Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  * * *

  There is the day he deposits his daughter into her care, says please, it’s an emergency. The only emergency, Gwen points out later, is that he has both a daughter and a job to do. Lizzie has a job, too. Lucky thing her boss gave her the day off.

  Gwen does not approve. She would never judge, she says. She’s not talking as a married woman, a wife with a young child who knows all the ways a husband is vulnerable, she insists. She’s simply worried. None of this is in character for the Lizzie she knows. The Lizzie she knows is not this kind of woman. You’re compromising yourself, Gwen says. I’ve never been more myself, Lizzie says, and after that she tries to say less. She only told Gwen about the affair in the first place because not telling her would have indicated she was ashamed.

  She’s never done anything so shameful she had to keep it secret—and maybe, Lizzie thinks now, this is another one of her problems, a recipe for an unmemorable life.

  You’re too smart for this, Gwen tells Lizzie. How can you think this will end well?

  Lizzie doesn’t want to think about it ending.

  Then what do you think will happen, Gwen wants to know. What are you doing?

  Lizzie has no idea. What Lizzie understands of cheating, she understands from soaps, where cheating is inevitable and comes in two distinct flavors. There’s destructive adultery, vulnerable men preyed on by sloe-eyed succubi, fallen victim to secret vendettas—woman-on-woman violence, husbands collateral damage to wifely war. Then there’s adultery of the heart, on which every great soap romance is built. Love-as-higher-law, cheaters excused by the purity of passion. Neither archetype suits; Lizzie rebels against the constraints of archetype. She does not know what either of them are doing. She knows that when she’s with him, when his arms are around her, she is too happy to ask these questions. The feverish, restless, ceaseless questioning that has driven her life finally stills. Her brain quiets. Her body gives way to its present, to him. Whatever it is she’s doing, how could she stop?

  * * *

  Wendy knows. She can tell Wendy knows.

  One day Wendy says, “Do you think I could fall in love when I’m like this?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think love is knowing someone. If I don’t know myself, how could anyone love me?”

  “Hmm.”

  “But I also think, maybe, there’s so little of me to know that I’d be easy to love. There’s not so much of me to see.”

  “So you’re asking if someone could fall in love with you, then. Not if you could fall in love.”

  “Is there a difference?” Wendy laughs. Sometimes Lizzie forgets they’re not actually friends.

  * * *

  All the men she’s loved before. Tried to love. Failed.

  Lucas, maybe. She liked thinking he might be smarter than her, liked less that he seemed so sure of it himself. She liked the focus that fell over him when he got to work, as if he were trying to alchemize flesh into pure thought. He was the first to say I love you, but he said he thought he loved her, which seemed not quite the same thing. She thought she loved him, too, which meant sometimes she thought the opposite. Then they left each other, and they both survived, so what kind of love was that?

  Before Lucas, Adam. Taller than she would have liked, with limp mustard hair. The first man who did not seem like a boy, with not just a job but a career, the kind men had on TV, managing accounts, angling for promotions. He worked in naming. The best name, he said, sounds like one you already know and have simply forgotten. He’d named: a toothpaste, a cookie, an insect repellant, a line of stainless steel cookware. He named what she felt for him: love. It became a game between them. You know you love me, maybe I do, maybe I don’t. When she summoned the nerve to dump him, he said thank you.

  Before Adam, Caleb. She was a sophomore, he a senior. Her first older man. He was handing out heart-shaped cookies at the Valentine’s Day blood drive. She fainted and woke up to find her cold hand in his. He was an artist, her first and only. Painted in the nude. Painted her once, literally, red streaks down her legs like blood, blue ringing her nipples. It tickled. It was the most unlike herself she had ever been, but her father was dead, and she wanted to be anyone else. They only kissed, and only rarely. It was too embarrassing to admit, even to herself, that her need for him was the need against which she measured all others.

  * * *

  Then it’s New Year’s Eve and Lizzie is at a party surrounded by scientists and benefactors in 1999 novelty sunglasses, and she’s squeezed into a dress she saved from her mother’s scrap heap, a crinkled velvet left over from a college formal, outdated even when she bought it, but she still felt a little like Cinderella until she arrived at Strauss’s door, where she is greeted, again with impeccable politesse, by the wife.

  What she now knows about the wife, from Strauss: smart, not brilliant maybe, but able to keep up. Planned to be a neuroscientist but ended up teaching biology at a suburban public high school. Did not intend to get pregnant when she did, or ever. Fell in love with the baby, quit for the baby, changed by the baby. Husband and wife had been equally ambivalent about procreation. Motherhood, once enacted, became the only dream the wife had ever known, and the wife judged her husband for his lack of similar myopia, his inclination toward anything but the paternal. The wife wants to send their daughter to private school so she will have the right advantages and not mix with the wrong people. The wife is no longer the wife he married. It’s easy to forget, in his telling, that she’s still so beautiful.

  Madeline Strauss introduces her to the moneymen she’s chatting with as “Benjamin’s protégée,” a phrase Lizzie has come to hate. The possessive apostrophe, which she resents not resenting the way she should; the compliment of the noun, in which she no longer has faith. She knows now that he wanted her from first sight, which makes all praise retroactively suspect. Lizzie has confessed this to him, and Strauss has dismissed it. He would not want her, he says, in absence of her mind. Would not call her special if it wasn’t true. But it’s Strauss who’s impressed upon her the need for objectivity, and she can no longer trust his.

  “She’s pretty,” Wendy whispers. Wendy is, at Strauss’s suggestion, her New Year’s Eve date. “Don’t you think she’s pretty?” Pretty is beside the point. The point is that the wife can throw a careless arm around Strauss, can kiss frosting from the corner of his lips, is flesh and blood and silk and his.

  Lizzie tilts glasses of champagne down her throat, one after the other after the other. The only thing Strauss says to her all night is, maybe you should slow down.

  Just before midnight, she gives in to temptation and drifts up the spiral stairs, peeks behind closed doors until she finds their bedroom. Their bed. Beneath her, the floor gives a champagne wobble. She sits down, hard. Does not lie down on the bed, her head on the wife’s pillow. Does not want the view of the ceiling the wife has when he’s on top of her. Does not want to know what they see out the window when they wake up together, lazy and lounging as the sky turns pink.

  Downstairs, a countdown. Time is running out, then runs out, then Prince is instructing the crowd to party like it’s 1999, because now it is, and Lizzie knows that Strauss and his wife are kissing, because this is how you greet a new year, if you can, to prove to yourself that you’re not alone.

  * * *

  It’s 1999, the year of the end of the world, and she tells him she can’t do this anymore. She won’t do this again. By the end of the conversation, she is doing it again. He swears she is the only one, and this seems to matter, though Lizzie is unsure if or why it should. She does not accept that her actions should be defined by his heart—that if he loves her, she is a tragic, romantic heroine, that if he simply lusts, if she is a link in a chain of lust, then sex is just sex, her body just a body. She does not accept that she should be categorized like a Shakespearean play, end defining the means—as if adultery resulting in marriage is inherently nobler than adultery that simply expires. She does not accept t
hat she is a type, a tool, a hole—if he deems it so. She is neither helpless in the face of love nor ruthless in her weaponization of lust. She is this kind of woman: the kind who wants. If it is just sex, just desire, just one body in need of another, then let it be just.

  * * *

  Sometimes, though, she’s less convinced. Sometimes she thinks he is every husband who’s ever fucked a woman who’s not his wife; she is every woman who’s ever said I don’t care if he leaves her, and longs for him to leave her. She wants this to be different, but sometimes secretly suspects Meg Ryan is right, Tolstoy is right, nothing is ever different. She dreams of the day he discovers he cannot live without her, even if it means enacting a Russian tragedy. When the pull of the dream grows too strong, she promises herself she’ll stay away. When the pull of his body grows too strong, she boomerangs back. He’s a married man. She’s the other woman. Note, she thinks, the articles. A married man could be any of them; the other woman is particular, the active agent, the one to blame.

  What are we doing, she asks, always, but always after.

  Elizabeth—he says it like a sigh.

  Lizzie hears it like a promise, because there is no Elizabeth without him. Then he says can we not ask that, not now?

  He says “we,” as if they are one person, and that one person is him.

  IX

  WENDY

  What they do when they think no one’s watching

  She’s lying to herself, pretending she’s not in love with him. I wonder how I can tell, if it’s because I’ve been in love with a married man. If my husband was cheating on me. Maybe I caught him red-handed and bare-assed, and fled. Though I would prefer to think I was not the kind of woman who would be broken by a man.

  I listen to them in his office sometimes, my ear pressed to the door. I like the way she sounds when she forgets herself. It’s a noise between a whimper and a laugh, and her please lives in the same gap, a wounded joy. They are my soap opera now. He creeps up behind her while she administers my tests, watches me watch him subtly stroking her neck. He’s hard on her in public, she’s lost her golden girl glow; he wants everyone to know he sees her flaws, and she wants everyone to know it, too, so no one imagines the truth. She never stops watching him, or watching for him when he’s gone. When I catch her crying, she pretends she isn’t, and I pretend to believe her. If she asked, I could tell her I’m pleased she’s finally allowed herself to want. I could tell her it would be better if she wanted someone else.

  I can tell she’s lonely. I could tell her I remember that, the feeling of being lonely with someone else. That sometimes, before I fall asleep, I can remember how it felt to lie beside someone who doesn’t love you enough to stay awake. I don’t tell her this, though, because she would only want to know how I remember, and whether the memory is tethered to person or place, and what this kind of memory feels like compared to the memory of whether I want pepperoni on my slice or how many stars are on the American flag. It wouldn’t occur to her that I could help. I’m a subject, and subjects don’t do, we’re done to. I see the way he looks at her. If she asked, I could tell her: she’s a subject, too.

  LIZZIE

  At work, Lizzie told herself, nothing would change. She refused to benefit professionally from her personal choices—and she refused to be penalized. She would neither leverage sex for ambition nor trade it. This, at least, was the plan. Unfortunately, the plan didn’t take into account how much of her cognition would be consumed by thoughts of Strauss, how distracting it would be to have him either present or absent, both their own kind of exquisite pain. Whether she was in her office or the imaging lab or across from Wendy, she was mentally with him. Rehearsing the trail of his fingers down her stomach the night before or the pressure of his hands on her hips as he guided her onto him, held her rhythm steady, showed her where he wanted her to be. This was not to her professional advantage. Nor was Strauss’s increasing reluctance to be alone with her during business hours, to praise her in public, to indicate, in any way, to any possible viewer, that she meant more than she should have, or anything at all.

  “What did you do to Strauss?” Clay asked. “Kill his cat or something?” They were at the musty dive bar the fellows haunted after work. With new incentive to stop standing out, Lizzie had forced herself to join them.

  “What makes you think I did something to him?”

  “Because he used to treat you like the lady of the manor and now he’s treating you like…”

  “Like a dead raccoon that’s started to smell,” Mariana said.

  “What did you do, seriously? Fuck up his results?”

  “Fuck up his fund-raising?” Dmitri said.

  “Refuse to fuck him, more like.” That was, inevitably, Clay.

  “I didn’t do anything. Nor did I refuse to do anything.”

  “The fall of the favorite,” Dmitri said knowingly. “Standard courtly dynamics. Cf Galileo.”

  “Am I the only one who has no idea what he’s talking about?” Clay said.

  “Just the only one so eager to admit it,” Dmitri said. “Which is why he treats you like a dead raccoon, for the record.”

  She was struck by the ease between them. They poked one another’s weak spots, but not so hard it would hurt. Lizzie wasn’t one of them, and now she couldn’t be. A second beer and she might get sloppy. No beer and she felt like clawing off her own skin. Her life had begun to feel like a performance, one she could drop only when she was with him, which made being with him the only time that felt real. It was necessary but impossible to remember that being with him was the least real thing. This sticky table, this cheap beer, this was real life. She was sometimes very lonely. Even lying with him in the nest of blankets they sometimes made for themselves in his office, Lizzie trying not to feel like they were in a dog bed, two animals rutting on the ground, even with Strauss’s lips nuzzling her neck in his sleep, she was swamped by loneliness.

  That morning they’d stolen an entire two hours together, necking in an empty movie theater like horny high schoolers—necking, that was his rusty word. He’d asked, as Mel Gibson raced the city with a gun and a rage hard-on, whether she wanted to go back to LA, if she missed it. What she missed: hiking along the Palisades trail under a full moon. Smoking on the balcony, blowing puffs into the avocado tree blossoms. The chitter and rustle of her rat lab, the sighing of fluorescents, shiny blade of scalpel, quiet rhythm of slice and scrape and plate and slice and scrape and plate. Slurping soba noodles, arguing about quantum mechanical models of cognition and Kantian reasoning and free will and wishing Lucas would shut up already about his pigeon brains. Lucas, daring her to forget driving home, daring her to walk the deserted sidewalks, walk west and west, see how far they could get. Lucas slipping his hand in hers as the ocean stretched endless before them. Lucas at dawn, sun rising on what still felt like the wrong side of the world—rising on what felt like the beginning of some new self, a Lizzie who plunged, fully clothed, into a moonlit ocean and dozed damp on its shore. She missed an LA that no longer existed for her; she could not go back. She told Strauss she hoped to stay through a second year, if she could. Her research was too promising, her connection with the subject too well developed to abandon. She didn’t phrase it as a question, saving him the need to answer.

  “Galileo’s crime was being the teacher’s pet, favorite courtier in the Medici court,” Dmitri said now. “Which meant every other courtier was gunning for him. Guy should have kept his head down. He had no one to blame but himself for getting it cut off.”

  “Why do you even know this?”

  “Uh, because I read?”

  “Oh, Stephen King’s writing about dead astronomers now?” Clay said.

  “I was no one’s favorite,” Lizzie said.

  “Are no one’s favorite,” Mariana said. Strauss was taking Mariana with him to the upcoming Chesapeake Conference, a UK gathering of world-class cognition experts that occurred only once every five years. It would be her debutante ball: a c
opresentation with Strauss, endless schmoozing with hypothetical future employers. Strauss’s flight home from the conference routed through Chicago. Lizzie, whom he couldn’t have chosen without arousing suspicion—they both agreed on this—would fly out to meet him at a hotel near O’Hare.

  Gwen kept asking, is this enough for you?

  But nothing was ever enough for Lizzie. Gwen was the one who always said that.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Dmitri said. “I hear he does this every year—picks someone, gets bored, moves on.”

  He was trying to be nice. Lizzie made herself smile, and let him pay for her second beer.

  * * *

  Strauss told her that work was his only respite from missing her. She resented the privilege. Work was where she missed him most. The Meadowlark Institute was Strauss embodied, his will made flesh and concrete. He ran his hands along its walls as if it were a body, as if it were her body, and it seemed to her the building was her truest rival. She thought she’d been obsessed with him before, but this felt different. This felt physical, her body shaping itself to his, her nervous system readying itself, like prey sensing a predator, for his withdrawal. She had never intended to need someone like this, and with need came the terror of what she would do if—but if was the wrong word for inevitable, for something baked into the terms of engagement, the word was when—he took himself away. If she weren’t so certain of this, his absences would be easier to endure. But because she was, because she understood that his presence in her life was weather, not climate, every absence felt like a foreshadowing of the final one.

  Gwen’s baby was old enough now to enjoy playing peekaboo, or at least to giggle at the appropriate intervals. Lizzie marveled at Charlotte’s shock each time hands fell away and restored the face behind them to the world. There was a theory of developmental psychology that infants are not born understanding object permanence—that the brain’s default assumption is that an object, once removed from sight, ceases to exist. Hence the peekaboo cycle of terror and relief, every adult an alternately vengeful and merciful god, dematerializing then restoring the objects their children loved most. Lizzie felt like she’d retrogressed, could not maintain her faith in existence beyond her own perception. Maybe if she’d had some control over when she could see him, when she could indulge the fantasy that he belonged to her, but they saw each other on his schedule, at his whim. This was reasonable: he had the Meadowlark, he had the wife and child, he had more to juggle and more to lose. She had only her work and him. Piaget argued that infants developed their sense of object permanence via touch, persuading their brains that material reality rested not in the visual, but in the physical. It was only when Strauss was solid in her arms that she believed in him, let herself stop fearing, at least for that moment, how hollow she would feel when he was gone.