We Have Everything Before Us

by Esther Yin-Ling Spodek

  He touches her elbow and a shot of electricity shoots through her. Should we try again? No. Relief, nothing really happened. She begins to calm down. Again, relief. No penetration. Nothing really happened.

  “Look,” Phil says, sitting up and reaching for his clothes. “We could try this again some other time if you want. But in reality, this sort of sneaking around isn’t a good idea. Look at all you have, your husband, your kids. I don’t want to ruin that.”

  Relief. And now she is feeling limp herself. Guilty, guilty. But nothing really happened. She tells herself this, in her head. Maybe, in the end, it doesn’t matter if she wanted it to. Or, if she tried. The end result was that nothing happened. Nothing but residual embarrassment.

  She wants her own soft bed. But first she wants to shower. She gets up off of the grinding concrete, and in a thin stream of light from the window, she sees Phil smile at her. She begins to put on her clothes and pick up the dirty blanket. Why hadn’t she suggested that she be on top? No. Definitely she had not thought this through. Or, perhaps, she had thought too much about it and not at all about what a stupid idea it was. She opens the garage door quietly and peers out onto the dark yard. They walk silently to the back door, one after the other. Eleanor goes to the basement, to an old shower no one uses anymore, and washes off the night.

  15

  “I KNOW WHO you are. And I am sure you know who I am.”

  Sarayu read the email. She knew who it came from. Sarayu read it, and it stayed in her head, brought back the guilt and the sadness she had suppressed after the affair ended.

  Sarayu’s anger flared at Linda’s attempt to intimidate; it made her want to confront Linda, in person.

  So, on a bitter morning, Sarayu packed a sandwich and a thermos of coffee and drove out of the city, weaving through the streets to the expressway. She passed the long stretches of industry, block-like windowless buildings and wide parking lots crammed with cars, one factory or warehouse after another. And then, along the expressway, the populated area morphed into office building groupings with sculpted lawns. Eventually, farms stretched along the sides of the road as she got closer to where Phil lived.

  “I know how you feel hearing from me,” Linda had written. “I have faced his infidelity before. Now, I want to move on. I am not doing this for you. I am doing this for me.”

  Past the billboards advertising state-line casinos and ambulance chasers, she came to Phil’s small riverside town. The trees along the river road were bare, the sky an empty grey. She held her breath and let it go slowly, then repeated the process, hardly recognizing that she was doing it.

  SARAYU REPLAYED THE email in her head and tried to map out what she would say to Linda. As she turned on to the gravel street of Phil and Linda’s development, she was sure that Phil would not be there.

  Her anger sparked again as she came to the beginning of their block, where she could see their empty driveway ahead. She turned onto the street and parked across from Phil’s house. She sat for a moment, unsure. She could still back away from the confrontation. But what satisfaction would that give her? The house looked empty, no movement beyond the open curtains. She got out of the car.

  Sarayu walked up to the house and around to the side, then came to the path leading to the front door, where she heard and saw the door open.

  In that small moment, she was struck with the fear of being caught. What if it was Phil?

  Nothing came to her mind. She knew she was not a good liar. As she stood still, an arm emerged to push the outer door, then a thin, tall body, and finally a blonde fifteen-year-old girl closed the door behind her and stopped short when she saw Sarayu.

  The girl didn’t speak. It was the middle of the day, and she should have been in school. The lit cigarette in the girl’s hand made Sarayu sure that neither Phil nor Linda were at home.

  The two of them looked at each other, caught in their individual crimes.

  “Hi,” the girl said, straightening the shoulder strap of her book bag. “Who are you?”

  “I’m—I’m an old friend of your father’s.”

  “He’s not home right now.”

  “Ah.” Sarayu smiled at the girl, who did not return the look. “Then I should come back when he is.” She turned toward her car and began to walk slowly, the energy in her body draining with each step. Then she stopped and turned back to the girl, who was still standing on the path, holding her cigarette and her book bag, watching Sarayu.

  “What is your name? I’ll tell him you were here.”

  “You must have a day off from school,” Sarayu said. “My name is Anna. Tell him—tell your mom, too—that I came by.”

  The girl looked puzzled and spread her lips into a smile, revealing a mouth filled with metal braces. “Sure,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  Sarayu got into her car with confidence. The girl wouldn’t say a word to either parent about the strange woman on the walkway.

  16

  MONDAY MORNING: ELEANOR has spent the night awake or dozing, and having brief, frightening dreams in which Frank walks in on her while she is having sex with Phil (not just trying to have sex with Phil). The dreams take place in different rooms in Eleanor’s house, but not the garage. When she wakes, she has the feeling of not sleeping, and at the same time, of having done something horribly bad.

  When Frank comes into the kitchen to say to her that he is leaving for work, she jumps in her chair. “Touchy!” he says. “Maybe you should go out and walk the dog.”

  She looks up at him and he gives her a sideways hug. “You aren’t still angry that I got drunk with Eric the other night, when your friend was visiting?” He gently takes her chin with two fingers and turns it toward him. She thinks, he really is so clueless. But do people ever believe things they don’t want to believe? “Please don’t be. It doesn’t happen very often. Maybe I was jealous that you invited a guy from high school to our home. I mean, it isn’t that I worry about making any sort of impression on that guy. What a drip.” He kisses her cheek.

  “No, that’s over with,” she says. “He was a drip. I’m tired.”

  “It really was one of the worst dinner parties we have ever had.”

  She can tell that he is trying to make her laugh, but she can’t.

  He casts a suspicious look at her, at least that is how she interprets it, and then leaves. In her chair at the kitchen island, she tries desperately not to think about what happened on the porch to turn her on to Phil so much.

  But trying not to think about it makes her think about it. She never wants to see or hear from him again. Saturday morning, he was in her home. As she and Phil had planned, she woke early to see him off, started the coffee maker, sliced bagels she had purchased specially from an old New York bagel maker on Dempster, waited nervously for Phil to come downstairs before anyone else arose. At the top of the landing, looking into the kitchen, he stood for a moment and she watched the pale blue eyes that she found still stirred her. She felt mixed up. He broke into a smile and opened his arms as he walked down the stairs. “Come on, it isn’t all that bad.” No other man she knew would ever act this way.

  What wasn’t bad, she thought? The shared intimacy? The fact that he couldn’t get it up? The amount of alcohol they’d drunk? The fact that they were in her home, her garage?

  But she did not want a prolonged discussion. She wanted him to leave so that she could begin to forget the whole thing, and yet she was afraid to let him go and be left with the creepy fact that they had attempted intercourse in her garage.

  “You okay about last night?” Phil said. “I don’t want us to be on bad terms.”

  She lied, “Neither do I,” but wasn’t sure her body language followed what she was telling him. “What time are you seeing your daughter?” Her attempt to change the subject.

  “A little later. But I know you want me out of here. And that’s okay.” He sat down and poured his own coffee.

  They drank quietly and ate bagels. Eleanor s
aid nothing, though things were racing through her mind. Why did you let me try to have sex with you here? Why did we do all of this while my family was home? While the neighbors were next door, while my sons were asleep in their rooms? So, you could come into a place where you weren’t known and leave a mess behind you? Go. Go and don’t come back.

  Then, finally, he received a text, looked at his phone, then at her, and said it was time to leave. “It’s my daughter. She’s awake early.”

  Eleanor looked at him. In the end she did not want to confront him. She just wanted him to go.

  Now, on Monday morning, as she sits in her kitchen, she wonders how Phil came to be the way he is, a jerk, something she thought she might understand because of the vague way she remembered him in high school, and how she thought he might be the answer to the boredom in her life. And now she has the guilt that she is going to have to haul around for a while. Maybe forever. It seems like forever right now. But at least she doesn’t ever have to speak to Phil again.

  Eugene leaves the front door wide open as he bounds down the steps to the sidewalk on his large, floppy feet, arms flailing as he attempts to catch the bus to the high school. Liam has another twenty minutes before he leaves. He makes his own lunch and packs his backpack. “What the heck is wrong with you?” he asks his mother. She merely looks at him. The radio is on loudly and Liam turns it off. Usually she tells him to leave it alone so that she can hear the news, but she hardly notices.

  “Eugene left the front door open,” he complains.

  “Hmm.”

  “He does half as many chores as I do. Why do I have to close the door he leaves open?”

  “Did I ask you to?”

  “You were about to.”

  Then, looking puzzled, he walks away. He has left dishes and food on the counter for her to see. Eleanor snaps to. “Put them in the dishwasher,” she calls to him. She sees his head around the corner of the doorway.

  “Why should I have to put dishes in the dishwasher when Eugene doesn’t? Answer me, Mom. I am asking you why?” “Because you are a better person.” She doesn’t even know why she is saying this but she is not in the mood for an argument. Something is telling her that she should be doing everything for this kid so that he can grow up thinking his mother loves him, that she is not the type of person to ignore him. Another voice is telling her to come out of herself and her self-loathing and be a regular mom. “You are here,” she says. “So put your dishes in the dishwasher. When you are three years older, Eugene’s age, have a huge amount of high school homework, and puberty and your grossly underdeveloped frontal lobe make you forget everything, we will revisit the issue of your chores. For now, you do as I say.”

  Liam does it and stomps off. There are days, Eleanor thinks, as she locks the front door behind him, that she wishes her children would speak to her in texted partial words and partial sentences, because today Liam has too many words, and each one reminds her of how shitty she feels for almost doing something horrible.

  Eleanor takes a package of Italian sausages out of the freezer for dinner, runs water into a pan, and puts the package into it to defrost. She doesn’t want to think about tonight’s dinner or anything else, so she leaves it and turns to the ping of her phone, where there is an email from Phil’s wife.

  Eleanor doesn’t have the sense or lack of curiosity to ignore it. “Eleanor,” the email reads, “I know my husband was with you this past weekend,” she writes. “He still tells me everything. I don’t know why he wants to be honest with me now, after all of his lies. Maybe he is afraid I might smell something on him? After all, he knows I don’t trust him.”

  Eleanor blinks. She would pinch herself if it wasn’t corny. She wants to write, “Really? REALLY? Why should you care? What are you still doing living in his house while you are seeing another guy? What makes you such a martyr?”

  But that would only fire Linda up, and the conversation would go on forever. No. It is time to get out of this mess, Eleanor thinks. She imagines Linda’s face, and it makes her angry, the weakness in Linda’s expressions, her soft compliant voice. “I am sorry you are upset,” Eleanor writes. “What makes you think he isn’t lying this time? Do you always smell his clothes when he comes home from anywhere? Why would you assume it was me?” She deletes it all. “He was here,” she writes. “We had a family weekend. My husband joined us, as well as another couple, and my sons. We barbecued.” What normal woman sleeps with her houseguest while her husband is home? She presses send.

  Linda’s answer is fast: “I knew he wasn’t with the last woman he had an affair with. The nurse. I emailed her on Friday to say that Phil is leaving me. She said that he wasn’t there.” Eleanor finds it odd that Linda is so trusting of people who lie.

  Linda continues: “Did he say I was leaving him?”

  “You told me.”

  “We are sorting through the property now. Ultimately we will divorce.”

  Eleanor compares this with what she heard from Phil, the stories of sitting at the dining room table with papers that represented their lives together, the kind of thing Frank might do with her if he knew what had happened in the garage. Eleanor can now replace her guilt with Linda’s drama, which seems to suck the anxiety right out of her. “Why did you contact this other woman?” she types. “Isn’t it over?” Does she mean Linda and Phil, or Phil and the other woman?

  Linda could be laughing now at the absurdity of all this, if Linda were normal—and Eleanor is thinking that Linda is not.

  “Not for her,” Linda writes back. “Now that he is almost free. And she wasn’t the only one. There was another one before her. That I know about. Then when he was in the military, who even knows about that? I had no control over him. He was in another country. Prostitutes. Parties. Who knows? I never asked for details. I got credit card bills for rooms. What an idiot he was. I thought it was all part of being a marine’s wife. I was so young. Maybe he was the kind of guy who just couldn’t go without sex for six months, and it got me off the hook when he came home.”

  If only she knew how he’d flopped over the weekend.

  And now you can control who he is with next by contacting his former lover? How does that work? Eleanor thinks. “I don’t believe you,” she writes. But of course, she does. It gives her someone else to blame for what she has done. “This isn’t the boy I remember from high school. He was going with the same girl for two years, junior and senior year. They even stayed together for part of college.”

  “I didn’t know him then.”

  At this point Eleanor isn’t sure where the conversation is going, and she is fraught with anxiety, though her curiosity is still strong. “You are making up the story about the marines. I can’t believe he would do that”—actually she can, she does, but she doesn’t want Linda to suspect this. “He doesn’t at all seem the type. He seems quiet. Like he doesn’t get out much”—which she knows he does, otherwise what would he be doing at her house, in her garage?

  “Are you drunk? Why are you doing this?” Eleanor begins to write some more, then she cancels. She looks up as if someone is there to distract her. But it is only the dog, who trots to the back door and barks to be let out. Eleanor writes, “I’m not out to get you. Honestly. I was just a person curious about a boy I went to high school with.”

  “No matter,” Linda responds. “I’m a Christian. I’ve been saved by Jesus Christ. I’m concerned for your soul, for you getting mixed up with this man. He leaves a trail of women behind him. Look at me. I’m one of them.”

  Eleanor reads this twice. Linda is angry, mischievous, probably bored and writing all of this to pass the time, a distraught almost-ex-wife who has no control over what her husband does. After the last series of emails, where Linda claimed to want to save Eleanor’s soul, Eleanor finds all of this troubling. If Eleanor reacts angrily, then Linda will win some satisfaction in this ridiculous battle of emails, she will have achieved a purpose. So, to counteract this, she writes back: “I am just trying to
live my life here. I believe Phil told me about his situation with you because I don’t live in your town. I am a voice with no face even though he knew me in high school and came to my home for dinner one time. I might have answered things in emails that were intended to comfort him through his marriage breakup, and you took them the wrong way.” Saying something like this smooths over some of Eleanor’s guilt, in the same way an apology to someone who doesn’t deserve one does. “I am not doing anything at all that would affect your marriage.” Broken marriage. “Or your divorce. I don’t wish bad things on you.” No. Truthfully, I just wish you would vanish.

  There is a break. Eleanor puts on the kettle, then she hears a ping from her phone. “Tell me more about the weekend,” Linda writes.

  But at this point Eleanor is confident that she has the upper hand and that Linda’s messages have the undertone of a woman trying to cling to a man as he runs away, and she doesn’t want to continue. It only reminds her of her own sins and makes her feel like crap. So, she dials Kaye.

  “What the heck is she emailing you for?” Kaye screams into the phone.

  “I don’t know. She thinks something went on in my house during the visit.” This exits her mouth so quickly that she immediately regrets that she has said it. (She wants to let it out to someone. To Kaye.) Then she breathes deeply and lets the air flow out in a slow stream. She tells herself that she can learn how to lie well. “Mostly she wants to tell me what a horrible person he is.”

  “Is he such a horrible person?” Kaye asks, and Eleanor interprets it as a query: did something happen on Phil’s visit? “He seemed a little clueless, but better than the last time.”

  “Just because he believed you when you said you were a cop …”

  “I’m going to come up with a new story for the next time we go clubbing with your ex-boyfriends and their ex-wives.”

  “Something about this woman—it’s as if she is talking to a therapist—she is not a woman who really knows her husband. She’s putting out feelers to find out what he is doing. She doesn’t know me at all. Or whether to trust what I say.”