that part of his anatomy and only touched it by accident.

“I love your red bikini,” he told her.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

He stopped, mid-spiral. A vaguely pained expression passed across his sun-burnished face, as if he were trying hard to remember the name of his congressman.
My first handsome boyfriend
, Sarah thought proudly. She wished Arthur Maloney and Amelia and Ryan and everyone else who’d ever hurt her could be watching right now on closed circuit television. Todd peered down at her, his face enormous above hers, a lovely eclipse.

“Do you feel guilty about this?” he asked.

Sarah hesitated. She would have liked to explain that her husband had become some sort of panty fetishist, but it didn’t seem like the right time to broach such an awkward subject. It had been hard enough to discuss it with Richard, to keep a straight face while he attempted to convince her that he’d mail-ordered the panties for professional purposes—some sort of research he was conducting on web-based sales and marketing models, blah blah blah—and had inadvertently let his curiosity get the best of him. Sarah had accepted his pathetic alibi with a polite expression, feeling both sorry for him and oddly liberated, as if she’d been formally released from her marriage by the sight of her husband huffing another woman’s underpants.

“No,” she told Todd. “I thought I might, but I don’t.”

“I do,” he said.

Oh God
, she thought,
here it comes
. Some primitive high-school-era defense mechanism kicked in, and she managed to accept this confession with a calm, curious expression, while at the same time bracing herself for a sudden descent into misery.
This is where he rolls off me and buries his face in his hands
.

“I feel really bad,” he continued. But then he shrugged, as if this were a minor nuisance at best. “What can you do?”

Sarah forced herself not to smile.

“You better pick up the pace,” she said, slapping him lightly on the thigh. “They could wake up any minute.”

With admirable haste, he started up the corkscrew again. Sarah couldn’t help laughing.

“Who are you?” she asked in not-quite-mock bewilderment. “The Roto-Rooter Man?”

Before he could respond, a ferocious crack of thunder shook the house, as if the sky had exploded directly above them. The lovers froze in place, their faces turned toward the stairs, waiting for a cry to erupt from the bedroom.

“Keep going,” she said, after a few seconds had passed. “It’s okay.”

He sprang back into action, but then abruptly checked himself.

“Did you just call me the Roto-Rooter Man?”

“It’s a compliment,” she assured him.

Sarah had come to the Town Pool the previous week in the full knowledge that she was offering herself to Todd. There was nothing coy, or even subtle, about her methods. She had spotted him from a distance before she’d even shown her badge to the gate attendant—he and Aaron had staked out a prime piece of poolside real estate, a shady patch of grass near the shallow end, neither too close nor too far from the rest rooms—and once inside, she led Lucy over to this spot with the confidence of someone who holds an equal claim on the property. She spread her towel on the grass just inches from his, sat down without a word of greeting, and began rummaging in her straw bag for a container of sunscreen. Only after she’d found it did she deign to acknowledge the neighbors whose space they’d so blithely invaded—the father shirtless and reading
Men’s Health
magazine, the son in Rugrats swim trunks and his jester’s cap, and Big Bear, still buckled into the double stroller, watching the scene with his perpetually horrified expression, as if he could foresee a calamity he felt helpless to prevent.

“Oh, look, honey, it’s that nice little boy from the playground.”

“He’s a bad boy,” Lucy said darkly.

Aaron didn’t take the bait. He was busy staging a head-on collision between a garbage truck and an oil tanker, an act he choreographed with peculiar sound effects and an air of grave concentration.

“Don’t you like his hat?”

“It’s stupid.”

This got Aaron’s attention. He glared at Lucy.

“You stupid,” he informed her.

“Aaron,” said Todd. “That’s not nice.”

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” the boy muttered, in a barely audible voice.

Sarah smiled, offering Todd a small shrug of apology.

“I hope you don’t mind. Lucy has sensitive skin. She’s better off in the shade.”

“Not at all,” he said, swatting the magazine at a fly that was dive-bombing his head. “It’s nice to see you again.”

Sarah made Lucy stand at attention for a thorough slathering of water-resistant SPF 45 sunscreen that included the tips of her toes and the rims of her ears. After getting her daughter settled with a coloring book and a box of crayons, she shed her baggy T-shirt and began applying the protective goop to her own body, wishing she had something a little sexier to caress into her skin, baby oil or one of those coconut-scented lotions so popular during her adolescence, back when a lobstery sunburn was seen as a necessary first stage in the tanning process. Then she turned to him, as casually as if he were her cousin or brother, and said, “Could you do my back?”

“Sure.”

She wriggled toward him, passing the plastic bottle over her shoulder. Bending forward, she lifted her hair away from the nape of her neck—she knew it was one of her finest features—with a languid gesture that made her feel momentarily glamorous, a model posing for a cover shoot.

He didn’t overdo it. He rubbed the sunscreen onto her back and shoulders in a polite and businesslike manner. He didn’t linger unnecessarily in her lumbar region or take any other liberties.

And yet.

It felt illicit.

She might as well have been naked.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

She knew, at that moment, as clearly as she knew her own name, that they were going to be lovers, and that it would happen sooner rather than later. They didn’t really have a choice; there was some kind of raw sexual connection between them that she’d never experienced with anyone in her life.

That was Monday. By Friday her opinion on the matter had taken a 180-degree turn.
It’s not going to happen,
she told herself.
And maybe that’s okay.

It wasn’t that her attraction to him had faded as they spent more time together; if anything, it had increased. He looked like some kind of blond American god stretched out on his rainbow-striped towel, baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, bronzed torso rising and falling with each lazy breath. Lying beside him without being able to touch his hand or lick his skin was a fresh erotic torment to her every day.

But there were compensations. She’d been so focused for so long on the memory of their unexpected kiss at the playground that she’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to him, the way they’d just plunged into conversation as they pushed their kids on the swings, his disarming honesty about himself, a quality he had of accepting people for who they were, of simply enjoying their company for however long he was allowed to share it.

Day after day, they sat in the shade, distributing snacks and brokering occasional disputes—having little choice in the matter, Aaron and Lucy had formed a fragile friendship—talking all the while about their own childhoods, things they’d read in the paper or heard on the radio, household matters, the people around them. When the kids got too hot or bored, they took them in the pool, continuing their conversation in waist-high water. Sometimes they traded offspring. Todd taught Lucy to doggie paddle while Sarah played rough with Aaron, lifting the feathery boy in and out of the water, the jingling of his bells mingling with his giddy laughter as he windmilled his arms wildly at the air.

It was the most fun she’d had in years. On three separate occasions strangers complimented Sarah on her beautiful family, and she neglected to correct them. One afternoon, when she and Todd were snacking on a huge bunch of grapes, Sarah saw Mary Ann and gave her a big wave. Mary Ann hesitated for a moment—she was wearing sunglasses, a gigantic straw hat, and some kind of gauzy yellow cover-up—before putting on the fakest smile Sarah had ever seen on the face of another human being. She raised her arm slowly, as if it were made of lead, and waved like it hurt.

As badly as Sarah sometimes wanted to just grab Todd by the face and kiss him, to crawl onto his towel and blast away the pretense that they were just a couple of pals killing time together, she wanted just as badly to hold on to the innocent public life they’d made for themselves out in the sunshine with the other parents and children. If they had an affair, all this would have to head underground, into a sadder and darker and more complicated place. So she accepted the trade: the melancholy handshake at four o’clock in exchange for this little patch of grass, some sunscreen and conversation, one more happy day at the pool.

So much depends on the weather,
she thought later. Maybe that first week felt idyllic not only because of the supercharged current running between her and Todd, but also because every day of it was sunny and dry and in the mid-eighties, a cosmic smile of approval, one blessing piled on top of another.

The idyll ended over the unspeakably dreary weekend that followed, when a stubborn heat wave pushed into the area and refused to budge. Monday and Tuesday were brutal, in the nineties, with the kind of humidity that turned Sarah’s already frizzy hair into a freak show, the air quality index edging from “bad” to “unhealthy.” The pool was packed, the patch of shade she’d come to think of as “our spot” overrun by early birds. Lucy was cranky, Aaron lethargic; Todd couldn’t think of anything to talk about but how damn hot it was, which at least gave him a one-topic advantage over Sarah, who didn’t want to talk about anything at all.

By Wednesday the whole world was in a rotten mood. The sky loomed low and heavy, promising rain but not delivering. The pool was tepid, barely any relief at all. Todd squeegeed the sweat off his forehead with an index finger.

“It’s funny,” he said. “In the middle of winter you can’t even imagine a day like this. And if you could, it would probably seem okay.”

Sarah could barely muster the energy to nod.
We should just go to the movies,
she thought. They could see
Spy Kids
at the mall, hide out in the air-conditioning for a couple of hours. But she kept this idea to herself. It seemed dangerous somehow, too much like a date.

“It works the other way, too,” he went on. “On a day like this, it’s hard to believe in February. You know, that week around Valentine’s Day, when you don’t even want to walk out to your car.” He shook his head. “Remember those vinyl seats they used to have? Might as well sit naked on a block of ice.”

“I wish,” Sarah muttered.

“It’s a little like being dead,” he added, after a moment’s thought.

“Vinyl seats?”

“No, it’s just like when you’re dead and you try to remember being alive, it’ll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You’ll know it’s true, but you won’t really believe it.”

“That’s actually sort of comforting,” Sarah pointed out. “I always figured that when you’re dead, you wouldn’t be able to think of anything. There wouldn’t be any
you
to do the thinking.”

“That’s a depressing thought.”

“Only if you’re alive,” she said. “If you’re dead, it doesn’t matter.”

Todd looked at the sky. There was a whiny note in his voice that Sarah didn’t like.

“They said scattered showers. I don’t see any scattered showers.”

Oh, what the hell
, she thought.
I’ll just ask him to the movies. We don’t even have to sit next to each other.
But then something distracted her. A disturbance in the air, maybe. A low murmur of warning. Some kind of collective shift of attention. One of those moments when you and a lot of other people are suddenly looking in a certain direction, though most of you have no idea why.

The Bellington Town Pool was set at the bottom of a grassy hill, an enormous, but still somehow jewel-like circle of water ringed by a concrete walkway. A group of coltish adolescent girls, awkward and lovely in their tiny bikinis, did their sunbathing on the walkway, but everyone else pitched camp on the hillside, which undulated upward in a series of gentle plateaus that gave the whole facility the feel of a natural amphitheater.