Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (3 page)

Except. Except I had the sneaking feeling that this wouldn’t be an isolated event. That this lonely moment was the first of many lonely moments, so many that if you were to string them all together and look at them from a certain angle, they’d make up not a lonely life, I wasn’t feeling
that
gloomy, but at least a lonely epoch in an otherwise unlonely life. The person I’d been for most of that life wouldn’t have minded a stint of loneliness, at least not minded much, but I hadn’t been that person for a while.

I sat there, with the dinner party droning and burgeoning around me. You chose this, I reminded myself. This is where you live now. These people are your people.

I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was still there.

T
WO

A
s Piper sat on a hard, wooden, undersized chair in a brightly lit school library, without warning, from out of nowhere or from out of a past so distant that it felt like nowhere, the memory of the man’s back came to her.

There was no way in the world she could remember the man’s name (because he had not been particularly important to her, had not even so much been “the man” as “a man,” one of many), but there it was, a back Piper hadn’t seen in, God, it must be fifteen years. And it was as if she were seeing it at that moment, as though she were not sitting in the crowded library but were instead naked, tangled in sheets on the bed in the man’s apartment with the man’s back before her, within touching distance of her hands and mouth.

The man’s back was tanned and V shaped. Water trickled down the cleft of spine toward the white towel wrapped around his narrow hips. How she had loved damp men, men just out of the shower, gleaming and supple, but also somehow softer than usual. Newly born and fragile.

Piper sat in the library of what would be, in a few days, her son’s school, what technically already was his school, she reminded herself with satisfaction, since she’d talked Kyle into bypassing the quarterly payment-plan option—might as well wear a sign saying “We don’t know if we can really afford this”—and putting up a full year’s tuition two months ago. Technically, Tallyrand Academy had been Carter’s school for two months. More technically, for two months, the Truitts had been a Tallyrand family. She and Kyle had been Tallyrand parents. She and Kyle
were
Tallyrand parents.
WELCOME, TALLYRAND PARENTS
! proclaimed the easel-propped dry-erase board by the library door.

Piper looked around at the other parents, many of them people she knew, noting what an attractive group they comprised, how tidily turned out and uniformly tan. The men had expensive but unflashy watches; the women had expertly summer-streaked hair and manicured toes peeping out of sandals. It was true that three of the women were less than slender. A ten, a ten, and a twelve, Piper estimated. But three out of roughly fifty was certainly not bad, especially when you considered—and Piper never considered this without a shudder—that the average American woman was a fourteen.

Just as she glimpsed her husband entering the library, Piper had a sudden memory of herself playfully slipping on the man’s—the other man’s, the fifteen-years-ago, nameless man’s—white coat, like a robe, going into his bathroom to brush her teeth. She could see the edge of the white coat against her tan, nineteen-year-old thigh. A medical resident. Or perhaps a fellow. Probably a fellow, since Piper had generally chosen men who were considerably older than she and as many removes from her world as possible. An ophthalmologist, she remembered now. He’d made flirtatious jokes—weak but sweet jokes—about looking into her eyes.

Kyle stopped to talk to the headmaster, but met Piper’s gaze across the room. He gave her a look that said “Made it!” She gave him a look that said “Just under the wire.”

Kyle’s job moved in cycles of frantic activity and relative quiet, the vicissitudes of which still eluded Piper, although, a few years ago, she had made one long conversation’s worth of good-faith effort to understand them. She remembered with fondness Kyle’s almost childlike enthusiasm at answering her questions about this mysterious, intricate ebb and flow, but when he’d gotten out a notebook and begun to supplement his information with chartlike hieroglyphs, she’d tuned out. Consequently, Piper was not entirely clear on the reasons for Kyle’s current, prolonged period of busyness, but she found that she didn’t need to understand it in order to find it inconvenient and irritating.

Still, now that Kyle had appeared, she registered his appearance with pleasure. The fine cloth and cut of his shirt, his suit-pant cuffs resting on his shoes in just the right spot, the precise and recent haircut. He was the very picture of a man who’d spent the last nine hours performing a lucrative, enviable job in a tastefully appointed office. And she admired the way these indicators of a well-spent day were balanced by the absence of jacket and tie, the smallest whisper of a five o’clock shadow, the gentle ruffling of his hair, as though he’d run a hand through it in the car on the way to the school.

If he’d shown up in full, polished workday regalia, like a couple of the other men had, Piper would have experienced a distaste bordering on repulsion, but Kyle’s note of unstudied casualness, of not trying too hard was the right note to strike, and Piper loved it when people struck the right note.

This was something Piper kept to herself, knowing that it could make her sound snobbish, which she didn’t so much mind, and also shallow, which she minded more, but she also knew that her love of the right note wasn’t evidence of snobbery or shallowness, not really. While she would never have put it quite this way, for Piper, appropriateness meant the opposite of chaos; Piper’s trust in it was akin to other people’s trust in God.

Just two nights ago she’d woken from one of her usual nightmares—Carter sinking into quicksand or her daughter, Meredith, bouncing out of the convertible Piper drove, vanishing, screaming, over the edge of the roadside cliff—and calmed herself by remembering the socks she’d bought that day. Athletic socks, thin but not too thin, rising to just above the knobby bone of her inner ankle for a slimming effect (not that Piper’s ankles were thick, but she had to admit—not publicly of course—that they were not her best feature), at twelve dollars a pair, expensive but not ridiculously so.

The crowning glory of the socks was their apparent seamlessness. Ever since Piper could remember, she’d hated the sensation of a sock seam across her toes. Her father used to tell stories of an infant Piper tugging at her socks and weeping, and Piper herself vividly remembered slipping into the cloakroom at school, sometimes three times a day, to remove her shoes and twist her socks back to the least uncomfortable position. These new socks were wholly suitable—perfect for kickboxing class, perfect for step class, perfect for jogging on the treadmill—and recalling their suitability, picturing them, four pair, white and folded, like sleeping butterflies, in her drawer, slowed Piper’s racing heart and mind, chased away her terror.

As Kyle approached, Piper stood to greet him. The plastic cup of red wine in his hand precluded a hug—Piper wore white pants—but she smiled at him and gave his arm a squeeze.

“Hey, pretty wife,” he said, “sorry I’m late.”

“You’re not,” said Piper, running a hand along his arm, restoring the crease in his shirtsleeve where she’d squeezed it, “not very. A few minutes. Did you say hello to Bob and Betsy yet? They’re over in the corner, near the early reader shelves. He’s wearing a golf shirt.”

“I just got here, Pipe,” Kyle said, a little wearily.

“A golf shirt,” repeated Piper, musingly. “You think that means he decided to take that early retirement offer?”

“I don’t know. I can ask,” said Kyle. His voice grew vehement. “He’d be a fool not to.”

“Because of that golden parachute, you mean,” said Piper, raising her eyebrows and glancing again at Bob and Betsy. Bob was laughing at something; Piper noticed the pale skin around his eyes, a sunglasses tan.

Kyle looked at Piper. “That, too.”

“It means he’s expendable, though, which has to hurt.” Piper’s gaze drifted over her husband’s shoulder. “Oh, God, there’s Tom,” said Piper. “I should go talk to him. He looks like hell.” Tom Donahue was Piper’s best friend Elizabeth’s husband, and he did look like hell, although there was nothing remarkable about this fact. For months, ever since Elizabeth’s battle with cancer had begun, “like hell” had been Tom Donahue’s standard look.

Piper smiled up at Kyle. “Give Bob and Betsy my best? Tell them we’ll do dinner soon. Okay? We’ll throw something on the grill. They’re over near the early reader books.” She gave him a tiny push in the proper direction. “Okay?”

Kyle took a long sip of his wine, and his eyes did the squinting thing they did when he was thinking of something else. Fleetingly, it occurred to Piper that Kyle’s eyes had been doing the squinting thing a lot lately. If she didn’t know him better, if she’d been a different kind of wife, she might suspect that he was harboring secrets. The thought of Kyle with a secret life was so preposterous that it made Piper smile. Kyle noticed the smile, smiled back, and said, “Okay, honey. Will do.”

Piper made her way over to Tom, who still stood just inside the library entrance, his arms hanging at his sides, his shoulders slightly hunched, and Piper couldn’t stand it that he stood that way, couldn’t stand the way he drew in breath after deep breath, as though he were preparing to swim the English Channel instead of to step into an ordinary room full of people he knew.

For God’s sake,
thought Piper,
would you pull yourself together?

All the women Piper knew agreed that Tom Donahue was a good-looking guy. He had a slightly-too-long, angular face—a face that would look at home under a cowboy hat in an old Western—offset by big, winsome blue eyes, baby’s eyes almost, with long, thick lashes. But when Elizabeth got sick—as soon as she was diagnosed, Piper thought bitterly, on the way home in the goddamn car—he’d begun to lose weight, to appear almost monstrously gaunt and hollow-eyed and lost. Defeated, Piper thought. Walking around the house with defeat written all over him, while his wife fought the battle of her life, a battle that wasn’t over, not by a long shot.

“Tom touches me like I’m made of glass,” Elizabeth had told her a few weeks ago.

Piper had followed Elizabeth’s gaze out her kitchen window to the backyard, where the sprinkler swept its great fan of water back and forth with languorous grace. Like a dancer, thought Piper, like a manta ray. The sprinkler’s beauty made her want to cry.

She’d looked at Elizabeth, wondering if she’d noticed the sprinkler, too. But Elizabeth was running a finger around the rim of her teacup. “Not just like I’m fragile, but like I’m made of something besides flesh and blood. Like I’ve already turned into something else.” Elizabeth paused. “Although he’s probably not thinking that. Probably it’s just the way he makes me feel.”

Suddenly, Piper had felt so angry she couldn’t speak. Silently, she’d swooped up their two cups of the vomit-tasting, curative tea some college friend had sent Elizabeth, strode over to the sink, and emptied them with vigor, the green-brown splashes ugly and dramatic against the white porcelain. Piper had stared into the sink for a long moment, then had turned around, smiled at Elizabeth, and said brightly, “Someone had to put that tea out of our misery.”

When she saw Tom standing in the school library like a tired, frightened old man, the anger flared again, fresh and hot, but Piper felt people watching. She was aware of all those eyes full of sympathy for Tom.
Poor bastard,
thought the men.
Poor sweet man,
thought the women. Piper could almost hear the words.

“Elizabeth’s the one who’s sick,” she wanted to tell them all, “and she’s getting better.” She wanted to scream it, but instead she gave Tom a reassuring hug, then took his arm and led him into the room. Piper felt the eyes on her now, imagined the voices saying, “Piper’s been a rock for that family,” and despite her anger and her huge, genuine worry, she felt a twinge of pleasure.

She walked Tom over to the long table at one end of the room and poured him a cup of wine. Tom thanked her, took the cup, and was about to sip from it when he noticed the poster hanging over the table. An illustration of two pigs in party hats and a parrot hovering between them against a yellow background.

“I recognize that,” he said, quietly. “I think my kids have that book.”

“Toot and Puddle,” supplied Piper. Probably every woman in the room would recognize those pigs, she thought. “And Tulip. The parrot’s name is Tulip.”

Tom knitted his brows, then shook his head mournfully. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said with heavy consternation.

Piper resisted a strong, sudden urge to punch Tom in the stomach or at least give his upper arm a hard, twisting pinch the way her mother had done whenever Piper had acted up in public. A grown man getting maudlin about a pair of pigs and a parrot.
Lighten the fuck up,
thought Piper.

“No worries,” said Piper, with a light laugh. “Kyle wouldn’t know Toot and Puddle from the Cat in the Hat. And he might not know the Cat in the Hat.”

Tom turned his sad eyes on Piper. “Elizabeth does most of the reading out loud around our house,” he said, bleakly. “She does voices and everything.”

Piper would’ve socked him then, she was sure of it, but at that moment the headmaster, Rupert “Roop” Patterson, a short man with a thunderous voice, bellowed cheerfully, “I hate to interrupt this good time, but the prekindergarten teachers have put together a short presentation on what your children can expect over the next year. It’ll make you wish you were four years old again, I guarantee it!”

Tom looked at his watch. “How long is this supposed to take?” he asked Piper. “The sitter needs to be home by nine o’clock.”

Piper was the one who felt socked. “You got a sitter?” she said, biting out the words, one by one. “Did Elizabeth ask you to?”

There was no sign that Tom had picked up on her tone. “No. I just called her. Abby Lau. We usually use her sister Lauren, but she broke a tooth this morning. She was playing tennis. It’s Abby’s first babysitting job, but she seems very mature for her age. Has to be home early though.”

Grimly, Piper took hold of Tom’s elbow and steered him toward the seats.

“How do you break a tooth playing tennis?” mused Tom, shaking his head.

With an intense concentration of effort, Piper loosened her grip on his elbow. “I cannot imagine,” she said.

It happened again in the middle of the pre-K presentation. Just as the teachers were beginning to describe the road to reading readiness, the ophthalmologist’s back reappeared, pushed its way through years and years to arrive still damp, the muscles finely articulated and breathtakingly symmetrical. So breathtakingly symmetrical that, before she could stop herself, Piper gasped.