Be Mine

by Laura Kasischke

Or, was it possible that he was so much a part of me, my body, still (my baby), that, somehow, he simply knew}

  But then Chad turned around at the luggage carousel as if he'd heard or felt us behind him, and he smiled, stepping toward us, his arms open—and the wash of it in my veins rose from me, a cool and floating sensation in my limbs, in my chest. No, I thought, he doesn't know. Garrett, the good boy, the patriot, the loyal friend—Garrett would go to his grave with a secret like that. And there was no one else who would want to hurt us that way. And it was impossible to simply know—with that distance of the continent between us. Chad didn't know. I let him take me in his arms, my face pressed into his denim jacket, the smell of fuel, ozone, airport on him. Behind us, Jon stood with his hands in his pockets, and when I turned to look at him I saw that there were tears—slippery and iridescent—in his eyes.

  I MADE spaghetti for dinner. Garlic bread and salad. Chad was starving, it seemed. He ate so much that I didn't take seconds for myself, afraid there wouldn't be enough for him if I did—although I was also strangely hungry, as if I'd gone days without eating (had I?), or run a marathon.

  Jon and I asked him the usual questions about school.

  Grades (all As). Dorm life. Cafeteria food. Friends.

  But the conversation was exhausted early—the long flight, for Chad, I supposed, and the time change.

  And, for Jon and I, the last two days since Bram had come to the house spent huddled in anxious conversation with one another, reassuring ourselves about our marriage, about our lives. Two sleepless nights. Two long days of oblivion, limbo—conversation, grief.

  There'd been weeping, screaming, stunned silences, and, at one point, Jon had stood over me, shaking his fist. "How could you do it?" he'd shouted. "How could you do it, whether you thought I wanted you to do it or not, you fucking whore."

  But that was the last name he called me, and it had surprised me how quickly his anger had softened into sadness, into pain, and then we were holding on to one another, kneeling together on the floor, both of us sobbing, clutching at one another, weeping, stammering.

  He stroked my hair, and said, over and over, "It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault."

  "Of course it's not your fault," I sobbed. "How could it be yours? It's mine."

  "No," Jon said with such conviction that I didn't argue with him about it anymore. "It's all my fault," he said.

  For hours that first night we groped and clawed at one another on our knees—lovers drowning in a shallow lake—sobbing, sobbing, talking, talking, talking. And kissing. Tasting one another's tears. We went to the bathroom sink together and took turns washing our faces. When Jon rose from the basin, water running off his eyelashes, down his cheeks, he looked up at me, and said, "Sherry, how could I not have known?"

  I put my hand to his forehead, as if checking the temperature of a child, or baptizing one.

  I said, "Jon. Jon. You never suspected? Not at all?"

  "No," he said—under his breath, sounding awestruck, amazed. "It never even crossed my mind, Sherry," and there was a look of such ravaged pain in his expression that I had to look away. I looked at his chest, focused my eyes on some vague place around his heart, and I said, "And, you—"

  I couldn't say it.

  —forgive me?

  Because what if he said no?

  "Of course I forgive you, Sherry. You're my whole world, Sherry. What good would it do me not to forgive you?"

  He stood up straighter then and went to the towel rack, put his face into the towel, leaned against the wall, heaving into the towel for a few minutes while I stood, motionless, watching, frozen in place, in time, and then he looked up from the towel—and when he turned around, I was shocked to see that he was smiling—distantly, sadly, but he was smiling, and he said, "I didn't know you, did I?" He said, shaking his head, but still smiling, "It's embarrassing. Really, Sherry, that's what it is. It's embarrassing. I was in an imaginary world, all these weeks—no, all these years— while you were living in the real one."

  I didn't smile.

  I went to him.

  He took my head in his hands. He looked at me closely, as if trying to read an answer to a question in tiny print on my face. He said, "But it's over, now, right? Now, it's over?"

  "Oh, yes, Jon. God. Yes. It's over," I said.

  He kissed my forehead then. He inhaled. Kissing my hair, he said, "I just want everything exactly the way it was before. The way it's always been," and he wrapped me more tightly in his arms.

  We stayed in that embrace for two days.

  We stayed in the same room at all times, kept our hands clasped together, our knees touching, our shoulders. We lay down together on our bed at night, but we didn't sleep, we didn't make love, we never even got under the covers. We stared at one another for long, lingering moments. For hours. Occasionally, I saw Jon squint, or grimace, as if he were remembering something, but then he would see that I'd seen it, and he'd try to smile. He'd kiss me—my lips, my eyelids, my ears. We cried, and the crying turned to laughter, and we laughed, which turned to crying. We didn't answer the phone. We didn't leave the house.

  We made plans.

  We were, Jon said, in this now together. He was willing to take the blame, because he believed, completely, that I would never have had the affair without his goading, that I wanted as much as he did for this to be over. It was our mistake, he insisted—a misunderstanding born out of complacency, out of blindness, out of sheer ingratitude for the great gift of our long marriage, our perfect life. So, in ending it, we were conspirators, partners in a high-stakes game. As we held one another and made plans, I realized that we had never before been (had we?) so passionate, together, about anything—not even the house, not even our child, and never our marriage—as we were in determining the way we would deal with the problem of my lover.

  I would meet Bram, we decided, at the coffee shop around the corner from the efficiency on Tuesday (not at the efficiency) and tell him that, because the semester was over, I had broken my lease, that we no longer had a place to meet.

  And I would break the lease. Right away. There would be no more efficiency. In the fall, Jon and I would find a condo closer to our jobs, in the city. No more commuting, or separation. ("I don't care about the house, Sherry," Jon said. "The house is nothing without you.")

  On Tuesday, at the coffee shop, I would tell Bram that I'd made a terrible mistake, that my son was home now from college, that my husband was suspicious, that I had too much to lose. I would tell him that people at work might find out, that maybe some of them already suspected, that our jobs could be in jeopardy. If I had to, I would tell him that my husband had a rifle, that he was a hunter, that he could be violent—impressing upon Bram that the danger was great, that the affair had to end.

  Even Jon agreed that I couldn't, shouldn't, tell him that my husband knew.

  Who knew what Bram's reaction might be?

  Outrage? Humiliation?

  Jon, like me, had been shocked by the weight and the conviction of that sentence (I want you to be mine) and we'd agreed that we didn't know this man at all. We had no idea how he might react to any of this. We agreed that I could never be alone with him again, that I'd have to be gentle, but completely convincing. Stalwart. Not the slightest wavering in my conviction. I would end it, and everything would be as it had been before.

  Everything would be as it had been before.

  "So," Chad said, putting down his fork after finishing his third plate of spaghetti. "I've told you all about my life. What's new around here?"

  "Not much," Jon answered, quickly.

  "Nothing new here," I said, and shrugged.

  "Okay," Chad said. "So much for that."

  We talked about the weather. We talked about the war. And, after Chad and Jon helped me clear the table, we said good night, and Chad went to his room, and we went to ours—where, for the first time since Bram had been in it, Jon and I got into our bed and fell asleep in one another's arms.


  IN THE middle of the night I woke up from a dream that Chad, as a little boy, was wading at the edge of what I thought was a shallow lake. I was relaxed in the dream. Completely content. The sky overhead was overcast, but I felt happy about that, too. We didn't need sunscreen. Things were hazy. The lake was shallow. Everything was fine, I thought, the way it had always been. We were completely safe.

  But, even in this dream, I knew that if I were feeling these things, so conscious of them—the goodness and security of it all—something bad was going to happen. This was, after all, a dream. So, I stood up from the chair I'd been reclining in on the beach in my dream, and forced myself to wake up before the bad thing could happen.

  Afterward, I lay awake beside Jon for a long time, and felt the relief of the near miss, the averted disaster, even if it would only have been in a dream.

  It must have been, I thought, about three in the morning, but I could hear Chad in his room—the stereo a dull thumping through the wall.

  Jet lag.

  A boy from a different time zone.

  A boy from another life.

  It was comforting and unnerving at the same time to hear him in there, I realized—our little boy, back home.

  But, also, a stranger in the house.

  I'd grown used to the privacy of having him gone, I knew. Making love with Jon on the living room floor. Walking naked from the bedroom to the bathroom.

  Now, I put on my robe after slipping out of bed—something I hadn't bothered to do since the last time Chad had been home. I pulled it around me. I headed for the bathroom. When I passed Chad's room, I paused in the doorway and looked in. The light above his bed was on, and Chad was sprawled on top of the covers in his boxer shorts, reading a book with a black cover.

  "Hi," I said.

  "Hi, Mom," Chad said, and put the book down on his chest so that it rested there, wings spread, like a crow.

  His suitcases had been opened, and various items—books, a towel with a Corona beer bottle on it (something I'd never before seen in Chad's possession), and a few faded T-shirts—were scattered around on the floor.

  Since spring break, I'd only gone into his room to straighten, to dust. I'd only vacuumed once. Without Chad there, it had seemed like no one's room. I'd mostly ignored it.

  But, now, already, it was Chad's room again, reclaimed completely. Without thinking, I felt a pang of annoyance—the dirty laundry on the floor—and he must have seen it on my face, or simply noticed me looking at the mess on the floor. He said, "Don't worry, Mom. You can clean up in here and do my laundry in the morning. I'm in no hurry."

  I looked up from the mess to the boy and smiled, rolled my eyes. I said, "Did you get enough to eat for dinner?"

  Chad shook his head and said, "No, actually, Mom. Can you make me some pork chops now?" then laughed.

  I nodded. I understood: Why are you asking?

  I said, "I just wondered if you couldn't sleep."

  Chad propped himself up on his elbows and said, "I can sleep, Mom. I just choose not to sleep."

  This sarcasm (irony?)—where had it come from, when had it started? I liked it, actually, but it was the attitude of someone I didn't really know. A clever clerk at the video store. A student from the back row of the class. I said, "I'll leave you alone, now, Chad."

  He nodded, and said, "Good night, Mom. I'll see you in the morning."

  I said, "Maybe after you're settled in and caught up on your sleep, we'll go to visit Grandpa?"

  "Sure," Chad said. "But it'll have to be Saturday, okay? I work this Tuesday and Wednesday"—the lawn service for which he worked last summer—"so tomorrow I'm going to visit Ophelia if Dad'll let me take his car."

  "Ophelia?"

  "Yeah, Ophelia," Chad said.

  "Where is she?" I asked.

  "She's staying in Kalamazoo for the summer, in her sorority house."

  "Oh," I said. "So, are you—seeing her? Ophelia?"

  "Well, I'm seeing her tomorrow, Mom. Otherwise I haven't seen her since spring break. Why do you pronounce her name like that, like it's some kind of tropical disease?"

  "I don't!" I said. Too loud. I would wake Jon up. "I say it like everyone else says it. Ophelia."

  "Ophelia," he said, correcting me, although I couldn't hear the difference between his pronunciadon and mine.

  Ophelia.

  He was already visiting her, his first day home from college?

  What was there, I thought, about this girl, who'd seemed neither particularly pretty nor bright, that could be of such interest to Chad? Surely, the girls at Berkeley must have been infinitely more sophisticated, more interesting. I'd imagined Chad finding, there, someone slender, and bookish, I supposed—an English major, maybe a writer, someone, frankly, more like me.

  But, Ophelia?

  I remembered that her feet, flat, shoved into too-tight shoes, had looked painful as she tottered around in the grass in our front yard while Jon arranged her with Chad in his camera lens. "Smile," I remembered Jon saying—and then the casual distant smile Chad offered beside the overeager, too-wide smile of Ophelia Vanriper—who, I thought now, wasn't only plain, but was one of those girls who balanced so precariously between plain and ugly that it would be only a matter of lighting between one and the other.

  And, at the same time I thought these things, I was surprised to find myself thinking them, so viciously, about a nice girl my son liked.

  Since when did good looks in a girl matter so much to me?

  Hadn't I always been the one who'd told Chad, when he was little, not to make fun of the chubby girls, not to assume that just because a girl wasn't pretty that she wasn't a lovely person? When he was in seventh grade and I found the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue on his desk, I took the opportunity to tell him about the objectification of women, about how it was a fine thing if someone looked nice on the outside, but it was the inside that mattered.

  What reason did I have to dislike Ophelia Vanriper, who'd only ever been polite to me?

  "Okay," I said, trying to smile with sincerity—generously, warmly. "If Dad won't let you take his car, you can take mine."

  "Sweet!" Chad said. "You're still my excellent mother." He winked.

  BUT CHAD and Jon were both gone when I woke up. I looked outside to see that Jon's car wasn't in the driveway and that, either overnight or in the few hours of morning sunlight I'd slept through, the lilac bush at the edge of our yard had burst into purple blossoms.

  I opened the window.

  I could smell it.

  The perfume of it was so familiar and redolent of home, of peace, of domestic certainty, that I felt filled with blind optimism—such a complete faith in the future that I had to sit down on the edge of the bed to catch my breath.

  I looked around.

  There, on my dresser, my jewelry.

  There, on the wallpaper, those roses.

  The lace curtains. The white lampshade. That braided rug on the floor. Outside, as usual, Kujo was pawing around in the scrubbrush. The birds sang. A nest, built by house finches in the hanging fern on the back porch, was full of baby birds already, and from where I watched I could see the mother come and go busily. I could smell the musk of them (damp feathers, bird shit) and hear the brilliant cheeping as they called her back to them when she left. And, overhead, and from a great distance, miles and miles into the sky, I could hear a jet traveling from one edge of the world to the other, flying at great speed, with no feathers at all. Everything will be fine, I thought:

  I will make a pot of coffee, take a cup, and drink it on the porch. I will pick up that book I put down so many weeks ago, the one about Virginia Woolf. I will read it. I will call Sue, to whom I haven't spoken since the afternoon, in the hallway, when she told me about the notes. I will tell her she's my best friend. That she will always be my best friend. I will forgive her completely. What choice do I have? Haven't I, in these weeks, proven myself to be someone capable of hurting those I love the most? Haven't I, in these weeks
, proven myself capable of harboring secrets—harmful, bitter, painful secrets—and did those not exist right beside the deep, complete devotion I had for those I loved?

  And Garrett.

  I'll call Garrett.

  I'll try to explain to Garrett that it's all been a misunderstanding. A terrible misunderstanding. Whatever Bram had said to him—please, please forget that. I'll invite Garrett to dinner. I'll tell him that Chad's home from California, and wants to see him. I'll make burgers, or nachos, or sloppy joes—some kind of big, young-man meal. They can drink all the beer they want.

  And then I'll call Bram and explain that my life is the life of a simple woman.

  A woman here.

  A mother. A wife.

  That I belong to this life, have always belonged to it, can never belong to him.

  I will stand up.

  I will inhale.

  Lilacs.

  Morning.

  Ready to begin my ordinary day. Return to my ordinary life.

  BUT THEN the phone rang—loud and insistent, like an explosion in the silence of the house. I stood up from the edge of the bed fast and hurried down the stairs in my bare feet to answer it. My voice sounded breathy, I thought, and formal, and unfamiliar to me when I answered. "Hello?"

  "Hey, babe."

  Bram.

  I swallowed.

  For a moment I could say nothing, and then I said, "Bram. You're calling me at home."

  He said, "Well you're not in your office. Where am I supposed to call you?"

  "You can't call me here," I said. "My son is home from college. He could have answered the phone."

  "Yeah," Bram said. "Well, I'll tell him I'm selling encyclopedias. Or I'm the plumber." There was a scratch on the air between us. A laugh?

  "Where are you?" I asked.

  "I'm at your efficiency," he said. "I'm on my cell phone. I'm lying on your futon."

  "Oh, Bram," I said. "I'm going to have to let the lease on that go. The semester's over. I—"

  "Being here, thinking of you, is making me hard."