Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (5 page)

“I have just a few notes,” he said.

Jack spread the pages of the brief out on the black credenza against the far wall of his office. The credenza is ever so slightly too low for comfort, and when I went to look at his notes, I ended up bent over a bit at the waist. The tabletop was wood, varnished to a high shine, and as we stood side by side our reflections were clear, almost as if we were looking into a mirror. I could see inside my shirt. One of my breasts had fallen forward and swelled outside of the molded cup of my bra, bared almost to the nipple. Jack stood to my left and a little behind me, his left hand pushing the pages aside, one by one, his right shoved into his pocket. I know now, because he told me, that he was doing his best to camouflage his erection.

I was wearing a black miniskirt, not so short that it was unseemly, but neither so long that it would pass the scrutiny of the headmistress of a Catholic school. Underneath I wore stockings and a garter belt. Had it been July or August, I might have claimed that I wore this outmoded style of lingerie because it was hot, and because wearing panty hose in the summer in New York is an invitation to a yeast infection. This was, in fact, the reason that I owned the garter belt. But it was March. The first crocuses were just beginning to peek through the remains of the last snowfall. I wore a garter belt and stockings because I had fantasized about seducing Jack. I had dressed for the fantasy, but had not planned for it. I had not imagined I would work up the nerve.

I bent low over the table and reworked a sentence he had marked. While I agreed that my phrasing had been awkward, I thought his correction even more so. I leaned my cheek on my left hand, scribbled a better sentence than the one he had written, and crossed out a line in the next paragraph that now seemed redundant. At that point, I realized that my skirt had ridden up, that the black straps of my garter belt were surely visible, cutting into the flesh on the backs of my thighs, that the tops of my stockings were sagging just enough to leave bare an few inches of soft, white skin. I paused, the pen hovering over the paper. I could hear the hiss of Jack's breath coming from his nose. Before I could stop myself, before I could even think through the ramifications of what I was doing, I stepped one foot ever so slightly away from the other, parting my legs, and then I leaned gently backward, until I felt the wool of his trouser leg brush against my thigh.

Jack pressed back. It was like junior high school, like a Friday night dance, bumping and grinding against the hopeless boner of a pimple-faced boy who knows with a desperate certainly that he will never, not in a million years, get laid. Except that there was no bumping and grinding, just soft, insistent pressure. And except that I would have fucked Jack in a second, right there, with the door open for everyone to see.

I turned to the hallway and standing in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, was Marilyn. Our eyes met, and then she shut the door with a firm click of the latch.

I felt a gut-wrenching stab of guilt. I felt like I had pursued Jack, tracked him, shot him, and heaved him over my shoulder, with no thought at all for his wife and child. But that's not true. I thought about them. I thought about them all the time. I felt guilty and miserable, and I hated myself for wanting so wildly and urgently to take him away from them, not just because I knew it was a bad thing to pursue a married man but because I knew precisely how Carolyn and William felt. I knew what it meant to have the man around whom you have built your life betray you, discard you, and find a younger, more appetizing object of his desire.

When my sister Lucy informed me of my father's many infidelities, she was revealing nothing I did not already know. In fact, there are secrets about my father that would bring my sister to her knees with horror if she knew them. I was the one who held my mother's hair back from her face while she vomited her despair into the pale blue toilet of the master bathroom in the house where I grew up. I sat in the waiting room of my mother's gynecologist—the same doctor who had, ten years earlier, given me a prescription for Zovirax, along with a lecture about sexual responsibility—while my mother lay on his examining table and tried to explain, without crying, why a fifty-three-year-old woman who had only slept with one man in her entire life needed an HIV test. Only I—not my sisters, not my parents' friends, not my grandmother, not, I presume, my father's law partners—know that my father did not leave my mother.
She
threw
him
out after discovering that he had been spending as much as $50,000 a year supporting a Russian stripper. No one knows but me, and my father has no idea that I know. I have kept my knowledge a secret from him, and revealed his secret to no one, not even Jack, to whom I have told everything else. My father's secret has been safe with me despite what it has cost me. Every time I see my husband and my father together, I feel soiled, as if my father's filth has been rubbed off on me by my complicit silence. I don't know why I haven't told Jack. I don't know if it's because I am afraid he will be disgusted with me and with my father, or if I am more afraid that he will not be, that the behavior that I find so horrifying will strike my beloved as normal.

I worry that this is something men do. Maybe there is a vast secret underworld about which the wives and daughters know nothing. Maybe the men are all there, in the clip joints of New Jersey, watching as some girl barely out of her teens, a faint blush of acne staining her buttocks pale pink, spreads wide her spindly thighs clad in nothing but a poorly laundered polyester G-string. Maybe all men sit in dark rooms, fingers itching to explore the plump bodies of girls younger than their daughters. Maybe it's perfectly normal to slip hundred-dollar bills into the fists of fat pimps with gold chains digging into the flesh of their necks and then check into third-rate hotel rooms for an hour or two, paying extra to leave the condom in its wrapper, paying even more to do things the wives and daughters could never even imagine.

Or maybe my father is just a fucking psycho. I vote for that. It helps me to keep from hating him, thinking he's crazy. It helps me to have some kind of relationship with him, after he left my mother wretched and alone in a five-bedroom, mock-Tudor house, crying into a wine spritzer, asking me if I thought he would have been faithful if she had not gained so much weight over the years. It helps me to love my husband to think that only men suffering from my father's mental illness—sexual compulsion, sexual obsession, surely there is some heading in the DSM-IV under which to file my father—would engage in this kind of behavior.

So, yes, I've seen betrayal and its cost. When I stood, bent over Jack's credenza, his erection pushing against my ass, even before I saw my self-loathing reflected in Marilyn's eyes, some part of me felt miserable and sorry for what I was doing to Carolyn and William. Mostly, though, I was just so happy, so filled with joy at the palpable evidence of Jack's fervor, that I pushed away the idea of the devastation I wrought on his wife and child. I was the atom bomb of desire, and they were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could not spare time for mercy. I had a war to win.

Chapter 5
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

W
hen
Jack comes home, William is building a Mega Bionicle in his bedroom. William has already pointed out to me, twice, that the recommended age range on the box of this elaborately violent-looking Lego is seven to twelve years, and I have expressed astonishment and admiration for his prowess and also informed him that nobody likes a braggart. I am in the kitchen unpacking tonight's dinner from the foil and cardboard to-go containers in which it arrived. Once again, one of the containers is poorly sealed and a slick of curry sauce from the tiger shrimp covers the bottom of the plastic bag. The oil has separated from the coconut milk and little clots of congealed peanut sauce stick to my fingers. By the time I realize I am doing a veritable Lady Macbeth at the kitchen sink, I have used nearly half a bottle of dishwashing liquid scrubbing my hands clean.

My mother taught me how to cook. She is a natural in the kitchen. She started as a girl adding piquant spices to the family brisket and exploring alternative methods of poaching the carp that swam in the clawfoot tub every Friday, and progressed quickly to butter-infused French dishes learned from Julia Child. Two of my most prized books are ragged paperback editions of Elizabeth David's
French Provincial Cooking
and
Italian Food
that my mother presented to me when I left for college. She hated the idea of my being forced to subsist on dorm food when she'd brought me up on a diet of coq au vin de Bourgogne and saltimbocca alla Romana. Despite having been raised, like most Jewish girls of her generation, on a steady diet of boiled chicken and kasha, and despite raising her own family in the culinary wasteland of the 1970s, my mother never in her life cooked a green bean to a gray paste or began a recipe with a packet of onion soup mix or lemon Jell-O. Every cooked vegetable she placed on her table gave a little against the teeth before snapping, unless it was supposed to melt on your tongue, in which case it did so with style. She grew her own herbs and greens and would drive hours to find a good tomato or a rumored cache of morel mushrooms. Had she never married she might have become one of those revolutionary chefs who, in the latter part of the century, transformed the American palate. Certainly she could have opened her own restaurant, if she had been young enough after the divorce to withstand the vigors of a professional kitchen. Or so I like to imagine. She says she would have gone back to school and finished her master's in library science.

I've never quite reached her level of artistry, but the first meal I cooked for Jack was a revelation to him. His apartment was still almost entirely unfurnished and I had to bring my own pots and pans. I made a chilled soup of yellow tomatoes with peppers, cucumber, and basil; veal meatballs with artichokes, green olives, and sage; and a simple arugula and fig salad. I baked a Meyer lemon cake for dessert. I did it all before his eyes, bustling around the kitchen wrapped in a long white apron with my hair piled on my head. He sat on his kitchen counter and opened his mouth obediently for me to pop in bits of balsamic vinegar–soaked bread, olives, ends of crisp vegetables, spoonfuls of whipped cream. I was the witch in the forest, and Jack was my willing Hansel. Except he never grew fat and the only man-eating that was planned was of the figurative variety.

I have not cooked a meal in months now. I still shop as if I am planning on it. I go to Fairway every few days and fill up a basket with plump vegetables, soft ripe cheeses, deep-red wild salmon, organic roasting hens. I would like to feed Jack. I want to delight his tongue and fill his belly with a meal that I know will make him happy. But I cannot seem to bring myself to face my beautifully seasoned iron pans, my Le Creuset roasters, the Piazza cookware my mother brought back for me from a recent cooking-school vacation she took to a North Carolina resort. And so the greens wilt, the filets and chops go pale and start to stink. Every two weeks the cleaning service comes and throws out the rancid contents of the fridge.

After Jack turns his key in the lock and pushes open the apartment door, he pauses, and I know he is holding his head up, sniffing to see if the air is redolent of tarragon and thyme, a reduction of butter and white wine, the tang of lemon zest. Or, once again, of princess prawns from Empire Szechwan.

“Hey sweetie,” Jack says, coming into the kitchen. “Can I give you a hand with dinner?”

“I've got it under control,” I say as I lift my face to be kissed.

“What did you two do today?”

“Oh, you know, built a cold fusion reactor out of rubber bands and swizzle sticks.”

Jack laughs perfunctorily and I remind myself to stop joking about William's precocity.

There is a pounding in the hall and William barrels into the kitchen, skidding across the floor and flinging himself headlong into his father. He buries his face in Jack's belly and rubs it madly back and forth, shouting, “Daddy, daddy, daddy! I missed you so much!”

“I missed you, too, Will-man,” Jack says, and lifts William into his arms. I know this is a heartwarming sight. I know I should clasp my hands together and smile benignly at my boys.

“What's for dinner?” Jack says to me.

“Thai,” I say.

“Great,” he says, and I wish he wouldn't. I wish he would say, Goddamn it, Emilia, I've been working all day, would it kill you to cook me a meal? I wish he would ask me what it is I do with myself while he is clocking billable hours. But he is far too kind, too considerate of me and of my broken heart. It's not fair of me to wish he knew that his kindness makes it that much easier for me to be so appallingly self-indulgent.

“Emilia told me to shut up,” William says.

Jack puts William down and looks from one of us to the other. “What's going on?”

I turn back to the bag of takeout, finish pulling out the foil trays with the paper tops. “Ask him,” I say.

Jack crouches down next to his son. “William?”

“I was teaching Emilia about eBay, Daddy. And she said shut up.”

“William suggested that we sell the baby's things on eBay,” I say. “The stroller. The crib. The American Girl doll.”

“What?” Jack says. “William, what's going on here?” He is doing his best not to raise his voice, and his suppressed anger makes me very happy. And immediately guilty for being so mean, so immature, that I am pleased to foment conflict between this little boy and his father.

“We don't have to sell
that
stuff,” William says. “Any stuff we don't use is okay. We could sell, like, my old Mega Blocks. Because I don't use those anymore.”

Jack pushes his hand through his hair. “Sweetie pie, what's the deal with eBay?”

“He wanted to sell the baby's things!” I say. “He wanted to take all the baby's clothes, and her toys, and auction them off on eBay.”

Jack lays a hand on my arm. “Just give me a second, okay?” He turns back to William. “Will-man? Did you really want to sell the baby's things?”

I cannot believe that this has somehow turned into a refereed squabble, that Jack is doubting me.

William's eyelashes are wet with unshed, glycerin tears. “I wanted to do eBay and I was trying to think of stuff we aren't using. I thought since the baby's dead she's not going to use her stuff. I didn't mean to make Emilia so mad.”

Jack looks up at me. I can feel the heat in my face.

“Emilia's not mad,” Jack says.

“Yes, she is.”

“No, sweetie. She's not.”

Yes, I am.

“Emilia's just so sad about the baby that it's hard for her to talk about selling the baby's things. You're right, we'll never use the baby's things, but we're not going to sell them on eBay.”

“I'm sorry, Daddy.” William lets loose with his tears now and buries his face in Jack's belly.

“It's okay, sweetie,” Jack says, lifting him in his arms. “It's okay, my little man. I know you didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings.”

“I didn't. I didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings,” he wails. “I just wanted to do eBay.”

“I know, and Emilia knows, too, don't you, Emilia? She's sorry, too, sweetie.” Jack looks at me over the top of William's head, and gives a little half smile of encouragement or pleading.

Yes I'm sorry, of course I'm sorry. I'm sorry about so many things. I'm sorry that your son seems able to pierce my heart with unerring accuracy. I'm sorry I am unable to rise above it, to recognize that he is a child and I am an adult. I am sorry that the baby died and left me an angry and guilt-ridden mess, unable to laugh at the thought of making a killing selling Bugaboo Frogs on eBay. You have no idea how sorry I am, Jack. Would you love me if you knew everything I had to be sorry about?

I pull out a stack of three shamrock-green Fiestaware plates. “Who wants a squeeze of lime on his pad Thai?” I say.