We Have Everything Before Us

by Esther Yin-Ling Spodek

  There are two bottles of cold chardonnay resting on their sides, condiments, plain and flavored low-fat yogurts. She must eat like Linda. No meat, though he has seen her eat meat before. They will have to go shopping if he is to stay here. He searches the cabinets until he finds two wine glasses and opens a chardonnay.

  Sarayu appears in her robe. “You found the wine.”

  “I think I found dinner, too, but I didn’t take it out yet. You hungry?”

  She takes a glass of wine as he proffers it and smiles. “Yes. After the exercise. Starved. Are you taking over my kitchen? Can I at least put my clothes on before we eat?” She is smiling.

  Phil shakes his head. “No.” He grins. “I mean yes. I’m not taking over your kitchen and you can get dressed.”

  She leaves, tracing an imaginary line on the wall with her index finger as she walks, a gesture Phil finds erotic. When she returns, dressed, she takes the two bowls covered in plastic from the refrigerator and brings them to the dining table just off the living room area. The table is already set with woven placemats and white ceramic dishes. “I made Chinese sesame noodles with peppers. Is that all right?”

  He forces himself to say that it is and watches her uncover the dishes and put out water glasses and silverware. “As long as I don’t have to eat with chopsticks.”

  She smiles. “You have to eat one noodle at a time.”

  Phil has them make a toast—awkwardly—to being together, sitting with the corner of the table between them. He eats slowly, appreciatively. At least he thinks he does. Sarayu rolls her noodles on to her fork and shovels them into her mouth. She gulps her wine.

  “You’re hungry,” he says.

  “I’m happy,” she says. “I’ve been waiting all day. For several things.” She grins shyly, a look of mischief, and watches him grin back. It’s something he forces because he feels he is taking in the situation. “One of them was food,” she says.

  “How is Josh?” he asks.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He’s your friend.”

  “He’s been my friend for a long time.”

  “Did he know about me before?”

  “A little.”

  “Hmm.” Phil is not sure he wants to know how much she has told Josh. “I don’t want him to think that I’m a bad guy.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “He doesn’t know you. How do you feel about washing the dishes and going for a walk?”

  They stand next to each other washing, rinsing, and putting away the dishes. Their elbows brush against each other. Sarayu pauses and puts her head against his upper arm, briefly, as if to tell him that she is there. He likes the feel of her cheek on his arm. It’s a gesture of affection, the kind he isn’t used to right now.

  Daylight is long, and, as they walk, Phil takes a while before he moves to hold Sarayu’s hand, putting his palm against her back, just between the shoulder blades, as they stroll, then sliding it to the hand closest to him. She grips it at first, and as they move, she begins to loosen her fingers and relax.

  A foursome sits at a table outside a restaurant laughing, drinking. Two men pass them, holding hands. Music spills out of a bar where women younger than Sarayu line up in high heels and tall hair. A panhandler reaches out with his paper Starbucks cup and asks for change. “Will you be blessed?” he says to them. Dusk falls and the neon of a restaurant sign stands out in the fading light. As they walk, they are still holding hands.

  POSTCOITAL, THEY ARE lying naked on the bed, the blanket and sheets crumpled around them, and the ceiling fan blowing cool air across their bodies.

  “Penny?” Sarayu asks.

  “What?” Phil answers as if he has barely heard what she said.

  “Penny for your thoughts. Didn’t your mother ever ask you that?”

  “Did yours?” Phil puts his hand behind his head and watches the shadows of the moving fan on the ceiling.

  “She did.”

  “In Indian?”

  “What? No, silly. In English. She was born in Toronto. My grandmother is from India. There are hundreds of languages in India.”

  “I was thinking of how you met Josh.”

  Sarayu turns on her side. “Again? He is just my friend. That’s all. I knew his girlfriend a long time ago, when I was at university. She was my friend. I was young. She was the kind of girl who gets into trouble. I was the one who would try to talk her out of things.”

  “Like …”

  “Sneaking into the rec center in the middle of the night to swim after we’d been drinking. We knew someone who worked there and had keys. Decorating a statue of Queen Victoria near the university. Things you do when you are drunk and a student. Except that we weren’t always drunk.” She turns onto her back. “I don’t know where she is now. She and Josh broke up. Then later, I moved here and knew he lived here. I wanted a friend, so I looked him up. That was years ago. And he doesn’t have girlfriends anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “You couldn’t tell?”

  He faces her. “I guess not.”

  “Why are you asking me this now? We just made love and you are asking me about another man as though he were someone who I would have a romantic relationship with. Are you suddenly possessive? What if I were to ask you about how many affairs you had during your marriage, before me? And how many you found on the internet?”

  “Go ahead.” Phil props himself up on his elbow and looks down at her face.

  “Well?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Who did it start with?”

  “A woman I worked with. I didn’t find her on the internet. We traveled together, worked together. I was unhappy at home. Linda wouldn’t have sex with me. I had to do something.” He laughs nervously. “You knew about this.”

  “You told me about her when I met you.”

  “But now you want to know about other women.”

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m still married.”

  “And you were when we met.”

  “Now I’m getting a divorce.”

  “Come closer. Just lie with me.”

  “I am close.”

  “Closer.”

  He rustles the sheets as he moves the small distance between them and leans in so that their foreheads touch. “That close enough?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes are closed. “You can go to sleep now.”

  “I didn’t brush my teeth.”

  “One night won’t kill you. Go to sleep.”

  “I was about to, but you wanted a penny for my thoughts.”

  “You really can sleep now. Go on.”

  “You are distracting me.”

  “Not for long. I’m falling asleep.”

  “So am I.”

  Phil’s phone sounds. “That’s my daughter’s ring.” He sits up and reaches for his phone.

  “You should answer it,” Sarayu says.

  “Isabel? Yes? No, I wasn’t asleep. What’s going on?” He listens. “Wait a minute. Slow down, Isabel. Who? Ok. Ok. I’m coming home. There’s nothing you can do now. It’s—no, it isn’t your fault. Ok. Yes. I’m coming home.”

  Phil turns to Sarayu. “She let the dog out. She got hit by a car. Phoenix is dead.”

  “Who let her out, your daughter?”

  “No. Linda. Linda let the dog out and forgot about her. She ran into the street to chase cars. The neighbor didn’t see her in the dark and she got hit. That was Isabel on the phone. She is with the neighbor.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Sarayu puts a hand on his arm.

  Phil gets up and begins to put on his clothes. “I have to take care of this.”

  “I know how much you loved the dog.”

  “Not as much as I hate Linda right now.”

  “You think she did this on purpose?”

  “I do.”

  Sarayu gets out of bed and wraps herself in her bat
hrobe. “Is she that crazy?”

  Phil is buttoning his jeans when he stops to meet her eyes. “I have tried to tell you that it is a volatile situation!” His tone is dead serious and he is angry. Sarayu doesn’t like the way he is looking at her, as if, for the moment, he sees Linda in her. It isn’t an experience she has had with Phil. She backs away. “I don’t want to have to explain this again,” he says to her. “You know how it is.”

  “I am not sure that I do. I’m not sure I understand your baggage.” She leaves the bedroom and goes into the bathroom to catch her breath. She turns on the water in the sink and cups her hands to toss water on her face, then buries it in a hand towel. She isn’t crying, but she feels as though she has been. When she opens the door, Phil is standing there.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. He doesn’t put his arms around her as she expects him to, but passes her on the way to the toilet, closing the door behind him. When he is done, he packs his overnight bag in the bedroom. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and takes out his car keys. He stops to look at her and Sarayu sees that he is all business, a dramatic shift from fifteen minutes ago.

  “I’ll call you in the morning after I’ve settled this problem.”

  She wonders if she should tell him that he has angered her, or say something to comfort him, but she does nothing because she cannot decide. She follows him to the front door.

  “This isn’t the way we were supposed to end the weekend,” he says.

  “You are upset about your dog,” she finds herself saying.

  “Worried about my daughter. Angry at my wife. I don’t know how I am going to talk Isabel down from all of this. Maybe call her from the car.” He reaches and kisses her on the cheek. “Again, I’m sorry.”

  “For talking to me the way you did?”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t about you.”

  Phil puts his duffle on the floor. “Oh—come on!”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m your wife.”

  “Ok, ok. We can deal with this later, can’t we? I have to go. My kid is waiting for me to get home.”

  She nods. He puts his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t make a big deal, not now, please? I have to get through this with Linda.”

  She nods, but inside she isn’t nodding. He leaves. She shuts the door and goes back to bed, but she can’t sleep. She lies awake thinking about how things have not changed. Phil is the same. She is the same. No, maybe she is not the same. Finally, she dozes.

  At sunrise, which is near five in the morning, she wakes and gets out of bed. She changes the sheets and takes a shower. When she returns to bed, she falls into a deep sleep.

  22

  ELEANOR ARRIVES THROUGH the gate at the side of the house. She breaks Kaye’s concentration as she unloads a Rubbermaid container of margaritas and a bag of blue corn chips from her tote bag onto the patio table. “I’m glad you called,” Eleanor says. “No one is at home at my house. I was dying of boredom.”

  “Me too.”

  “Any news from Clara today?”

  Kaye shakes her head and pours from Eleanor’s container into two handblown margarita glasses. “She stays out all day, even getting up early to leave, then comes home at ten when I am asleep. I don’t even know how she is doing at school. She talks to her dad. I’m useless.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Eric thinks we should let her work out her angst on her own. But he wasn’t around for the storm. He didn’t chase Clara down and find her when the emergency sirens went off. He wasn’t frightened like I was. He was downtown working. I was the one who found Clara in the storm. I’m the one she’s nasty to. I should leave Eric to raise her and see what happens. It was his idea to have a kid. It was his idea to have me stay at home. It’s been rather a failure.”

  “You’re not serious,” Eleanor says from inside her margarita glass.

  Kaye shoots her a death ray of a look. “She put up her room for rent on Craigslist.”

  “You haven’t told me about this. Did she mean it? How could she do that?”

  “We didn’t discuss whether she meant it or not. I answered the door in the middle of the day while she was at school and discovered a guy there wanting to rent her room. She is such a stupid teenager that she forgot the guy was coming around. It’s such a ridiculously far-fetched idea. I don’t know how she could have been serious. But I’m not in her crazed head.”

  “What guy?” Magda appears at the side of the house. She is carrying a bowl of raw vegetables and she puts them on the table. “This is to counteract the chips.” She pours herself a margarita. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Clara put her bedroom on Craigslist as a rental,” Eleanor says. “A guy came to check it out when Clara was at school. He’d made an appointment with Clara. Kaye answered the door.”

  Magda laughs until she sees that Kaye doesn’t think it’s funny. “How typical,” she says. She sits at the table. “They are so stupid at that age.” Magda’s older daughter is now in college. The younger one is Clara’s age, but they are not friends.

  “I thought he was some guy she’d picked up at a club or coffeehouse who thought she was older. How the hell do I know what she does with her free time. He was in his twenties. I thought she’d lied about her age,” Kaye says.

  “Then what happened?”

  “He left. She came home from school. She left the house. The usual. The storm erupted and I got worried that she was out in it. I chased her down, put her in the car, brought her home. Now she isn’t speaking to me. Apparently, she doesn’t want me running her life. Or raising her.”

  “You’ve already raised her,” Magda says.

  “Into someone I am not sure I like.”

  They sit in silence for a moment. Until Magda says, “It won’t always be this way. She’ll change and get over it. When she needs something. Emotional support. Money. A car.”

  “She has someone,” Kaye says. “She has her dad.” She looks at the bottom of her glass rather than at Magda. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  Magda nods. “What’s up with the guy from high school?” she asks Eleanor. “The old boyfriend?”

  “He wasn’t my boyfriend. I just knew him.”

  “Residual romantic feelings?”

  “No.”

  “He has a daughter at school here, at Northwestern, and one in high school, and he is getting a divorce from his wife. But she still lives with him.” Kaye tips back the rest of her margarita. “Not very ‘divorce-y’ behavior if you ask me, to live in the same house.”

  “Maybe it’s a big house,” Magda says.

  “I’ve never been there,” Eleanor says.

  “Not yet, “Kaye says.

  “Not ever,” Eleanor says.

  “Why? Did the romance flicker out? What happened?” Kaye asks.

  “No romance. I got a call from his wife during the storm. She wanted to know if he was here. I told her no,” Eleanor says. She blinks and looks away.

  “I told you this was going to happen.” Kaye sits back and folds her arms against her chest, then leans forward to refill her glass.

  “The big storm where you lost your car and tree?” Magda says.

  “Yes.”

  “So where was the guy?” Magda asks.

  “How did the wife get your number?” Kaye asks.

  Eleanor shrugs her shoulders with a mouthful of tortilla chips. “How should I know. I hardly know this guy or the privacy settings on his phone. The question should be, ‘Why is she calling me?’ And I don’t know the answer to that. It was weird.”

  “I agree. Although, I could be a police detective and find out.” Kaye smiles for the first time since Eleanor has arrived.

  “No.” Eleanor sounds uncertain.

  Kaye swirls the drink in her glass. “Did the city come and chop up the tree that fell in front of your house?”

  “So far they have cleared the part of the tree that fell into the street. They measured the trunk and marke
d the sewer and cable lines. I suppose they will remove the stump. It’s huge.”

  “And Frank’s car?” Kaye has successfully changed the subject.

  “Towed. Frank wasn’t home when the truck came.”

  “Now you will have a new tree and a new car,” Magda says, happily. “Not bad in the end. Someone on my street lost a huge cottonwood that fell into their yard, and their ten-year-old son put up a sign, tours of the dead tree for fifty cents.”

  “He’s lucky no one was hurt or killed when the tree fell,” Kaye says. They all sit silently for a moment. “Did anyone take the tour?”

  “One or two.”

  “Frank loved that car,” Eleanor says. “I feel really bad about the whole thing.”

  Kaye watches Eleanor and thinks that she means something more than the storm and the tree, but she won’t ask her. Eleanor wouldn’t answer truthfully, she knows. And now Kaye has her own problems to worry about. She thinks about the little secret suitcase she has had for some time in the back of her closet, packed and ready for the proverbial rainy day. And now, the rain has come and gone, and it feels to her like it is time. She refills everyone’s glass distractedly and waits.

  SARAYU STANDS IN front of her refrigerator, looking for something else to bring to work with her lunch. There are large green plastic bags of lettuce and green beans from Phil’s garden, wilted and rotting. She didn’t eat them. She knew she wouldn’t eat them when he brought them. She was, however, impressed by Phil’s eagerness, the effort he had taken to try to find something besides sex for them to do with each other. He had wanted to cook with her, but she had made dinner before he arrived so that they would not have to waste time cooking. It wasn’t her favorite thing to do as a group activity. And in the end, it was good to leave the house and go out walking in the neighborhood, to bring the relationship out in public.

  Her home is her sanctuary. It was where she found comfort after he had broken up with her in the past. She is hoping that Phil does not see it as a sanctuary away from his wife. As he left in the middle of the night to go back home to his daughter, she began to feel that he did. Ever attentive, he had called early in the morning, long after arriving home and sorting his situation. “My daughter is very angry at her mother. She won’t speak to her. It’s a real mess over here. A real mess. Linda needs to move out.”