Sugar in My Bowl (22 page)

He pointed to a third column. “It says mobile dating.”

I leaned close to the screen, shielding my eyes, as if it were a sunny day; I was so near that my pinky was touching the computer, making a color swirl. “Mobile dating,” I read. “Oh my God. Mobile dating!” My mouth felt sticky when I tried to speak again. “Phone sex? Is this phone sex?”

“I don’t really know,” he said. “It says ‘dating.’ It looks like he’s been using a dating service.”

“A dating service? Oh my God.” I rested my head in my hands, so I was looking down at Ivy, who was half awake in her sling. I ran my finger down the curve of her cheek, checking the rolls in her neck, the places where milk and dirt sometimes collected in gray pellets. Ivy looked back at me, blinking patiently. Her eyes were still that newborn navy blue color but getting lighter all the time. I just sat there, looking down at her, my eyes fixed on hers.

Finally the guy said to me, “I can look up that service for you if you’d like. Maybe we can figure out what it is.”

“Would you mind?” I said, disappointed that in the silence he hadn’t just disappeared, along with his computer and all the information it contained. “That would be really helpful. Thank you.”

“Okay, sure.” He typed, paused, typed. “Yeah—it looks like a dating service.” He pointed to the screen that was still facing me. There was an image of a girl wearing a black beret and black tank top, red lipstick, smiling. She was holding a cell phone. Next to her the words, which he read out loud, “Meet local singles in your town.” Then a new photo came on the screen, a girl lying down, also in a tank top, that one pink, her arms stretched out in front of her, in her hands a white cell phone. “Real singles, just a phone call away.”

“Oh my God,” I said again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want me to print out the bill?”

“Can you do that? Could you check the other months?”

“It’s on last month’s too,” he said. “I already checked. I’ll look at April.” After a minute he said, “April too. We only keep records three months back.”

He printed it all for me, and when I left the store, my fingers were shaking so much that I could barely dial Henry’s number on the stupid, fucking cell phone. “I need to talk to you. Can you meet me at Noah’s on Chestnut Street?”

“What’s up?” he said.

“I’ll wait for twenty minutes. After that, I’m leaving.”

“Leaving? What do you mean leaving?” he said.

I turned the phone off and went across the street into Noah’s. I sat on the patio at a wrought-iron table in the cold and the fog, hugging warm and sleeping Ivy to me. I kept thinking how stupid I was and how every woman probably thinks the same thing. I never thought he would be with someone else. I had no fucking idea. How could I miss something like this? At least now things were clear. Get away from this loser, idiot, lamp maker. Lamp maker, seriously. He was hot, but I married him? I had a baby with him?

I recognized him by his walk, which was more of a lope, his torso hanging back, and his legs striding ahead, like an R. Crumb cartoon. I knew he could see my face even from the sidewalk, through two sets of glass doors, because he had eagle eyes. He was always pointing out things to me I never would have seen or noticed, like the dot of a hawk in the sky or a silver rectangle across the bay that was the hospital where he was born. And it wasn’t just his vision. All his senses were heightened. He heard things and smelled things seconds before I did. And watching him walk through Noah’s, past the line of people ordering their lunch, to get to me, I couldn’t breathe, because somehow I knew I loved him. Still. I knew it all again, just like that.

He sat down next to me and looked at the bill, three sheets of white paper that I’d laid out on the table. The phone numbers were circled, “mobile dating” underlined several times. He looked across the patio, his arms crossed on his chest. Then he wove his fingers together, pressed them outward so his knuckles cracked, crossed his arms again. “I was masturbating,” he said.

“You’re such a fucking liar.”

“You didn’t want to have sex with me,” he said.

“So this is why you were so calm about our shitty sex life.” I turned to him, my face so close to his that I could see the light stubble on his cheek. “Now I get it. Just be patient—ha!”

“You seemed like you lost all desire for me.”

“Do you realize I just had a fucking baby? Something happened to my body!”

“That’s why I didn’t want to bother you,” he said.

“I tried to talk to you about it. Oh my God.” I hit my elbow hard onto the table, my funny bone throbbing. I was grateful for the physical pain, the jolt of it helping me to stay angry, which was better than experiencing how scared I was. I could feel sadness, just below the skin of my face, a body under water, about to surface.

“I felt like you wanted nothing to do with me. Except to feel better about yourself.”

“How do you think I felt? You did nothing to inspire sexual feelings in me. You came to me with your sexual needs but there was no romance. I asked you about masturbating and you didn’t say anything!”

“I was ashamed.”

“Ashamed of what exactly? Were you with someone else?”

“No.”

“You weren’t with anyone else? I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you were ‘just masturbating’ or whatever. How do I know what the fuck you were doing? Why would you go to a
dating
service to masturbate? Even the AT&T wireless guy didn’t think it was just phone sex.”

“The AT&T wireless guy?” he said.

“He looked it up for me on the Internet.”

“I wasn’t trying to meet anyone.”

“Then why
that
service?”

“Because it was free.”

“Because it was
free
? Oh my God. Are you insane? Do you see this bill?” I picked up the papers and held them right in front of his face. “Hundreds of dollars! I was complaining to you about this bill for weeks!” I stood up.

“I saw an ad in
SF Weekly
. It said the first call was free.”

“Look how many calls you made, asshole,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “Each call wasn’t . . .” He trailed off.

“What?”

“I wasn’t talking to anyone.”

“Right, you were having an affair.”

“No.”

“Fuck you, Henry.” I got up out of my chair, my arm underneath the sling, keeping Ivy still.

“Wait,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Let me explain. Please.”

I stood there, looking through the glass doors, through the restaurant, out onto the street where I could see people walking.

“It was a message exchange. People record messages, and I listened to them. There was no connection.”

“What did the messages say?”

“Sexual things, stupid things. Like ‘I just got out of the shower, I’m horny.’ ”

“What did your messages say?”

“My messages?” he sounded surprised. “I didn’t record any. Well, I recorded one. You have to record one to do it.”

“What did it say?”

He was quiet.

“Tell me.”

“This is Michael. I’m six one. I have gray eyes.”

“Oh God. That’s so real. That makes me feel sick.”

“I’m sorry, Juliet. I felt so rejected by you. I felt like you didn’t want me. You seemed so angry and so unsatisfied.”

“I tried to talk to you about how I felt. I needed you to be there for me. But you were never there for me and this whole thing is a lie. I’ll never be able to trust you again.”

I walked out of Noah’s without looking back, pressing bundled Ivy close against me, moving faster and faster until I was practically running. The cold fog felt so good on my burning face. I went straight to Sheila’s house. I didn’t call her to let her know I was coming, because I couldn’t bring myself to turn on my cell phone.

Sheila opened her door, looking beautiful as always, in a white turtleneck and white pants. I couldn’t remember the last time I wore white. “Hey, this is a nice surprise,” she said. And then, “What’s wrong?”

I collapsed against her, bawling like a child, which woke Ivy up and made her cry too.

Sheila put her arms around me, holding me, all of us staying in her doorway until I pushed her away to take a deep breath, wiping my nose on my sleeve.

“Come get a Kleenex,” she said, taking Ivy from me.

“I am a Kleenex,” I said. “I’m covered in spit-up and snot. It makes no difference. Really.”

Sheila smiled and reached out to touch Ivy’s cheek. “Hey, precious,” she said. Keeping her arm around me, she guided us inside. “I’ll make you some tea.”

She handed Ivy down to me as I sat on her white couch and looked through her giant rectangular window at the two bridges, the Golden Gate on one side and the Bay Bridge on the other, Alcatraz Island in the middle, the view from Pacific Heights that everyone in San Francisco wanted. I could hear Sheila moving things around in her kitchen.

“My cell phone bill has been really high,” I said, unclipping my bra so I could nurse Ivy. “So I went to the wireless place, and it turns out . . .” I cupped my hand under Ivy’s tiny, bald head, marveling at how she curved perfectly into my palm. “It turns out Henry’s been calling a mobile dating service. Hundreds of dollars of calls. Over months. As far back as the records go.”

Sheila came out of the kitchen, holding a metallic purple teakettle, the kind that makes a two-toned harmonica sound instead of a whistle. “Oh God, Juliet.” She stood in front of me, the kettle in midair. “Was he having sex with these women?”

“He told me he was masturbating. No face-to-face encounters with anyone. He said he didn’t want to meet anybody. It’s some kind of message exchange.”

“What?”

“He told me, I don’t know if it’s true, but he told me he listened to messages.”

“That’s not such a big deal,” Sheila said. “Everybody masturbates.”

I was having a déjà vu of our earlier conversation, about faking orgasms and other lies Sheila had supported
for the sake of the relationship
. How stupid and smug I’d been then, thinking Henry and I were so honest, so open with each other, above all that.

“But he never told me about it.”

“He was probably ashamed.”

“That’s exactly what he said.” I twisted my hair around in my hand. “But ashamed of what?”

“Phone sex is OK as long as it’s not one of those, you know, meet real people places.”

“That’s exactly what it was,” I said.

Sheila put the teakettle down on the ottoman. She plucked a pink Kleenex from the box next to it, handing it to me. I took it from her and blew my nose, then pulled a folded square of paper from my diaper bag, holding it toward her. “Go look up mobile dating and this number on your computer. You’ll see what I saw.”

She unfolded the bill, and Ivy turned toward her, because she loved the sound of paper.

“This doesn’t say anything,” Sheila said, squinting at the numbers. “Except that he was being compulsive with the calls. He was calling a lot. Look, every day that week.”

“Yeah, I thought he had a low sex drive. Ha!”

She went across the room, sat down, and typed. “Okay, it’s real women, which is bad,” she said, looking at me over the monitor. “But if he wasn’t a member, it doesn’t look like he could do much. According to these charges, nine dollars and ninety-nine cents a pop, it doesn’t look like he was a member. Where’s he now?” she asked.

I reached in the diaper bag again, turned my phone back on, and right then it rang. I had twelve missed calls from him. I turned it off again. “Can I lie down with Ivy? I just feel like going to sleep.”

She put me in her guest room with its cream-colored comforter and silky pillows. I changed Ivy’s diaper and cuddled next to her warm little body. I fell asleep right away, because crying a lot exhausts me; just like a little kid, I pass out. When I woke up, it was dark. I pushed Ivy to the middle of the bed, put a blanket over her lower half, and went into the living room.

“Henry called here,” she said. “That’s probably what woke you. I told him you were sleeping. He said he was coming by.”

“Please don’t let him in.”

About fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Sheila changed the channel to
Entertainment Tonight,
then CNN. The bell rang a couple more times. Then Sheila’s phone. It rang again.

Sheila turned to me. “This can’t go on. I’ve got to get it. This is ridiculous.” She reached up behind her, over the back of the couch, grabbing the phone from the table. “Henry, if you don’t go away, I’m going to call the police.” She listened and then hung up. “He says he loves you and he’s sorry.”

I shrugged.

“He says he won’t call or ring the doorbell, but he’ll wait outside my house until you talk to him.”

“Fuck him,” I said.

“He said he’ll wait all night.”

Ivy started crying, and I went in the guest room to get her. I brought her to the couch and nursed her. Sheila opened some wine, but I didn’t feel like any. About an hour later, she made pasta, but neither of us ate it. After a while, she left out a plate for Stephen on the dining room table, and we all went to bed.

I stayed with Sheila for four days before I saw Henry again. Sometimes, I tried hard to see things from his point of view. I realized I hadn’t really done that at all, the whole time. I didn’t think he deserved that effort, since I’d gone through so much with the pregnancy, birth, breast-feeding, etcetera. But I saw how I’d mostly used sex with him just to feel okay about myself. Maybe I’d always used sex for that.

Sheila said she’d watch Ivy when I went to meet him. She was so excited to have the baby all to herself, I ended up leaving her place twenty minutes early. When I got home, I went upstairs to wash my face. Henry’s shirt was on the floor, and I picked it up to throw it in the laundry basket. Then I just sat with it on the bed until he came home.

“Hey,” he said. “Nice to see you.” He sat down next to me and took my hand. “Juliet, I love you. I’ve missed you. I’m sorry about all this. I understand what you must be feeling.”

“I don’t feel like you understand,” I said. “If I did this to you, you’d leave me.” I started to cry. “I feel so betrayed and lied to.”

“I don’t feel like I betrayed you. I just felt like you didn’t want me.”