Still Life with Husband (20 page)

“That’s just nothing,” I say, my face hot. “I’m working on an editing project. That’s just something I’m playing around with.” I half–stand up and snatch it out of Angie’s hands. “It’s nothing.” I stare at Becky, then Angie; I dare them to laugh at me. Meg I ignore, since she already is laughing at me.

I hastily drop the notebook back onto the table, where, as if it has free will and is out to spite me, it promptly flips open to a short verse I wrote a couple of months ago, while I was eating a tuna melt. For some reason, lost to me now, I scrawled this particular poem in large, purple block letters.

Fish, my love for you sticks

but are we meant to be?

How I wonder, ponder, flounder

But I fear our love is doomed,

for I am scared of water,

chicken of the sea

Becky and Angie stand there for a while, their heads cocked toward each other, staring at the poem, puzzled. Becky purses her lips as if she’s about to ask a question but can’t quite form the words. Angie’s perfect eyebrows arch, then furrow. I try to reach for the notebook, but for a weird moment, I’m paralyzed. Meg claps her hand over her mouth, snorting with glee. The tips of my fingers feel itchy and prickly. I look from the notebook to Becky and Angie. Becky reaches up and smoothes a stray wisp of her subtly highlighted blond hair behind her ear. After a long pause, she says, not unkindly, “You were always so creative, Emily.” She and Angie stand there for another endless minute. Nobody says anything. Meg’s hand is still clamped over her mouth. Another snort escapes her.

“But there’s no money in
that,
” Angie finally adds, nodding in agreement with herself.

“Mmmhmmm,” Becky concurs. They both look like they feel very sorry for me. I’m starting to feel very sorry for me.
Sole Mates.
Love poems to nonhumans. What was I thinking? I feel like that dream everyone has, where I’m walking down the hallway of my high school naked. I feel like all the choices I’ve ever made, right down to the carrot-bran muffin in front of me, have been wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The muffin disgusts me. What was I thinking, ordering a carrot-bran muffin?

After they finally leave, half-decaf no-foam skim lattes in hand, Meg turns to me. “I’m going to mock you later,” she says, giving my arm a little squeeze. “But right now I need to panic!” Meg won’t really mock me later. She’ll chide, maybe heckle. But in a nice, best-friend-who-believes-in-me kind of way. She reaches for my muffin and takes a huge bite. “Was there any frontal lobe activity in those two!?” She tears off another big chunk of muffin for when she’s finished chewing this one. Meg is a nervous eater. “Am I going to turn into that?”

“Sweetie,” I say. “It’s going to take much more than a baby to lobotomize you.” I push the muffin across to her. “Do you remember what they were like in college?” I say. “Just like that, only with bigger hair and baggier sweaters.” I can calm Meg. I know that vapid, complacent motherhood is not her destiny. I can feed her reassuring bits of pastry and tell her honestly that she won’t turn into anything she doesn’t want to be. Her way is clear. Meg is solid. It’s my own amorphous self I’m worried about right now.

“They were nice, though, weren’t they?” Meg says. “I mean, it’s probably really complicated, once you have a kid. It might be easy to slip into that lifestyle.” She looks around the coffee shop, then back at me. “You want the best for your child, and the next thing you know you’ve bought a house where it’s safe and quiet and
all white,
and you’re driving your six-month-old to his private baby algebra tutor in your Ford Explorer, to hell with the planet!”

“Meg,” I say, patting her arm, “that’s not how it’s going to be. You’ll make the right choices for this baby. You won’t give in to the pressure to buy an SUV and vote Republican, because you don’t give in to that kind of pressure now. You never have. You’ll be a fantastic mother.” Coffee-tinged acid rises up in my throat. Something has to give.

DAVID KELLER’S APARTMENT IS NOT WHAT I EXPECTED
. But then, neither am I.

I came over straight from White’s. I still can’t believe I’m here. After forty-five minutes of comforting Meg, I told her that I had to go to work, which in fact was true. She left, full of muffin and reassured about her life. Then, coolly, I packed up my books and notebooks and slid them into my green backpack. I dabbed at my mouth with my napkin and carefully tidied up the table, wiping the crumbs into my palm. I was all movement. I was automated. I searched through my backpack for my cell phone, which I had, as usual, left at home. Undeterred, I thanked the surly girl behind the counter and walked steadily to the pay phone in the back of the store. I called David Keller. I knew his phone number by heart, knew the exact pattern my fingers would make on the keypad, even though I’d never actually dialed his number before. It was two-thirty. As the phone rang, I thought,
If he’s not home, it’s a sign. If he’s not home, then this is not my destiny, and he is not the answer to my problems. If he’s not home…
But of course he was home. I said, “Do you want to see me?” He said he did.

Saying, “I’m on my way,” that was the moment my robotic calm turned into a shaky anxiousness. My heart started beating fast at that moment and it hasn’t slowed. Next I called work. The phone felt strange and cold against my ear. I thought about how many germs public phones must harbor. I knew a girl in junior high, Katie Wu, whose mom used to carry alcohol wipes with her. She would scrub down public phones before she’d allow Katie to use them. Dick answered. It took him a moment to remember what to say. “Ahhh,” he said, “Ahhh…
Male Reproduction.
”

I told him I wasn’t feeling well. “Stomach flu,” I said, and I felt guilty, but less guilty than if I’d said I had a cold, because, really, my stomach was feeling awfully weird.

“I’m so sorry, my dear,” Dick said. My scalp began to tingle. Dick told me to rest and to take care.

Then I called Kevin at work, praying his voice mail would pick up. It did. “Hey, it’s two thirty,” I said. “I’m heading to work now, but I forgot to tell you, Dick has an errand for me to do today, so I won’t talk to you this afternoon, but I’ll see you tonight.” I did this so that Kevin wouldn’t call me at work. My voice sounded perfectly normal to me as I left this message.

As I walked down the street to my car, I became aware of how often I was blinking. I started to feel as if I were blinking too frequently, and that people might notice and keep their children away from me. I felt as if I were very rapidly going crazy, just a heartbeat away from talking to parking meters. But I got into my car. I turned on the heat and the radio, and I took some deep breaths; everything was familiar, and I started to feel like myself again: a very not-normal sort of myself.

I drove through the city, obeyed the traffic signals, arrived, parallel parked as if I were going to buy shampoo. I pressed David Keller’s apartment buzzer, and then I spent an interminable moment in the common hallway during which I carefully examined my reflection in the plate glass and noticed a hair growing out of my chin. David buzzed me through the front door before I could do anything about that, and I made my way up the flight of stairs and down the corridor to his apartment, number six.

And there he is. He’s standing in the open doorway, dressed in a green T-shirt and jeans, smiling awkwardly. He looks as nervous as I feel. His hands are in his back pockets, elbows jutting out at strange angles, a pose that manages to look both practiced and ridiculous. He’s barefoot. As I maneuver around him and walk through the door, he doesn’t make a move to touch me, and I keep a good ten inches of space between us. All I can think about are bodies, his body, my body, the imminent collision of the two. All I can think about is heat. I can’t look at his face; I can’t make eye contact.

The front door leads directly into the living room, and for a minute I just stand there, taking it in: the apartment of my downfall, the den of my adultery. It smells a little bleachy. He takes my jacket, drapes it over a chair. I know as I look around that I will never forget a single detail of this place, not a lamp, not one sofa cushion. My hands are so slick with sweat I have to rub them surreptitiously up and down my jeans to dry them; my stomach is a carrot-bran knot. I can taste tinny nervousness in my mouth. I feel about as sexy as a garden slug.

The living room looks generic, devoid of personality. It’s perfectly respectable, perfectly neat and tidy, but it looks like an apartment law offices might rent out to their summer interns. There are two black leather chairs and a black leather sofa placed artlessly around the central object, the large flat-screen television. Tastefully framed black-and-white photographs decorate the walls. The carpeting is off-white and very clean. There’s a coffee table next to the couch; it’s made out of chrome and glass. I think back to our first conversation, mine and David’s, about the astrology behind personal home decorating styles. He told me he inherited his decorating inclinations from old roommates. I wonder who his former roommates were. Actuaries? Computer programmers? This is not what I pictured David Keller’s home to look like. I imagined, in a vague, daydreamy way, that it would be as sexy as he is.

“So,” he says. He moves a few steps closer to me, his hands still in his pockets. We’re still maintaining a distance between us that would be recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention if one of us had smallpox.

“Um,” I say. Clearly, today’s events will not include scintillating conversation.

“I’m happy you called,” he says. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

“Me, too,” I say. I’m rooted to the floor. I look around the room, my eyes resting on the black halogen floor lamp. This could take all day.

But just then, just as I’m wondering how long I can stand here without moving before my legs finally grow numb and I collapse in a stiff, twitching heap on the floor, David Keller begins walking over to me. He’s looking right at me, and he’s smiling; he’s moving toward me, this man, soon to be my
lover,
this strange, warm body in a green T-shirt, and my hands are shaking, and now he’s close enough, finally, that I can smell him underneath the scent of soap, close enough that I can hear him breathe. He touches my shoulders, moves his hands slowly down to my wrists, steadies me. I lean into him, and he looks down at me, and I gasp suddenly, because it seems that I haven’t been breathing for the past few seconds. He holds my hands for a moment and then he places them on his face, like we’re playing statue. His skin underneath my fingertips is rough and not Kevin’s; this is not Kevin’s skin, not his face, and I am breaking apart, and then David kisses me, he kisses me back together, back into myself, and then he leads me into his bedroom.

For a long time we just stand there, at the foot of his bed, kissing. And for one brief instant, that frozen, crystallized fragment of time before the long dive into the water, I think,
Could this be enough? Could it stop here?

But then. We’re on his bed, he’s undressing me, he is still not Kevin, not-Kevin, he’s throwing his own clothes onto the floor and he’s next to me, he’s on top of me, every angle of him new and amazing, every touch specifically his, all the things I already know about him and everything I’ve yet to learn and every single thing I will never know reaching up through his body and landing on mine. His fingers are like fine, fine sandpaper against my skin, skin I never knew had so many nerve endings. Here we are, being carried off, swept away, pulled under,
it’s all true.
He looks at me, whispers,
Are you sure?
and I am.

An earthquake is an awesome force of nature!
What causes the earth to move under our feet? The answer is
energy.
Sometimes pieces of the earth’s crust may break off when they are under enormous
stress.
This produces vibrations, or
seismic waves.
These waves radiate outward from the source of the earthquake, causing the earth to shake and quake, move and vibrate, tremble, shudder, and quiver.

An earthquake is nobody’s
fault.
But many earthquakes occur along fault lines! What’s a
fault
? A
fault
is a break in the earth’s crust. There are three kinds of faults: normal, thrust, and strike-slip. Normal faults occur because of tension, thrusts happen as a result of compression, and strike-slips happen in response to either of those stresses: pulling or squeezing, tension or compression.

Even if there was recently an earthquake along a fault line, more are likely to follow.

Earthquakes can cause serious damage, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

“Emily,” David says, watching me from the bed as I’m getting ready to leave, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to get enough of you.” And my whole body goes liquid, all my bones melt for a second and then harden again. I have my back to him; I’m buttoning my jeans, covering the body that, astoundingly, just a few minutes ago, was beneath him, next to him, on top of him. And I have to pause, midbutton, because my fingers have stopped taking orders from my brain; for a second, I don’t even belong to myself. I know that what he said is true. We aren’t going to be able to get enough of each other.

By sleeping with David, I’ve probably sealed the deal on utter chaos. I’m sure I have. I’m not some soap opera diva; I haven’t forgotten Kevin, haven’t repressed the part of this incredible event that is nothing but treachery. Still, I can’t help but feel clear and strong and hopeful, and happier than I’ve felt in a long time. Possibly ever. Maybe that makes me a horrible person. Probably it does. But I turn, half dressed, smiling, and I see myself the way he sees me: I’m something amazing.

David was a new song on the radio, one that gets into your head, under your skin, and you don’t even realize that your body is moving to the beat. He was a ripe mango, when all you’ve ever had before were mealy apples and watery, seedy, off-season oranges. He was electricity, when you’ve been squinting in the dark. A person can’t help but compare. Honestly, was it the best sex I’ve ever had? Well, how much sex have I had? Not that much. But, yes.