The Pull of Yesterday

by Gabriella West

  I shook my head. It was out on the table, then. “I was disgusted.”

  “Of course,” she said soothingly. “Mike likes slutty women like that. I don’t. I like interesting people, of either gender. People who are loners, a bit lost. A little different. Like you. Are you shocked by what I’ve told you?”

  I shifted in my seat. “Not really. I guess to stay married to Mike, you’d have to fool around as well. And just recently...”

  “Yes?” Wendy prompted almost breathlessly, her attention fully on me.

  I thought about what to say. “I’ve come to realize that much as I love Aaron, I want to be sexual with other people, too. Like my ex, Matt. And possibly with women.”

  I saw her smiling to herself. “You still like women.”

  “I do, yes. I mean, it surprises me, but I do.”

  “Has Janine ever hit on you since you got together with Aaron?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, but only recently. And it was a mutual thing.”

  “Ah.” Wendy was quiet, an enigmatic look on her face.

  I started the car, but she put her hand on my wrist. I left the car in park.

  It all happened very fast then, the kiss, which confused me because it was rough, impersonal, her lips hard, like kissing a young Chinese guy, something I had never thought I wanted to do. Her deft hand was in my pants, her strong grasp attending to my dick. It was a quick, hot hand job and she was so sure of herself that there was never any point that I wanted to push her away, or even felt I could.

  Afterward, she just wore this catlike smile and I had a strange feeling too, that nothing very bad had happened, that in fact it was just right, just right for the moment and where the two of us were in our lives.

  “You remind me of Mike,” Wendy said, “when I first knew him. He was kind of sweet then, kind of inexperienced. A Catholic boy. He’d gone to Catholic school and University of San Francisco.”

  “You must have blown his mind,” I said lazily, and we laughed together.

  “Sure,” she said. “But later things got hard, as they do in a marriage. I never wanted kids. I suppose if we’d had kids, we’d be closer now. It doesn’t feel close anymore.”

  She sounded sad. I nodded.

  “All the same, it’s what we both know. In fact, we like being married.”

  “Should we go back?” I asked her. I was in no rush; in fact, I felt deliciously relaxed.

  She nodded, a pensive look on her face. “Don’t worry about Mike. He’ll never know about this, and even if he did, he’d probably be fine with it.”

  I hadn’t even worried about him. That showed how cut off from reality I was, probably.

  “He hadn’t crossed my mind,” I said dryly.

  She giggled, and we kissed again. They were short, almost chaste kisses. But there was a giddiness about it, a buzz.

  “You didn’t get anything out of that,” I said.

  “Oh, but I did,” Wendy said, leaning back in the passenger seat. She was the only person to have sat there except Aaron in a really long time, I thought.

  “I’ll catch you next week,” she said as she jumped out of the car. Her expression was giddy, as if she’d made a big score. I gave her a little wave. I was super-relaxed as I strolled into the Museum. I needed to dry my damp hair, though.

  Vic came up to me in the downstairs bathroom as I was wiping myself with a paper towel. “That was a long drive with her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I answered, looking at myself in the mirror. My pupils were big, I thought.

  “You smell of clove cigarettes.”

  He handed me a little bottle of mouthwash and I cracked up.

  “Vic, you’ve got to stop doing this! First the deodorant and now this. Come on!”

  He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Do you want Mike to notice?” he asked quietly.

  I sobered quickly, gargling and spitting. He still lingered nearby, looking oddly worried.

  “What is it, Vic?”

  “You should know,” he said in a low voice, “that Wendy will probably want more. Once it starts, I mean.”

  “She doesn’t seem predatory,” I said. “She seems really nice.”

  “Sure,” Vic said, his eyes wary. “But she’ll turn nasty if she doesn’t get what she wants. In the end.”

  We were alone, standing very close. “She will?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you give her what she wanted?”

  He paused, then nodded. “I had to. Years ago.”

  “And you’re still here...” I mused.

  He smiled. “It was a short fling. Complicated, though. I’d rather not say any more.”

  “Does Elena know?” I asked as he turned away.

  His hand was on the door of the bathroom. “We don’t keep any secrets. She knows what I’ve done, and I know what she’s done. It’s the only way, right?”

  “Is this the price of working here?” I blurted out. It was strange, because it wasn’t my style to interrogate, but I just had to know.

  His eyes intense and serious, Vic nodded. “Seems like it. As I said, it gets complicated. Mike gets in on the action, too.” He paused. “But in the end, they move on.”

  So he had put out to keep his job. I felt a chill go through me. I looked at the checkered tile floor. I looked up at Vic. He was still there.

  “Sounds like there’s no way around it. Is that right?”

  He hesitated. The Museum seemed utterly silent while I waited carefully for his quiet response.

  “You can say no. They can’t demote you. But they can hassle you.”

  “And you can’t protect me.”

  “I’d like to,” Vic said. He shrugged. “I’d like you to stay,” he said finally. “But not at the cost of... you know...whatever.”

  I nodded.

  “I like it here,” I said, clearing my throat. “It’s a beautiful place.”

  He smiled wearily, his eyes moving over my face, my body. “There was no way that this wouldn’t happen, with the way you look.”

  I shook my head. “It never happened before on the job. It’s sexual harassment, Vic! It’s not supposed to be OK.”

  A brief look of amusement, or perhaps pity, flashed across his eyes.

  “Yeah. But trust me. It happens a lot, you know. Everywhere.”

  I couldn’t help my next question. It poured out of me.

  “Did Mike fuck you?”

  He hesitated, giving a quick glance outside the door. Then he nodded.

  “A few times. They took me back to Marin for a three-way. I was in my early twenties.”

  I shook my head, in shock. We should have been getting drunk talking about this. Not like this, here. I looked around the sterile bathroom, disoriented.

  Vic nodded. “It wasn’t the end of the world. I told you I experimented, remember?” He sighed. “Get back to work now, Dave. OK?”

  He left me holding on to the sink for balance. I stared at my face again. I looked the same.

  I had been warned, but I still couldn’t quite believe it.

  I spent the rest of the day upstairs in the gallery pondering what Vic had done. I was older than he had been then, and I knew better—maybe. But I understood what he had done.

  I felt stunned. The world of the Museum was civilized, it was ordered. Yet behind it, this rottenness flourished. And truthfully, I didn’t even know how wrong it really was. Not really. Maybe it was a rite of passage, something you had to do. Something in me rebelled at that, disgusted. But Vic didn’t strike me as a bad person, or someone who had been robbed of something, some deep-seated important thing.

  It was all consensual. Right?

  I thought about the hand job. It was as if it had never happened. It hadn’t lingered with me at all. Wendy’s dry kisses hadn’t either. The whole thing had been an interlude, meaningless, one I’d soon forget. The conversation and the clove cigarettes had actually been more enjoyable than the physical contact.

  But I knew I didn
’t want to bed her. Or, for God’s sake, Mike. I understood now, and it hit me full force, that the reason he’d been such a shit to me at the beginning of all this, last year, was not because he saw me as a bad influence.

  It was because he thought I wouldn’t put out. A cold fish, he’d called me—it made sense now. He’d actually been attracted to me.

  And he saw that I wouldn’t play his games. And he was right about that, I vowed. I never would.

  Next week, I’d tell Wendy that I couldn’t go out with her in the car again. We could have a nice chat on the grounds of the Museum if she insisted. That was it.

  Boundaries.

  Inevitably, though, if Vic was correct I would soon be out of a job here. Damn it! It hurt. It seemed like I had just managed to crack the inner circle. But then, perhaps it was better to be on the outside. Not to know.

  Elena walked briskly past me at one point, shooting me a smile that somehow didn’t reach her eyes. Her gray tweed skirt and sheer black pantyhose, her white blouse, all seemed like the uniform of an older woman. I nodded at her uneasily.

  Perhaps she dressed like that to look respectable. Because of what was really going on behind the scenes. With Mike.

  Yes, surely she would be Mike’s type. I swallowed, my lips dry.

  Poor Vic. He deserved better.

  5.

  “What a messed-up day,” I said, sighing.

  I had Aaron’s attention immediately. We were hanging out in the living room after dinner on Friday, slumped at opposite ends of the worn black leather sofa that he said he had found at a thrift store in Carlsbad and driven up here when he moved. It was his first piece of furniture as an adult and he was proud of it. It was comfy enough, and I certainly hadn’t contributed much on the furniture front. It reminded me too much of Janine’s and my old sofa on Lake Street, though. But what would I have wanted instead? Hard to say.

  I had his attention immediately. He powered off the TV, which was on some nature channel that neither of us were really watching.

  “What happened?”

  His eyes behind his glasses were watchful yet kind, and I winced.

  “Well, I screwed up. I don’t think I mentioned to you that I’ve been taking walks every week with Wendy, Mike’s wife?”

  His eyebrows shot up. He looked astonished for a moment.

  “No. You didn’t.”

  “She was nice, I thought. She’s Asian. I used to talk to Janine about her, which is why it seemed weird to talk to you too. Hard to explain,” I mumbled.

  “What happened?” Aaron said again.

  “She made a pass at me, I guess you could say. We were smoking clove cigarettes and we drove up to the Presidio...”

  “During the work day?” Aaron appeared incredulous.

  “Well, yeah. See, it’s kind of like a family there, and Vic didn’t seem to mind when I took off with her. He said it was fine. You remember Vic, right, the guy who’s like my supervisor?”

  Aaron nodded. “The one you see as a friend.”

  “He was trying to be a friend to me today by tipping me off.” I paused. “Aaron, I don’t know what to tell you, but the lines got blurry today. And Vic says it’s only going to get worse. It sounds like sexual harassment to me, what she and Mike have done to people there in the past.”

  Aaron nodded, looking down. His silence made me feel worse somehow.

  “Do you want to quit?” he asked finally.

  “No, I want to stay! I just think it’s going to get worse. Messy. If I don’t go along with their agenda.”

  “She wants you to sleep with her,” Aaron said directly. He was looking at me with assessing eyes.

  I shifted nervously. “She indicated that today, yeah. Things got a bit physical.”

  “And you didn’t expect that?” he asked. His tone seemed almost mocking.

  I shrugged. “No. For one thing, she’s twenty years older than me!”

  “All the more reason,” Aaron mused. Then, “She’s bored. She wants to play around. You seemed easy.”

  I blushed. “That’s what I seem like to you? An easy target?”

  He grinned slightly. “Well, you were pretty easy for me!”

  He nudged me with his bare foot, a sign of affection. I sighed again, looking into his eyes, wishing he could fix this.

  “Thanks for listening, I guess,” I told him. The rain had started up outside. “Maybe we should watch something now?—I dunno.”

  He was silent for a long while. “I suggest you don’t panic,” he said. “Don’t quit until you feel really miserable there. You could try to line something else up.”

  He was so practical.

  “But what?” I asked. “I don’t want to go back to the service industry. I don’t have any skills, really.”

  “You have a track record of employment,” said Aaron, shrugging. “You should look at what’s out there. I mean, there’s tons of things out there that pay more than what you’re making, to be honest.”

  I winced. “I’d just started to like the Museum.”

  My tone must have been very doleful. He looked at me sympathetically.

  “You liked it ’cuz you were getting special attention, though, right? Sometimes that comes along with other things. I get treated like crap at work. Nobody really gives a shit about what I do; I never get any praise. In my department, I mostly work with a lot of guys, and a few women, who’ve been shipped in from India on H1-B visas. It’s not fun. You’d think it would be, but it’s not.”

  “Huh,” I said. I’d never thought to ask much about his programming job at Twitter. I knew he came home weary every night.

  “I work super-fast during the day so I can come home at a sane time at night. Other people work really late. That’s encouraged. Even mandatory, sometimes. But it’s been a long time since we had a big project. Which is good.”

  “Work in general sucks, is that what you’re saying?”

  He nodded. “The way you’ve described the Museum, it’s been strange to me from the beginning. You take it too personally, somehow. You give these people power over you, lots of power. I don’t know why.”

  His words shocked me. They stung.

  “Shit,” I muttered, shaking my head.

  “It’s what a therapist would say.” He got up and stretched. “Except you won’t ever go to one, so I might as well say it.”

  This wasn’t what I had expected. I just looked at him.

  “I’m not going to ask for details about the Wendy thing,” he went on. “I don’t care. But look, just do the job. If you get too close to people, this is what happens. You can’t really blame her for thinking you were available.”

  I gave a deep sigh. With all his dysfunctions, he had picked out the one area of my life where I wasn’t a hundred percent solid.

  “It doesn’t seem like you’re in love with her, or even attracted...”

  “I was slightly attracted to her for a while, maybe. But no, definitely not.”

  “They can’t just order you over to Marin for sex,” Aaron said coolly.

  I wasn’t sure I liked this side of him. And somehow, as he paced around the room, running his hand over the back of the sofa, uncertain of what to do next, it seemed, his nervous energy and my dark mood really clashed.

  “I’m going to go get a drink,” I said, not looking at him. “I need a smoke, too.”

  “Of course.” There was that slightly mocking tone in his voice again.

  I got up and walked out, closing the door behind me, which was an odd thing to do, but somehow I wanted him to stay away, leave me alone. The empty kitchen beckoned, and I poured myself a glass of red wine. I made sure there was never hard liquor in the house, though Aaron liked to cook with it sometimes, so there might be some hidden away. I was tempted to look. Still, the wine would do.

  I wanted some other life. It came to me as I sipped. Some other life, but there wasn’t one. I’d blown it a long time ago, or fate had decided for me. For some reason I thought about M
att’s home in Sausalito, now inhabited only by his widowed mother, I assumed. That place had seemed like home to me for a few days once, more than my own home in Boston had ever done. And this? I stared around the kitchen. This was Aaron’s home, Tessa’s part-time home. It just was. I’d left very little trace here of my presence. In fact, I was living on borrowed time here on Elsie Street.

  A lump came to my throat and I swallowed the wine rapidly, needing to feel numb. Borrowed time. But any time I had with Matt would also be borrowed time, surely. I couldn’t get away from it.

  I smoked two or three cigarettes in the back garden, sheltered by the roof, listening to the faint sounds of animals rustling, the wind, the neighbors talking to their dog a few houses over, rain hitting the earth and running in the gutters.

  Finally Aaron popped his head out the door, saying he was going to bed. He gave me a quick hug and kiss on the cheek. I told him I’d sleep in my own room tonight. He nodded, left. I stared up at the dark, clouded sky, craving answers.

  ***

  In my room, I propped myself up on the twin bed, laptop on my knees. I opened up Facebook, which I’d ignored for the last few days. Since Tuesday.

  A notification appeared on top of the message icon.

  I clicked on it, hands trembling.

  It was Matt. And it was unexpectedly long. His message appeared right under the last one I had sent him, months ago, the cheery note that had basically blown him off and told him to have a good honeymoon. My heart beat hard as I scanned it.

  Dave,

  I saw you clicked on my photo the other day. Sorry there’s not too much happening in my Facebook world! Life’s been kind of crappy lately and I hope things are going better for you than they are for me. Nothing too terrible, just job and marriage stresses. I’ve actually been living with my mom for the last month because Taylor and I are doing a trial separation. If you can believe that. The short version: she was laid off suddenly, and we couldn’t afford the astronomical rent on our place in Mill Valley, so I suggested moving in with my mom temporarily and she vetoed it. My mom, though, was delighted at the idea of me living with her again. So I moved back home. Crazy, isn’t it? T. moved in with a female friend in the East Bay. They’re pretty tight, so I’m not sure what the next step is. We’re going to counseling and all that, probably a mistake, but I don’t want to just give up on the marriage. Maybe I should. Mom tells me that I’m being an idiot and should just get a quickie divorce while I have the chance.