The doorbell rings. Elinor drops a tin of white pepper clanging to the floor. She wipes her hands and heads into the hallway. Before opening the door, she pulls her apron over her head. Too suburban and matronly.
Gina stands on the porch wearing a long tie-dyed skirt, a tiny white T-shirt, and leather thong sandals. A strip of her flat tan belly peeks out above the skirt’s low-cut waistline. Elinor would like to slam the door.
“Come in,” she tells Gina.
Ted turns off the TV and saunters into the hall, being the polite husband. His head jerks back when he sees Gina. Gina’s eyes pop open, but then she narrows them, redirecting her alarm into a smile, her expression making a U-turn.
“Gina, this is my husband, Ted,” Elinor tells her.
Ted limply shakes Gina’s hand. “Nice to meet you.” He opens the coat closet door. “May I take your coat?”
Suddenly Elinor’s embarrassed by the coat closet. It’s jammed full of junk, much of it a testament to her athletic failures. The tangled jump rope, the dusty hiking boots, the too-small ski suit.
“She doesn’t have a coat,” Elinor tells Ted. Still, Ted lingers with his head in the closet, as though he’d like to dive in.
“Can I get you a drink?” Elinor asks Gina.
“Do you have tomato juice?” Gina asks. Bracelets tinkle on her wrists.
Ted closes the closet door. He and Gina are busy not making eye contact. So far, Elinor would give them an A-minus on this not-knowing-each-other thing.
“No tomato juice,” she tells Gina. “Diet Coke?”
“Oh, artificial sweeteners,” she says. “That’s one of the things we’re going to have to purge.” Clearly she’s trying to be firm, but nervousness bubbles under her sentences.
You’re one of the things we’re going to have to purge, Elinor thinks as she motions Gina into the kitchen.
“Hey, I recognize you,” Ted finally says to Gina. “From the club.” Perspiration darkens his armpits.
“Yeah.” Gina cocks her head and squints her eyes. “You work out a lot.”
Gina places a little food scale and a spiral notebook on the kitchen counter. Elinor hands her a glass of orange juice. If orange juice has any evils, she doesn’t want to hear about them.
“You get to have artificial sweeteners on Weight Watchers,” she tells Gina while looking at Ted accusingly. “What’s the deal with that?” Her jaw hurts. Now that she’s found anger again, she wishes she could reel it in. Her hatred for the fickle diet gurus. Her loathing of the world.
“Well, ladies,” Ted says. “I have some work—”
“I was hoping the three of us could eat dinner together,” Elinor tells him. “Talk about things.”
Ted freezes in the doorway.
“Oh, I can’t stay for dinner.” Gina places her untouched juice on the counter.
“Really? But you two like to eat together,” Elinor says. Suddenly she’s dizzy from the intensity of this encounter. She wants to sit on the floor. Call this crazy intervention off.
Ted rests a hand on the doorjamb, turns halfway toward Elinor and Gina.
Gina giggles nervously. “What?”
“Sleep together? Eat together? All that good stuff.” Elinor pulls the Zone cookbook from its hiding place in the bread drawer (Ted would never look there!) and waves it at them.
“Elinor,” Ted says. He faces Elinor with his back to Gina, his eyes pleading. Suddenly he looks old—slim from his newfound athleticism, but in a gray, gaunt way, not in a rosy, happy way.
“Ted,” Elinor says.
Please, his eyes say. I’m sorry, and please.
“I better go.” Gina picks up her food scale and notebook.
Elinor looks at Gina’s impossibly small waist, remembers how easily Ted crossed the room in Gina’s condo, how quickly his hands slipped up under her flimsy robe to touch her breasts. He made the first move. Suddenly she can’t stand being in the kitchen with these two. She can’t stand being in her own house. For the past few days Elinor fantasized about going away with Ted to Hawaii—skinny-dipping and stargazing and oversleeping. She even surfed the Web and chose a resort on the Big Island, sighing at the thought of the last time they visited the Kona Coast and left blissfully worn out from too much sun, sex, and rum. Yet now she wants to go away by herself. Leave these two with the carbohydrate charts and bland chicken breasts. Maybe before you can fix something, you have to let it break completely.
“I have to go,” she tells Gina. She opens the cupboard, yanks out the bags of flaxseed and flax meal, and shoves them into Gina’s arms. Gina flinches as though Elinor’s going to deck her, then looks curiously at the bags.
“Flax at it!” Elinor races up the stairs to pack. Just like in the movies. There is something liberating about being the first one to leave in a situation like this—sort of like being the first one up in the morning or the first one to dive into a cold swimming pool. What does she need? A few work outfits, hose, shoes, comfy pajamas, slippers, toilet articles, bubble bath, magazines, The Iliad. She folds the things into her little black suitcase. She’s a pro at packing quickly for emergency business trips. She’ll drive to the Fairmont downtown. Order room service. Pancakes with real maple syrup.
Elinor nearly crashes into Ted on her way down the stairs. She lunges past him for the front door, her legs and knees suddenly rubbery at the sight of him.
Ted reaches for her bag, trying to stop her. “Don’t leave,” he says. Gina appears to be gone.
Elinor turns to look at her husband. He’s as tired as she is. She can see that. Many nights when she thought he was sleeping and he thought she was sleeping, neither one of them was. They’d discover this in the morning as they tripped over each other in the kitchen. Instead of watching the indifferent blue numbers on her clock radio click toward dawn, Elinor wanted to roll over and hold Ted, talk to him. But despite her inability to sleep, or maybe because of it, she was too exhausted to move.
“She’s gone,” Ted says now. “Listen, I know we can work this out.”
Elinor squeezes the handle on her suitcase and tugs it past Ted.
“I love you,” Ted says, his voice rising with desperation.
I love you, too, Elinor thinks. I did. I do. But that’s beside the point! Isn’t it?
“What are you going to do?” Ted asks as Elinor opens the door.
“What am I going to do, Ted?” She pictures him unbuckling his pants and sinking to Gina’s kitchen floor. “What am I going to do? I’m going to call the Dalai Lama. Do you think he’s listed under D or L? I’m going to lie on my yoga mat and rub soy milk in my third eye, and weave baskets out of turkey bacon. I’m going to spend a week in the Zone.”
Ted steps toward Elinor. Elinor backs away from him out onto the front porch. Maybe she’ll finally get a good night’s sleep at the Fairmont. She looks away from her husband toward her car in the driveway. She closes her eyes for a moment and imagines sliding between crisp white hotel sheets. What do they use to make them so clean? That crisp white cleanness of starting over. Starch? Whatever it is, it seems less pedestrian than starch. More otherworldly.
She opens her eyes. Ted hovers in the hall, not wanting to step over the threshold. He doesn’t like to leave the house in his bare feet. Not even to retrieve the newspaper from the driveway.
“Excuse me.” Elinor reaches around Ted for the door handle. She wants the satisfaction of closing the door behind her. As she pulls it shut with a thump and a click, the image of Ted’s drawn face disappears. Good-bye, then. She steps off the porch. But then she stops halfway down the driveway to her car. Life is never like it is in the movies. Not her life anyway, because she has left her car keys inside, on the kitchen counter. She takes a deep breath of cool, moist air and tries to gather the gumption to walk back in. Then she remembers her hide-a-key. A few years ago, when she slid the thin, magnetic box under the driver’s side of her new car, she wondered if she’d ever lock herself out. She tried to picture such a scenario: rushing
in the parking lot at work, or spacing out while loading groceries. She never would have imagined this night.
She continues down the dark driveway, halting again when a shooting star streaks across the horizon, just above the trees. It’s big and bright, followed by a greenish tail. The Perseids. The meteor shower is marked on Elinor’s calendar so that she and Ted can make their annual trek to the backyard, with lawn chairs and blankets. “I saw one!” they usually shout to each other, almost competitively. Last summer she wished on every meteor for a baby. Although she’s not a superstitious person, Elinor has always taken wishes seriously. As a kid she would hover over her birthday cake candles until islands of wax pooled in the frosting. While trying to get pregnant, she wished on everything from found pennies to stray eyelashes. Now Elinor tips her head to look up at the sky. According to the newspaper, tonight there will be up to 150 meteors per minute. The next neon green streak makes Elinor gasp. She squeezes her eyes shut. For the first time, she’s not sure what to wish for.
2
The affair is over. As Ted drives to work on a hot August morning—a thirty-minute, second-to-third-gear rush-hour crawl to his podiatry practice in Menlo Park—he exhales, letting out breath it seems he’s been holding for weeks.
Last night, after Elinor ran upstairs, Ted told Gina they could never see each other again. Gina nodded and headed for the door. There was pride in her posture—shoulders pulled back, chin pointed forward, cookbooks tucked firmly under one arm. As she brushed past Ted in the hall, he caught the earthy-sweet smell of her China Rain perfume. But then, when Elinor came downstairs, she left, too, the door shutting with a gentle yet final click for the second time that evening. Standing alone in the empty house, Ted felt a surge of self-loathing. He couldn’t blame his wife for leaving, and felt certain that now his lover would be better off.
He waited an hour, then called Elinor on her cell phone. She had checked into the Fairmont downtown. “El,” he pleaded. “It’s over with her. Please come home. I love you. I’m so sorry. Let’s start over. Let’s go back to the counselor—to Dr. Brewster.” Maybe he’s a snob, but Ted resents calling these PhDs doctor, especially since they seem to have so little to offer in the way of a remedy.
“I took a bath,” Elinor said. “The water here is really hot.” She sounded like a kid. “And the tub is huge.” She bit into something crunchy. While doing the infertility treatments, El hadn’t been allowed to take baths. She said she was forbidden to have the two things that comforted her most—a hot bath and a big glass of wine. Ted was hurt that he wasn’t one of the two things. “I love this robe,” Elinor continued. “Everything is so clean in hotels.” There was a manic calmness in her voice that made Ted nervous. Yell at me! he thought.
“I could get the house professionally cleaned,” he offered. “One of those deep cleaning deals.” He pounded his fist into the counter. For the past six months he’d been at a total loss for what to say to his wife. They used to finish each other’s sentences and laugh at each other’s jokes. Now every word Ted uttered seemed to make Elinor flinch or frown.
Elinor explained that she needed time to herself. A break from her life. Of course this meant a break from Ted, the philanderer, the adulterer.
“You don’t have to come home, then,” he said. “We can go away together. How ’bout to Bermuda?” Elinor had loved it there. She said the sand was pink. Color-blind, Ted struggled to imagine this.
“Maybe,” El said. Her indifference was eerie.
Now Ted queues up to go through the metering lights onto the freeway. It’s a stifling yet cloudy day, the sky the dull gray color of car primer. He pops the lid off his yogurt and eats with a plastic spoon. This is one of the few carbs he allows himself a day. The affair is over, but he’s going to stick to Gina’s healthy regimen. She helped him get onto the Zone Diet and actually do that triathlon, which made him feel healthier than he had in years. Now he’s determined to keep off the fifteen pounds. For the past two months, he’s experienced an odd paradox of feeling fit and healthy and like hell at the same time. The result of a steady diet of turkey bacon, and sex with the wrong person. He will have to find another gym.
During the three months that the affair went on, Ted broke up with Gina several times in his head. He practiced his breakup speech in the shower and on his way to work: You’re a wonderful woman, he would tell her, imagining a safe distance across a restaurant table, but I love my wife. I know you’ll meet somebody else. Not an old fart like me. Ted was forty-five and working on a breakup speech. What an asshole. A fool and a liar and a cheat. How hard could it be to say, No, I’m married?
Yet Gina seemed drawn to Ted because he was married. “You’re a grown-up,” she’d murmur wistfully. This was in contrast to her former boyfriends, the “bad boys” who got DUIs or lost their jobs. Even though Gina rolled her eyes when she mentioned these guys, the thought of them made a flare of jealousy burn in Ted’s chest.
Ted shifts into third gear, which is liberating, if only for a moment. Although she was a health nut, Gina said you needed some fat in your diet. Once, she fixed Ted fried eggs and thick slabs of nitrate-free bacon in a cast-iron skillet. The smell made Ted wish for snow and a remote cabin, for sticky sex under flannel sheets. Gina occasionally smoked pot, too, an activity that was accompanied by a mini-diatribe about how alcohol is actually much worse for you.
They’d had sex in crazy places—in their cars, at the park, buried under blankets from Gina’s trunk. Gina carried a wad of bedding in her car that she referred to as a bed-in-a-bag. She had assembled it the last time the country went on Orange Alert, and the newspaper listed items you were supposed to stockpile, including water, batteries, and flashlights, plus snacks and blankets in your car, in case you had to relocate instantaneously or got stranded while on the road. Or in case you needed to screw in the park under an old sleeping bag that smelled like a campfire. That time under the tree, fear and excitement had surged through Ted’s brain until he was sure he’d have an aneurysm. Even when they wound up back at Gina’s condo, they never seemed to make it to her bed. Gina alleviated a pain that Ted wasn’t fully aware of until he met her. Everything happened so fast and felt so good and then so horribly wrong and awful. It was as though Ted had started sniffing glue or robbing banks.
As Ted creeps along two car-lengths behind a BMW, he takes an inventory of how things got so screwed up between him and Elinor. It all seemed to start with the infertility treatments. First their sex life was downgraded to a clinical failure. Even their kissing seemed obligatory, Elinor presenting her cheek to him like a handshake or a clean napkin to go with a sandwich. It wasn’t that she was cold, but she was always fretting now—obsessing and talking about the latest study she’d read or acupuncture data or donor eggs. Then they lost their ability to communicate. Elinor thought that Ted’s quiet bewilderment meant that he wasn’t listening to anything she said. He just couldn’t think of anything to say that was the right thing to say. Finally, they lost their dignity. For Ted, there was a defining moment when he lost his: the day he dropped his semen sample in a corridor at the hospital, and it rolled under a giant refrigerator.
Ted hated doing in vitro. For the first time in his professional life, he was overwhelmed by medical information. He had never considered himself a control freak, but the complexity and uncertainty of all the hoops they had to jump through—shots, ultrasounds, egg retrievals, embryo transfers—left him feeling unglued. He liked being able to fix things. In college, he’d spent hours in the driveway tuning up his old Plymouth Scamp. You could open the hood of that car and identify everything under there. Ted misses that V-8 engine the same way he misses Johnny Carson and the house he grew up in. Now, when he looks under the hood of his Audi, he is mocked by a gleaming electronic mass.
Ted was nervous as hell the morning of that first egg-retrieval surgery. How much higher could the stakes be? Christ. When they got to the clinic at the hospital, he sat with Elinor while the nurse started a Valiu
m IV. El smiled at the ceiling as if it were an old friend. It was a relief to see her relax. Ted kissed her forehead and each of her cool cheeks. Then he headed to the nurse’s station, as instructed, to get the key for The Room. Ha-ha: The key chain was a white plastic sperm. He lumbered down the hall, clutching the plastic sperm.
Later, Elinor wanted to know about The Room. Ted told her how it was just a bathroom with a stall and a big black chair like the ones you sit in to give blood. There were lots of magazines. No, not Newsweek! The magazines were worn and smudged and covered with white stickers that said PROPERTY OF REI CLINIC: DO NOT REMOVE. Elinor thought that was pretty damn funny. At first she had managed to find humor and irony in the treatments. One of the things Ted loves about his wife is her dark sense of humor. She is so smart and funny and beautiful.
“How was your date with the cup?” she’d tease.
“Oh, the romance!” Ted would reply.
While he laughed, Ted was terrified he’d mess up the sample somehow, after Elinor had gone through all that agony: four shots of hormones a day for ten days so she’d produce more eggs. Thighs bruised from the shots, and a belly so swollen with follicles and fluid that she walked on her toes, grimacing. And now this surgery. As Ted carried his sample to the lab, he worried about Elinor’s anesthesiologist. The guy looked about twelve! What if he screwed up and gave El too much Versed? Ted lost his bearings in the confusion of corridors on his way to the lab. You’re a doctor, he told himself. Get ahold of yourself. Still, his hands shook. The cup sprang out of his fingers like a live fish. He was supposed to carry it in the little brown paper bag they’d given him, but he’d sort of ruined the bag in The Room and thrown it away. That was another story. In a flash, his specimen rolled under this giant refrigerator thing that had a padlock on the front. Ted fell to his hands and knees and peered under the machine, which rattled and hummed. He could see the cup all the way toward the wall, pinned under a loop of metal that hung down. He pressed his cheek to the floor and slid his hand under.
Happiness Sold Separately Page 3
