Man of the Year

by Caroline Louise Walker

  If she’d have stayed, she’d still be Stuart’s literary accessory, and he’d be self-publishing chapbooks that no one reads, dedicating them to my darling elizabeth and expecting her to feel not just flattered, but honored. Meanwhile, she’d be holed up with a calico cat in a tiny apartment in Harlem, scribbling notes in a knock-off Moleskine and mass-mailing her CV to second-tier schools, facing rejection after silent rejection until someone in Indiana called for an interview from which she’d never return. I gave her a home with a pool and a garden, fresh air, a job, a respected husband with thick hair and a boat. She might miss the idea of that other life, but if she’d have stayed, right now she’d be wondering what might’ve happened if she’d said yes when that handsome doctor invited her for a drink after his panel discussion.

  So the problem is boredom. Nick is only a symptom.

  “Elizabeth.”

  She doesn’t turn.

  “What about giving their book group another try?”

  “Their huh?”

  “Luna’s book group.”

  She moans and rolls her head. “Don’t you remember how mortifying that was?”

  “Of course I do, but it was so long ago. Maybe they’ve gotten better.”

  “Maybe. Not my job to investigate.”

  I pace myself. “Those women need someone like you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Are you kidding? Don’t act like you don’t know this.”

  “Robert, those women don’t want to discuss books with me.”

  “Oh, come on. They’re not bad women.”

  “That wasn’t a judgment call. It’s a fact. They were talking about libidos and finances and other people’s children. They drink white wine and discuss carbohydrates and heated tile.”

  “You went one time, Elizabeth. Once. Two years ago.”

  “Once was enough.”

  “I still think you might be generalizing, but if you’re not, that’s all the more reason to throw a wrench in their mediocrity.”

  “Why should I volunteer to throw wrenches?”

  “Because you are brilliant, Elizabeth.”

  She tucks her chin and offers a crooked smile.

  “You know I think you’re a damn genius.” It’s true. I do.

  She shrugs.

  “Go to their stupid club, talk about their damn book, crack open their minds and show them who you are. Give them something new to talk about and maybe they’ll surprise us with brainpower of their own.”

  “They aren’t stupid women,” Elizabeth says. “Luna is terribly sharp. She handles Graham’s trust like she’s the head of the IMF, for Christ’s sake.”

  “So go show her there’s nothing wrong with having conversations about more substantive matters than curtains and hormones.”

  “Hormones are substantive, Robert.”

  “Fair enough,” I concede, knowing how close she is to saying yes, knowing she doesn’t like being pushed. If Elizabeth could make more friends around here, she wouldn’t need to search for Nicks to cure her boredom. Her midlife crisis.

  “I’ll think about it,” she says.

  “They should be so lucky.”

  The music box theme song of our neighborhood ice cream truck blasts from a bullhorn atop a refrigerated vehicle down the street. Children clutching fistfuls of dollar bills snatched from their parents’ wallets answer the call of a lazy piper. The Entertainer.

  “I wonder what they’re reading,” Elizabeth murmurs, and I smile.

  This is a small step, and not a comprehensive solution, but I’ve successfully planted a distraction in her mind, and I’ve effectively boosted her softness toward me. All I want is for us to be happy, and so it gives me great pleasure to watch her mull over the possibilities of an idea she now thinks was her own.

  10.

  My heart-to-heart with Elizabeth brings a peace that lasts through the night, but first thing in the morning, Raymond squashes it by requesting a status report. He texts only a question mark, sufficiently cryptic for anyone who isn’t us, but enough to make me resent him for acknowledging what he knows. I reply, All good, and erase our messages.

  It’s not all good, though. The symptoms and risks of Elizabeth’s needs may be clearer, true, but addressing them without addressing Nick is like popping vitamins without removing the tumor. Healthy systems require both prevention and treatment.

  Mark Wycott took a baseball bat to Steve Dunn’s car. All I have to do is kick a kid out of my house. Confronting him would be a waste, given how this thing’s being stopped before it starts. The most I could expect is an apology for dirty thoughts. Of course, the worst I could expect is a confession, which is out of the question, as the only thing more revolting than imagining this affair would be hearing Nick confirm its existence. That leaves me two choices: black mold or double-booking. The toxicity of mold is poetic, but I’d hate for fungus to be his parting association with our home.

  Double-booking, then. An old friend, maybe a cousin, someone who reserved the guesthouse so long ago, it slipped my mind. Someone important—no, better yet, someone boring.

  I knock, ready to tell Nick he’s being replaced by a dullard, but he looks haggard as hell, so I have to ask, “Late night?”

  “Yeah, right. Was up most of it with a fever, I think.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  He scratches his head. “Don’t know. Achy all over. Took some Tylenol, so—”

  I reach toward him without permission and place my hand just below his jaw, lightly gripping his neck, and pause here to imagine crushing his trachea with my forty-five-year-old hand, my hand that’s punched walls and signed huge checks and touched Elizabeth in places he’ll never reach. “Your glands feel fine,” I say. “Why don’t you let me drop you at the beach again. Fresh air will do you good.”

  He shakes his head. “I should rest. Don’t want to get you sick.”

  My hands itch to grab him by the throat again, to assist in incapacitating him on this beautiful Friday, the very day Elizabeth happens to work from home, and so, not trusting myself to kick him out without kicking him in the face, I walk away dazed. His claims of sickness threw me, but by lunchtime I’m spinning, because either Nick was contagious and gave me his bug, or I’ve made myself ill imagining what might be happening at my house at this moment. Simone brings me Alka-Seltzer while I stretch out on the sofa in our lounge, and I tell her she’s an angel, and “What would I do without you?” She smiles. Really, though. Everyone needs a Simone.

  • • •

  When I pull up to the house at five on the dot, my driveway is blocked by a black Expedition. Familiar, but not enough for me to place it. Familiar, maybe, because half my zip code drives a version of the same beast. I park behind it and trudge through the yard, opening the door to a mess of voices talking over bossa nova playing through my stereo system. “Hello?”

  Elizabeth shouts from the den, “We’re in here.”

  “Robert, you little worm,” a voice calls—and yes, now I recall the black SUV I loaded and unloaded with flowers after my party.

  “Hello, Luna,” I reply, greeting Bonnie McAlister, as well—and two women on my couch who don’t introduce themselves, which I appreciate, because I don’t care to meet them, either—and Nick, too, perfectly healthy and terribly smug. He’s sitting next to Elizabeth, his feet propped on my coffee table. I’m looking at him still when I tell Luna, “Three times in one week. Might be a record.”

  “Aren’t you the luckiest?” she says.

  “What’s the occasion this time?” I ask.

  But it’s Elizabeth who answers with a semi-smile, and her cadence is peculiar—artificial but knowing, seductive almost—when she says, “We’re planning our book club.”

  Luna points at me. “No thanks to you, naughty boy. I practically begged you to give Elizabeth the message.”

  Holding her gaze but harder, Elizabeth says, “Don’t you love Luna’s idea, Robert? She wants to revamp her book club
to make use of my brain. Isn’t that flattering?” Elizabeth is so proud of herself for discovering what she thinks she knows, as if I’d derived pleasure from passing off Luna’s suggestion as my own. Elizabeth doesn’t understand that my moves are strategic, that my strategies are designed to protect her from humiliating herself. Liking Nick’s attention is one thing. Needing it would be a disgrace.

  “Feeling better?” I ask Nick.

  “Much,” he says. “Elizabeth talked me into an immune-booster tea from that café by the farmer’s market. With all due respect for modern medicine, the tea might have worked miracles.”

  The ladies giggle, and Bonnie says, “You do have such nice color now.”

  One of the unidentified women says, “Yes. You’re glowing.”

  “You did look peaked earlier,” says Luna, reaching over Elizabeth to pat Nick’s knee. “Poor thing.”

  Elizabeth says, “I drove Nick to the pharmacy for antihistamine and we swung by Java and Juice for a ginger tonic afterward. Bumped into these ladies, and here we are.”

  “Kismet,” says Luna, “and not a moment too soon. Swear to God, the last book we read was a cookbook, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It was bull-honkey,” Bonnie tells me. “Movie stars don’t eat like that.”

  Luna rolls her eyes. “We’re desperate for new blood. Elizabeth is going to revive us, and thanks to Nick, we’re off and running. He mentioned Elizabeth’s favorite book, and not a single one of us had read it. Aren’t we pitiful?”

  Favorite book? Elizabeth doesn’t have a favorite, unless she does. I’d ask, but Luna and Company would draw conclusions and start rumors about Nick knowing my wife better than I do, so instead I nod. I’m trying to remember any book Elizabeth has ever mentioned, good or bad, when a voice behind me says, “It’s out of print.”

  I spin around to find Jonah slumped in my leather chair. “Didn’t see you.”

  “No kidding.” He’s staring at the phone in his hands.

  “Did you have class today?”

  “Yeah. Just got home.”

  “Are you joining their book club too?”

  Jonah says, “If they’ll have me.”

  “Oh, I suppose we can make room,” says Luna, and everyone laughs. “Anyway, we were just paying our bill at coffee, so I suggested we come here for an impromptu planning session. But fine, confession time: I’ve been dying to see what you’ve done to the house.”

  “Well, I hope you approve,” I say, trusting Luna to miss my sarcasm, which she does.

  “Oh, it’s fabulous. You never know whose hands these old houses will fall into, but clearly, yours are skilled.” She winks at Elizabeth. “I’m just crazy about this mix of mod and classic. It kills me when new-money types destroy a home’s character because its best features aren’t new. Don’t take that the wrong way. I’m not talking about you. Obviously, you get it—adding funky stairs and Japanese sliding doors while keeping the widow’s walk intact, things like that. Isn’t that the most glorious term? Widow’s walk. Yours is lovely. I recognized it right away from that feature in the paper a while back.”

  “Well,” I say, “good thing it’s lovely, because it sure isn’t functional.”

  “No,” Luna gasps, and holds a hand to her chest. “Really?”

  Jonah says, “Just try going up there and see what he does. Dad’s threats scared me more as a kid than the roof ever did.”

  “Consider yourself loved,” I tell Jonah. To our guests, I explain, “It’s a death trap. The cupola, the balcony and railings: disaster. Suicide central at the moment, but we’ll get around to it one of these days.”

  Luna purses her lips and flares her nostrils, as though she’s smelled something sour but doesn’t want to draw attention to the source. “Well, anyway, the interior is great. You should entertain more. Let me help you host a cocktail party. Will you, please?”

  “We’ll think about it,” says Elizabeth.

  Still looking at his phone, Jonah says, “There might be two copies at that antique spot by the harbor?”

  Everyone except for me celebrates his discovery, and Bonnie says, “Have you read Earthly Paradise, Robert?”

  I ask, “Steinbeck?”

  Sympathy laughter from giddy women drinking beer in my den. And my wife. She laughs, too. So does Jonah. So does Nick.

  Elizabeth explains, “It’s Colette’s memoir, more or less. Not the greatest work of literature of all time, but it’s delicious and haunting, knowing what we now know. The way she rewrote herself is almost sorcery, and the imagery is to die for.”

  “In that case, proceed with caution,” I say. When no one asks about me, I add, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to regroup after a hectic day at work.”

  Luna waves good-bye without looking at me, and for a split second, it sounds like she might be asking me a question, but no, she’s just soliciting opinions about Colette’s braid. I might as well have vaporized as I trudge to my room with fire under my skin, calling on all the old tricks: counting backward, counting breaths, visualizing my heart staying calm, visualizing a gentle breeze on an empty beach. Behind me, a bottle cap hits our glass tabletop, sending ice picks through my skull, bombing my mental beach. I’m not mad about being excluded from their drivel. I’m mad that I care about being excluded. Those women are mistaking Nick’s role in our lives. They think he’s a connector. Nick probably agrees, and the longer he believes—

  A digital bell chimes.

  My head quiets, a Pavlovian tick. The digital bell chimes again.

  Elizabeth has left her cell phone charging on her nightstand. Normally I’d ignore it, but nothing’s normal these days, so—two new texts from her sister, Laurie. An inside joke, I presume. Nothing urgent or emergent, but now the phone’s in my hand, so flicking my thumb feels natural, not treasonous. I scroll past texts from me and Jonah, some from colleagues, two billing notifications, an emoji from her father in Missouri. Nothing from Nick. Even the most innocent houseguest texts his hosts every so often, and vice versa—need paper towels? or help yourself to leftovers, or, do you have a spare key?—but there’s nothing here. Not a word.

  Her photos: our house, a sunset, the overgrown elm in our yard. Happy family at Elizabeth’s nephew’s graduation last spring. Screenshots of book reviews, articles, and maps. Pictures Elizabeth took in dressing rooms, reflections of herself wearing gowns with tags still on them, tight jeans I’ve never seen, a skirt I recognize, or don’t. They are intoxicating, these self-portraits in overhead light—proof that she would never buy a dress without knowing how it looks on her body from every angle, even when I’m not there to assure her.

  Downstairs, someone breaks a glass, maybe a bottle. Something shatters. Our guests are occupied by an innocent accident, but so am I, because stumbling into Elizabeth’s private world has made me greedy to know more, to know everything, completely—or, at the very least, better than those strangers downstairs.

  Elizabeth calls my name. Her voice is too close. I darken her phone and hurry to meet her on the landing. She says, “We’re all running to a bookshop, then dropping Bonnie at her car. We won’t be long. You’re blocking Luna so I’m taking the Audi.” She skips back down to her fan club as I tell her to take her time.

  More chatter, then less, then none. The front door opens, closes. Engines start, fade to silence. The house is mine.

  Snooping doesn’t come naturally, but I do my best, starting with our bathroom wastebasket (wads of innocuous tissue, strands of used dental floss) and moving on to Elizabeth’s makeup drawers (cosmetics and earrings, medicine and junk, nail clippers, nail polish, files). No condoms hidden in the Band-Aid box. No love notes taped to the bottom of a jewelry box. Still, something feels out of place. Something’s off.

  Her closet and dresser: sock and underwear drawers, the toes of her shoes, the backs of her shelves. Check, check, check. Her pillow smells like my wife, not cologne or sweaty boy. No traces of someone who isn’t me. Of course, there wouldn’t be. Elizabe
th isn’t lazy. She wouldn’t leave clues as cliché as lipstick on a collar, cologne on a pillow, used condoms in the garbage, dirty underthings where they shouldn’t be. Elizabeth wouldn’t save incriminating text messages or photos. She would never be so stupid, even if she were so bold, and her hair doesn’t smell like cologne or get stuck in other people’s drains because she’s not dumb—or, better yet, because there’s no smoking gun to find, which should be a relief, but it only sparks disgust, because now I see that it’s come to this. Nick has turned me into a man who raids his wife’s closet, rummages through dresser drawers, puts things back neatly where he found them, and even knowing as much, I can’t stop.

  Shoeboxes line the shelf high above Elizabeth’s clothing racks. I have to use her stepstool to take them down, one by one, cracking the lids and inspecting their contents before putting them back. Sparkly high heels. Snakeskin sneakers. Thigh-high boots in white leather with fringe. The fourth box contains a pair of Frye boots I’ve never seen, but the soles are misshapen, the ankles scuffed and the leather worn thin at the toe. Instead of tissue paper, a folded piece of fabric lines the bottom of the box. It stays anchored when I try to lift it away, so I move the boots, and I remove the bundle beneath them: a thin white T-shirt wrapped around a notebook and a stack of greeting cards all tied up with a string. I recognize the top card right away. Shiny gold letters on recycled paper with rough edges. The card Stuart sent Elizabeth for her birthday last year.

  My stomach lurches like I’m on the teacup ride, and I have to sit down, propping this Frye box on my knees, untying the string, releasing all of those birthday wishes and a few auld lang synes. She saved them and hid them away, stacked atop a Moleskine notebook that already makes me want to vomit. I slide the elastic strap from its cover and open to a random page: