Married Sex (11 page)

Chapter 25

When an animal in the woods gets sick, it goes deeper into the woods, burrows in, and sleeps. It stays asleep, as much as possible, until healed. With Blair gone, I followed animal wisdom: Lay low, keep quiet.

So in October, all my nights were one night, the same night. The dining room was my default location. A goose-neck lamp cast a pool of light as I typed on a laptop. Mozart horn concertos suggested order. And there was order: no open Chinese restaurant takeout boxes, no pyramid of empty beer cans, no ashtray overflowing with cigar stubs.

In other circumstances, this might be a picture of a man in the throes of creative effort. Sadly, this is a picture of a man churning out emails that couldn't be sent:

Blair—I know we said you'd contact me first …

Blair—Shouldn't have looked through the photo
albums, but …

Blair—So I went to the Met. And there did see a painting …

Blair—“If equal affection cannot be,” Auden wrote …

Oh, Blair, sweet Blair, I …

Unproductive then and embarrassing now. In my defense, when I wrote these blasts, I thought I'd print them out and bind them—a record of a sad season. To be shared with Blair or not, depending.

On the plus side, I ran in the morning and again at night. I took on a pro bono case—a mother of two married to such a monster that a protection order wasn't sufficient and I had to move her to another city. I opened more doors for the infirm and elderly, was more generous in my thanks for services, noticed the city's castoffs and peeled off dollar bill after dollar bill.

Along the way, I achieved a modest balance. I wasn't a man who pimped his wife, a man unworthy of love. There had been more hands than just mine on the tiller. Blame was a luxury. A postmortem had no point. Survival was victory. I had twinges, but most of the time, I wasn't beating myself up.

La Rochefoucauld: “No man can look long upon the sun or death.”

In late October, I labored to be his Exhibit A.

Chapter 26

But I regressed.

She called herself Madame Bovary. I hadn't read the novel in decades, but I remembered the carriage ride, curtains down, Bovary and her lover scandalously having at it.

There were many other Manhattan women on the cheaters' website. Their pseudonyms were more to the point: ChasteOne, 38Dee, CumHere. Madame Bovary was the only name that suggested this woman had read a book between trysts. That affinity sufficed.

Using the confidential messaging form on the cheaters' site, I gave myself the name of a lawyer who became a bestselling author—John Grisham—and began a conversation:

JOHN GRISHAM:
In the novel, she kills herself. When you chose the name, did you think of that?

MADAME BOVARY:
Of course. She dies alone. No worries for you.

JOHN GRISHAM:
I don't wish to contribute to your demise.

MADAME BOVARY:
Don't flatter yourself. There were others before you. There will be more after.

JOHN GRISHAM:
Who are you?

MADAME BOVARY:
Your mirror. Married, not happily.

JOHN GRISHAM:
I'm happily married.

MADAME BOVARY:
Please.

JOHN GRISHAM:
Happily married with a temporary bump.

MADAME BOVARY:
Never done this before, I see.

JOHN GRISHAM:
How can you tell?

MADAME BOVARY:
The clichés. Repeaters are slicker. Funnier.

JOHN GRISHAM:
So I'm green. School me.

MADAME BOVARY:
Height. Weight. Age. Income.

JOHN GRISHAM:
5'9”. 175. 46. None of your business. Who are you?

MADAME BOVARY:
A woman who'd respond to a guy who calls himself John Grisham. Whom I admire. He's our Dickens.

JOHN GRISHAM:
You write?

MADAME BOVARY:
Between patients. I'm a psychiatrist.

JOHN GRISHAM:
What brings you here?

MADAME BOVARY:
I'm looking for a lover who knows enough to do one thing slowly. Know what I mean?

JOHN GRISHAM:
Yes. If you do that, it feels like the energy … builds.

MADAME BOVARY:
Exactly. So I like him to start with his hand between my legs. And just … hold it.

JOHN GRISHAM:
I do that.

MADAME BOVARY:
And then I like it when he puts his arm there.

JOHN GRISHAM:
I can do that.

MADAME BOVARY:
And then I like the tip of his tongue just touching me.

JOHN GRISHAM:
Emma, what do you look like?

MADAME BOVARY:
Under oath, Mr. Grisham? For 50, I'm hot.

JOHN GRISHAM:
I'd like specifics.

MADAME BOVARY:
Standard Hotel. Tomorrow. 5:30 p.m. Ask for Bovary.

JOHN GRISHAM:
Isn't that the hotel where couples leave the curtains open so people on the High Line can watch them?

MADAME BOVARY:
It is. And if you're willing to do it in the window, I'll let you have my ass.

Those words stopped me. As a sentence—words in combination—and as an idea. A wall of windows. A woman, standing parallel to the window, leaning over. A man, lubricated, slipping inside. The woman, breathing into the pain. Or welcoming it. The warmth. The tightness.

Bovary knew exactly what the pause in my typing meant.

MADAME BOVARY:
I'm talking about the thing your wife doesn't let you do, am I right? Or she did before you got married but won't now. The thing you most want …

JOHN GRISHAM:
Emma, you're out of my league. I'm sorry.

I left the cheaters' site. Didn't return. In this world, I'm an amateur, and glad about it.

Chapter 27

A key turned. The front door opened. I switched from my evening ritual—unsent email to Blair—to a law blog I kept open in hopeful anticipation of this very moment. I pretended to be absorbed. I rehearsed surprise.

“Daddy!”

I was instantly laid low. And, just as fast, revived. Ann is the daughter every parent dreams of and we got. Colic as an infant and no trouble after that. Really, none. Great grades, good at sports, author of alternately funny and outraged editorials in the school paper. She's in the center of every class picture. She's the one reaching out to the new scholarship kids from the Bronx. The food drive at Thanksgiving, the soup kitchen not just at Christmas, building a house in Haiti in the blast furnace of summer—that's Ann.

Ann is beautiful but doesn't grasp it, and if anyone insists that she is, she's confused—she understands beauty to be about cosmetics, and she uses none. There's her mother's brightness and curiosity in the eyes, her mother's skin, her mother's effortless athleticism. Like her mother, Ann's clothes—jeans, a sweater, J.Crew barn jacket—are cared for but not fussed over.

Her mother's child.

A whirl of motion. I jumped up, she dropped her backpack, we hugged, I pulled away to look at her, she grabbed me again, and we stood that way for some time, two hearts beating fast.

“I had to come,” she whispered.

“Why?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“I talked to Mom.”

“What did she say?”

“That you're taking a break until Thanksgiving.”

“We are.”

“That seemed strange.”

“What?”

“That she'd move out. What happened?”

“Something small and stupid and all my fault.”

“I can believe that,” Ann said.

I realized I'd been holding on to my daughter literally “for dear life.” I liberated her, weak with relief—Blair hadn't told Ann about the threesome and what it had led to. And she wouldn't. Whatever we'd done to each other, we wouldn't spill the damage into Ann's life.

I couldn't say what, but there was something different about Ann now, something acquired at college in two short months. How could that have happened? You watch her change and chart her growth for eighteen years, and suddenly she's left home, and you're not sure you shouldn't introduce yourself and start over.

“Hungry?” I asked.

“I had something on the train.”

“I'd love an omelet. You?”

She nodded, and we moved to the kitchen.

“You look … great,” I said, as I busied myself with eggs and cheese.

“You too,” she said, a little too quickly.

“One of us is lying.”

Before I made the omelets, I reached for the coffee grinder and beans.

“Could I have hot chocolate?” Ann asked.

A small surprise. Ann is, like me, a coffee snob.

“I haven't seen you drink hot chocolate since that snowstorm,” I said, foraging in the cabinet. “How long ago was that?”

“I was fourteen. We walked in the park all the way to the Boathouse.”

“We sat at the bar. You thought you were so big.”

“What a joke,” Ann said. “The waitress wore a white blouse and a black bra, and I said she must be French. And you agreed.”

“She wasn't?”

“Brooklyn.” She punched me. “As you remember.”

“I loved walking with you in that storm,” I said. “But really, what
don't
I love about you?”

“The perks of an only child.”

We talked about Tufts and her courses and why she wasn't running cross-country and how studying international relations and diplomacy was like splitting the difference between her father, who gets warring parties permanently separated, and her mother, who builds relationships. We talked about her high school friends and how they were adjusting to college. We kicked some politicians around, and she brought me up-to-date on new music.

Then it was late. One more thing to say. I'd been avoiding it.

“About Thanksgiving. If you want to bring someone home and are now thinking maybe that's not a good idea … it's a good idea.”

“Waifs and strays?” Ann asked.

“All your loser friends.”

In the movie version, Ann pretends to wince at my bad, old joke, punches me and hugs me, and goes to her room to play music too loud. And in the final shot of that scene, as good old dad starts to wash the dishes, he smiles, as if to say: I am halfway to okay.

In real life, Ann dropped the mask.

First, the setup. “If I bring my friends home, how do I know it won't be
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
?”

“Your mother and I are fine,” I said. “This is just a … moment.”

Now the knife: “Why was Mom choked-up on the phone?”

There was nothing I could say.

The first thrust: “If your dog was in that kind of pain, you'd put it down!”

“We're not … in touch,” I said. “I didn't know.”

“You didn't know you hurt her?”

“I do know that.”

“What did she ever do to you?
What
?
”

If I could have said anything, it would have been something like … well, I don't know. How do you tell your daughter you're sorry for what you and her mother did in bed?

Chapter 28

And on the 22nd day … Blair sent me a midafternoon instant message. I had to smile; instant messaging is archaic. Who uses instant messages these days? Older people, when they need to communicate more than location and mood and when their kids aren't around to mock them.

BLAIR:
I hurt. I'm not blaming you. As they say: “No victims, only volunteers.” I didn't see that for so long. Now I do. Not that I'm “a finely tuned instrument”—forgive­ ­me for that. When I said it, I was in crazy pain. I'm better now. I acknowledge my complicity. Boy, do I have work to do. And so do you, because, over years, small, persistent wrongs have a cumulative effect: blunt force trauma. And I love you.

A first-draft, top-of-the-head blast? Not close. It had the force of weeks of thought. But it called for an immediate response.

ME:
Pleased to hear from you. Can we talk?

BLAIR:
Not today. Your voice would unnerve me.

ME:
We could meet. Wear dark shades. Pass notes.

BLAIR:
To what point?

ME:
Broker a peace treaty. Discuss our child. Or make out under the bleachers. Whichever comes first.

BLAIR:
You'll be pleased to know I rapped Ann's knuckles
.

ME:
She's just a kid.

BLAIR:
This isn't her business. She's being a moralizing little brat. And she's rewriting family history—remember, in the Bahamas, when Kenny Klein was driving the boat, and he went faster and faster?

ME:
Ann was scared. I asked him to slow down.

BLAIR:
And Kenny said, “She's got a life vest. Even if I flip the boat, she'll be alright.” Ann sobbed and sobbed. You grabbed the wheel and stopped the boat
.

ME:
He never talked to me again
.

BLAIR:
Ann now tells it like she got hysterical and Kenny stopped only because she begged him.

ME:
Weak, irresponsible dad.

BLAIR:
Who never put her arm around her. Who never told her she was safe as long as you were in this world.

ME:
Doesn't matter.

BLAIR:
It does. Whatever our differences, you're a great dad.

ME:
Thanks. Right now I only care about getting my wife's chin off the table.

BLAIR
(ignoring me):
I've got to return to my regular scheduled programming.

ME:
Will you think I'm “controlling” if I suggest a book?

BLAIR:
Sigh
.

ME:
When Things Fall Apart
, by Pema Chödrön.

BLAIR:
Can you just summarize his message?

ME:
Her
message.

BLAIR:
A female writer. How like you.

ME:
I'm ignoring that. Here's a story she tells: A poor family had a son they loved beyond measure. He was thrown from a horse and crippled. Two weeks later, the army came to the village and took every able-bodied man to fight in the war. The young man was allowed to stay behind with his family.

BLAIR:
So?

ME:
For Pema Chödrön, that's the moral: “Life is like that.We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.”

BLAIR
(after ten seconds of silence):
Well, that's where I'm at. I don't
know
.

ME:
I'm there too.