Monday's Lie (22 page)

After the birth-control saga and the electrocuted embarrassment of the tandem-texted butterfly photo, I had no appetite for dealing with whatever I might find, so instead, I let myself get distracted over Brian Menary and remembered that Pat's ego had taken a hammering. I had given it a pass, albeit perhaps one with an expiration date.

But now I was being followed, and Patrick had inserted unknown plans into my itinerary for the coming weekend. I had my own wrung-out concerns to wrangle. For my purposes, his track record of wandering-eye syndrome would smooth the way to news I
did
want at the moment, news that my brother could get for me.

“You think this is her car?” Simon's voice yanked me back to my quest.

“Um, yeah. Maybe.”

“Your pauses are the worst, Dee. Might as well hold up a sign—
THE NEXT THING I SAY WILL BE DODGY
.”

“No, I don't know whose car it is.”

“Are you worried?”

“Not particularly.” Lie, but no pause for me this time. I wouldn't be caught out twice. Not in the same conversation. He took a turn at dead air.

“Simon, I really need you to respect my privacy on this. I'm embarrassed as hell at how my life is turning out. And you pointing out the other night that it's probably all ruined anyway no matter what I do—it just didn't help. You made me feel like an idiot. This is hard enough without you judging me. Just let me handle this mess my own way, okay?”

It was a bit of a low blow, but it was the truth, if not the entire truth.

“Wow. You know I didn't mean to hurt you with that,” he said.

“Didn't you?”

“No! Of course not. He's the one who should get hurt.”

“And your sister's self-respect just got caught in your cross fire?”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“All right, I'll do it.” He was now squarely trapped into making amends. They should all be so easy. “I'll do it if you promise me that you'll ask for my help just before you're one hundred percent sure that you need it.”

I smiled into the phone and felt our mother smiling with me. To her, swaggering past rational fear was the greatest folly of all. It was a betrayal of the instinct she'd constantly groomed in us. She'd say,
Don't be stupid. Under the guillotine, you're only one hundred percent sure the blade has dropped when your severed head is staring back at its stump.

“Why do you pretend she didn't train us up like good little soldiers?” My voice caught on the sentiment.

“What's the license number, Plucky?” His voice was as thick as mine.

I
knew
the very moment I laid eyes on Patrick when he came through the door that I didn't want him back. I didn't want to salvage the life we'd had, and I'd already done the last double-back to make up with him that I would ever do.

I did want more information, though. I wanted to know what he was up to for Saturday, and I wanted to understand why. But I knew that I was no longer interested in fixing things between us.

Then I realized I had known it an hour earlier when I'd changed clothes.

I'd put up with Victor to get into my office, blessedly too swamped with a gaggle of new interns to give me much of a hassle, but I didn't make it through the day there. I claimed a migraine and left early. I didn't suffer from migraines, but no one seemed to mark my inaugural complaint with anything more than distracted tut-tutting and standard government-issue sympathy.

I tried running errands. I bought a roll of stamps we didn't need. I gassed up the car and took advantage of the pennies-per-gallon discount for adding in a wash with my fill-up. It was only practical. So, the car was clean and I'd shaved another four minutes off my spinning. The grocery store was stocked with not a single appetizing thing, and I had looked over each aisle with care, so I left with only two bottles of the pricey pinot noir that Patrick bought whenever he was in a particularly good mood.

At home, an inadvertent glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror pulled me off the track I'd been wearing into the hallway floor, zipping back and forth—with a haul of collected garbage, with a two-course trip for all the recycling, with a pass of the dust broom, and now with a load of laundry.

I'd run out of frantic busywork at the office. Hence the phantom migraine and, ultimately, the shiftless drifting from room to room back at home. Onward and upward, the house would be tidied all the way to the baseboards at the pace I'd stirred up. By God and by elbow grease, I'd get control of myself. I would have order, but the mirror showed that it would come at some great cost to any chance of being taken seriously. Patrick would come home to a madwoman looking every bit the part.

A tuft of my ponytail had tried for a jailbreak but hadn't made it past a hairy hiccup on the top of my head. Blurred mascara ringed my startled eyes. My face was a waxy mask the color of bad news. And for the finale, a splotchy flush blazed up from the neckline of my shirt. I'd be lucky to fetch even a sympathy point.

The clock showed that a hurry would make me presentable by the time Patrick got home, but as I reached for one fragrant bottle after another in the shower, the choir of butterflies in my middle hunkered down, quiet and wary, almost of their own accord. The calm soaked into me with the creams and lotions, settling my stampeding pulse with a false pharmacy of lanolin and lavender. I was changing the script as I went, with strange clockworks shifting to the foreground in my mind, recommending new lines for me to speak, and new responses to expect.

I stole peeks at the transformation in the mirror. It was safer to give all the credit to the drugstore potions. Otherwise, there was no way to deny a hatching was going on, an unfurling that would not fold back into its box anytime soon. With every swipe of the brushes and with each stroke of powdered color, everything that had been rattling inside me stilled and cooled.

I went into the closet with a mind to put on the jade blouse that always earned compliments from Patrick. It was my go-to power shirt, the one I didn't merely wear, but rocked. I loved the green blouse. Or I had.

I stared at my reflection again and tried to remember a time that the green blouse had worked any magic. I turned to the side, shook out my shoulders, and relaxed the edge off my rigid, green-blouse-makes-me-fierce posture. But it was practically pulsing its greenness into the room. I wasn't Dee wearing a green blouse, I was a green blouse with an agenda to keep Dee from being naked. I hated it.

I wadded it into the wastebasket and took up a black, long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. Now the mirror didn't shout green. It didn't shout anything at all, which was a relief. I straightened up to find I owned a fierce-is-in-my-back-pocket-if-I-need-it posture that was, while not exactly familiar, very suitable. No sympathy point would be needed. And no automatic two-tenths deduction for trying too hard.

“Fuck it,” I said to the mirror, and went to open Patrick's wine.

•  •  •

I was deep into the second glass and also deep into the big armchair in the living room, legs tucked under me, when Patrick finally came through the door.

“Hey,” I said neutrally. I took a deep breath, committed to not raising my voice.

“Whoa! Crap. You scared me.”

With no inflection of pleading, I said, “Come give me a kiss.”

“What? Why are you sitting in the dark?” He flipped up the switch for the overhead lights.

“I didn't need a light. I was just sitting here thinking. Thinking about you. And waiting for you to come home.” I nodded at the low table in front of me and at the bottle with its empty, expectant glass beside it. “I bought that wine you like. Have some. One good turn deserving another and all that. You did me a favor today with the car, and we're speaking actual words for the first time in a few days. So let's end this. Right now. Let's just take the shortcut. To hell with it. Kiss me and I'll pour you a glass of wine and we can get on with our lives.”

I knew he wouldn't do it. There wasn't a kiss to be had, for love nor money, anywhere in our emotional zip code. But no matter . . .

“Just like that, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. Why not?”

“Because I'm tired, that's why not. And you're being weird. Give me some space, Dee.”

“Have you been smoking?”

“What? No!”

“I can smell it.”

“No, you can't. You know that Darren smokes around me during the day. You're just needling me.”

In my best impression of my mother's measured tones, I asked, “Do I do that? Do you feel needled and hassled, or are you just assigning me random faults so that you can stay mad at me for, what, ever?”

“Well, I'm certainly feeling hassled right now. I don't kiss you on command and suddenly I'm getting analyzed before I can even take my jacket off ?”

“By all means, take your jacket off.”

He did. He set down his computer case, where it slumped against the table's leg. His jacket went over the back of a chair. When he didn't make a move toward the wine, I did it for him and offered up the filled glass. He let me sit there, arm extended for a few beats longer than it took indecision to crest over into outright rudeness.

“No, thanks,” he said finally.

“You might as well.” I set the glass on the table in front of the chair. “We need to talk.”

“I don't feel like talking, Dee. It's been a long day and I just want to relax for a little while and then go to bed. That will go a lot farther in getting us back to normal than you dolling up and staging an intervention.”

Dolling up
? I wondered what the green blouse would have bought or cost me.

“We're not going to drag this out,” I said.

“Right. Because you say so.”

“No, because I've put a lawyer on retainer,” I lied.

In the span of Patrick's tardiness, while I'd sipped the wine that I was at first sure I'd bought for him, I decided to give him a dose of what he didn't even know he'd served up that morning. If he had orchestrated a private investigator and a legal ambush for my spa day, it might help me get a little of my own back if I caught him out of play here at home this evening.

Whatever else, I needed him to react. I needed to take the temperature of his surprise, or to shake loose a bread crumb to track back from. He was going to be, at the very least, furious. And I'd known now for five minutes that I couldn't care less.

Recklessness reaped what recklessness generally sows. Patrick simply freaked out.

“You did
what
?” He took what should have been the two full strides between us in a single leap. He had me by the shoulders and pulled halfway out of my chair before I could put down my wine. “You did
what
?” he bellowed again as my glass arced through the air and splash-thumped into the carpet. “What did you do, Dee? Why did you talk to a lawyer?”

I was unprepared for the bright, sparking outrage that surged through me. In more than thirteen years together my husband had touched me in affection (even of the manufactured variety) or not at all. We didn't snuggle without its signaling sex. We didn't casually hold hands. We didn't roughhouse, wrestle, or push each other into the pool. And the thing was, I didn't know which of us wasn't the cuddly one. His fingers crushing bruises into my arms put us instantly into unmapped territory. Into unimagined territory.

This was only one of several scattered thoughts and revelations cast off as the lava swell of fury carried me the rest of the way to my feet, clutched and struggling in Patrick's clawed hands. Also noted was that Patrick wasn't just angry, he was terrified. And PS, the carpet's ruined. Monday got a subtab for Monday Night.

“Are you out of your mind? Let me go!” I shouted.

“What have you done?” He shook me with each word and then flung me out of his grip. He raked his hands through his hair.

Either he was terribly, explosively even, distressed at the prospect of losing me, or—as I'd tried to avoid knowing all day—I was very wide of the bull's-eye on what was happening in my life. I stepped back from him and put myself close enough to the chair to jump behind it should I be unable to wiggle off this powder keg before another eruption from Patrick.

“Jesus, Pat. I didn't do anything yet.”

“Tell me exactly what you said to him. And how much you paid him.” Patrick was pale and panting. He was wilting before my eyes.

I split the lie in half. In truth, I hadn't even thought to pick up the sharp stick I'd just poked him with. There was no lawyer. I'd never made the call. I'd only invented the scenario at the top of the second glass of wine. Not that I'd backpedal that far now.

“It was a
her
not a
him
.” I made it up as I went. “And I didn't actually make the call or give her any money. I didn't even actually talk to her. I only looked into it.”

“Have you told everybody that you're leaving me? Is that it? Am I the last asshole to know?”

“Patrick, I'm just trying to get you to talk to me. I exaggerated about the lawyer just now because you won't get into what's going on with us. You are out of my reach. You're either angry or spacing out—all the time—and I can't take it anymore. I haven't packed my bags or anything. But neither have you, right?
Right?
And when have I ever, since you've known me,
ever
aired my personal business to anyone. It's not exactly in my blood, now is it?”

“What about Simon?”

“What about him?”

“Does he hate me?”

“No.” It wasn't a lie and it wasn't the full truth. Simon would put up with whatever I would from Patrick. As such, his attachment was all but over, but that little detail didn't feel useful for Patrick to have at this point in the conversation.