“Don’t go soft on me, Wadsworth,” growled Pen, but it was Pen who was going soft. In her mind’s filing cabinet, she maintained a list of things that she would’ve otherwise disdained but liked because they made Augusta happy, and she could feel Jason taking his place on it, muscling in with his big shoulders, until he was wedged into a spot well below hair glitter but several notches ahead of chicken fingers and stickers.
When Jason moved his seat in Vancouver, both he and Augusta were in hog heaven for hours. They played I-Spy. They watched the same cartoons and Disney movies on their individual seat-back screens, headphones on, commenting to each other on the action in voices booming enough to generate a flutter of smiling, gentle remonstrance from the ballerina-like Asian flight attendants. They colored in the coloring books Pen had purchased for the trip, Jason scrunching his large form into painful-looking positions in order to chase runaway crayons. They played seemingly endless rounds of Old Maid and tic-tac-toe, until Will offered to read to Augusta, and the four of them shifted seats, so that Will sat between Augusta and Pen and Pen sat next to Jason.
She recognized Will’s offer as an act of mercy, one she herself would have appreciated, since her own tolerance for mindless and repetitive children’s games topped out at around fifteen minutes, but which appeared to deflate Jason. Once Augusta was gone, he was visibly at loose ends, aimlessly channel surfing, flipping through the duty-free catalog, finally digging out a thick, daunting slab of a hardcover book, which Pen recognized with surprise as a recent, prizewinning presidential biography. When Jason said sarcastically, “Don’t look so shocked. We graduated from the same college, remember? I do know how to read,” Pen had the grace to be ashamed.
Still, ten minutes into the book, after a period of repeated head lolling and jerking awake, Jason was fast asleep. His left arm was inches from hers, his face maybe a foot away. She never got used to it, the forced intimacy of airplanes, and it took a while for her to look at Jason directly.
“Geez,” she whispered to Will. “He looks so vulnerable, like an enormous baby chick.”
“Don’t do it,” cautioned Will.
“Do what?”
“Put that little airplane pillow over his face. Augusta would be bummed.” They both glanced down at Augusta, who was sleeping again, tucked under her blue blanket, her feet in Will’s lap, and then looked back at Jason. “Plus, it might be too small. You might need something bigger.”
“Seriously,” whispered Pen, “it’s weird to be this close to him.”
“Better you than me, pal.”
“Thanks a lot.”
But she had to admit that Jason’s face in repose held a kind of sweetness, smooth cheeks, dimpled chin, blond hair like a freshly mown lawn on top of his head. Seeing him like this, especially after seeing him with Augusta, it was slightly more possible to imagine why Cat married him. Maybe he had reservoirs of goodness under all that bluster. Maybe this face was his real face.
Maybe not, she told herself, sharply. He had lied and misled them multiple times; he had driven Cat away; he said “dude” frequently and without irony. Now was no time to get sappy.
Hours passed, who knew how many? Pen’s inner clock had gone helter-skelter, befuddled by time zone switches, the plane’s interior darkenings and illuminations, and the indeterminate meals, randomly served (she liked the fish congee, but was it dinner? breakfast? Pen had no idea). Time on the plane seemed to alternate between clotting to an immovable mass and thinning and dissipating, like air on a mountaintop. After that early gift of plane sleep, Pen couldn’t even manage a catnap. She read; she watched several episodes of a crime show that made you desperate to be a forensic detective, if only for the sleek, glowing, is-it-a-lab-or-is-it-an-art-installation interiors and scuba-suit-tight pantsuits; she walked around and around the airplane like a panther in a cage; she ate every single thing the flight attendants put in front of her. Mostly, she talked to Will, talked and talked, like a thirsty person at a mountain spring, an enterprise that made time disappear altogether.
It was when she was giving up on her fourth nap attempt in an hour that it happened: Jason, still sleeping, shifted his knees and caused a minor earthquake in his seat, dumping an open bag of caramel corn onto the floor and sending the presidential biography tumbling over the armrest and onto Pen’s lap. When she picked it up, it flopped open. Two photographs slid out and rested, facedown, on her knee. Even as her mother’s voice told her to slip the photos back into the book without looking at them, she was switching on her reading light and turning them over in her hands.
The first was a wedding picture, Cat on Jason’s lap, laughing, her whisper-delicate neck and shoulders rising from the bodice of an upside-down lily of a dress, her button nose pressed against Jason’s cheek; Jason’s face shining with beatific joy. The second was Cat by herself in leggings and a tiny T-shirt, turned sideways, her arms spread in a gesture that said Ta-da!
Because she was taking in Cat’s lovely, devilish smile, her long hair (Cat had never had anything longer than a long bob in all the years Pen knew her), it took Pen a moment to understand the significance of the gesture, and then she saw it: an almost imperceptible rise above Cat’s narrow hips, what would’ve just looked like ordinary stomach on anyone less waiflike. A baby bump.
As Pen stared and stared at the photo, her eyes burning with tears, she heard a small sound, the sound of a person clearing his throat deliberately: “Ahem.” It came from the direction of Jason. Pen froze. People made a lot of noises in their sleep, but, in her experience, this wasn’t one of them. Filling with dread, she braced herself and looked up.
Jason’s eyes were on the photograph, and the expression on his face wasn’t angry; in fact, it might have been the opposite of angry. Gently, he took the photos from Pen’s hands.
“Twelve weeks,” he said. “It’s as far as we ever got. A couple of days after I took this picture, she started bleeding and, poof, our baby was gone.” When he said “our baby,” his voice was like the expression in his eyes: honest, bleak, rife with longing. Pen remembered what Sam had said, how Cat had told her that wanting a baby had nothing to do with her husband and everything to do with Cat’s wanting to be a mother. Looking at Jason, Pen thought Cat had gotten it wrong. She wasn’t the only one who had been stockpiling love.
“I’m so sorry,” said Pen.
“She was at the grocery store when it happened,” Jason went on. “And then for, like, weeks afterward, she couldn’t go back. Started ordering groceries from this online delivery service.”
“Poor Cat. Poor both of you.”
For the first time, Jason’s eyes met hers. “You know, she didn’t even tell me? I’d come home from work and the fridge would be full of food, and I didn’t think twice about it. You know how I found out?”
“How?”
“I complained about the bananas.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second or two, as though trying to clear his head of something. “Can you believe that? They were too ripe, all those strings sticking to them when you peeled them. I hate that.”
“So does Cat,” said Pen, suddenly remembering this fact. “She liked them when they were so green you could barely peel them.”
“Yeah, well, right about then, she wasn’t eating much of anything, which also took me a while to notice.” He shook his head in disgust. “My wife can’t walk into a goddamn grocery store without having posttraumatic stress, and I’m complaining about bananas.”
“Listen,” said Pen with great seriousness, “if you didn’t know, it was because she didn’t want you to know. It wasn’t your fault.”
Jason looked at her for a few seconds before he said, with equal seriousness, “Thank you.”
They sat in a prickly, awkward silence, until Pen couldn’t stand it anymore. She turned to Will, who was facing the other direction, sleeping, and tapped lightly on the back of his head. He swatted at her hand for a few seconds and then turned around.
“Hey,” he said reproachf
ully, glaring at her with half-closed eyes and running his hand across the top of his head, “I was asleep.”
“I know and I’m sorry,” said Pen. “But someone has to save us.”
“Me and you?” asked Will. “From what?”
“Me and Jason,” said Pen. “From ourselves.”
Will peered across Pen at Jason. “You were fighting?”
“We were getting along,” said Pen with a shudder.
“Yeah,” snorted Jason, “Pen was nice. It was freaky.”
“That is freaky,” said Will.
Pen punched him in the arm.
“Ow!”
Rubbing his shoulder, Will narrowed his eyes into the Clint Eastwood squint and looked from one face to the other. Then he nodded. “Okay, fine,” he said, “but if we’re going to do this, we need to clear up a few things.”
“Wait,” said Jason, alarmed. “Do what?”
“Hey, you started it,” said Will.
“We failed to treat each other like radioactive waste for a whole half a minute. So what?” said Pen.
“Yeah,” said Jason, “don’t get all one-giant-step-for-mankind on us, dude.” But under the scorn, he sounded the way Pen felt: optimistic, goofy with relief.
“I’m going back to sleep,” said Will, starting to turn away.
Pen tugged on his shirtsleeve. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you what’s going on.”
“What?” said Will and Jason at the same time.
“We being on the same side,” she said.
No one made eye contact. Everyone fidgeted, each in her or his own way.
“Whatevs,” said Jason finally. “I guess it only makes sense. We’re all trying to find Cat, right?”
“Right!” said Pen. “Absolutely.”
But Will was shaking his head. “Not so fast,” he said.
“Fast?” said Jason. “Don’t forget I hated you for, like, a decade.”
Pen chuckled at this, and Will jabbed her with his elbow.
“What?” she protested. “It was funny!”
Being careful not to jostle Augusta’s socked feet, which still rested in his lap, Will twisted in his seat to face Jason. “You need to explain something,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” said Jason with a brief flare of his old pugnacity. “And what might that be?”
“‘Motherfucker.’” Will didn’t load the word with venom, as Jason had done on the phone, just divided it into two parts and impassively placed them in front of him: thunk, thunk.
Jason sat still, his forehead wrinkled, processing this. Pen watched him figure it out, every step written all over his face. Whatever the opposite of a poker face was, that’s what Jason had. Finally, his brow cleared: he got it. But instead of answering, he pressed his lips together and rolled his eyes, hostile and bored at the same time. He looked like a teenager whose parents had just confronted him about the joint in his pocket.
“Come on, Jason,” Pen said softly. “Just tell us.”
He looked at her, then, and he didn’t look like a teenager anymore. Pen saw something private and broken in his gaze. Will and Pen watched him take deep breaths, collect himself, get his emotions in check.
He breathed out. “There was a guy.”
“Oh,” said Pen. It wasn’t what she had expected him to say, but as soon as he did, she realized that she wasn’t surprised. Of course, of course, there was a guy.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Jason said quickly.
“Okay,” said Will.
“We’d been doing the infertility thing for so long, her hormones were all screwed up. In addition, she was sad. Losing the baby at twelve weeks tore her up. Even when she was over it, she wasn’t over it. She’d never talk about it, bite my head off if I even thought about bringing it up. A thing like that leaves its mark.”
“I bet it does,” said Pen.
“My point is she was vulnerable.” He glared at Will and Pen, as if they might contradict him.
“Things can happen when a person’s defenses are down,” said Will carefully, “that wouldn’t happen otherwise.”
“You got that right,” said Jason. “And then there was the Freudian shit on top of that.”
This was unexpected. Pen and Will exchanged a glance.
“Go ahead,” said Will to Jason.
“You know how Cat was about her dad, thought he hung the fucking moon. Dude forgets her birthday every single year, and I’m talking about not even a crappy Hallmark card, but she thinks he’s Mr. Perfect. What’s it called, the thing where the guy killed his father and then ripped his eyes out of their sockets. But for girls.”
Pen winced. “I would hardly say she had an Electra complex.”
Jason shrugged. “None of us are psychologists, right? Let’s say that when it came to her dad, she was a little off.”
Pen started to argue, but Will gave her elbow a surreptitious squeeze and she stopped.
“We all know she was crazy about her dad,” said Will, “but what does that have to do with this guy?”
“Armando Cruz,” spat Jason. “What kind of soap opera name is that?”
A nice name, Pen mused, like music: Armando Cruz and Catalina Ocampo—it sounded like a poem. As Pen considered the name, a light began to dawn. “Wait. He was Filipino? Like Dr. Ocampo? Is that what you meant by Electra?”
Jason turned the back of his hand to them and shot up a stubby index finger. “Filipino.” He raised another finger. “From the same town as her dad.” One more finger. “And he was a fucking doctor, to fucking boot. Tri-fucking-Electra-fecta.”
A man’s face appeared above the seat in front of Jason. “Do you mind?” he said. “I got a kid up here.”
“My bad, bro,” said Jason. The man disappeared. “Bottom line,” Jason continued, “he took advantage of her.”
“What do you mean,” asked Pen, alarmed, “‘took advantage of her’?”
“Not like that,” said Jason. “I mean she was vulnerable—all those hormones bouncing around. He should have backed off, irregardless of her having a husband.”
Regardless, Pen corrected inside her head. She wasn’t about to challenge Jason’s version of the story, but she wasn’t convinced by the picture of Cat as a manipulated innocent.
“What did he look like?” she asked.
Jason shot her a look. “Why does that matter?”
“I just wondered if he looked like her dad.”
“Oh.” Jason’s mouth worked itself into a hard line, and Pen could tell that he was picturing Armando Cruz next to Cat’s short, squat, round-faced father, trying to find some common ground. “Not exactly.”
I knew it, Pen thought. He was beautiful.
Jason blew out a short, painful laugh. “Put it this way: soap opera name, soap opera looks. The guy was cheesy: expensive haircut, ten million teeth, kind of dipshit who runs without a shirt. Honest truth is when I first met him, I thought he was gay.”
“You met him?” asked Will.
“Dinner party some stupid neighbor threw. Out by the pool. Mr. Soap Opera was doing his fellowship or what have you at the hospital where her husband worked. Oh and listen to this,” he said eagerly. “You guys are the type who will hate this.”
“What?” said Pen.
“She invited him and Cat specifically to meet each other.” Jason slapped his hand on the armrest.
“You mean that she set them up?” asked Will.
“Naw,” said Jason. “I mean, she just assumed they would have shit in common because they were both Filipino.”
“I see,” said Pen. “How … presumptuous.” But what she was really thinking was that Cat and Armando did have some pretty significant shit in common, at least eventually.
“Anyway,” said Jason, “I saw him a few times after that. We kind of got to know him even.” He scratched his head. “Well, some of us got to know him better than others, obviously.”
Will said, “How did you know they had an affair?”
“I told you,�
� said Jason angrily. “He took advantage. It wasn’t your typical affair.”
“All right,” said Will. “But how did you know?”
“She told me,” said Jason. The pride in his voice was enough to make you cry. “My wife couldn’t stand to keep something like that from me, that’s how close we are and that’s how done with him she is. After he left, she came clean, told me everything. They had sex, but never in our bed!” He said it as though forgoing sex in their bed was proof that Cat loved him, and who knew? Maybe it was. “It seemed like she expected me to kick her out, but I would never do that.”
Pen turned and caught Will’s eye, wondering if he was thinking what she was thinking: that there was a fine line between “expected me to” and “hoped I would.” In answer, Will lifted one eyebrow, a fleeting, infinitesimal movement, and flicked his eyes back to Jason.
“Armando left?” he asked.
“His fellowship ended, and he went back to the homeland. Made it seem like it was this big noble thing, too. Who cares? Good riddance, asshole.”
Pen waited for Will to ask what had to be asked, but she could sense that he was waiting for her to do it. It was an awful question, since it canceled out or at the very least called into deep question Jason’s recent declaration that Cat was “close” to Jason and “done” with Armando, but, since they were on a plane to Cebu, there seemed to be no way not to ask it. When the pause in the conversation started to become unbearable, Will nudged Pen encouragingly. She ignored it. He nudged her again. She kicked him.
“So. Uh. Jason,” said Will, “do you think she went to Cebu to be with Armando?”
“Oh, Will,” Pen exclaimed, flinching. “‘Be with him’? God. Could you not do better than that?”
“Hey, it’s not like you were asking.”
“Well, clearly, I should have.”
“And you would’ve phrased it how?” demanded Will. “‘Visit him’? ‘Spend time with him’? Come on, we all know a euphemism when we hear it.”
“All I’m saying is—” began Pen, but Jason raised his hand.
“Hello? I’m sitting right here,” he said.
They both stared at him.
Falling Together Page 27
