Other People We Married (3 page)

“But what if it could actually work? There have to be exceptions, right? Some people must really fall in love,” I said, thinking about something I’d read about Dolly Parton’s
husband and how he’s never seen her without makeup and how she has to go to award shows by herself because he doesn’t like the spotlight. That was weird, but it worked for them.

“Well,” Jeff said. “There was the one guy in ninth grade who let me jerk him off in the broom closet.”

That made us both chuckle into our drinks for a minute. The bar was getting more crowded; it was time to go. “So, Jeff, why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

He smiled. “I do have a boyfriend. David Bernard, history.”

“With the… from the seventh floor?!” David Bernard was shorter than I was and completely bald. His head gleamed. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Jeff stood up and dropped a few bills onto the bar. “Because, Amy, you never asked.” He was still smiling as he led me out the way we’d come in.

Martin didn’t sound as surprised to hear from me as I thought he would—he was used to the protocol. We agreed to meet at his house for dinner. Martin lived on the other side of town, where most of the professors lived. His house was on one of the nicer streets, one that faced a nature preserve and a lake that rented paddleboats in the summer. Laura and Brian were looking at a condo nearby. I slowed down and checked the mailboxes for his number.

Both the inside and outside lights were on, so I could see the house clearly. Martin was considerate that way. A flagstone path led up to the door. I could hear some jazz playing
inside, and I waited for a minute before ringing the bell. I’d shaved my legs and worn a skirt.

Martin opened the door promptly. He had an apron tied around his narrow waist, and he patted his hands dry on it before pulling me close for a kiss on the cheek. He hadn’t been divorced long.

The living room was dominated by tasteful objects—pieces of art from other countries, lots of rugs. It was the house where a grown-up lived. He brought me a glass of white wine—dinner was almost ready. We ate sitting on pillows beside a low table. Martin had spent a few weeks in Japan a decade ago. It was where he’d met his wife—on the same tour of a temple outside Tokyo. Some things just stuck, he said.

When his clothes were off, Martin’s body looked exactly the way I expected, but with all the unforeseeable eccentricities of a human body—a freckle here, a birthmark, tufts of colorful hair. We didn’t talk about whether or not it was a good idea, or whether or not I was on birth control. We weren’t drunk. It was just two people doing something that people do. I thought about Jeff and a straight boy hiding in a broom closet. Just because something was impossible didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. I thought about Paul’s shoulders and nose, and my bare skin prickled. Maybe Martin wouldn’t mind growing his hair out a little on the sides, maybe if it was longer it would look a little thicker. Maybe Martin had his own paddleboat and could use the lake whenever he wanted—maybe he could teach me some words in Japanese and the best way to use friction in various circumstances. When it was over, I went home.

*  *  *

Laura took me to the mall—now that I was seeing someone, it was time for a new look, she said. She’d seen a show on cable where these two good-looking fashion experts threw away everything in a woman’s closet and then made her buy what they told her to. She said it was just what I needed, plus some new underwear. New underwear was important.

“Do you have any thongs?” Laura asked. “Boy shorts?”

“Are you speaking English?” The walls were pink—it was like being inside a gumball machine. The sexy stuff was in the back, Laura said, pulling my arm.

I saw Paul before I heard him—he was walking down the main aisle of the mall with two other boys, boys just like him, only less advanced. I shoved the small pile of underwear into Laura’s hands and rushed outside, ducking slightly behind a large potted plant. The three boys vanished into a clothing store that looked like a nightclub—a dark-paneled fake porch swallowed them. Posters of larger-than-life disembodied torsos flexed and shone like diamonds, beveled to the point of unassailable perfection.

Laura appeared beside me, clutching a plastic shopping bag. “What the hell?” she said. “Panties are your friend.”

“Shush!” I clamped my hand over her mouth and pulled her down next to me. Our knees rested uncomfortably against the large ceramic pot. The green stalks growing out of it were plastic.

Paul and his friends reemerged. He was chewing gum and wearing shorts. This is what he would be like, I thought, if we
never had anywhere to be, if we were always on vacation. I didn’t care what Laura thought. I wasn’t even in the mall anymore, I was somewhere else. I was in my forties, in my fifties. I was in the grocery store and bumping into Paul. We were exchanging phone numbers, two grown-ups. It happened all the time.

C
laire didn’t want to tell her husband that she’d called a pet psychic. Matt was a lawyer and scoffed easily. She told him that Vivian was a friend from her postnatal yoga class, and wasn’t he always saying she should have more friends? Matt was glad that the cat was gone, Claire could tell. He’d helped her put up the flyers in the neighborhood: up one street and down the next, but his heart wasn’t in it. Rosemary was not an easy cat to love, but that was no excuse. As Claire sometimes liked to say, she’d been sleeping with Rosemary ten years longer than she’d been sleeping with Matt, so it was just something he was going to have to deal with. It was a permanent relationship. Claire expected tears.

Rosemary had been missing for four days before Claire found Vivian’s name on a flyer at the yoga studio on Court Street.

“Are you full of shit?” is the first thing Claire said. Vivian said no. “Then can you help me find my cat?” Claire burst into tears, but Vivian remained calm, and asked if she could take notes. That was how Claire knew that Vivian was a professional.

“Let me come over,” Vivian said. “And look at some of Rosemary’s things. Then we can get started.” They made an appointment.

The baby hadn’t been sleeping well. Claire was sure he could sense that something was amiss. Could babies smell fear, or was that just dogs? Surely they had formed some kind of bond when Sebastian was in the womb, when Rosemary used to drape her thin black frame around Claire’s rising middle. Before they moved to Cobble Hill, Claire and Matt talked about real estate as much as they talked about themselves. Who were they, they would ask: a one bedroom with an office? A half bath? Were they a decorative fireplace or a breakfast bar? When Claire got pregnant, things got more clear. They were a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath co-op on the garden floor of a brownstone. Rosemary could lie in the sun, the bricks baking her black fur. They were a family of four. Everything was going to be perfect, just like in a magazine: glossy and impossible.

Vivian came over on a Thursday. They sat at the kitchen table and drank decaffeinated tea. Rosemary had been gone six days. Claire had Sebastian strapped to her chest, face out. He was sixteen weeks.

“So how does this work?” Claire said. She and Sebastian
had the same green eyes, the same thin, dark hair. Claire was pleased that the baby looked more like her—was it fair the other way around? She couldn’t imagine carrying a bowling ball for nine months just to have it come out looking like someone else. This was the point of having a baby: a tiny, growing mirror.

“Tea is good,” Vivian said. She wrapped her hands around the mug and smiled. Vivian was small and had olive skin; she was from somewhere else, somewhere outside the five boroughs even. Just moving to Brooklyn had been big for Claire. Her friends and whatnot. But Vivian was from even farther afield. She had a scar on her arm from an old-fashioned inoculation. Claire had been careful about those with Sebastian, and now she wondered about everyone else’s parents, how they could have been so negligent. She was sure that even then, there had been options.

Claire chose another tack. “Do you like the kitchen? We just had it redone. The travertine used to be marble. I think it looks more modern this way, don’t you? It was so eighties. And the backsplash tiles were actually in a subway station. Somewhere in Brooklyn, I think. They were reclaimed.” One of the few times that Claire’s father came to the house, he promptly spilled a glass of cabernet on the white slipcovers in the living room. Now she tried to keep people in the kitchen, where the surfaces were easier to clean.

Vivian nodded patiently. “Let’s talk about Rosemary,” she said. Her eyes fixed on Claire’s in a focused staring contest. She took a box of tissues out of her shoulder bag and put it between them, one fluffy Kleenex already poking through the top of the box.

“Okay,”
Claire said, “but before we start, I want you to know I still think this is all totally ridiculous.”

“You called me,” Vivian said. “Let’s just see what I can do.” She leaned back in her chair, patient. Sebastian kicked his feet with approval.

When Matt came home from work, Claire waited to see how long it would take him to remember that she’d had a date, that she’d done something with her day. It took almost an hour. He was practically asleep, and on his second glass of sauvignon blanc.

“Oh!” he said, instantly pleased with himself. “How was your yoga friend, whatshername?”

“Vivian.” Claire crossed her arms. The baby was already asleep. She felt almost weightless without his solid body resting against her.

“Whad did you girls do? Some chanting?” Matt made little peace signs with his fingers and closed his eyes. The TV barked something about the stock market and his eyes flipped back open. One thing Claire had actively wanted to avoid was the Dad Chair, which was inevitably at the head of the table, looking straight at the television. She hadn’t noticed until Matt became a dad that this had, in fact, been waiting to happen for all five years of their relationship.

“No, no chanting.”

“Huh, oh well. Have fun, though?” Matt didn’t take his eyes off the screen. It was blue and pulsing, the visual equivalent of a shout.

“Yup. Sebastian likes her.” Claire waited. Sure enough, as
though she were watching her words flit through the air and slowly drift down into his ears, Matt turned her way.

“Sebastian?” he said, as though the name alone were a question.

Claire wanted to know how it all worked. She made Vivian explain. Few of her clients worked regular hours, and so Vivian spent most of her days going from house to house. Not that she discriminated; she could just as easily go to their offices. There were often secretaries who would close the door. You’d be surprised who believed in what, given unforeseen circumstances. Guys in suits. The woman who cleaned the yoga studio. It took all kinds. Mostly though, Vivian admitted, it was women like Claire. Pretty and bored, with husbands who were usually somewhere else. Vivian didn’t use the word
bored
, but Claire heard it in her voice. It wasn’t unlike therapy.

Everyone’s first question was, Is he okay? Vivian looked at people’s belongings, at their clothes, at the framed photographs on their desks and in their hallways. She’d pet the hairy, matted cushions and the dented spots on the couch. She could always start there. Then the client would sit with their hands over their mouth, give the occasional nod, and try not to cry.

Sebastian’s room was blue: cerulean, not navy. Nothing nautical. Nothing that would make him want to join the army or play with slingshots. The decorator had been very helpful in that regard, assisting Claire in the decoding of paint chips.
People fought more in yellow rooms, everyone knew that. But there were other clues, too. The color of the walls was as important as prenatal classical music and talking through the belly button. Sebastian was very lucky to have her. Claire was doing everything right.

Before the baby, Claire had held three jobs. The most recent job was as the deputy beauty editor at a women’s magazine. Every day she sorted through boxes of new products: lip glosses, skin creams, thickening sprays. Her office’s windows faced Seventh Avenue. She’d had an assistant, a girl straight out of college who wore heels every day just to answer the phone. Claire had loved her job. It had been up to her to identify the best; she was a tastemaker. There was a photo of Claire in every issue, and she’d demurred when the editor in chief asked to include a pregnant shot. In the magazine, Claire was forever thirty-three and a size four. No one wanted beauty advice from someone’s mother. Sometimes Claire took out old issues of the magazine just to look at her photo, and do the wrong math: this baby couldn’t be hers. Hers had been a phantom pregnancy, like a teenage girl in the 1950s, sent off to an undisclosed location while still small enough to fit into her normal clothes. This thought always made her smile.

Their second date at the kitchen table was more serious: Claire agreed to Vivian’s terms. One hundred dollars per visit. Six visits minimum. No guarantees. Claire was sure they could negotiate that last part somewhere down the line, once Vivian understood what Rosemary meant to her, how
much she really deserved her back. Claire was confident in her own abilities. She was very persuasive.

“How long had you been letting Rosemary outside?” Vivian’s chair was angled toward the garden. Together, they watched a robin fly from branch to branch, its voice trilling upward toward unseen friends.

“Since she was a kitten,” Claire said. “She was always very independent.”

Vivian nodded. “Mm-hmm.”

“Not in a stereotypical way, though,” Claire said. “She was practically a dog. Always next to me. But when she wanted space, she took it.” In the last week, Claire had often felt Rosemary’s body brush against her bare calves, only to realize that it was a chair leg or Matt’s socked foot, which she would immediately kick away.

“Of course not.” Vivian held a stuffed cigar in both her hands, rolling it back and forth like a piece of Play-Doh. The cigar was Rosemary’s favorite, Claire assured her. It had been an early present from Matt: the only one, in fact. Claire had kept that information to herself. If Vivian was good, she thought, she’d figure it out.