The Houseguest: A Novel About Sharing (and) Temptation

by Arnica Butler

  The very friendly, very back-rubby kind.

  It sent me into a weird rage of both jealousy and desire.

  When we got home, I hadn't known what to do with myself. I'd done the lashing out (“You and Dave sure seemed to be hitting it off,”) and that had elicited an eye-roll from Natalie. And then I can hardly say what happened, but she ended up saying something like, “Oh you'd like that, wouldn't you?” and we'd played a little game.

  And... we hadn't talked about it after that.

  But maybe the third time something like that happened, Natalie asked me about it the next day:

  “So what's up with the 'you're flirting with other guys,' thing?”

  The first feeling to fill my arteries was cold-as-ice fear.

  I shrugged.

  “I don't know. It's just... I don't know. Kind of hot.”

  Inside I remember thinking I was a huge fucking idiot. Why didn't I have anything to say to her? Of course she was going to ask this, eventually.

  A note on Natalie of this era: Natalie was a really smart girl, as I said, who had been in that fancy-ass bachelor's program. This was a science-based program, and Natalie had been this girl who wore crazy dresses and died her hair deep magenta and preferred to spend all her time painting emotionally disturbing stuff. So, don't let the next bit of this narration take you completely by surprise:

  She leaned over me and took a cigarette out of a pack that had fallen on the floor.

  I slapped her hand.

  “I'm not going to smoke it,” she said, rolling her eyes. She put it between her lips and pretended to smoke. “I just feel like I should be doing this if we're having such a deep conversation.” She smiled. “Just tell me what it is you like about it,” she said.

  When I didn't answer, she added: “I'm sorry, it just seems pretty weird to me.”

  I shrugged again. I had spent – well, zero minutes articulating “what I liked about it” to myself in words. I had no answer.

  “I don't know,” I said. I felt pretty exposed and sort of wished we weren't having the conversation. “It's just... hot.”

  Natalie was looking at me, at that moment, with such a strange look on her face, that I felt the need to say quickly – very quickly - “Purely as a fantasy. You know? I would never actually... want you to... you know.”

  Natalie fake-ashed her fake-cigarette. She gave this some thought. “Huh,” she said. Then, she looked up at the ceiling. “Yeah. I can see that.”

  She hopped out of bed at that point, and began to shimmy on her underwear.

  “See what?” I had to ask. For some reason, her response was really... bothering me, though couldn't say exactly how or why.

  “Just...” she pulled a t-shirt on and shook her hair out. “I have stuff like that, you know? Things I think about and wouldn't actually want to do. So I think I get it.”

  Two roads diverged into a wood, and I took the well-lit one:

  “Like what?”

  “Huh?”

  “Things you think about. Like what? When?”

  What I should have done is clarify to her that this was something slightly different. I should have asked any other number of questions at that moment, but this is what my brain had come up with.

  Natalie slid into her jeans. “Oh, you mean fantasies?”

  “Yeah.”

  She had hopped on the bed and playfully crawled toward me to kiss me on the lips. “Like, private, secret things I like to think about inside of my own head, privately?”

  “Yeah.”

  She hopped away. “They're private.”

  I simmered in bed for a few minutes after she left the room. I knew I didn't really have any good reason or right to be as incensed as I was with her at that moment, but I was. After a good long think, I realized that her refusal to share her private fantasies after I'd told her about mine really irked me, but then again, I had never asked her for a quid pro quo.

  But the thing that had really gotten under my skin was that Natalie took me at my word, so easily and with so much conviction, that watching her with another man was just a fantasy I didn't really want to actually indulge in. I was angry with myself for jumping in and saying that, and not letting her offer up her own opinion. I had trapped myself into this position, of Natalie thinking I didn't really want to live out the fantasy, and I had no idea if really playing it out would appeal to her or not.

  I stewed on all of this for a while, and then I had an epiphany:

  I was upset by the conversation because deep down inside, I didn't think of the fantasy as just a fantasy. Deep down inside, I did want to make it real.

  This realization terrified me, so I set the whole idea on the back burner and tried not to think about it. I had a good thing in Natalie. She was pretty, loyal, fun, and smart. I loved her, and she loved me. Why would I want to risk all of that for a sexual fantasy that I wasn't even 100% sure I wanted?

  Having kids sort of put a lid on everything anyway. Natalie let her hair grow out plain brown, started painting commercially-viable art pieces, started worrying more about what daycare and preschool to get the kids into than anything else. Life centered around all of that for such a long time that by the time the kids were old enough for us to have some remnant of our old lives back, we were not the same people anymore.

  I remember having that thought, some time in the year before the reunion. The kids were away at the grandparents, we had gone out for dinner, a waiter had flirted with her shamelessly after asking to see her ID when she ordered wine with dinner. I had a thought about indulging in my fantasy, bringing the waiter up, having a night like the ones we had abandoned so long ago. Natalie was standing by the window, peeling a white camisole away from her body. When I looked at her reflection in the mirror, I had the strangest feeling. Like this was not the person I had married, and I barely knew her.

  We made love that night, and it was good. But there was no way I was bringing up the dark things that lurked in my mind with this angelic, brown-haired girl who drove the kids to soccer and still tucked the little guy into bed.

  So that was that.

  Until the reunion.

  CHAPTER 3: SURPRISES

  Two weeks later, I was back at work and beleaguered in my office with the usual overflow of papers. I'm a contract and small-claims lawyer. It's boring as hell.

  There's no point going into further detail.

  I answered my phone one afternoon, convinced it was my paralegal Sandy, calling to tell me if she was able to file in Lexington. The courts were overflowing, and filing had to be done in person with originals, but half the time no one was there to do it.

  “Yeah?”

  The papers I had been juggling slipped out of the folder and I watched them slide, like slow-motion lava, toward a half-full coffee cup on my desk.

  “Erik?”

  The voice paralyzed me. The papers continued, impacted the Styrofoam, and the cup tipped. Then tipped some more.

  “Shit.” I dropped a file and reached for the cup. Too late. The Styrofoam popped on the table and the coffee poured out.

  Directly. Into. My briefcase.

  “Hey, man, you busy? It's Ethan.”

  “Ethan?” I forgot all about the coffee. I held the phone away from my face. Local number. “You in Yorkdale?”

  “You sound busy, man. I can call you later.”

  I looked into the briefcase. “Just knocked a... no, it's cool.” I found myself reverting to the speech of my early twenties. It felt silly, but I couldn't stop myself. “No... but, where are you? You here?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Yeah, listen. I'm wondering if we can get a beer or something.”

  I surveyed the scene. My eyes went to the clock. “Now?”

  Ethan's laugh, a sort of wild-boar sound, hissed through the phone. “No, man, Jesus. What are you, in high school? No, later. Can you get away tonight?”

  “You're here?” I said, buying myself some time. It was Tuesday, for fuck's s
ake. And what Ethan even doing here? He hadn't been back to South Carolina for years.

  “Yeah. How about Shoppy's. Eight o'clock?”

  “I...”

  “See you then.”

  And he was gone.

  “Ethan?” Natalie's voice said, sounding as nonplussed as mine through the phone. “Like, from our trip, Ethan?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  A pause, and I tried to imagine the face Natalie was making.

  “What's he doing here? I thought he never came back?”

  I shrugged, and then I realized she couldn't see me. “I don't know.” I sounded slightly exasperated. I was gearing up for Natalie to put up a big fight, and half of me wanted her to so I could legitimately not go see Ethan, while the other half didn't want to deal with explaining that I really should. And those halves were further divided into more complicated thoughts, like whether or not I should feel obligated to see Ethan. On and on.

  Natalie was no help whatsoever in sorting any of this out when she said: “God. He's a mess. You should just go out with him.”

  I had no idea what had gone in Natalie's mind in the two seconds between my sentence and hers. “I... what? Are you sure?”

  She paused. “Yeah. Just.. whatever, just go out with him, he's probably not in town that long. I can take care of things here. Or are you coming home for dinner first?”

  I looked into my briefcase again. “I poured some coffee into my briefcase,” I said. “So I think I'll be... I'll just go from here?”

  I was still confused by the lack of “discussion” about this whole thing.

  “Okay,” Natalie said cheerfully.

  “Okay,” I said, much more guarded.

  “See you when you get home.”

  I mentally scanned her voice for any trace of passive-aggression, and finding none, I reluctantly agreed. “O... kay.”

  “Don't go to any strip clubs,” she cautioned. (I had, somewhere along the way, filled her in on Ethan's proclivities for dirty Southern stripclubs).

  “He wants to meet at a bar,” I assured her.

  Which, come to think of it, was also very strange.

  Natalie smacked a kiss into the phone. And hung up.

  Shoppy's was a dive fifteen years ago when we were in high school, and I hadn't even driven by the place in over a decade. But, there it was, as if nothing had ever happened between then and now. The same dirty, beige adobe walls outside, the same Standard Blue Collar Man's Bar Decor inside. There was a crack of pool balls as I stepped into the dim space, which still reeked of all the cigarettes that had ever been smoked in the joint. Which were many – and some more recently than the smoking ban might have indicated.

  Ethan was hunched over a beer, and he would have looked like the pathetic guys next to him – old-timers, the permanent fixtures of any establishment like Shoppy's – except that he was far younger, far better-looking, and, even though he had dressed down to a sweatshirt, he was still slicked over with his money. He also looked like he ate something besides bar peanuts, which was probably the only non-alcoholic item in the rest of the guys' diets.

  He looked up and saw me, and stood up to meet me on my side of the bar – no way he was getting any of those guys to move. He brightened a little in an interaction with the bartender, a bottle-blonde whose name escaped me, but the same one who had served us beers underage fifteen years ago. Underage beer had been the only appeal of Shoppy's back then, because the bartender – a battle ax ten years ago and even meaner-looking now - was the only woman in the place. A beer materialized in front of me as soon as I sat down. “From your buddy Ethan there,” her smokey voice told me.

  Ethan hugged me this time. Almost a little too long.

  “Hey man,” I said. “What's up? What're you doing here?”

  “This place,” Ethan said, ignoring my question and swinging himself around for a look around the bar, “has not changed at all.”

  I braced myself for a trip down memory lane, which included such great events as Ethan headbutting three bikers and me thinking I was going to die, and Ethan hitting on some neo-Nazi's girlfriend and me thinking I was going to die, and me talking the cops out of arresting Ethan after he called them “pig-faced pig-fucking pigs” when they tried to remove him from the bar because he was naked… and me thinking I was going to die.

  Good times.

  “I'm getting a divorce,” he said, and the sentence was so heavy it crushed all the sound in the room for a moment.

  I was still taking my coat off. I stopped, the sleeves still caught on my arms.

  “What?” I said.

  This was my first conversation of this type. I'm a pretty touchy-feely guy, or so I'm told, but I don't have a ton of social engagements anymore. I was sort of hoping to escape my thirties without ever having to do this, and yet here I was, getting divorce-bombed two years in.

  I sat.

  “Man. Ethan. That's... rough.”

  I also had no idea what to say because Ethan just being married had been such a shock to my psyche that Ethan getting divorced actually seemed to be a return to normalcy.

  He shook his head. “It's all my own fault, you know? I really had a good thing with Moira, and I just didn't... I don't even know what happened. I didn't spend enough time with her, or something.”

  I pressed my lips together.

  “Uh... is it really... like, it's really over?” I was sorry I said this the minute I said it. It sounded so idiotic.

  Ethan just sighed miserably.

  I put my hand on his back and clapped it a few times. It's not that I'm an insensitive guy, it's just that I was realizing at that moment that I no longer knew Ethan at all and I had no idea how to console him. He seemed really, genuinely upset by his divorce, which wasn't anything the Ethan I had known in the past would be feeling. That Ethan never would have gotten married to begin with.

  Ethan turned and looked at me. “I'm sorry man,” he said, like he had read my thoughts. “We haven't been in touch for so long. Sorry to dump all this on you.” He took a sip of his beer. “I just... realized with all this, I didn't have any real friends. You know? It's been this big epiphany, things falling apart, seeing who was left, who stuck by me...”

  It was then that I realized Ethan was really, really drunk.

  I sucked in my breath. It was ill-advised but I bought him another shot, which he made me have also. One more and I'd be cabbing it to be on the safe side.

  I cringed inwardly when Ethan raised his finger at the bartender.

  “So... is this why you're back in Yorkdale?”

  Ethan looked up at the ceiling and inhaled. “I don't know. I don't know man. I'm kinda thinking about moving home.” A pause. “I'm fuckin' broke.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  Ethan didn't elaborate: it was easy enough to see how it might have happened. Rich people always seemed more “broke” at the end of a divorce. It was all relative though, and I could vouch for that, handling small claims in Yorkdale, South Carolina. I had a client on a $20/month payment plan for a $10,000 bill because it was all she could do.

  We had another shot and Ethan launched on a monologue that was so slow, branching, and drunken I feel compelled to just summarize it here. It was also such a classic, and by that I mean cliché, that it almost hurt to listen to: he lost love and he realized there's more to life than money, he was back home to see if there was a way to stay here, change his life, get back in touch with what really matters.

  “Like you and Natalie,” he slurred, at the end of his diatribe. He was well, well into the bottle, having had two or three shots for my every one (and I was in the bag). “I want... something like... you and Natalie...”

  “Okay, bud,” I said. “Let's get you home. Where are you staying?”

  I started to dial a cab, because no matter what the answer was, I wasn't driving.

  Ethan turned to me. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he was looking pretty pathetic. Somehow, he had made me feel sorry for him,
and that wasn't a feeling I'd ever, ever had for Ethan. “I don't know what I'm gonna do,” he said. “I'm sleeping in a fucking hotel!” He pointed at the ceiling, which I assumed meant he was staying in the three-room dive above Shoppy's.

  Pretty grim.

  “I have no money,” he went on. “I have no friends.”

  At this point he was sort of yelling, the way drunk people do. People at the bar were looking over, but as far as Shoppy's went it was a mild disturbance, fairly boring, and not really causing a scene. But it was headed there.

  I've dealt with a lot of drunks in my life, so I should have known better than to do what I did next. “Look, Ethan, man, it's not true. I'm your friend. I'm... hey, I have an idea.”

  I had an idea because I was, as I discovered when I stood up ten minutes later, much drunker than I thought I was. Ethan bear hugged me out to the cab, and we said goodbye.

  And about two minutes into the cab ride, the world closed in on me, and all the things I'd just said and done came into sharp relief.

  “Fuck,” I said, aloud.

  The kids were asleep by the time I got home, and Natalie was in the kitchen, assembly-line packaging lunches and soccer snacks and other school-related items. When I came through the door of the laundry room to the kitchen, she turned her body halfway and smiled and me, one hand holding a knife still in a jar of mayonnaise. “How'd it go?”

  I was relieved she didn't seem to be annoyed by the late hour, because I had little shards of guilt floating around in my head about it. “Good,” I said, and the word was pregnant, more like a question. “I, uh... had to take a cab.”

  “Oh, really good, then,” she joked.

  I squinted at her. What was with the good mood?

  “Because I was drunk,” I said. I wasn't sure why I was trying to provoke her, but I really wanted her to act normally, just so I could confirm I wasn’t dreaming this.

  She looked me up and down. “You don't say.”

  Back to the mayo.

  I sat down on a barstool at the kitchen island. “So, you were right about Ethan and Moira,” I began.