The Half-Life of Everything

by Deborah Carol Gang

  “It wasn’t pity,” Kate clarified. “He’s smart and attractive and I knew he wouldn’t do me any harm.”

  “Well, he might fall in love with you.”

  “That isn’t harm in itself,” she insisted. “But anyway, that isn’t what’s going to happen.”

  They sat in silence. David thought he had never heard her make a more naïve statement. She looked miserable. That was something.

  “So, I know we aren’t even now,” he said finally, “but are we even now?”

  “This wasn’t about payback or scorekeeping.”

  “What was it about?”

  “I did it because it’s the kind of thing almost everyone wants to do. And I thought I could do it without losing you.” She looked up and met his eyes. “But I couldn’t do it without telling you.”

  “Right. Afterwards.” He sounded aggrieved and suddenly didn’t like himself very much for it. “So, Kate,” he went on, but gentler, “It was…was it what you were looking for?”

  “Well, someone new…you and I both know how much fun that was, before we met. I was sort of old Kate. I mean young Kate. I mean Kate before…all this. He was kind of amazed. I guess his wife found sex a lot of work. And the results were unpredictable.”

  “Amazing Kate,” he said, and he knew he sounded a little sad.

  She moved a few inches closer. “I think maybe this will benefit you, David. Us. Though maybe not tonight. I get that.” They sat quietly for a while longer, and then she went inside.

  By the time he got to bed, she was asleep. As he lay close to her and watched the rise of her breath, he took note that his mind hadn’t tried to picture Kate and this William. Perhaps he could keep that up. Leave her that much privacy. The thing he thought would kill him, he realized, may not have made him any stronger, but it didn’t seem to have killed him. Yet. He gently shook her. “I’m sorry, Kate. Please wake up. Please.” He said it again louder, and she roused herself with a soft groan.

  “Is this something you want to happen again?”

  She turned over to face him. “It would be bad for him,” she said. “He needs someone to love him. Maybe someone to help him be more lovable. I can’t do that.”

  It sounded to him like exactly the kind of thing she could do.

  “That’s not what I want anyway. I don’t need more.”

  But wasn’t that exactly what she had done? Gone out and gotten more?

  Dylan was tired of thinking about his parents. The night before, Lily asked if he thought there was anything between his mother and Jane. He had been trying his best to convey that this question and the entire topic were off limits, but her curiosity had gotten the better of her. When he protested, she looked guilty. “Okay then,” he said. “So we’re done with this topic?” They were in bed just before falling asleep, and it was their first time together that day.

  “I’m sorry. I just want to understand things. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  He supposed it was natural to be fascinated, and she didn’t have his same aversion to the specifics. He turned to look at her. She covered herself with the sheet and then contradictorily said, “I could make it up to you.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. It would be something to look forward to, and maybe by then his parents would be out of his head. Lily kissed him once before they both rolled apart. As they were drifting off, he said sleepily, “I think she only likes men. My mom, I mean. That’s my understanding.”

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she said. She was asleep before he had time to laugh.

  Dylan had always considered his parents completely conventional people who married somewhat young and never strayed, either romantically or from responsibilities. He would call them both enthusiasts, but that only came after the last dish was dried and the lawn was short again. His father wanted to be good, and no matter what the everyday rebellions of his youth, Dylan knew him as responsible and considerate—colorless qualities that instead seemed desirable and to be copied. When neither he nor Jack made it past Webelos as Scouts, he knew his dad worried they were missing out on the finishing touches of their moral development. “Look, Dad,” he had argued, desperate to be free of the regimentation, chanting, and general dorkiness of scouting, “we’re being raised by an Eagle Scout. That has to count for something.”

  What did it mean that a man who needed to be good, who was good, was now so entangled? He and Jack very much wanted their parents to go back to how things were; no one wants unusual parents, especially parents unusual in a new way. He was surprised and baffled to find himself drafted to not only cooperate with, but also explain this plan they’d cooked up.

  Perhaps there was a lesson somewhere—something to learn about marriage and love. And friendship, he realized. He had long ago understood his parents as lovers, but perhaps he hadn’t begun to understand their friendship. Maybe what seemed like an embarrassing failure of fidelity was, in a different light, not a lapse of anything. Would leaving Jane have been a heroic act or obedience to convention—an obedience that left his mother with a lovesick man who needed to be good at any price?

  Dylan didn’t think of Lily as a friend yet. To him, she was everything, and someone who was everything couldn’t also be a friend. But he knew eventually things would settle down and something else would settle in, taking the place of extreme new love—from rapture to routine. That’s what the brain research says.

  Lily and he were new enough that he could think they’d be exempt. But probably not. If they were lucky, they would have friendship. He used that word now when he thought about his parents—how they didn’t like to beat each other at games, how nice his dad was when she dinged up the car. How his mother wouldn’t warm up to his father’s parents no matter how hard they tried to charm her, which made them try even harder and ignore his dad even more. She was polite. She remembered their birthdays and engineered regular contact between them and Dylan and Jack, but she did not forgive them for wounding David, and she loyally refused to be charmed.

  The next day, Dylan wasn’t entirely surprised to be interrupted by a rare call from his brother. Family issues were in the air and, in any event, he would have called Jack soon. Jack had timed his call for Dylan’s forty-minute lunch break, and Dylan set his sandwich aside to listen.

  “I’ve been studying with someone, Erica, and she asked why I seem so post-traumatic. Did my parents go through a horrible divorce, or what? Through all the years of Mom being ill, no one has ever asked that. They seemed to accept that I’m this dark—or maybe it’s light—cynical person. No-drama Jack.”

  Dylan was surprised to hear this. He had always felt Jack’s grief to be visible, though of course he had his own grief to guide him. He’d heard various adults worry about Jack too, but he supposed young people wouldn’t see it or would mistake it for some appealing detachment.

  “Well, what are you doing? I mean what do you think she sees?”

  “I didn’t think I was doing anything, but—and this is going to sound stupid—but at least recently, since Mom came back, I realize I’ve been keeping everyone safe. Well, Mom mostly. You all seem to be having a lot of fun. Everyone’s in love with at least one person. So I’m like Grandma, worrying for all of us, but what good did all her worrying do? I think I’m like the sacrifice—I won’t get too happy—so long as you don’t punish my mother. So hooking up is okay. It’s…” He paused here but finished gamely with, ‘It’s nothing.”

  Dylan understood how Jack might feel it wasn’t safe to be happy. He wouldn’t ridicule this superstitious bargain. Scientists are as prone to superstition as anyone. They just recognize it for what it is. He knew he could give Jack a pep talk—offer to share the worrying, gently expose the superstition. But what he thought Jack wanted or needed to do was tell him about Erica. So he said, “Who’s tutoring who?”

  “Who?” Jack said, and Dylan got the joke. In the old days, their mother would have said, “Whom, Dylan. The second one is the object.” Now, lucki
ly, she didn’t care about that kind of thing. Dylan had the impression that she wanted to spend as little time as possible mothering them, as if friendship—there’s that topic again—with her sons was the thing that counted most now.

  Jack proceeded to describe to him in great detail, and with reasonably correct grammar, about his new acquaintance, whom he had never touched and who seemed interested in him—not in acquiring him, but in getting to know him, and how he found he could remember their conversations almost verbatim.

  Dylan stopped himself from offering platitudes like just take it slow, because if he had learned something recently, it was that he didn’t know anything predictable about love. He had thought that he didn’t want to have a child before thirty, and that he would always be completely strict about birth control, and then a few weeks ago, he and Lily were completely stupid about it, and he felt more curious than worried about the outcome. It didn’t seem like a disaster, and if his mother were to be around to meet her grandchild, that would soften the blow of his master schedule being disrupted. But mostly, he just didn’t feel very in charge of things.

  Of course, he and Jack had wanted his parents to choose normal and status quo, to reunite without complication. He had thought his parents would tidy up their lives for his and Jack’s sake and for the others who objected with varying degrees of insistence. But he had predicted wrong. They had fretted, but then not actually cared much what other people thought.

  So what he said was, “She sounds great. Don’t fuck it up. Whatever that means.”

  “Remember opposite days at school? Clothes on inside out. Last period first.” Jack answered his own question. “I just have to do the opposite.”

  “I’m going to call Dylan about his birthday,” Kate said to David, and then they both looked up at the ceiling. The cats were rampaging overhead; their thundering steps sounded more like small horses than eight-pound felines. David heard them slide across the tile floor of the bathroom. There was a thump so loud it sounded as if they both ran into a wall, then silence before they resumed the chase.

  He remembered Dylan and Jack playing too wildly and then hiding all signs of pain from their collisions. They only wanted to continue the game, and he had admired their toughness. Some of the neighbor kids seemed to treasure every bruise and enjoyed the drama of comfort, but his boys always had something they wanted to get back to. Jack once finished a soccer game with a broken arm—a fact that still embarrasses Kate, the parent on duty and a nurse no less, but he knew he would have been just as taken in by Jack’s stoicism.

  Kate reached Dylan and, by her expression, it was happy news. He and Lily would take off work early and be home a week from Friday for Dylan’s birthday the next day. Saturday birthdays always seemed lucky even though they came around regularly every seven years. Or did Leap Year change that? Who could ever recalculate Leap Year? David liked the whimsical phenomenon of it, though: things are coming out uneven. I know, we’ll add a day!

  “He said we should invite Jane if we want to. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. The boys seemed to be able to dislike the situation but not dislike Jane. Maybe they didn’t even hate it any more but refused to go on record as anything but opposed. “I’m still baffled by them. About what’s best.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t always get to do that. You have to say something. In any direction that you want, but something.”

  David had avoided thinking about this very topic. He hadn’t anticipated or welcomed Kate and Jane’s emerging friendship, and he’d been surprised to discover nothing harmful about the two of them as friends, nor anything unpleasant about the three of them spending time together, but he had never arrived at any policies.

  “All right, since you asked, I will tell you this: that during those times when we’re together—whether it’s just you and me and Jane, or whether there are others around—life to me seems just about perfect.”

  She looked surprised.

  “I don’t think about you getting sick again,” he continued, “and I forget about my own imminent tumors—and whatever is waiting to strike Jane or the boys. I stop thinking about the press waiting to descend and ruin our lives. I don’t even think about William.” He had worried a lot about William until Kate pledged to tell him every detail about every contact she had with him. And he knew she had told him, and none of it was romantic or threatening. In fact, he was a little tired of hearing about William’s blossoming post-divorce life. Kate had apparently been a big confidence booster. Go William!

  “It feels safe. I know there’s nothing the least bit safe about any of it, but I have the illusion of safety. It’s…” his voice trailed away as he concluded, “lovely.”

  “Well, let’s definitely invite Jane then,” Kate said, and before he had a chance to laugh, she walked the few steps towards him and despite her much smaller frame, enveloped him in a strong, tight hug.

  “Hurry up, guys,” Jack called out from the living room. “We’ve got the film festival ready to roll.” The three of them had arrived in time to cook dinner together. Dylan and Lily prepared the only impressive dish they’d mastered, chicken with a very long list of ingredients. “We have to invite different friends to dinner each time,” Dylan explained. “And we never give out the recipe.” Jack made Caesar salad, as well as brownies-from-a-mix, which was almost like cooking from scratch these days, his mother told him, sounding genuinely impressed.

  Kate and David put the finishing touches on the kitchen cleanup and joined the others in front of the TV. While he was washing dishes, David had heard some distant hilarity, but still, he wasn’t prepared for the first movie to be My Favorite Wife. “It’s a 1940 British screwball comedy,” Dylan announced. They watched as Irene Dunn, declared dead by the court following a shipwreck, and now rescued and in love with a fellow survivor, returned to her husband, Cary Grant. Kate began to snicker and then laugh, and David found himself joining in.

  Dylan periodically fast-forwarded the film, summarizing the skipped plot because they had “a number of movies to get through.” Simultaneously, David and Kate grasped the theme of the film festival and laughed harder. At the end of the movie, they applauded and Kate said, “I mean, why would anyone not choose Cary Grant?”

  Lily said, “I get that now. I hadn’t seen him young enough before to understand the fuss.”

  The next movie, Too Many Husbands, also 1940, featured Fred MacMurray, this time thought drowned in a boating accident, only to return to find that Jean Arthur had quickly married his business partner, Melvin Douglas. She discovered that having two formerly inattentive husbands competing for her love was very pleasant and a situation worth drawing out—though only for 81 minutes—and far less with Dylan and Jack’s editing. Jack was masterful at summarizing twenty minutes of plot with one compound sentence.

  David tried to say, “Is this supposed to be instructive somehow?” but could barely get the words out. They were all tired and silly from laughing.

  “I noticed a few useful Cary Grant mannerisms.” Jack said. “It’s too bad Jane couldn’t be here. Or is it?”

  “Oh, she will be so annoyed that she missed this,” David said emphatically. Jane was visiting her mother. She and Dylan had a surprisingly long phone conversation earlier that day. David thought Kate might not love this, but she seemed only pleased when Dylan passed on Jane’s greetings and regrets.

  “Now we have a remake of the previous film as a musical, Three for the Show,” Dylan announced. They settled in to watch as Betty Grable found herself married to both her long lost husband and his replacement.

  “Of course, you’ll have to decide which one you want more,” someone official told her, to which she said, “Why?”

  David and Kate tried to sing along with the bits of lyrics they could remember to “I’ve Got a Crush on You,”

  “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and “Just One of Those Things,” though the boys allowed them only the first few lines of
each song.

  “Now, this next one is amazing,” Jack announced, as he studied the text on the box. “I doubt you’ve ever seen it. It’s the unfinished footage from Marilyn’s last movie. She died before it was completed and, from 1962 to 1990, it was buried in a vault and almost no one saw it.”

  David realized that he had seen a lot of the clips when they were finally broadcast as part of a documentary. He’d been mesmerized by her sexual power. Until then, he’d kind of wondered about the obsession, but after the swimming pool scene, he got it. They settled into Something’s Got To Give and watched Dean Martin pretend he wouldn’t have immediately sent his new wife packing and hauled his shipwrecked wife off to bed. The pool scene was everything he remembered.

  “This would have been the first sound picture to feature a mainstream movie star in a nude scene,” Jack read.

  “Who had the honor instead?” Lily asked.

  Jack consulted his printouts. “Jayne Mansfield, 1963. Promises, Promises.”

  “Tacky,” Dylan offered.

  “Never heard of her,” Lily said. “Or maybe I did—big blond?”

  They ended with Move Over, Darling, a remake of Marilyn’s aborted effort, with its now-familiar story of Doris Day’s return from a lengthy stay on an island with a handsome survivor. James Garner had searched for her for years, but a man can only wait so long, and he had her declared dead just prior to leaving on his honeymoon. Dylan skipped the slow spots but showed all the Don Knotts scenes.

  “Well, that was quite a montage,” Kate said, over the final credits. “When was the last time I laughed that much? Though I have to ask, were you boys even the least bit worried that we’d be offended?”