"Well, what can I say? He's got great taste in women?"
I blushed. I could feel it, mottled on my neck, and the heat of it in my cheeks. I felt like a little girl again, turning scarlet in the back of the school bus when a boy I liked said I was pretty. Garrett was standing up, pushing his chair into the table, smiling down at me, humoring me sweetly, sincerely, with tremendous kindness, and I thought of my father then, the way the nurses called out to him in the hallway, and how grateful and content he seemed—the child, among the children who had somehow become the adults.
"WHO TOLD you?" I asked Jon as he took my coat from me—graciously, gently, like a solicitor, or a parent.
"Chad did. He called."
"What?"
I could smell meat burning in the kitchen. Was Jon making dinner? How long since that had happened?
"How in the world did Chad know I hit a deer?"
"Garrett e-mailed him."
"Oh," I said. E-mail. I'd forgotten about it, forgotten that Chad spent hours every day now checking messages, sending messages. I'd forgotten that the world had shrunk to this, that he and Garrett didn't need pens or phones to talk to one another anymore.
"And, Sherry, neither Chad or I is too thrilled to be getting this vital information about our wife and mother from an outsider."
I said, "I'm sorry. I had to teach, and then I forgot, and—"
"It's okay," Jon said. "I'm just glad you're all right."
He pulled me to him. I put my face into his chest, into his T-shirt, then pressed my ear just above his heart and listened to the steady humid thump of it.
"I guess you need to get a place in the city after all, to cut down on the commuting, Sherry. That's fine with me, a couple nights a week, if that's what you want to do, honey. I'm sorry I didn't insist on it before."
He pulled back and looked into my face.
"Besides, it'll be a good place for you to rendezvous with your lover."
He was smiling. He moved his hand up to my neck, then down to my chest, unbuttoned the top button of my dress, and slid his hand to my breast.
BY THE time we were done making love, the roast Jon had tossed in the oven to surprise me with—at a hundred degrees higher than it ought to have been because he hadn't bothered to put on his glasses when he turned the temperature dial—had blackened and shrunk down to the size of a fist.
We'd been lying on the bed, Jon still on top of me, when the smoke detector went off, and we had run down together, naked, laughing, to turn the oven off, open the windows, waving our arms around in front of our faces to clear the air. Then, when he'd pulled the roast out and thrown the ruined thing into the garbage, we realized we were hungry and the only thing there'd been in the refrigerator to eat was wrecked.
"Let's go out," Jon said.
"But it's so late," I said.
Jon looked at his watch, the only thing he was wearing. "Since when," he asked, "is 9:30 too late to go out?"
He was right, of course. Since when was 9:30 too late to go out?
But I knew since when—since eighteen years ago, when Chad had to be nursed and put to bed by eight o'clock.
How was it, I thought, that such a brief period of time—that year of his infancy—had caused us to form habits that had lasted this long? I remembered Jon joking on the phone with his sister, leaving a message on her machine the day we brought Chad home from the hospital:
"Hey, Brenda, we had that baby we were talking about. If you want more details, give us a call. We'll be home now for about the next eighteen years."
It had been a joke that had taken on a life.
"Get dressed," Jon said. "We're going to Stiver's."
Stiver's, a truckers' bar down the road. Hamburgers. Beer. Karaoke. I'd never been there, but it sounded to me like the right thing to do. I said, "I'll take a shower first."
Jon said, "To hell with that. Just put on your sexy new dress."
WAS STIVER'S like anything I'd imagined it would be, all those years passing it on the way to the freeway?
By the time Jon and I had stepped inside, I'd forgotten whatever those years of accumulated impressions had been. Driving by it, I'd always marveled that there were people in a bar at six o'clock on a Tuesday night, at two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Driving by it with my child strapped into his car seat behind me, or on my way to pick him up from school—hurrying, flying, off the freeway, I'd glance at it and marvel:
People with nothing to do on a Thursday afternoon but drink beer in a dumpy bar.
No children waiting for them. No dinner to be made. No homework to help with.
Did I feel sorry for them, or did I envy them?
Stepping into Stiver's with Jon for the first time, I could no longer remember what I'd felt about the place and its patrons then—only the vague impression of a kind of vast expanse of exemption from motherly duties going on in there. Deserts, prairies, contained inside its badly sided exterior, KAREOKE NIGHT misspelled on the rollaway board at the door.
It must have been someone's house at one time—a doublewide trailer. There was a window box under the one big, blacked-out window that faced the road (nothing in it but cigarette butts) and a screen door with no screen in it. I'd known it would be crowded inside because there were so many cars in the parking lot (Jon had to circle it several times before deciding just to park at the edge of the lot, in the dirt) but still I was surprised by the crowd, the closeness, and it seemed to me that every person in that room turned to look at us as we walked in, emerging from the cold outside into the smoke and dimness of the bar, and continued to watch us as we made our way to a table crammed into a corner.
The music was deafening, all-encompassing. I couldn't see where it was coming from, but a wildly out-of-tune voice, a woman's, was wailing a country song. Jon shouted over it, "I'll go to the bar and order," after pulling out my chair for me to sit.
While he was gone, I looked around. Over at the bar, two men (in their fifties?)—one in a cowboy hat and one in a cap—had turned all the way around in their chairs, beer bottles in their fists, to look at me. They smiled and nodded. I smiled back, then looked away. When I glanced back at them, they were simply staring. They turned around when Jon came back to the table with two beers.
"All they had was Old Milwaukee," he shouted over the music. "I ordered us two burgers." He shrugged. "We'll see."
The singer had changed. Now, a man was bellowing "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." Over Jon's shoulder I could see the heads and shoulders of dancers on the little dance floor, moving in time to the man's bellowing. Jon reached over and squeezed my hand. "Having fun yet?" he shouted.
Was I?
Yes, I was.
The beer tasted metallic on my teeth. It reminded me of high school, drinking cheap beer in my boyfriend's basement while bis parents slept upstairs, directly over our heads. There was always a swirl of steam that rose when one of those cans or bottles was opened, and it always made me think of genies, spirits, smelling of skunk, yeast—a spirit that never rose from a bottle of good wine or when the seal was broken on a bottle of expensive cognac.
How long had it been since I'd drunk a bottle of cheap beer?
Jon laughed when he saw I'd finished it already, and got up to get me another.
I watched the dancers.
One woman, in a silvery tank top, was moving so sensually—grinding, slinking, against her dance partner—that it was impossible not to watch. Another couple danced stiffly, not looking at each other, as if they were having an argument while dancing. Two women in their twenties danced together as their boyfriends watched from the bar.
"Excuse me, miss?"
It startled me to look up and find the man in the cowboy hat standing over me.
"If your date wouldn't mind," he shouted down, "would you like to dance?"
I looked from the man back to the dance floor. I looked over my shoulder and saw Jon's back at the bar, then turned to the man again and said, "Sure. He wouldn't mind."
<
br /> AN ICY rain had fallen outside while we were inside Stiver's.
They never brought us our hamburgers.
Instead, we drank four beers each, and by the time we left I'd danced with the trucker and his friend through seven or eight songs—several slow ones, in their arms.
The one in the cowboy hat, whose name was Nathan, was a huge, lumbering dancer. I felt like a child in his embrace. He smelled like my father—smoke and aftershave—but under his khaki jacket, he had on a tight T-shirt, and his muscles were surprisingly solid. He was a strong man. And I was right, he was a trucker. He was from Iowa, on his way to Maine with a load of something. He had no idea what it was, and didn't particularly want to know, he said.
But the other one danced as if he, like I, had taken lessons all through childhood. It was studied dancing—although, unlike me, he had a natural affinity for it.
He was graceful. He could hear the music, it seemed, in his limbs. I felt awkward at first, dancing with him. He rocked on his heels and watched me for a while, waiting for me to begin a rhythm, or a style, and at first I wanted to turn, go back to the table, ask Jon to take me home.
But then I saw the appreciative look he had on his face, watching me dance (was I good at this?) and at my body, and I couldn't help it, I slipped out of my self-consciousness like a sheath, and then, as if we were having a conversation, he began to dance in response, his body close to mine, brushing up against me. At one point I felt the back of his hand brush against my breasts. Surely, I thought, it was an accident, but my whole body responded to it—and then a slow dance started up, and without asking me, he took me by the waist, his hands pressing into the small of my back, and my face pressed into his shoulder.
The man singing the lyrics to the country song was belting them out with such passion I felt the intensity of it move down my neck, down my spine, to the place where this trucker, whose name I never learned, had his hands.
His face was next to my ear, and I could hear him breathing.
It was like making love in public, with a stranger, and every once in a while we turned so I could see Jon over his shoulder—and Jon was staring, sipping his beer, leaning back in his chair, watching me in the arms of another man in front of him with a look on his face I'd never quite seen before—as if he were a stranger, watching strangers, but also as if he were a part of it, as if he could feel that trucker's hands on my hips, his body hot and moving against mine.
This one smelled plainly of sweat.
He was younger than Nathan.
He didn't want to talk about where he was going, where he was from. When the song ended he moved his hands up and down my back, looked into my face as if he were considering kissing me, then thought better of it and said, "Thanks, beautiful," before leaving me standing on the dance floor, trying to regain my bearings, to find my way back to Jon.
In the parking lot, Jon said nothing.
He unlocked the passenger side of the car for me, and when I got in, he reached down and pushed the hem of my dress up over my knee, leaned over, caressed my calf, looking into my eyes in the vapor light attached to the eaves trough of Stiver's. He slid his hand up, then, to my thigh, and said, "You've been naughty," in a mock-serious tone—then put his hand fully between my legs, and for the first time I realized, myself, how warm and wet I was, and he said, "When we get home, I'm going to fuck you hard for this."
I could hardly catch my breath. When we got home, my knees were so weak he had to help me out of the car.
***
"WHAT the hell is going on? Where the hell are you?"
"What's going on? I've been waiting by the phone all night. When you get this message call me right away."
"Jesus Christ, I have to get news about my own mother now from Garrett Thompson? Should I call Garrett to find out where the hell my mother is?"
"You can call me, you know. It's three hours earlier here. I haven't gone to beddy-bye yet. I'm waiting to find out what the hell is going on there."
It wasn't until we were done in bed (Jon hadn't pulled out of me before he started again) that I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking with seven messages from Chad.
I was, I guess, too drunk to remember his phone number. I had to look for it on the caller ID, and then I misdialed and a groggy-sounding woman answered, then hung up on me when I said I thought I had the wrong number.
Chad answered the phone on the first ring, sounding wide awake and furious. I thought his voice was shaking—a tremor he'd always had, even as a two-year-old, when he was angry or upset, and which made him sound as if he were speaking from the caboose of a train rattling across uneven tracks. "Gee, thanks for calling, Mom," he said.
"I'm sorry, Chad. Your dad and I went out—"
"Until two o'clock in the morning? On a school night?"
I couldn't help it. I laughed.
"So, it's funny, Mom? That I've been sitting around my dorm room all night, worried sick?"
"No, I guess. It's just..." I was afraid to go on. I was afraid he'd be able to tell that I was drunk.
"So why don't you tell me what happened."
"What do you mean?" For a crazy second I thought he meant at Stiver's, with the truckers.
"What do I mean? I mean Garrett says you hit a deer on the freeway, Mom. Are you okay?"
"Yes, Chad, of course I'm okay. Just the bumper's bent. Everything else is fine." I paused. "Except the deer."
"Jesus," Chad said. "People die that way. You guys need to move into the city. This commute is dangerous. Let me talk to Dad."
Jon was in the shower. I could hear the water running. He was singing, too, something operatic and ridiculous. Soon, he'd fall into a deep sleep.
"He's already in bed," I told Chad. "I'll tell him to call you tomorrow."
"Good," Chad said. "Now you'd better go to bed yourself. Did you go to the doctor? Did you make sure—"
"Nothing's wrong," I said.
"You don't know that, Mom. Sometimes people have skeletal or internal injuries without any immediate symptoms. Did you hit your head?"
"No, Chad," I said. "I hit a deer." I couldn't help it. I started to laugh again. I was drunk.
"Real funny, Mom," Chad said. "This is all real funny. Just go to bed, and tell Dad to call me in the morning. And thanks for getting back to me in such a timely manner."
He hung up.
A HANGOVER this morning. And, from sex, the exertion of it, my stomach muscles ache. I'm sore between my legs. A stinging burn just under the skin of my inner thighs. All these familiar, nearly forgotten, vague pains of passion.
"I want you to find out who this secret admirer is," Jon said last night, turning me over, looking into my face as he entered me, "and fuck him."
"Okay," I whispered.
"I want you to let him do anything he wants to you," he said.
"Okay."
"I want you to fuck another man."
Jon's eyes were narrowed, and the look on his face was more intense than any expression I'd seen there for years. My heart sped up, seeing it, as if I'd caught a glimpse of an animal at the zoo, outside its cage, or a man sauntering into the bank with a gun. Anything could happen here, now, I thought, and I was as excited as I was afraid to find myself in this ordinary place suddenly lit up with so much extraordinary potential.
"Do you understand?" he asked, putting his hands on my shoulders, his face on my neck, slamming into me.
Yes, I said, arching my back to meet him.
It wasn't until after we were done, after I'd gone downstairs, called Chad, hung up the phone, and gone back upstairs to find Jon out of the shower and already asleep, naked, on his back in our bed, that I wondered how serious he had been—or, if he was serious at all.
That expression on his face—it had seemed serious.
But that was sex.
That was the moment, that was the fantasy. Surely, he wasn't serious. We'd never even come close, in the past, to acting out any of our fantasies—even whe
n we were young, and childless, and only marginally employed, with so much less to lose, and so much more time on our hands. And that one time—with Ferris—when it had seemed that I might stray, Jon had reacted, in the end, with anything but pleasure. Those many years ago, when I'd told him about Ferris's profession of love, and the kiss (how innocent now, it seemed, that furtive parking lot kiss) and my own confusion, before Jon's tearful pleading (You can't ruin our family, Sherry. You can't do it, to me, to Chad. Please, tell me you won't do it, that you'll just turn around now and come back), he'd been furious. He'd picked up a bedside lamp and, holding it by the neck, had shaken it at me.
I'd been in bed, in a nightgown, holding a book (Mrs. Dal-loway) so tightly in my hands that the pages held the indentations of my fingers forever. He was standing over me, and I suddenly realized how vulnerable I was—how easily my bones would break, my skull, if he wanted them to, or even (maybe especially) if he didn't want them to, but lost all control of himself, all notion of what it was he wanted.
What was my body made of, anyway, after all, I thought then, but so much tissue, and blood? I would rip open, like a pillow. I would crack to pieces, like an egg—and, still, stubbornly, absurdly, I was thinking about Ferris, the pencil behind his ear, pushing an overhead projector through the hallway, looking tired and intelligent and overwarm in his button-down shirt, telling me he was in love, for the first time in his life, and too late (two kids, a pregnant wife) with me.
Go ahead and kill me, I'd thought, looking at Jon with the lamp in his hand over me, raging.
But he put it back down on the nightstand and walked away.
No, I thought.
My husband did not really want me to fuck another man.
Even if he thought he did, holding my shoulders as he said it—I want you to fuck another man—he was wrong.
Surely, if my secret admirer revealed himself, Jon would feel jealous, threatened. The titillation was in the possibility, not the act itself, I felt sure.
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