And One Last Thing...

by Молли Харпер

  So when Genie started rubbing the lotion into my hand with the textured buzzing mitten, I burst into tears and ran out of the house. When I came home from Genie’s without so much as edible panties, Mike considered this a confirmation of his skills. He smirked and snarked so much for the next few weeks that I went to Aphrodite’s Palace over in Dalton just to reclaim some dignity. Scary as it was, I bought the less “intrusive” version of Zeus’s Thunderbolt, a scepter-themed gold number called Cleopatra’s Asp, and a pack of D batteries.

  The good news was that having regular, albeit solo, orgasms made it much easier to fake them for Mike. Unfortunately, it also meant I knew what I was missing. It was a double-edged sword.

  I faked it. A lot. I deserved an Oscar for the performances I put on. Meryl Streep had nothing on my ass. I didn’t know if Mike bought into the theory that I suddenly, without special effort on his part, pushed through my frigidity. I think he was content not to be bothered. I gave the appearance of being satisfied and that meant he didn’t have to try harder.

  The thing that really chaps my ass is that now that I’d read the e-mails, I knew that Mike was at least willing to try the new and different with Beebee. On the copy machine. On the couch in the office. In cheap motels. Why could he break his precious sex rules for Beebee and not me? Because I was his wife?

  Because he couldn’t think of me that way? Or was I really that bad in bed? I tried to respond in ways that made me feel good, but whenever I asked Mike what he wanted me to do, he’d just say, “That’s fine.” It felt like I was being criticized for not knowing what I was doing, but refused adequate instruction. It was like high school algebra.

  Now he had to search for his own suits. And I was alone.

  What would I do now? What could I do? I had no work experience. I wasn’t trained for much besides journalism. And at this point, my skills were a little rusty. Besides, newspaper editors probably preferred writing about me than hiring me to write for them. The idea that I might not be able to support myself was depressing and terrifying. I’d never had to worry about money before. And the idea of going to my parents to ask for help made my stomach turn. It was bad enough driving my mother’s car.

  I leaned back, fluttering my feet through the cool water. At least this way I could figure out what I wanted, what could make me happy, without worrying how it would affect everybody else in my life.

  Behind me, I heard the door to my neighbor’s cabin open and Wolverine stepped out. (I refused to call him Lefty, even in my head.) Beer bottle in hand, he tipped his face up to watch bright blue and green light from the fireworks splashing across the sky. It took him a few minutes to realize I was there. He nodded, not a friendly gesture, really, just acknowledgment of my presence. I nodded back, then turned my face back to the light show.

  Independence. Making the choice to be alone. I only hoped it didn’t make me into a vaguely threatening, brooding psycho.

  11

  Nude Neighborhood Watch

  A few days later, I stood at the end of that same dock, considering my mother’s cautionary tale about Natalie Wood.

  I didn’t usually swim after dark, or for that matter, in water not surrounded by concrete. But swimming the lake had been a tradition since we were kids. Also, it was mid-July, the humidity level was somewhere around “sauna,” and I had a window air-conditioning unit from 1978.

  I sighed. Screw it. I wasn’t drunk. Christopher Walken was nowhere in sight. I would be fine.

  I ran off the end of the dock and slid into the black water headfirst. I sliced the mirror-smooth water soundlessly, with sure strokes. I’d always been a strong swimmer. Despite the fact that Emmett was three years older, I always beat him in our races from the dock. I propelled forward, the water streaming over my skin. My body remembered the distance from the dock to the buoy that marked the boat channel. My hand stretched out and touched the familiar rusted metal. The buoy bell, our traditional victory signal, echoed off the shore.

  I laughed and kicked off the buoy, stroking back toward the shore. The night was clear, sending little fire-bursts of reflected stars off the surface of the water. The last time I’d swum here at night was about three years before. I was still trying to improve our sex life and got Mike up to the cabin for a weekend alone. It was Indian summer and still warm. The neighbors had all abandoned their cabins for the season on Labor Day. I thought it would be romantic and spontaneous to swim under the stars.

  Of course, when Mike told his friends the story later, I was the one who had to be persuaded to skinny-dip. I was the one who whined about the water being cold. I was the one who objected to having sex on the dock because of the possibility of splinters. I remembered walking onto the Dixons’ back deck at a barbecue the next weekend and overhearing Mike bragging to his buddies, “She couldn’t get enough. I had to do some fasttalking to get Lacey out there, but once I got her in the water, she was begging for it.”

  I practically dropped the tray of drinks in Mike’s lap. I slunk back into the house until the blush drained out of my cheeks. I was the one who had to sweet-talk Mike out of those stupid plaid swim trunks. I was the one had to beg and plead for him to do anything different, but he was taking credit for it.

  I gritted my teeth at the memory, at the way Mike’s friends smirked at me for weeks afterward. I stripped off my suit and slung it toward the dock. “Screw you, Mike.”

  I could do this. I could be unpredictable and bold. I could be naked outside. I was my own woman, my own completely nude woman. I floated on my back, enjoying the way my bare breasts puckered against the soft night air. I raised my hand, blocking out the full moon. I watched the water sluice down my skin. I looked down at the contours and curves of my body, marble white against the moonlight. I’d always had an above-average figure. That was one thing Mike couldn’t blame his wandering for, my letting myself go.

  I wasn’t big on mirror time, but Mama had instilled in me a healthy esteem for my looks and the time and attention it took to maintain them. I had slim lines, good cheekbones, and, if Gammy Muldoon’s complexion was any indicator, skin that would remain soft and unlined until I was well into my seventies. I dutifully went to my stylist for a trim and an eyebrow wax every three weeks whether I thought I needed it or not. I slathered on the Oil of Olay before bedtime. The results spoke for themselves. I knew the way Mike’s friends and clients looked at me. And I’d always assumed that was part of my job, to be one half of the smiling all-American blond couple. How was I supposed to know that Mike found that boring?

  If I wanted to, I didn’t doubt that I could find another man. Heck, I’d had several offers, also from Mike’s friends and clients - even an uncle of Mike’s that Wynnie considered a saint - but since I’d assumed that my “unspoken agreement” with Mike included not sleeping with other people, I declined. The question was whether I wanted another man. They were such a sackload of trouble, and really, what had I gotten for it? Psychological issues that would require years of therapy and/or vodka-related self-medication.

  I backstroked and slid under the surface, swimming underwater until I reached the dock. My breath stretched my lungs, a comfortable cushion against drowning prolonged by years of yoga classes. I plunged to the bottom, remembering the game Emmett and I used to play, sitting on the bottom of the lake and trying to talk underwater, relaying secret messages. Mostly they came out as “burbleburbleburble.”

  I was enjoying the quiet, muted world below when a pair escaped mental patients and hockey mask-wearing serial killers, I struck out blind at my attacker, kicking and flailing. He grunted behind me as I glanced my foot off of his chest, grabbing my arms to keep me from swinging back at him. I broke the surface, spluttering and curling my fingers into claws and swinging at nothing. I couldn’t see! A bubble of panic rising in my chest, I sank again, fighting against the instinct to draw water into my lungs.

  Terror stretched those moments into an eternity, giving me time to berate myself. How could I have been so stupid?
Swimming alone at night in a secluded area? Why didn’t I just send up a “naked unchaperoned woman” flare for every sex predator in the county? Hadn’t I been through enough? Hadn’t my dignity already been smacked all to hell? Now I was going to die in some sort of horrible John Carpenter-esque slaughter. The headlines would read “Divorceés Mistaken for Co-ed by Horny Psychopath.” My father would probably skip my funeral for the annual Phi Rho CM Horseshoe Tournament. Mike would get widower’s sympathy and get everything I owned since I hadn’t changed my will yet.

  I would not allow that to happen.

  Grunting, I pushed up from the squishy mud bottom with all the strength in my legs. I was not going to die this way. I would survive. I would make it to the cabin and call 911. Okay, it was highly likely I was going to die this way because I could not fight off a full-grown man in a naked underwater wrestling match. But I was going to at least put up a fight. As I rocketed up toward the surface, my head bumped against my attacker’s chin. I gave in to my instinct to curse and swallowed a mouthful of water. As I broke through to air, I swung at where I thought the guy’s eyes were, but I hit his forehead instead.

  “Ow!” Wolverine yelled. “Stop! Stop struggling and just let me help you!”

  “Help me?!” I wheezed, coughing up water as he wrapped an arm around my chest and towed me toward the dock. “You’re drowning me. What is wrong with you?”

  My neighbor clapped a hand on the wood stairs and anchored us there. He was not dressed for a night swim, wearing jeans and an old navy blue T-shirt. I could feel his sneakers bumping against my legs as he treaded water. “Me? What’s wrong with you? What are you doing out here?”

  “Swimming! Now would you mind getting your hands off me?” I said, slapping at the protective arm slung around my breasts. He winced and let go, letting me slip under the water again. I considered staying there for a moment, just to prevent the conversation that would follow. But ultimately I bobbed up and got my own grip on the staircase.

  “What are you doing swimming at two a.m.?” he grunted, hauling himself out of the water. His jeans dragged low on his hips under the soggy weight of the denim. He plopped down on the dock and slicked his hair out of his face.

  I stayed in the water for the sake of cover, blushing as I tried to explain. “Well, I didn’t count on you jumping in fully clothed and trying to drown me.”

  “I wasn’t trying to drown you. I was trying to stop you!”

  “Stop me from what?”

  “From killing yourself!” he shouted.

  “I’m not trying to kill myself! I’m just… It was too hot to sleep.” I finished lamely.

  “Well, of all the stupid -” He grunted as he pushed himself to his feet. “Swimming alone at night? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?”

  “My neighbor could jump in and try to kill me?” I snarked.

  “Look, I know you’re going through some emotionally traumatic thing right now, but I don’t have time for this shit,” he snarled. “I’m not going to be the guy who swoops in and saves you from yourself. I don’t want your Bundt cake or your lasagna or whatever you used to make for your husband that he never appreciated. I won’t be the guy who helps you get your groove back or whatever you think I’m going to do to nurse you back to health before releasing you into the wild. I don’t want to spend time with you. I don’t want to get to know you better. I am not interested in you. So the next time you’re feeling like doing something like this - don’t. All right?”

  Cursing under his breath, Mr. Monroe turned on his heel and stalked up the dock. My natural tendency when faced with this sort of open hostility - well, I don’t know what that would be because I’d never faced this sort of open hostility. Nevertheless, I launched myself up the ladder and stomped after him. The limp slowed him down, which meant I was able to easily overtake him.

  “Hey! Hey!” I yelled, slapping at the back of his shoulder. Carried by my own pissed-off momentum, I narrowly avoided crashing into him when he stopped.

  “I don’t know who the hell you think you are or where you got such a damn high opinion of yourself, Mr. Aloof Brooding Loner Man. But maybe you should, just for a moment, consider the fact that I’m not interested in you. I didn’t come up here trolling for a rebound man. I didn’t come up here looking for anything but a place to hide. I am in exile, you ass. I was humiliated by a husband who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and then I overreacted, just a little bit, in an extremely public way.” Monroe’s lips twitched, even if his eyes were still glaring with unexpressed urges to throttle me. “I have no interest in replacing one untrustworthy male appendage for another. In fact, if I had known there was a penis within a five-mile radius of this cabin, I wouldn’t have come up here. But I did and now you’re just going to have to live with it. But when you go to sleep tonight, comfort yourself in the absolute certainty that I have no interest in you, or the emotional baggage you’re obviously toting around with you… and I’m still naked, aren’t I?”

  Monroe looked down and nodded, the barest hint of a smile quirking his lips.

  “Shit.” I muttered. I didn’t have so much as a towel to cover myself with, so I did my own heel turn and stalked up to the cabin. I could only hope my ass wasn’t jiggling, which really would have capped the humiliation of the evening.

  “Just so we’re clear, we have established that we’re not interested in each other, right?” he called after me. I could hear the barely contained laughter tightening his voice.

  “Oh, fuck off!” I yelled, not bothering to look back at him.

  The good news was that my being angry at Monroe gave me a break from being angry at Mike. It was like my ears had been ringing for weeks and suddenly it had stopped. I showered, using well water to wash lake water out of my hair, which had never made sense to me. I shampooed in anger, which is never smart as you tend to go through about half a bottle of Paul Mitchell before you realize what you’re doing. I dragged on some pajamas and pulled out my laptop bag.

  I sighed, staring at the blank Word document. Samantha had asked me to come up with some thoughts on the breakdown of my marriage to Mike. She said it would help her come up with the best plan of attack for divorce court. But I sat there, mocked by the blinking cursor, and couldn’t come up with anything to say. After what happened with the newsletter, I was almost afraid to write anything. Where to start? When did my marriage start to decline?

  If I was honest with myself, I typed, I would say my marriage probably started to decline before it started. About three days before we got married, I woke up in a cold sweat. I marched into my parents’ room and was about to tell them I couldn’t marry Mike. We weren’t right for each other. I wasn’t ready to get married yet. There were too many things I still wanted to do. I opened my mouth and got as far as “I can’t” when I saw my father’s face. Whatever I was about to say, he didn’t want to hear. As usual, he only wanted to hear “happy thoughts” from his youngest child. So I bit my lip. I said, “I can’t find my address book for thank-you notes. Have you seen it?” And I backed out of the room with a lead weight in my stomach.

  The morning of our wedding, I woke up and vomited. And then vomited again. And part of me hoped that I was pregnant so I would have a good reason for going through with the wedding.

  It turned out to be nerves.

  I wrote about the pressure I felt from our families to stay with Mike, about my own feelings of obligation to Mike after being with him for so long. I wrote about losing the job opportunity at the newspaper, the shame I felt in letting myself get talked out of working, how useless I felt staying home, and how lost I was

  with no expectation of how I would spend every day. I wrote about how I’d networked and entertained and worked parttime in Mike’s office during tax season. And yes, how I wrote his monthly newsletter.

  It felt like automatic writing, like some filter-impaired spirit had taken over my typing fingers. I wrote about the first time I realized that Mike’s da
d was a jackass and it was likely that Mike was going to turn out just like him. About getting conception advice from eighty-year-old Margaret Mason, a fellow church member who’d decided that “enough was enough” and it was time for us to have a baby. I wrote until my fingers hurt and the space between my shoulder blades began to ache. My eyes were grainy and tired. I felt hollowed out. Nothing. No anger, no anxiety. Just empty and tired. I’d lost track of time… and had written almost fifteen pages. And I hadn’t even gotten to the “Mike’s a cheating bastard” period of our marriage.

  I ran a hand over my face and saved my document. I wasn’t sure how useful it would be to Samantha, but writing it made me feel… lighter. It was easier to move, like my joints had been unlocked. I stood, stretched high, and yawned. I looked at the little double bed in the “master bedroom” with the old purple patchwork quilt. It actually looked inviting. I stretched across the top of the blankets, keeping carefully to my usual side of the bed, the left, before I realized that I didn’t have to share. If I wanted to sleep lengthwise, I could. Experimentally, I slid my feet onto the right side, stretching in a long line, enjoying the luxury of unlimited legroom. I sighed, switched off the little bedside lamp, and wondered what I would write the next day.

  I woke up to a pitch-black room. I panicked for a moment, unsure of where I was or whose bed I was in. It was still an adjustment to sleep alone, even though Mike wasn’t exactly an exciting presence in the bedroom, when he was there. And it was a comfort to have his warm weight balancing the mattress. Once you get used to that, trying to sleep alone feels like you’ve forgotten something. You lie there and wonder whether you left the front door unlocked or the stove on and then you realize, oh, there’s supposed to be another person in my bed.

  I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything during the literary unburdening of my soul. I foraged in the fridge and was overwhelmed with my choices. I never ate midnight snacks. Since, as my mother-in-law put it, “Mike likes his girls thin,” I was pretty careful about what I ate. And despite the fact that I loved to cook a variety of dishes, so much of my meal planning and shopping revolved around Mike’s finicky palate - no spices, no fish, no nightshade vegetables. The rare exceptions were when we entertained people who, say, might like seasonings other than salt and pepper. Mike suffered through those meals, and after our guests left, groaned for the rest of the night as if I’d poisoned him.