Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  “Nine out of ten?” Cass says.

  “How’d you know?” says Pete.

  “They got you on dormant?”

  Pete’s eyes widen.

  “Mom, you’re scary,” says Alice.

  “Nice work, Pete. How was your day, Al?”

  Alice shrugs. She palms a piece of paper, crumples it up, and throws it in the trash, hopes no one noticed.

  “You want to talk about it?” says Cass.

  “Maybe later,” says Alice.

  Cass stalls and grabs the crumpled paper from the trash, stuffs it in her pocket.

  “Got some good news,” she says, lightening the mood.

  “What?” says Alice.

  “Jean’s coming tonight. She said something about marshmallows and graham crackers. Wonder what she’s planning…”

  Pete beams. Even Alice cracks a smile.

  * * *

  Cass stands alone at a busy school function. She is trying to hide at the cheese table, feeling a little lost among the power couples.

  “My favorite … a cave-aged cheddar paired with a two-year-old box wine.”

  She turns around, smiling. “I was dreading this without you,” she says.

  “You know I wouldn’t miss it,” says Ryan.

  A parent waves at Cass.

  “Oh, God, here comes that Allen guy.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Four o’clock. Keep talking. Keep talking—”

  “Allen, great to see you,” says Ryan. “We loved the pictures you posted from your family trip building schools for indigenous children in the Amazon.”

  Another mother approaches, recusing Cass from this conversation. Nora is the same age as Cass but looks a bit younger with brown hair in a bob, long bangs, light eyes, and twiggy legs the size of her daughters’.

  “Thank you,” says Cass.

  “How are you?” says Nora.

  “Pretty good. I’ve been—”

  “I literally woke up screaming. I have three deals closing, and two kids were up before six this morning. You make it look so easy.” Nora is a real estate broker, the petite grande dame of Cumberland. The two women met this way, when Nora sold Cass and Ryan their house.

  Cass smiles. “I just try to do my screaming in private. Where’s Dave?”

  “Probably in the broom closet, banging the art teacher. Ryan?”

  Cass turns to find him. He is not where he was a moment ago. She scans the room. Nora spots him first.

  “Busted.”

  He is talking to a pretty young redhead who wears overalls splattered with paint over a thin white tank top. Ryan looks up, waves at Cass. He holds up a painting of Pete’s. A perfect family portrait. Yellow sun, cobalt sky, a mom, a dad, and three children. Except in Pete’s rendering, everyone has curious sizes. Ryan is the largest, followed by Pete. Everyone else is tiny. Cass, however, is distracted by the current vignette’s vivid colors. The art teacher’s adorably tousled red hair and Ryan’s white teeth as he laughs at her joke. It must have been really funny.

  THREE

  Cass and Ryan’s first date nearly didn’t happen. Cass had been home that night in her Brooklyn apartment, working on a story that would become both her treatise and her swan song: SEASON OF THE WITCH: THE RISE OF INSTITUTIONAL MISOGYNY FROM POLITICS TO PRECINCT. Cover story of The New York Times Magazine. Single byline. Cass Phillips, legal reporter. It was the most exhaustive piece she wrote as a journalist before taking a hiatus from work for something more important—specifically, two things. And it earned its place in a frame above her desk, even if her subsequent pieces never filled the space that surrounded it. She was working, in pajamas, when a friend sent her an SOS text asking if she would meet her at the bar on the corner. She was headed to a friend’s birthday party and did not want to arrive “looking so single.”

  “Please,” said the friend. “You never know. You might meet someone.”

  Moved by a combination of duty and procrastination, Cass knocked on the door of her neighbor, a grad student and occasional babysitter, asked for an hour of supervision, then swapped her bra for a lacier model, pulled on the nearest pair of jeans, and joined the other single moms of the world in search of the elusive dream of starting over, or what her friend incessantly referred to as “getting back out there.”

  Skeptical as she was of the idea, Cass tried on the bettor’s logic of every woman who walks into a bar, that past odds do not predict the future, that one has an equal chance, every night, of finding one’s soul mate. Sometimes, the idea of a soul mate seemed less fanciful than the specimen she was after: a man who loved her enough to join her family project, a family she started with another person; a man who loved her enough to abandon his biological imperative. On this night, she would meet a man game for both options.

  Her friend, all dolled up and blown out, did want for some sort of decoy. Heavy eyeliner made her look more like a wounded raccoon than a wanton doe waiting for the buck with the biggest antlers. And so, when a man approached the two, Cass instinctively retreated. This only drew him closer. She did her best to deflect his attention, but he was relentless. Within twenty minutes, even the friend was rooting for Cass and Ryan.

  Cass was immediately struck by Ryan’s wit and his charm, his dogged drive and intelligence, both of which were on display in his pursuit of her affection. His looks gave him—put simply—an unfair advantage: dark brown hair, clear green eyes, and a smile that made a girl feel the sun had simply closed up shop and gone fishing for the summer. His voice, a boyish tenor, was somewhat hypnotic. That night, Ryan displayed the tenacity that she would soon learn was his nature.

  They chatted passionately. Pheromones swirled. Sexual chemistry combusted. A fireworks show of common interests lit up their compatibility detectors. An “accidental” brush of his hand sent heat from her throat to her stomach. They both loved spaghetti and scrambled eggs and popcorn with extra butter! They both loved the Beatles and Raymond Carver! It did not take long for this promising array of shared likes to create that special aura. And so, when Cass’s friend stood up to go to the bathroom, Ryan seized the moment. He asked if he could see Cass again and kissed her before she answered. The kiss caused such an electric jolt as to make her speechless. Ryan left soon after, claiming a work emergency, and Cass remained silent, if only because she was still unable to utter a complete sentence. He left as suddenly as he appeared, like some sort of caped crusader, leaving the prickle of bourbon on her lips, the smell of his laundry detergent on her clothes, and a taste of the future.

  He called her the next day and invited her to meet for an encore. She hit up the neighbor to watch the kids again despite the short notice. An early autumn chill had already scattered leaves across the sidewalks, but as Cass walked to their date, the path before her may as well have been littered with roses. Ryan and Cass sat down at the bar on her corner, and things grew blurry long before they’d ordered their first cocktail.

  “Do you like music?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know. Songs. Singing. You into that?”

  “Isn’t everyone?” said Cass.

  “No, not everyone. There are people, for example, who actually hate it.”

  “Why would anyone hate music?”

  “Because they’re too sensitive. They can’t bear it. Their nerves are too raw to withstand other people’s emotions. Or something.”

  “Weird,” she said. She stared at him, unnerved by the concept. But the truth was she had spent the better part of the last three years doing precisely that: shutting out all emotion.

  “Except for the Beatles,” he said. “They have a knack for making heartbreak seem pretty awesome.”

  She had to agree. “It’s like they live in a world where human suffering never gets too awful.”

  The next ten years of their lives had been set on a course, and they both knew it.

  “Oh shit.”

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s just�
�” He shook his head, wincing. “I can already tell how this is going to end.”

  “Oh no. You can? How?”

  “Badly. Tragically. Violently. In a cloud of indignity and a blaze of glory.”

  “Bad like gore and violence? Or bad like pain and heartbreak?”

  “Both.”

  “Oh no,” said Cass, smiling. “How sad. How scary. How tragic.”

  He stared at her as though he were trying to solve an equation. “I know what we should do.”

  “What?”

  “We need to take precautions.”

  “Precautions?”

  “We need to make a list. Ten things.”

  “Ten things?”

  “Ten things to do before we break up.”

  “To avoid breaking up?”

  “Hopefully. Yes. Maybe if we do all these things, we might just stay together.” He grabbed the pen lying on the bill and started writing on a napkin. “Ten things to do before we break up.”

  “That might keep us together?”

  “They may or may not.”

  “Why bother if it’s doomed?”

  “Try to look on the bright side.”

  Cass scanned the bar for the first time in several hours. The customers were thinning out, the candle on their own table nearing its last flicker. The bourbon she was drinking no longer tasted sour. And still, she took another drink and agreed to take the wager.

  “Pessimists see the world like this.”

  He picked her drink off the table and poured half of it into his empty glass. Now both of them were half full. And half empty. “How do you see the world?”

  Cass took a sip. “Blurry.”

  They toasted and both took a gulp.

  “Number one: make out in a taxi while crossing the Manhattan Bridge, silhouetted by the New York skyline and a pink-and-gray sunset.”

  Cass smirked. “That’s a little elaborate. Number two: read The Sunday Times in bed, cover to cover. We can read the Travel Section and plan all the trips we’ll never get to take together.”

  “Number three: go diving in the Great Barrier Reef.”

  “Number four: take a walk on a deserted beach.”

  “Number five: scream at one another.”

  “Number six: hold each other and cry.”

  “Number seven: kiss and make up.”

  “Number eight: get married and have a child.”

  “Wait, that’s two.”

  “Oh, you’re right.”

  “A child?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way. Never.”

  “Oh. Wow. Really? That’s too bad.”

  “Number nine: say, ‘I’m sorry.’”

  “Wait. We need to talk about this. I have two children.”

  “Yes, I know. Are you saying you want to have a child with me?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying—”

  “That’s really sexy. I’ll have to think about that.”

  She inhaled deeply. “Number ten: say goodbye.”

  “No, I don’t want to say goodbye.”

  She looked into those eyes.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  He smiled. “I know this really beautiful bridge.”

  And before she knew it, they were speeding across the Manhattan Bridge, toward the New York skyline, silhouetted by a pink-and-gray sunset, kissing and kissing and kissing.

  She woke up the next morning, heartily hungover. They exchanged some awkward niceties. He made her a cup of coffee. An hour later, she was sprinting down Atlantic, thanking her neighbor for the twelve-hour shift and racing to make it home before the kids woke up in the morning.

  At work, she struggled to think of anything else for the next eight hours. A text arrived at six thirty while she and the kids were eating dinner.

  “One down. Nine to go.”

  She stared at the phone. He was nothing if not charming.

  “You free Saturday? Heard there’s a good concert.”

  She put down the phone, smiling.

  With coupledom came a new world view. Two cynics abandoned their grim outlooks. It was an end to the sadness of recent years, the beginning of a happy ending. Ryan and Cass were perfect together, not because either one was perfect but because they fit so well together, one craving the other’s demands, the other craving being needed. Her grief understood his loneliness. His damage understood her sadness. Together they felt as calm as a lakeside cabin. Sex, of course, played its part in this feeling of contentment. Sex in every position, location, and coordinate. Sex in cars, closets, taxis, stairwells, front seats, back seats, chairs, hallways, alleys, beds, and bathtubs. No spot, no time, no potential passerby could curb their appetite. It was sex that made Cass wonder how she had lived without it. Sex that made her rush home from work, wake at any hour. Sex that made her forget years of heartbreak. Oxytocin worked its special magic, proving itself the world’s most potent panacea, upper, aphrodisiac, sedative, and amnesiac.

  It renewed her faith in pleasure itself, a sensation she had written off as the delusion of a younger woman. She had long since replaced the pursuit of love with the decision that life must be understood in a relativistic fashion, with gradations of pain to be borne, withstood, waited out and ultimately, with the grace of detachment, without that thing called judgment. This grim outlook replaced the trusting nature of the pre-tragedy Cass until it offered a kind of respite, leveling all experience to just that, experience, and sapping it of expectation. Ironically, it was this penchant to trust that made her capable, once again, of suspending disbelief and expectations.

  For Ryan, the relationship renewed his faith in the intimacy he had avoided, not only because it was his first experience with both but because he was somewhat shocked to find scintillating conversation and every pornographic position in the same woman. For a while, this mutual wonder worked, gluing them with the strongest adhesive. Cass was able to forget all the women who came before her. And Ryan was carried by his awe for Cass, all these new sensations and, even more shocking, his ongoing exclusive interest. Their love felt to them as it does to so many, as though they were love’s sole inventor, as if they had discovered a new element in the periodic table.

  But all this togetherness—the chemistry, the connection—all of it paled in comparison to another love affair altogether. When Ryan was with Cass’s kids, when Ryan presided at the dinner table, telling stories about his travels, when Ryan caroused with Alice and Pete, commandeered elaborate snowball fights, led them down to the lake like a mallard with his ducklings, when Ryan made pancakes on Saturday mornings and the whole family crowded round the table like a team of hungry athletes, it triggered a deep primal urge in Cass, the most basic maternal instinct. It spread a feeling from her heart to her toes of all-consuming rightness.

  Surely, there was a name for this: peace of mind, domestic bliss, contentment? The knowledge that her kids were healthy and happy, that she had fulfilled her duties, provided exactly what they needed: a mother and a father. The whole gang might be riding bikes, playing in the park, or just sitting at home, watching a movie, and she would find herself wearing the same stupid grin of people exiting a yoga class, high on meditation. Ryan was good for her kids. Her kids were good for Ryan. She was like a cavewoman who had brought a medicinal root back to her cubs, the ultimate gatherer to her marksman, except in this case, she had gathered something much better than a root: she had brought back—and trapped—a hunter.

  One year later, and a small courthouse wedding behind them, Cass and Ryan’s baby was born, and all the conditions surrounding his birth were quickly forgotten.

  Ryan liked to say a new sun rose in the sky the day Sam was born. That’s how drastically his world shifted. Far from those fathers who struggle with attachment during the newborn phase, Ryan was fixed on Sam from the first night like a laser on a target. Call it paternal instinct, or narcissism—for him, there was no distinction. Time s
pent away from Sam was wasted. Time spent with Sam was precious. Sam gave Ryan’s life meaning, story, purpose. For Cass, it was all good news, happiness to the third power. Sam was the perfect final ingredient to their burgeoning family, the last pinch of salt in a simmering dish, the connecting thread, the strongest adhesive. Watching a relationship bloom between her baby and her husband was just as potent as watching love blossom between Ryan, Pete, and Alice but with the added pleasure of a newborn. Here was the product of her love with a man she adored, a cooing bundle in her arms and a sibling for her son and daughter.

  Their first year as a family of five arrived with all its wonders—followed by the usual stresses. Muffled versions of “I told you so” turned into louder squabbles over the inequities of the nighttime feed, time to go to the gym, relax, read, take a shower, financial stress over the cost of groceries, child care, doctors, square footage, the nightly yelps of older kids awoken by younger siblings—all the inevitable tumbling pins of two working parents attempting the work-life juggle. Parents of newborns find themselves in a tricky position, in need of extra energy just when the right to a full night’s sleep has been temporarily suspended. And so a month of couples’ counseling turned into six and then twelve months. And new problems replaced old ones—the cost of square footage in Brooklyn, the dragon-like daily growth and need for space of three children, the cost of health insurance, education, not to mention the simple quest to get two kids to school on time every morning, shoelaces tied and stomachs sated.

  There were other more menial matters as well, more carnal kinds of competition, such as the difficulty of shedding baby weight and the seemingly endless crop of taut younger women strolling through flea and farmers’ markets in Brooklyn like gazelles on the Serengeti, and the threat of their intrusion into the periphery of the gaze of her husband. So did these concerns begin to collude with her late-night internet surveys and the ever-present allure of real estate listings in Seattle, San Francisco, Portland! Who could not picture their own family, crowded round the dining room table of a well-priced four-bedroom, lounging in these “sun-lit” living rooms, thriving in these “charm-filled” Victorians, Colonials, and Craftsmans, kids enrolled in the “best public school district” in the nation? And so Ryan and Cass went the way of so many before them, so many self-respecting families when faced with these options: they took a plea bargain, exonerated each other, and sentenced themselves to a more “livable city,” if not the actual suburbs.