Still, a strange feeling of curiosity overwhelms me as I look closer at the page, like maybe I’ll get a glimpse of a side of my wife I wasn’t aware of. I love discovering new things about her. But wait a second. When I discovered that she loves crappy music and garbled lyrics, did I love that? Still…
Feeling a little more hesitant, I look. On the left, I see most of her contacts are listed under family, with just five under friends, which strikes me as a bit sad for some reason, even though I have zero friends on Facebook. My wife’s five friends are Carla (obviously), Steve Miller, Monte Carlo, JJ Trey and Daniel Rathbone. In Daniel Rathbone’s photo, he’s standing on the deck of a boat with a fishing rod propped up in his hands, a big marlin hanging from the rod, an e-cigarette poking out of his mouth—out of Daniel’s mouth, not the marlin’s—and that’s when I realize that same picture is all over her page.
I look at the timeline. Apparently, she and Daniel were communicating right before she got in the shower. Maybe they were discussing a case? But they wouldn’t do that in public like that, would they?
I peer more closely at what was said:
Daniel Rathbone: You really kicked prosecutorial butt today!!!
Helen Troy: I know!!!
Lawyers talk in overabundant exclamation points???
Daniel Rathbone: See you soon!!! Well, relatively.
Helen Troy: Can’t wait!!!
See you soon? I guess Daniel must mean Monday at work. I’m not really crazy about that “Can’t wait!!!” from Helen. Maybe she means it ironically? I’m still mulling that when she walks into the bedroom, towel-drying her hair.
She looks surprised to see me there, her eyes moving back and forth between me and the laptop. Then she cocks her head as though listening for something.
The house is silent.
“No TV?” she asks with more surprise.
“They left,” I say.
“Sam too?” And yet more surprise.
I nod. Then, because I have to know, I ask, “Why’d you do that downstairs? Telling Alice you’re in the poker game now.”
She shrugs. “Well, I’m not going to lie about it.”
“No one expects you to lie. But it’s not like Alice asked you about it. You offered the information.”
Again with the shrug. “I guess I just didn’t see what the big deal is.”
“It’s not a big deal.” I’m feeling defensive now, although I don’t know why I should. “It’s that”—I’m about to say that it seemed to me that Alice looked hurt, instead of her usual angry, like she felt left out, but for some reason I stop myself. I start again with “It’s that,” finishing with, “what if Alice tells Stacy and Aunt Alfresca? How will that make them feel?”
I’m thinking I know how that’ll make them feel. After years of being kept out of the game, they’ll be pissed. Stacy will peck at Drew until he caves and brings her with him. And Aunt Alfresca? She’ll probably tweet about it!
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Helen says, and I can tell she hadn’t. “Do you really think Alice would do that—tell the others?”
I think about it and shrug. “I don’t honestly know. Alice—”
“I actually did want to talk to you about Alice,” Helen cuts me off.
“What about Alice?”
“I can’t believe she’s been coming here every day—every day!—and I only found out about it because I came home early today. If I’d never come home early again in my life, were you never going to tell me?”
“What are you talking about? You make it sound like there was a plan not to tell you. There was no plan. Why would there be a plan?”
“I never said there was a plan. Did you hear me say that? Why, as you say, would there be a plan?”
Sometimes I forget my wife is a prosecutor but right now I am totally remembering and oh is she good. She’s so good, I don’t remember what the question was. So what else can I do? I just start talking.
“Alice came by on Monday. You know that. When she and Billy came to dinner last Saturday night and she found out Sam and I watch GH together every day, she said that sounded nice, so, being polite, I said she should come by anytime. It’s just what you say in those situations. I never thought she’d actually do it. But then, like I say and like you already know, she came by Monday.”
“And she came again on Tuesday.”
“Well, I guess she must have had a good time on Monday.”
“But you never mentioned she came on Tuesday.”
“I did not.”
“So she had a good time on Tuesday and came back again on Wednesday, had a good time on Wednesday and came back on Thursday, had—”
“I’m familiar with the pattern.”
“Right. And at no time, in the middle of that her-having-a-good-time-and-coming-again-and-again, did it ever occur to you to tell me?”
“Why would it?” I could be wrong, but I think my voice just went up a notch. God, I’m feeling defensive. Why am I feeling defensive? “It was no big deal.”
“No big deal?” she echoes.
Let me interject here for a minute. Back when Helen and I first became a couple, one night we were drinking and we got on the topic of people we’d been involved with previously—my list was actually very short, minuscule really, while hers was shockingly short too—going all the way back to childhood. So we, like, told each other everything. You would think two adults in their thirties would be smart enough to know that indulging in the “Ooh, this is a shiny new relationship! Let’s find out everything about each other, including every little sexual blip!” was not a good idea. But, apparently, with our relative lack of experience, we did not know this. This means that Helen knows all about my previous feelings for Alice and while she’s never seemed to be bothered by this in the past at all and has in fact seemed to like Alice, now that conversation is coming back to bite me on the ass with…
“Alice is the woman who was once the girl you had a thing for, for most of your life, and you don’t think it worth mentioning when, out of the blue, she suddenly starts stopping by every day when I’m not home?”
“It’s not like that!” I say, my voice doing that slight-rising thing again. What is going on? I never raise my voice when talking to anybody. Suddenly, it’s like I feel an invisible rein, like I’ve been pulled up short. “Wait a second,” I say. “Are we having a…fight?”
“Are we?” And just as quickly, Helen looks the way I feel. “No, of course not. God no. It’s just…”
“Just what?” I reach a hand out toward her, a hand she grabs onto.
“It’s just I know the history between you two and—”
“What history? When I was a boy, I liked her. But I’m a man and I love you.”
“I know that, but.” She leans into me. “I think she’s got a thing for you.”
“Alice?”
“Why else would she be here all the time?”
I don’t answer her question. Instead, I roar with laughter as once again I say, “Alice?” More roaring. “You have got to be kidding me.” At last, I control myself. “No woman, in the history of the world, has had more distaste for a man than Alice has had for me. Really, the woman barely tolerates me. In fact, the only reason she’s put up with me all these years is because of Billy.”
“Then why has she been—”
I put my finger to her lips. “Shh,” I say. “I don’t know why Alice has been coming here every day—maybe something’s going on with her; maybe she just really hates to watch TV alone—but whatever the reason, I can assure you it has nothing to do with her having a thing for me. The very idea.”
Helen presses her body into mine and I am instantly aroused.
“Maybe she wants a piece of that,” Helen says, pressing harder.
The idea is so laughable, I nearly lose my hard on, but I’m not so easily deflated.
“The only person who gets a piece of that is you, Mrs. Smith,” I say, pressing right back at her.
Now w
e’re both laughing and we’re still laughing as she tackles me onto the bed, next to the laptop.
I’m kissing her, she’s kissing me back, when suddenly it hits me:
“You were jealous,” I say.
“Was not,” she says.
“Were too.”
“Was not,” she insists.
“Does that mature technique work for you in court?”
“All the time,” she says, straddling me and lowering her face to mine.
Something about the words “jealousy” and “court” being bandied about in a short period of time, even if the bandying is all initiated by me, starts a thought niggling in my head and that thought has to do with that open laptop and her Facebook page and Daniel Rathbone—why do they need to chat online together when they were just at work a short time ago?—but before I can properly phrase a question that doesn’t sound entirely assholeish, my wife pushes my T-shirt up. Then she reaches out a hand and, while kissing down my front in a southerly direction, folds the lid down on the laptop.
What was I going to say to her again?
I have no idea.
“We’re good?” I say when we’re both finished.
My wife smiles, lays another kiss on me. “We are so good.”
Seven o’clock, the doorbell starts ringing and so begins the weekly influx of troops at regular five-minute intervals. A part of me expects to see the wives come with their mates: Alice with Billy, Stacy with Drew, Aunt Alfresca with Big John, Katie Miller with Steve, although why Alice would ever call up Katie—who she only just barely knows—is beyond me. But that doesn’t happen, so apparently Alice kept her newfound knowledge to herself.
This is a good thing and Helen looks at me with a sigh of relief; no doubt, she’s been feeling a bit guilty about possibly causing disgruntlement among the troop mates. But if none of the wives are here, except for Helen, there’s another woman who’s not here either, and that is a bad thing.
“Where’s Sam?” asks Big John, the last to arrive and the last to ask this question although it’s already been asked by all the others.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“But Sam’s always here,” he says.
“I know. She left right after GH, said she’d be back.”
“On Fridays, she always stays after GH, right on through until it’s time to play cards.”
“I know that too.”
“So why would she do that—leave in between, I mean?”
I look over at Helen. What am I supposed to say—that my wife made Sam and Alice feel uncomfortable somehow, and the both of them scampered right out of here? I can’t say that. Besides, it’s not really true. Is it?
“Maybe she had to do something,” I say. “What am I, Sam’s keeper?”
“Yes. But in the meantime, let’s go play cards.”
We do that and we start playing, we play for a half hour, but it’s really not the same, and then…
Ding-dong!
“I’ll get it,” Helen says, jumping up from behind the stack of her winnings. Well, one thing’s the same, at least the same as last week.
She goes toward the stairs in her shorts and as I hear her pound-pound-pound up the stairs, I picture those sexy legs of hers.
“Who could that be?” Drew says. “Did someone order pizza? I could go for pizza.”
Billy taps him on the shoulder.
“What?” Drew says
“It’s probably not pizza,” Billy says.
“No?”
“No, it’s probably Sam.”
“Oh. Oh!”
If it is Sam, then why aren’t they coming down right away, I wonder? So, while we wait, we discuss…
“How about those Mets?” Steve asks.
“Ah, they’re not going anywhere,” Big John says, “but Dickey’s having a helluva season.”
Whenever I think of the season R.A. Dickey’s been having, and I think of it often, I can’t help but think of Leo from the coffee shop too and wish he’d stayed alive to see it. A knuckleballer on track for the all-star team, a knuckleballer on track to win at least twenty games and maybe even the Cy Young award…and he actually plays for the Mets! Leo loved the Mets. Every morning on the way to work, I’d stop for coffee and giant sugar things for Sam, and Leo and I’d talk sports. Now it’s just that new owner guy Bailey there. Bailey doesn’t know sports, not in any way that counts. I hate change.
What’s keeping Sam so long? If it even is Sam at the door. Maybe it really is pizza?
“So,” Big John says, “the Knicks traded Jeremy Lin.”
I used to be a Lakers fan for the longest time because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was my favorite player, even though he retired when I was just a little guy, before I practically even knew what basketball was. Sometime last year it occurred to me how absurd it was to keep following the Lakers, so now I’m on to the Knicks.
“No more Linsanity,” Drew says.
“Or stupid puns,” I say.
“So now what’ve we got left,” Billy says, “Chandleranity?”
“Anthonyanity?” Steve tries.
“Stoudemireanity?” Drew manages to garble out.
“None of the above,” I say, “and thank God for the end of inanity.”
“Huh?” Drew says.
Pound-pound-pound down the stairs, but this time there are twin pounds, plus the sound of women laughing, and a second later Helen and Sam tumble into the room. I don’t know what they were laughing about, but clearly they’ve been having a good time together, and Helen shoots me a smile and a wink. Whatever they’ve been talking about, they’re obviously cool together again.
“Sorry I’m late,” Sam says, pulling up a chair. “What’d I miss?”
“Just the usual inanities,” I say. “Where’ve you been?”
“The new guy finally moved into your old place next door.”
“Really? What’s he like?”
“Young, from Massachusetts. He likes hawkey.”
“Did you say hawkey?”
“Yes. That would be hockey to you, but he pronounces it hawkey. I don’t even understand what he’s saying half the time—it’s like he’s from another country. I swear, it’s going to be like living next door to Ted Kennedy if he were still alive, really young and drank cheap beer.”
“What kind of beer?”
“Budweiser.” Sam snorts.
There’s an awkward silence as we all glance at Drew who’s staring at the table. Drew always brings a case of Budweiser.
“Sorry, Drew,” Sam says, a rare contrite look on her face. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine.” Drew gives a magnanimous wave. “But it is the King of Beers, you know. I think people forget that sometimes.”
What can you say to that?
We don’t even try.
“So you’ve been with the new neighbor this whole time?” I ask Sam. For some reason, I feel unaccountably hurt by this, like I’m being replaced.
A new guy in my old place? More change. This is so not good. And how small am I?
“Well, yeah,” Sam says. “I mean, I had to break the guy in, didn’t I? When I left, I told him I already have the spare key to his place, but that he was going to need to stock the fridge with better beer if he expected me to be stopping by on any kind of regular basis.”
Fucking Sam.
“What did he say?”
“What do you think he said?” Sam shrugs. “He promised to get better beer.”
The table laughs.
While the others are still laughing, Sam looks at me, shakes her head. “Don’t worry, Johnny. He can buy all the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale he wants to—and I will drink it on him—but he’ll never be you.”
Fucking Sam—she is a thing of beauty. But wait. Am I really that transparent?
She shakes her head at me again.
“So,” she says, grabbing the deck of cards, “is everyone ready to shut up so I can deal?”
A few hours and several dozen inanities lat
er, everyone’s heading back out the door as Helen and I bid them all goodnight. The guys and I do the playful punch-each-other-on-the-shoulder guy thing and—what am I seeing here?—Helen and Sam hug. This is both strange and awkward, since neither Helen nor Sam are exactly your huggy types. I still don’t know what they said to each other while the rest of us waited down in the basement for them—maybe I’ll never know—but at least my best friend and my wife are cool with each other; from the looks of things, cooler than they’ve ever been.
What more can a guy want?
“We’re good?” my wife asks after we shut the front door.
I take her in my arms, lay a kiss on her. “We are so good.”
Weekend Worriers: Saturday
My wife looks so beautiful sleeping, the midmorning sun through the blinds making diagonal stripes across her face, I hate to wake her. Instead, I write a note, leave it on the empty pillow beside her. But as I’m tiptoeing toward the bedroom door, she stirs, opens one eye, aims it at the alarm clock and then at me.
“Where are you off to so early?”
“I figured I’d hit Stop & Shop, pick up some things for tonight.”
Taking Sam’s advice, I told Helen to ask some of her people to dinner this weekend and she took me up on it, said she would invite two.
“That’s great,” she says. “What are we having?”
Now that I think about it, she never said who the two are, so: “I don’t know. I guess I’ll wing it.”
“Sounds industrious.” The one eye that’s been open closes and she tucks her hands under the pillow beneath her cheek, a contented smile on her face.
A thought occurs to me. “I think I might be a little while. I think I’ll stop off and see Stavros.”
The eye opens again. “Didn’t you just get your hair cut last week?”
“Yeah, but Stavros wasn’t himself. Actually, I’m a bit worried about him, so I thought I’d just pop in, see how he’s doing.”
The eye closes again. “My husband.” The contented smile returns. “Such an incredibly sweet man.”
“Johnny!”
Stavros looks as surprised as Helen was that I’m going to get my hair cut two weeks in a row, although that’s not what I’m here for, but soon I realize that’s not what’s surprising him.
Isn't It Bro-Mantic? Page 17
