I climb the stairs and swing open the door to our bedroom, the scene of the crime. There’s the bed, there’s the reading chair, there’s the dresser, the mirror, nothing to indicate that this was any kind of marital ground zero. I walk over to my old dresser and pull open a random drawer. Inside are a handful of Wade’s boxer shorts and undershirts and a pile of dark socks. The drawer beneath it has a selection of polo shirts and T-shirts. In the closet, there are a few pairs of jeans and two suits. From what I can tell, Wade has moved in the essentials, but not every
thing. He’s still keeping his own place. I pull out the trousers from his suits and then go into the medicine chest for a pair of tweezers. I grab a six-pack of his beer from the fridge and take it with me to the den, 212
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where I watch Mad Max without sound on the plasma television while gently pulling the stitches out of his pant seams, leaving just enough to hold the pants together, so that they won’t fall apart until he moves around in them a little, preferably at work, in front of a large crowd. After I put the pants back, I open the night table drawer. There’s a bill
fold with a few hundred-dollar bills, a prescription bottle that says naproxen but that I know from past visits contains his Viagra stash, a checkbook, some loose change, receipts, a Sports Illustrated, a cell phone charger, and the spare key to his Maserati. I pocket the Viagra and three hundred dollars.
Down in the basement there’s a carton full of our old photo albums. I pull one out and flip through it. Our trip to the Caribbean a few years ago, in the aftermath of our dead baby; a two-week consolation prize. We splurged on a private villa. There was the beach, a pool, a water slide, and a casino. We made a rule: no talking about the baby, about home, about anything of consequence. We lay on the sand for hours, baking in the sun, staring out at the blue water until we could see it with our eyes closed. We read our novels and retained nothing. The sun turned our brains to Jell-O. Jen bought some new bikinis that showed off her tan and let a fat native woman braid her hair in cornrows like Bo Derek’s. In the evenings, we would have sex before dinner, urgently and desper
ately, bruising our groins, kissing our lips raw. There was another couple, Ray and Tina from Chicago, on honey
moon for their second marriage. Ray had a Chrysler dealership. Tina had big hair, a pierced navel, and store-bought fingernails. She’d been his secretary for years. You didn’t need much of an imagination to guess what had ended his first marriage. We all went on a midnight cruise, getting drunk on red rum drinks. There was a reggae band and we tried to dance but it’s hard to dance to reggae unless you’re very stoned. Ray stared at Jen’s tight ass. Tina was shorter and a little bottom heavy, but
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she had these sexy bee-stung lips and she grazed my arms with her fake nails when she talked. Ray and I got drunk and he confided in me that he’d give anything to have sex with someone who looked like Jen. We joked about swapping for the night. Back in our villa, Jen and I made fun—but not in a mean way—of Ray’s Tom Selleck mustache and thick gold necklace, of Tina’s nails and that she wore heels to the beach. After they went back to Chicago, we felt the silence between us even more. We read, we swam, we lay out on the beach, watching happier people. I went parasailing one day, and Jen rode in the speedboat, taking pictures of me in the sky. A day later, Jen was bitten by something in the ocean and her knee swelled up like a balloon. By the time we fl ew home, we could barely look at each other. Was she already seeing him then? Or maybe not yet seeing him, but flirting with him? Already redrafting the boundaries of her life? When, exactly, did she cross that line and stop being mine? The only thing more painful than not knowing would be knowing. Having to go back to every picture in every album and stamp it real or a lie. I don’t have the stomach for it. In the back of the album there’s a single orphaned photo out of its sleeve, and I recognize it from our honeymoon in Anguilla: Jen in a pool—looking seductively at the camera while, in the background, whitecaps dapple the blue ocean. It’s one of those accidentally perfect pictures you take, when the sun is just where it needs to be, and the fo
cus is perfect, and you’ve caught your subject at her absolute best. I look at the photo for a long time, at Jen when she was still Jen, when we were still us. I put the album back in the box and make it as far as the second stair before turning around and pulling it back out. Back in the car, I place the photo faceup on the passenger seat, where it stays for the drive back to Elmsbrook. I couldn’t begin to tell you why.
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7:45 p.m.
Home, for lack of a better word, or option. Firefl ies flicker and glow in front of my windshield as dusk thickens into another humid summer night on Knob’s End. I can smell barbecue. I follow the sounds of voices around to the backyard. Everyone is gathered on the patio eating, while Barry mans the grill. Wendy is sprawled on a lounge chair with Cole asleep on her chest. Everyone else is at the table, eating burgers and minute steaks, dipping chips and washing them down with Diet Coke. Paul is pitching a wiffle ball to Ryan, who whacks every third pitch or so. Horry plays the field while Phillip stands off to the side, providing the play-by-play through cupped hands. “The pitch . . . Oh, he got a piece of that one, it’s going deep, sending Callen to the warning track. Th at ball
is out of here! Ryan Hollis’s two thousandth career home run. Th e crowd
goes wild. You know he’ll be getting some tonight, Bill . . .”
Mom and Linda are at the head of the table, sipping chardonnay out of plastic wineglasses and playing Rummykub. Alice sits with them, idly reading the weekend paper. I stand around the corner of the house, watching these people, these strangers, this family of mine, and I have never felt more lost and alone. My cell phone vibrates softly in my pocket, and I step back around the house to answer it.
“Hey,” Penny says. “Want to go to a movie?”
My last trip to the movies didn’t work out so well. It was a few weeks after I’d moved into the Lees’ basement, and I could feel the walls clos
ing in. So I took myself to the movies. Back when I lived with Jen, I had some friends. In the aftermath of our separation, Allan and Mike had met me for drinks and we’d all raised our glasses in agreement that Jen was a cheating bitch and I was the good guy here. I didn’t know it at the
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time, but that night was actually my good-bye party. Jen would retain custody of our friends and I’d be wordlessly discarded. A few weeks later, as I circled the multiplex parking lot, I saw Allan and Mike with their wives, leaving the theater along with Jen and Wade, all walking in standard formation, talking and laughing in the cinematic afterglow, like it had always been just so. I tried to tell myself it was simply a chance encounter, but it was clear from their body language that they were all together, and probably not for the first time. It’s a sad moment when you come to understand how truly replaceable you are. Friendship in the suburbs is wife-driven, and my friends were essentially those husbands of Jen’s friends that I could most tolerate. Now that I’d been sidelined, Wade had stepped in for me like an understudy, a small note was in
serted into the program, and the show went on without missing a beat. 8:30 p.m.
The writer is pretty, beautiful even, but in a toned-down way; neu
rotic and accessible. She kisses her fiancé good-bye in their beautifully cluttered apartment and travels to a comically unpronounceable seaside village in Scotland to do a story for the travel magazine she writes for. There she falls for a local widower who trains sheepdogs. Th e townsfolk
are kindly eccentrics, the widower is rugged and built like an Olympic swimmer, and we forgive the ingénue her dalliance, since her eyes well up so beautifully when she talks about her recently deceased sister, and also because her fiancé is a cad who flirted with his sexpot secretary i
n the opening scene and likes his red sports car a little too much. Penny and I sit in the back row, holding hands. She softly runs the fingers of her free hand up and down the inside of my forearm, playing with the short hairs on my wrist. I lean my head against hers, and we’re 216
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seventeen again. We make out for a while, our tongues cool and sugary from the soda, and I never want the movie to end, not because it feels so good, although it certainly does—Penny kisses with passion and depth and just the right amount of tongue—but because when the movie ends the house lights will come back up, and real life will materialize around us like hidden creatures in the horror movie we should have gone to instead.
And even as we kiss, my hand now under the hem of her short skirt, rubbing her smooth thighs, her fingers in my hair as her tongue dances across my lower lip, I am aware of the on-screen plot resolving itself. Th
e fi ancé has shown up unannounced, there’s some kind of sheepdog festival, a chase through a crowded farmers’ market on motor scooters. Th
e fiancé rides his scooter off an embankment and into the duck pond. Happily-ever-after is just a dramatic gesture and a heartfelt speech away. We stop making out and tune in for the last ten minutes. The girl is at the airport, alone, having broken it off with the fiancé, but too late to save her relationship with the widower. But here he comes, zipping through the airport on a stolen luggage cart. He delivers a loud speech about what he’s learned about grief and love and second chances, pro
claiming his love even as the cops handcuff him. Somehow, his trusty dog is there too, along with half the village, who have all had a hand in bringing him here to stop her from leaving. She kisses him while he’s still handcuffed, and so he falls over and they kiss some more on the floor. Next to me, Penny sniffles at the happy ending. Then she leans over, takes my earlobe between her teeth, and says, “Take me home.”
10:45 p.m.
Penny lives in a ground-floor apartment in a complex downtown, just a few blocks from Dad’s store. There are framed movie posters on the
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walls—Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts—and not very much in the way of furniture: a mucous-green leather couch that she must have gotten a deal on because no one would choose that color in a vacuum. There’s no matching love seat, which I find somewhat sym
bolic. A fat cat with yellow demon eyes is curled up on the couch, and the potpourri scattered in little bowls around the room almost manages to cover the smell of the unseen litter-box. I’m nervous, the kind of nervous that leads to flop sweat and fl accid
ity. Too late I remember the Viagra I stole from Wade, now sitting worthlessly in my glove compartment. I have not had sex with a woman other than Jen in over ten years, if you don’t count my bizarre sixty sec
onds with Alice earlier today, and you’d better believe I’m not counting it. I’m treating it like a dream or a UFO sighting, something maybe you’ll talk about one day when you’re drunk and among friends, but nothing that has any bearing on your actual life. But when your wife spent the last year of your marriage going elsewhere for her sexual gratifi cation, it’s only natural to have some performance anxiety. Penny steps into the apartment, tossing keys and fl ipping off lights. I stand uncertainly in the doorway, my thighs trembling a little. I can feel all the crap I ate at the theater burrowing through my intestines, making me feel bloated and queasy. “Should I come in?” I say. My voice sounds hollow and scared.
She gives me a sharp, knowing smile. “If I were you, I would.”
The bedroom is a mess, clothes everywhere, towels draped over an armchair to dry. Penny undresses in the light of the desk lamp, not sul
try, not like a stripper, but the same way she would if I wasn’t here, let
ting her clothing fall where she stands. She presents herself to me, her body lithe and smooth, breasts full and buoyant on her too-thin frame. I am self-conscious about my own soft body, with its budding love han
dles and lack of abdominal definition, but she doesn’t seem to mind, kissing my thighs as she pulls down my pants and then falling down 218
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onto the bed with me, licking her way up my belly to my chin and then into my mouth. “You taste good,” she murmurs. I worry that I have bad breath, that my ass will feel fl abby in her hands when she grabs it, that I’m rubbing her breasts like a high school kid, that my dick won’t get hard enough, that it won’t measure up to other dicks she’s seen, that I’ll come too soon, that she won’t come at all. I should go down on her, just to make sure she gets something out of the deal, but I’m intimidated by the thought of an uncharted vagina, terrified that after a few minutes of fruitless exploration she’ll gently pull me back up by my ears and tell me it’s okay when we both know it’s not, that it felt good anyway when we both know it didn’t.
The sex is as good and bad as first times tend to be, like a play re
hearsal full of missed marks, botched lines, bad lighting, and no calls for an encore. We don’t do it up against the wall, on the kitchen sink, in the shower, from behind while she’s bent over the bed. It’s just paint-by
numbers missionary sex: kiss, rub, lick, stroke, enter, rock, moan, and come, all at the proper time. I’m playing scared, letting her set the rhythm, trying my best to banish the image of Wade humping Jen that hovers in the background of my mind. Thanks in part to my earlier re
lease with Alice, I’m able to hold out until Penny finishes, gasping and digging her teeth into my chin hard enough to leave a mark. And it oc
curs to me, as I surrender to my own somewhat subdued orgasm, that I’ve come twice today, and as sad and twisted as each occasion was, both involved actual, live women, one on top of me, and one beneath me, and maybe that’s a cause for some small measure of optimism, even if we’re not counting Alice. Which we’re not.
When we’re done, I roll off of Penny, feeling ridiculously accom
plished and wondering how soon I can leave.
“That was nice,” Penny says drowsily, throwing a leg over mine, splaying out her fingers against my chest.
“Okay. Give it to me straight,” I say. “I can take it.”
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“What are you talking about?”
“Why did my wife need to have sex with someone else?”
“Because she’s an evil bitch.”
“Come on. Really.”
Penny lies back on her pillow and removes her leg from mine. I grab it and put it back. I like it there. “In my limited experience, women rarely leave because the sex is bad. The sex becomes bad because something else has gone wrong.”
“Really?”
“Nah. He probably just has a world-class schlong.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
Penny laughs. “Judd Foxman. Naked in my bed. This is beyond surreal.”
“Surreal is my new reality.”
She kisses both my eyes and wraps her arms around me in a way that brings me dangerously close to tears. I should tell her about the baby. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
“Judd Foxman.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just like to say your name.”
Penny pulls me closer and burrows her head into the hollow of my neck, lazily repeating my name a few more times as she drifts off to sleep. I open my mouth to say any number of things, but in the end I just lie there, telling myself that no one can feel this disconnected forever. 11:30 p.m.
Wendy and Barry are standing on the front walk, having an argu
ment. Wendy gesticulates wildly while Barry stands there absorbing it, swatting away gnats as he waits her out. I wonder, as I often do, why 220
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they stay together, what it is they offer each other that keeps them locked in this b
loodless stalemate. But I suppose if I understood anything about marriage, I’d have understood my own a little bit better.
“I’m sorry, babe, it’s the eleventh hour,” Barry is saying. “I need to be there to close this deal now, or it’s all going to go up in smoke.”
“You’ve had a death in the family. Can’t they understand that?”
“Yes, but I can’t be gone for seven days. They need me there.”
“And what about your family? We need you too.”
“I’m doing this for my family.”
“Right. That old load of crap.”
They fall silent when I step out of the car.
“Where the hell have you been?” Wendy says.
“Clearing my head.”
“You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”
“There’s actually a good reason for that.”
“What?”
“I didn’t want to.”
Barry snickers. Dumb move. Wendy turns on him with a baleful stare, and I use the distraction to slide past them and into the house. Mom and Linda are in the living room, playing Scrabble at the cof
fee table and drinking tea. Paul, Alice, and Tracy are on the couch watch
ing Jon Stewart, while Phillip sits on the floor, thumbing through a shoebox of old photos. They all look up at me. Alice smiles, but I can’t look at her, can’t be anywhere near her. The monitor in the hall is broad
casting Serena’s cries in stereo. No one seems terribly concerned.
“Where have you been?” Mom says.
“Out and about.”
“Don’t be evasive. Just say you’d rather not tell me.”
“I’d rather not tell you.”
“But now you have me curious. Did you see Jen today?”
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“Yeah.”
“And . . . ?”
“And now I’m going to bed.”
Alice flashes me a meaningful look, and I try to remember if there’s a lock on the basement door.
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