I'm Glad About You

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Betrayed, that’s a joke.”

  “No, it is NOT.” He managed to land this without breaching the walls of the bedroom, but she was having none of it.

  “I’m not talking about this here. I mean it. We should go downstairs, to the kitchen, where—”

  “I am not going downstairs and neither are you.” He shut the door and positioned himself in front of it to make this point. “You are not ordering me around like a child, and you are not making me the problem here.”

  “Lower your voice.”

  “Whose baby are you having, Van? Because we both know it’s not mine.”

  “I don’t have to answer that.” She tipped her chin at him defiantly and “drew herself up,” that’s what they used to call it, this phony moment when the person who is the most in the wrong pretends to be taller than she actually is. He watched her mind settle into some far-off place where its righteousness was unassailable. It was astonishing.

  “You don’t have to answer that? You don’t answer, to your husband—”

  “You were never my husband.”

  He had expected some narcissistic retelling of their history, you haven’t been a husband to me since the baby was born, something that completely erased the fact that she was the one who had kicked him out of the marriage bed. But “never”?

  “I have no idea what that is supposed to mean,” he informed her. “That is just fucking crackers.”

  “Please refrain from the use of obscenity, it’s highly offensive.” Here we go, he thought, here we go.

  “Okay, Van. Great. I won’t say anything. You go right ahead. Explain this situation to me. You are pregnant, yes? You’re showing, so I would like to warn you, as a physician, that a denial at this point won’t do you any good. Because eventually a baby is going to show up. And that’s going to be a challenging thing to explain, if you’re not even pregnant.”

  “Babies are not things.”

  “No, they’re not; they most certainly are not,” he admitted. “So may we expect a new human being to show up around here, in the next six or seven months? And if that human being does show up, do you want to care to hazard a guess as to why that might happen?”

  “You’re ridiculous.”

  “‘Cuckold’ is actually the word, but yes, it is widely understood that it makes a man ridiculous, when he is cuckolded.” God he sounded like an ass. How was he losing this argument? He had all the facts on his side, and all that was right and good, and the girls too, his girls, all on his side, he had everything on his side, but she had folded her arms now and was looking at him like he was nothing more than a cheap bully. She was a skilled and devious opponent in an argument; over the years she had taught him the bitter rules of engagement with a will that refused to lose anything at any cost. Okay then. He leaned against the closed door and folded his arms. If you want to do this all night, we will, he thought. He couldn’t tell anymore who was in charge inside his head: bad brain, indifferent brain, victim brain. Was there a good brain anywhere? No. There isn’t.

  “I am pregnant. Yes,” Van said, defiant. Why was she defiant? thought one part of his brain. Because she’s a fucking idiot, another answered. “It is not your child.” No shit. “I think it’s clear that we haven’t been getting along for a long time.” Again, no shit. “I met someone. You don’t need to know who, it doesn’t matter. But he and I, we fell in love, and I’m sorry if this news hurts you, but honestly, it’s been so obvious for so long that our marriage was simply a huge mistake from the start. And I want you to always have a good relationship with your daughters, that is important to me. Maybe more important to me than it is to you, frankly, you don’t seem all that interested in them, most of the time. But that is an unkind thing to say and I really, I never meant to be unkind or unfair in any way. So.”

  A pause.

  “So?” In spite of the fact that most of his brain was feeling colossally aggrieved, the last shred of his logical mind couldn’t help but want her to finish her fucking sentence. So what? The lack of apology was maddening. Not the lack of apology, but the crazy conviction that this complete disaster was somehow his fault. And his failure to fall to his knees and beg her for forgiveness was even more reason for her to heap blame on his unworthy head. His many years feeding at the malign teat of gender sensitivity rose in his chest like bile. Those everlasting feminists needed to take a lesson from Van. All that moaning about injustice and patriarchy and victimhood? She could teach them a thing or two about how to avoid that bullshit.

  “So I don’t see the need to belabor this,” Van sighed, full of disappointed regret. “I would not have broken up our family in this way,” she informed him. It was a phenomenal performance. “I didn’t choose this.”

  “Well, I certainly didn’t choose it!”

  “That’s my point, Kyle, neither one of us chose this.”

  “And yet only one of us cheated.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, Van. I am not the one who went out and decided to have a child with another person.”

  “You would if you could.”

  “What? What, what on earth—”

  “Don’t act all, don’t—”

  “What are you accusing me of?”

  “You know what I’m accusing you of, and I don’t think, frankly, I don’t think you should make me say it.”

  “Make you say what?”

  “You know.” The accusation was profound.

  This was all going so wrong. Well, because she’s insane. Is this a surprise, that she’s insane? She’s not insane. Then what is insanity/ what is it/ she’s right you’ve been unfaithful/ never/ she knows/ I should go to bed have to get up at four Lord Jesus Christ.

  “Dennis told me.”

  The strangeness of this was perhaps the only thing that reached him. The room was so dark, so still. The one light on the bedside table beside him, beside the closed door, really made no impression at all, on the darkness. If she hadn’t been wearing that absurd white dress, she would have been invisible, a black hole, nothing.

  “Dennis told you, told you what?”

  “Now who’s lying?”

  “I don’t know, Van. I guess you think I’m lying but the fact is I don’t know what you’re talking about, what did Dennis tell you?”

  “You are still in love with her! When you married me, you were still in love with her, and that wasn’t fair, Kyle. Not to me, not to the girls, to bring them into a loveless home was not fair to any of us.” She was so aggrieved he thought his head would explode. The only thing to do, the only thing he could even think of doing, was to stick so excruciatingly to the facts that the hope of reality might hover around this nightmare of a confrontation.

  “I assume you are referring to Alison Moore.”

  “Yes, you assume correctly.” The sarcasm was dripping with timeless indignation.

  “I have not seen or spoken to Alison in a year. It’s more than that now, I haven’t seen or spoken to her since that stupid dinner party, so I don’t know what Dennis told you—”

  “He told me the truth. That you had sex with her, up in his father’s bedroom, you had sex with her while I was pregnant—”

  “What—”

  “That you are still obsessed with her, that you go over to his place, you lie to me and go over to his apartment and watch her, you make him tape the shows and then you watch her having sex—”

  “That is completely ridiculous. It’s beyond ridiculous. I have been completely faithful to you, I am not the one who cheated.” That shut her up. He decided to stick with a winning strategy and just repeat it. “I am not the one who cheated, Van. I never cheated on you. You are carrying someone else’s baby. You cannot make this my fault.”

  “You never loved me. Our marriage was never a real marriage.”

  “Well, that’s interesting, because it certainly feels like a real marriage.” There was another silence at this. He didn’t know if that meant he was winning or losing. He didn’
t know which would be better. “So Dennis told you all this shit—”

  “The truth, you mean?”

  “Whatever. Why were you off gossiping about me with Dennis?”

  “It wasn’t gossiping—”

  “Is he the one, he’s the one you slept with?”

  “Oh, please. That’s disgusting.”

  “That’s disgusting? None of the rest of this—”

  “You are so distorting this situation.”

  “How would that be possible, Van, seriously, I don’t see how I could possibly distort this any further.”

  “I did not sleep with Dennis. He’s your friend. I would never do that.”

  “But you would have another man’s baby.”

  “I knew you would say that.”

  “Say what?”

  “All your Catholic righteousness, it flies right out the window when it’s convenient. Well, let me tell you something. I am not getting an abortion. I would never do that. I would never, never do that.”

  “Did I ask you to?”

  “Didn’t you? What is my choice? If you don’t want me to have another man’s baby, what does that mean? That I should kill it? Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m not, I’m just—trying to get to the bottom of this!”

  “That’s not what you’re trying to do.”

  “What am I trying to do then?”

  “If you had come to our marriage with a pure heart, none of this would have happened. If you had tried to love me. But you never did, it is so apparent to everyone, and our marriage never even existed and I want a divorce and an annulment.”

  “An annulment?”

  “It’s the truth, it’s the truth of our marriage. You never loved me, you always loved that other person and it was never a true marriage.”

  The pins were starting to drop. He never actually knew what that old phrase meant before this moment, what the fuck are dropping pins, but he saw them now, in his head, metal rods in a clock-like contraption, pieces fitting together so that the mechanism is complete.

  “He’s Catholic,” Kyle told her. “You met him at church.” He took a couple of steps closer to her, so that he could see her better in the gloom. He felt like Sherlock Holmes. But how had he missed it? Holmes would never have missed the clues of what was happening right under his nose. “Who is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me.”

  “You don’t know him, Kyle, so it does not matter.”

  “Is he married?”

  “I’m not talking about him. He is none of your business.”

  “It’s none of my business. You’re cheating on me, you’re pregnant, you’re talking about destroying our marriage—”

  “It was never—”

  “I’ve heard, Van; I know the arguments, okay? I know the whole stupid annulment argument, I know the whole crazy Catholic set of rules, I WAS RAISED CATHOLIC, and I understand the logic of the technicality, if some consortium of elders in the Catholic church proclaims that the marriage never existed, then you’re free to marry again within the church. Which means that somehow you have managed not once but twice to fall in love with a practicing Catholic. Which is impressive; honestly there aren’t that many of us out there anymore.” His anger was spent. Somehow explaining Catholic dogma to this devious, pretty lunatic had brought him back to himself.

  Van watched him, uncertain. “So are we finished, then? Because I really am very tired.”

  “I—guess—we are finished.”

  She reached for a pillow. “I’ll go sleep in the baby’s room. It’s a miracle you didn’t wake her, but she’ll be up soon enough.”

  “It’s okay, Van. I’ll go somewhere else.”

  “I don’t want Maggie to find you sleeping on the couch. Until we get this settled about how we’re going to proceed, I don’t want her to have to worry about, you know. Why is Daddy not sleeping with Mommy? She needs to be protected.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before.”

  “I did nothing but think of that before,” Van flared. “Do you think this has been easy? It has been hideous. Every thought I had was for those girls. You feel nothing for them, that is so clear to everyone. So don’t, just don’t you dare throw that at me. I am a fantastic mother. You don’t have any right to accuse me, on that level.”

  Would this never end? “I will not sleep on the couch.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “I will sleep somewhere else.”

  “Please don’t go to your parents’. We really do have to talk to lawyers first.”

  “I will not go to my parents’.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I . . . will go to Dennis’s.”

  “Of course.” She smiled at this, triumphant, her point made.

  Really, would this never end?

  Dennis, drunk and sympathetic, was also completely unrepentant about whatever part he had played in this increasingly sordid drama. Kyle threw back a huge glass of Dennis’s best scotch—how can he afford this stuff he never has a job—while Dennis explained how Van had played him like a violin, had poured her heart out about her insecurities, had demanded the truth about Kyle and Alison, had been assuming something so much worse.

  “Seriously, Kyle, she was way out on a limb. She had a whole thing going on, you were flying to New York behind her back and having sex with Alison, it was crazy, she had dates and times all worked out. It was completely insane. And that’s what I told her.”

  “And then you told her—”

  “I told her that the only thing I knew was that one night, at the Christmas party.”

  “You mean the night I didn’t have sex with Alison? You mean that night?”

  Dennis shrugged. “You were up in that bedroom alone and it didn’t sound entirely innocent, my friend. I put the best spin on it but what can I say, it wasn’t exactly innocent.” Dennis’s tone moved off of reassurance and on to something darker but it bounced quickly. “What she did with it, I have no idea. She’s an interesting woman, your Van. How you two ever got together is a mystery to me. She’s a killer.”

  “She wants an annulment.” Blearily, he reached for the scotch bottle. “This is going to kill my parents.”

  “Come on, parents are generally sturdier than we think.”

  “Mine aren’t.” He was drinking much too fast, he knew it, but if ever a person had earned the right to pour booze down his throat, it was him, and the moment was now. “They’re like children, both of them. My mother, Jesus, this afternoon she was congratulating me on my happiness with Van, how we both finally seemed so happy and seeing me so happy made her happy and it was the best day of her whole life. This was, oh, four hours ago.”

  Dennis simply shrugged at this news. “If you don’t tell them anything about what’s actually going on, how are they supposed to know any better?” He swung himself out of his one good chair and headed back to the kitchen. It wasn’t actually a kitchen; it was a kind of old-fashioned kitchenette space that boasted a tiny refrigerator and the smallest four-burner stove imaginable. Dennis’s little apartment was both sparse and suffocating. Next to the charms of the sprawling Victorian mansion Kyle shared with Van and the girls, it looked pathetic.

  But Dennis considered his singular ice cube tray with the focused confidence of an aristocrat. “Well, I’m sorry if my little foray into the truth got you in the shithouse with Van. But for fuck’s sake, Kyle, the woman is a nightmare. I would say if she wants a divorce you should be celebrating. Do not pass go, just get out of jail free.”

  “It’s hardly that simple.”

  “Stop being such a pussy. You’ve been miserable for years. You never had the balls to just take what you want. Catholicism is stupid. Everybody else knows this; why don’t you? You’re supposed to be so smart, the doctor, start acting like it!” This last bit was delivered with a flash of mean pleasure. It moved quickly, but it was startling in its sneering super
iority. Something in Dennis had begun to edge into bitterness; he was turning into the definition of a nasty drunk. The clinician in Kyle recognized the signs and behaviors of the toxicity, how thoroughly the alcohol was taking hold of the organism. Dennis needed months in rehab. He needed his family to step in, not that they would. His father had washed his hands of him years ago. Can you do that? Can you wash away your children? The sacrament of baptism, the washing away of sins. Can you wash away your life?

  I need to get out of here. Kyle stood, swayed briefly as the oxygen hit his brain. He needed to find an all-night diner, and get four or five cups of bad coffee into him.

  “Where are you going?” Dennis asked. “Kyle! Where are you going?” What’s he so pissed about? Kyle’s bad brain seemed to finally have gone to sleep. Why, he couldn’t say. Maybe it was the sight of Dennis, drunk, proud, withered, old. “Are you going to New York, to finally do it with your long-lost love? Let me tell you. You haven’t missed that much. Seriously! She’s still not giving out. Not to the likes of us, anyway.”

  What was he saying? Kyle knew he was trying to get a rise out of him. He knew, also, that Dennis was a liar, that he had told Van whatever he could, that he had thrown bombs into his marriage, that Dennis was every bit the man he claimed to be—charming, dangerous, completely and utterly destructive in every way. He reached for the doorknob behind him.

  “Yeah, you heard me!” Dennis jeered. He sounded like a kid in a schoolyard, daring Kyle to punch him. “I went to New York, I saw her!” Kyle turned back and looked at him. “She’s totally sold out. She’s fucking some director, she’s fucking anyone. Anyone except you and me! She is what she always was, Kyle. She’s nothing but a whore.”

  “Stop.” Kyle was exhausted by the breakage. The breakage of everything. Dennis wove in and out of focus. He was wearing a dirty plaid robe—what an affectation—over a T-shirt and sweats. His face was full-on purple, the color of someone about to have a heart attack. How had this happened?

  “Did you even hear what I said?”

  “You should go back to AA, Dennis,” Kyle told him. “You’re not well.”