Apparently, at least one of my students had absorbed my publishing wisdom, such as it was.
“And this John Quayle,” Aunt Tess was saying. “It says here that he’s written the first in a mystery series, set at a college in Connecticut, about a secret writers’ club that solves their first case when their favorite professor is found murdered.”
I suppose another person would have dwelt on that last part—John had written a wish-fulfillment book about my death?—but not me. All I took away from it was: John Quayle, Mr. I Am Such a Pompous Ass, was writing genre fiction?
“What do five and six figures mean?” Aunt Tess busted into my thoughts.
“In what context?” I asked.
“It says here that Danitra got mid-five figures for her book, while John got a low six for the first three in his series. What does that mean?”
“It means my students sold well,” I said.
• • •
By the time the knock came at the door, the sun had long gone over the yardarm, as they say, and I was already well into my third tumbler of self-commiserating vodka. Bleagh. I hated the taste, but it was all I had in the house, and I’d been in no mood earlier to go out to the stores where I’d have to see actual people; now I was too drunk to go. The last time I drank straight vodka had been during my third year in college when a friend and I were too broke to buy beer, so instead we played backgammon for shots of a half bottle she borrowed from a neighbor.
Knock, knock.
“Coming!” I shouted again. Or at least, I thought I’d shouted it once already.
I picked myself up off the floor and dragged myself to the door. I swear to God, if it was someone selling magazine subscriptions, and if one of the subscriptions on offer was to Publishers Weekly, I’d shoot the person.
It wasn’t someone selling magazine subscriptions, however. It was Tony, who I hadn’t seen since I’d been back. Under one arm, he held a rolled-up copy of a magazine, and I could see enough of the corner of the cover to make out the distinctive “P” from Publishers Weekly. In his other arm, he carried a brown paper bag that had the look of the liquor store about it.
Seeing my expression as I looked at the magazine corner, he spoke. “I’m too late, aren’t I? You already know.”
I nodded.
He set the items down on the kitchen counter. “I wanted to be the first to tell you,” he said. “This must be so hard for you, Lise.”
I let him take me in his arms, silently blessing him for getting it. Sure, I was happy for my students and proud of their accomplishments. But I was a wreck because every time my students succeeded where all I’d ever done was fail, I died a little death.
Diana
I felt the tap on my shoulder before I heard the voice. It happened in that order because, once I felt the tap, I had to remove my headphones in order to hear the voice.
“Diana, I need to talk to you.”
What wife ever wants to hear her husband speak those words?
I was on the treadmill, which I’d purchased after our return from Georgia and had it installed in our basement in front of the bank of mirrors I’d also purchased upon our return so I could watch myself work out. The weight loss had slowed down a bit in recent weeks, yet I could feel the glorious specter of one hundred and fifty pounds looming tantalizingly in my not-too-distant future. One hundred and fifty pounds might sound like a lot to some people, particularly petite people or little dogs, but I was tall enough, if I could just get to one hundred and fifty, I’d practically be thin.
It was keeping the motivation up that was the problem, not to mention busting through the plateaus I seemed to get stalled at more frequently as time wore on. I figured using the treadmill, which I could do almost endlessly so long as there was music coming through the headphones, would step up my metabolism. As for the mirrors, seeing myself reflected back wherever I was in the room, however I moved, would surely go a ways to improving motivation.
But now there was Dan intruding on my early-morning exercise solitude. We’d not talked much since my return. When I did think about that silence, it was with a dread, as though the silence itself portended something. Now that he had chosen to speak, however, I found myself reluctant to hear what he had to say.
As part of our honeymoon, Dan had taken me to Italy. There, in Rome, we’d gone to some sort of palace or parliament thing where there had been something called the Hall of Mirrors. Looking at Dan now in the mirror as I slowed the treadmill just enough so I could talk over its motor without shouting, I was reminded of that place. The only problem was, that place wasn’t this place, nor were the reflective surfaces so grand.
“Can it wait fifteen minutes?” I said. “In fifteen minutes, it will have been a whole hour.”
“No,” Dan said, reaching out and turning the off switch on the treadmill. “It can’t wait. I have to talk to you now.”
“I see,” I said, even though I didn’t. I grabbed a workout towel I’d kept handy and draped it around my neck, but I didn’t step off the treadmill. “What’s this all about then?”
“Ever since you came home, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something, something that’s been troubling me for a long time. It’s important.”
I held up a hand. “Don’t,” I said. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“You do?”
“Yes. It’s Layla, isn’t it? I’ve seen on the computer how she writes you all the time. I haven’t read any of the e-mails—I wouldn’t do that—but I’ve seen this coming for a while. You’re going to tell me you’re having an affair with her, aren’t you?”
“Layla?” Dan looked perplexed. “God, no! I wasn’t going to tell you anything of the kind! Layla writes all the time, that’s true, but it’s only ever about stupid things: golf or what to get her husband for his birthday. But it’s nothing like you’re thinking!”
“What, then?” Even as I asked the question, I recognized how relieved his words made me feel. For so long now, I’d sensed something wrong between us, but I had felt a curious inertia about it that prevented me from taking any positive action. Now that I knew there was nothing between him and Layla—his expression was too earnestly shocked to doubt him—I gave an internal sigh, my greatest fears allayed. And now, having averted the worst, perhaps I could get back to my exercise. “What, then?” I prompted a second time.
“I know,” Dan said with great care, “it’s probably wrong and selfish of me to tell you. It’s undoubtedly more to expiate my own guilt than out of a sense of honesty, but I find I’ve been losing sleep not being open with you, and I simply can’t go on like this. While you were in Georgia, I slept with a woman.”
“You what? But who? How?”
“The usual way you do those things.” Dan gave a rueful laugh. “Well, except that I was drunk. She wasn’t anyone you know. She wasn’t anyone I know, really. She was just someone I picked up in a bar.”
“You bastard!” I reached out a hand to strike him, but he grabbed my wrist.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said. “It’s not like you’re wholly innocent in all of this.”
“I have no idea what you mean. All I know is, Artemis was right about you. She warned me about you before we were married.”
“Artemis.” He snorted. “That’s rich, bringing her into all this.”
“She never understood why someone like you would want to marry someone like me in the first place. I didn’t listen to her, but now look what’s happened. What kind of man are you, Dan? When you married me, I was a fat cow. But look at me now! And yet now is when you choose to cheat on me. I don’t understand. How could you have possibly loved the woman I was and yet not want me now?”
“It’s because you’ve changed so, Diana. You’re not the woman I married, not the woman I fell in love with. You were so different before. I’d had my fill of vain women by the time I met you. You were so funny, so smart and so sweet, I wouldn’t have cared if you were twice as big as you
were. But now? It’s like you’ve become one of those vain women. All you care about is clothes and how you look—it’s so hard to be around you!”
“Most women gain weight after the marriage. But I’ve managed—miraculously, I might add—to do the reverse. Any man would be happy with what I’ve accomplished.”
“In case you’ve never noticed, I’m not any man. And, anyway, it’s not like you’re innocent.”
“Yes, you’ve said that already. And I’ve told you: I have no idea what you mean.”
“Wait here,” he said.
I listened to his tread going all the way up to our bedroom at the top of the building, and then coming back down again.
When he returned, he had a large sheaf of papers in his hands. Before I could ask to see what he was holding, he let fly with them, sheets of paper raining down around us like some sort of sick ticker-tape parade. Bending over, I picked up one of the sheets. It was an e-mail printout, from Dirk to me. I picked up a few more, and then hurried to pick up the others, but there were too many of them. They were all either from Dirk to me or from me to Dirk. With a sick feeling in my stomach, judging from the quantity of pages scattered on the floor, I realized the sheer mass of it must represent our entire correspondence.
“How?” I said. “Why?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? I pay all the bills in this house. I pay for that damn computer upstairs. Did you think I didn’t notice when you took out a new private e-mail account? I knew what you were doing. For God’s sakes, I’m not you! I couldn’t stop myself from reading them, every last word. You told him everything about yourself, every intimate detail. You told him everything about me, us, our lives together.” He barked a harsh laugh. “You even gave him a running tally on your rapidly decreasing panty size! What man wouldn’t want to hear about that?”
“If you’ve known all this time, why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“I think maybe a part of me hoped you would stop on your own, that you’d see what you were doing, how wrong it was, and put an end to it. I mean, if I’d confronted you earlier, maybe you would have stopped, but it had no value to me, if you didn’t see to do it on your own. It wouldn’t have meant anything if you’d only stopped because you got caught.”
“It’s not the same,” I said, “what you did and what I did.”
“Oh, no? You’re right. It’s worse. I slept with one woman one night because I was drunk and stupid and lonely. But you were sober when you did all this. What’s your excuse?”
“How can you possibly say that what I did was worse?”
“Because that’s how it feels to me. How do you think I felt, day after day, month after month, playing voyeur to your growing closeness to another man? It ate me up inside. It killed me. All I did was fuck another woman, once. I’m not proud of what I did. But you? You gave your entire self to another man, every single day. If you didn’t give your body too, it was only because there was an ocean between you.”
“Dan, I’m sorry, truly. But you have no idea how lonely I was here!”
“Perhaps I don’t,” he conceded, nodding. “But if you were that lonely, Diana, then you should have come to me.”
Then he turned and started from the room.
“Where are you going?” I said. “We’re not done talking.”
“Oh, yes, we are,” he said, turning. “You know, it’s funny, when I came down here to talk to you, to confess my one sin, I was wondering how you’d ever forgive me. I felt so guilty about what I’d done, it was all I could think about, and I still loved you so much. Until the words were spoken aloud, though, I don’t think I realized just how angry I am, how hurt. And now that we’ve had this chance to…talk,” he surveyed the sheets of paper all around us with disgust, “the question I have is: How will I ever forgive you?”
And then he was gone.
I turned to my own reflection in the mirror. Then I picked up one of the weights from a small set I’d bought and smashed the looking glass.
The Third Party
Recommended Reading:
Sylvia: The Idea of Pakistan, Stephen P. Cohen
Cindy: Black and Blue, Anna Quindlen
Lise: A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby
Diana: Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailckas
• • •
“Surprise!”
Diana certainly was surprised.
When Lise had phoned, inviting her and Dan to dinner, that’s what she’d expected: dinner. Perhaps Lise wanted to pump her for information about Dirk. Or maybe she wanted to mend fences. But what Diana hadn’t expected, most emphatically not, was a surprise birthday party in her honor. There was Lise, of course. There was Cindy and Carly. There was Sylvia and even Sunny, the only man in the room. Balloons were everywhere and, on the table in the kitchen where Diana had entered through the back door, was a huge cake with white, pink, and green frosting. Diana guessed that Sylvia had baked it herself and she further guessed that Sylvia had baked it using Splenda, rather than real sugar, for her sake.
“What’s all this?” Diana asked.
“You didn’t imagine we’d let your birthday pass without a celebration, did you?” Lise said. Then she glanced over Diana’s shoulder as though the mere act of glancing would produce another person there. “Where’s Dan? Is he still in the car?”
“He’s not coming. Dan moved out. He cheated on me, and then he moved out!” Diana burst into tears.
• • •
“Perhaps I should go,” Sunny whispered to Sylvia, as she made herself at home in Lise’s kitchen, checking on the food in the oven, while the others sat in the living room. “Diana is so upset, it might be better if it were just you women here with her.”
“Pish-tosh,” Sylvia said. “You stay. You’re always such a calming influence; you’re practically an honorary woman.”
“Oh, now there is a sentence designed to make a man feel good about his manhood.”
“Never mind,” she said, shoving a serving plate of hors d'oeuvres and a stack of happy birthday cocktail napkins into his hands. “If you don’t want to be a woman, then make like a waiter and let them all sexually harass you.”
“This just gets better all the time,” Sunny said, but, after devouring one of the chicken satay skewers, he obeyed.
• • •
“I don’t want to discuss it,” Diana was saying defensively. “All I will say is, this is the reward I get for leaving my job, leaving my home, leaving my family, leaving my whole damn country and coming here: a husband who cheats on me and then walks out.” She turned to Lise. “What about you?” she asked accusingly. “Where’s Tony tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Lise said, clearly taken aback. “I saw him once since we’ve been back, when he came over to show me something in Publishers Weekly about a couple of my former students getting book deals. It was really nice, actually. Everyone else it seemed was calling me up that day to tell me about it and they were all acting as though I should be purely happy about it. Of course I was happy about it, but by no means purely. Tony was the only one who got that. As I say, it was very nice. But since then?” She shrugged. “I’ve hardly seen him at all.”
“See?” Diana said, knocking back the rest of her chardonnay. “It’s not that easy to hold onto a man, is it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Lise said. “I’ve never tried to hold onto one.”
Diana pointed a finger. “And there’s your problem right there.”
Lise forced a bright smile. “More drinks, anyone?” She got no takers but left the room anyway, saying, “Maybe one for me then.”
• • •
“I know Dan left her,” Lise hissed to Sylvia, the other woman having followed her into the kitchen, “but does she have to take it out on me?”
Sylvia thought about it for a minute. “Maybe she does.” Then she smiled. “And, hey, look on the bright side. At least if she’s taking it out on you, she can’t take it out on me.”
&nb
sp; “Oh, you’re a big help.”
• • •
“How’s the new job going?” Diana asked.
“Do you mean mine or hers?” Carly asked, indicating Cindy.
“Either. Both. It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t know,” Carly said. “I guess it’s OK. It’s kind of fun seeing what people buy to wear under all their clothes. But sometimes using that tape measure gets a bit squicky. Women ask you to size them, then they get all weird when they realize sizing them actually involves putting a tape measure around their breasts.”
“Mine’s going great,” Cindy said, “except for some of the really sad people who call or the ones who don’t really have problems. After the baby comes, I’d like to stay home the first few months, but then I want to see if I can maybe find a job like this that pays.”
“Ah,” Diana said. “The baby. Speaking of which, how is old Eddie these days? Have you heard any more from him?”
“No,” Cindy said. “Sylvia was right. As soon as I told him the baby wasn’t his, he vanished.”
“Our Sylvia,” Diana said, smiling, but there was an edge to it. “She’s always right about everything, isn’t she?”
The Sisters Club Page 27
