Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About The Author

  Copyright

  For my parents

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I DON’T KNOW WHO HE IS, this man lying next to me, his leg brushing against my leg, arm draped over my hip. And that’s when I want him. I keep my eyes closed and turn toward him, stroking him softly, fingers skimming over his chest, his thighs, feathery touches light enough to wake up just the parts that matter. He responds, and we both know what to do, how not to talk, not even to whisper, letting our bodies move together in the dark. This is a man I picked up in a bar; this is a man whose name I don’t know; this is searing, anonymous sex with a stranger, and I’m using all of my senses and none of my heart. He rolls on top of me, heavy and hard, not kissing, hot hands all over me. I grab a condom from my night table and hand it to him.

  “Emily,” he whispers, crashing rudely into my dream, breaking the rules of 2:00 a.m. sex. “Please?”

  “No,” I say, my eyes still closed, arching toward him now in spite of myself. “Shhh.” I know what he wants, and I’m not prepared to give it to him.

  “Baby,” he breathes, and I open my eyes to the face of my husband hovering over mine, earnest and needy, the man I have known since college, the man I share a bathroom with, the man who cried during Little Women, who thinks I don’t know that he plucks his nose hairs, who’s afraid of raisins because they remind him of mouse droppings. “Baby,” he whispers again, and I sigh, fully here now, fully awake and resigned to it. And this is how we finish, knowing everything about each other, completely together, naked and silent and half-satisfied in the middle of the night.

  “I’M THINKING ABOUT STARTING AN ALL-GIRL BAND,” MEG says to me as she flips through an old People magazine, stopping at a large photo spread of a popular boy band. “’N Secure. What do you think?” She points to the last blueberry muffin under the plastic cake cover. “I’ll have that one, please,” she says to the girl behind the counter. She looks at me, smiles, turns back to the girl. “And a decaf cappuccino. And a bran muffin.” I’ve already ordered my tea and my own (pumpkin–chocolate chip) muffin. You might as well be eating cake for breakfast, is the word on the street about muffins, but I don’t care. I would happily eat cake for breakfast.

  “A bran muffin instead of the blueberry?” The exasperated teenager plants her hands on the counter, refusing to continue until she gets this order straight. She is annoyed at us for talking, for reading magazines, for not concentrating on our transaction. There is a tall glass next to the cash register stuffed full of bills. The ominous sentence, “TIPS is SPIT spelled backwards,” is scrawled on an index card and taped to the glass. I imagine the tip money must have either come from her own pocket, or that customers envision her spewing into their lattes and drop their money so she can hear it.

  “Both,” Meg answers. “I’m having two muffins.” Meg is eight weeks pregnant, and says she feels as if she has a tapeworm. “None of that pansy-ass morning sickness for me!” she says. She started out about twenty pounds overweight, and, like most chubby girls, she doesn’t usually eat much in public. Now she has no choice, motivated by the hungry alien growing inside her. “It forces me to do things I would never normally do,” she admits, “like finish my whole meal at a restaurant.” Meg told me that a waitress at an Italian restaurant once actually discouraged her from ordering lasagna, telling her, “That’s fattening!” Shocked, Meg answered meekly, “Okay, I guess I’ll have a salad….” And then, a split second later, as the insult took full effect, she added, “Bitch!” and stormed out. Her hapless husband left five dollars for the bread and Cokes they’d already had, and followed her. Meg is my closest friend, but I’m a little bit scared of her.

  “I’ll be the drummer,” I say, “for ’N Secure, but I’ll just drum really quietly. And after every song we can kind of sidle up to the microphone and say, ‘Was that okay?’”

  “And our first song can be, ‘Will You Be My Friend?’”

  “Or, ‘Do These Jeans Make My Butt Look Big?’”

  Meg is a grade-school art teacher, but she’s been on sabbatical since the beginning of the year, freeing us to meet for breakfast twice a week at White’s, our favorite bookstore/coffee shop. The reason for the sabbatical, she tells people, is that she simply needed some time off to regroup. She and Steve, her husband, had been trying in vain for two years to conceive, and, after undergoing invasive diagnostic tests and humiliating procedures (“Think of this as preparation for the humiliation of giving birth,” one female doctor told her cheerfully, shoving an ultrasound camera up inside her), Meg decided, she tells people, that she needed to remove the stress and chaos of the job from her life for a while. The real reason she left was that she couldn’t bear the thought of one more seven-year-old sticking a pipe cleaner up his nose, one more fourth-grader trying to impress her friends by eating paste, chalk, and/or modeling clay, one more parent bitterly complaining that, by preventing precocious little Ashleigh from exploring the medium of gluing the unpopular boy’s pants to his chair, Meg was stunting the development of a budding genius. Pregnancy or no pregnancy, she’d had it.

  “We were trained not to scold children, to respect their individuality, their autonomy. Which I agree with!” Meg told me this summer. “‘You need to make better choices, Michael.’ But when I found myself wanting to tell small children to shut the fuck up, I knew it was time for a break. Half the reason I wanted to get knocked up in the first place,” Meg admitted, “was for the maternity leave.”

  In July, Meg and Steve squandered their savings on a trip to Paris, where Meg promptly got pregnant.

  Now, she licks her fingers between muffins and looks me in the eye. “Maybe you and Kevin need to take a trip to Paris.” We had always said we wanted to have babies at the same time, Meg and I, to be new moms together. We thought it would be a kind of combination life-changing event/girls-only road trip. We imagined ourselves meeting every morning at the playground—our same witty, edgy selves, but now with tiny new accoutrements. Meg is disappointed that she’ll be going on this voyage alone now, and, I think, she’s beginning to realize that the whole thing might be slightly less charming than we’d imagined. She’d like nothing more than to drag me into this procreational mess with her.

  Kevin, too, has been trying to convince me for a year now that it’s time for us to start a family. But it seems that my biological clock is a cheap knockoff, a ten-dollar Rolex sold by a guy on the street wearing a trench coat. Every time Kevin turns to me with that melting-ice-cream look in his eyes, every time he sees a baby in a stroller on the sidewalk and starts cooing uncontrollably at it, I have to squeeze my hands into fists and clench my teeth to keep from running away screaming from my darling husband. I think that this is probably not a good sign. In fact, we fought about it last night, for the millionth time. Kevin cornered me as I was getting out of the shower and rattled off a list of advantages to starting a family now (my favorite: “I want to have three kids, and you’re not getting any younger!”), and I railed, “Do you think you can sell me on having a baby? Do you think it’s like changing our long-distance company?” I pulled my towel tightly around me and shook back my dripping hair. “Once we switch over to Sprint, I’ll wonder how we ever managed without it?” Kevin, as usual, retreated into silence, the gears and cogs in his brain spinning silently. True, we had periodically spoken about having children—but vaguely, never with any particular time frame in mind. It was part of our plan, but then, so was buying a sailboat someday and sailing around the Great Lakes. Maybe it would happen when we were older; in the meanti
me, there were movies to see, books to read, camping trips and cheap vacations to enjoy. I’ve always wanted to take a pottery class, too, but I’m not rushing out to register for Beginning Wheel Throwing.

  I don’t know why I find myself repulsed and scared witless by the idea of having a baby right now, but I do. Small children used to be part of the landscape to me, not really registering, benign, like sidewalks or awnings or squirrels. But lately I see them around, fat babies flailing about, imperious toddlers riding around in plush strollers, and they look abnormal, like sinister, shrunken aliens; I imagine them secretly communicating with each other in a language we can’t understand, plotting—succeeding in!—global domination.

  Mostly I’m struck by the amount of space they inhabit. It’s as if they appear on the scene and just announce their demands, like Zsa Zsa Gabor, like a million tiny Zsa Zsa Gabors. Just the other day I watched as a little girl deliberately chucked her orange plastic cup out of her stroller, then screamed with rage because her distracted mother didn’t notice. Why would a woman—and it seems like it’s always women—do that to herself? Why would she invite chaos into her life like that? The idea of it terrifies me. There is even a part of me that secretly wishes Meg weren’t pregnant. I feel like we get closer every day to the moment the baby is born, when I will lose her for good. Of course I can admit this to no one.

  “I don’t think I need a vacation. I’m a freelance writer with a part-time job. I’m on vacation, more or less,” I say. I’m picking the chocolate chips out of my muffin, lining them up on the side of my plate. “The other morning, I played computer solitaire for two hours. Besides, Kevin would never take the time off.” I stuff a huge chunk of muffin in my mouth.

  “That’s bullshit,” Meg says. “First of all, Kevin needs a vacation. Anyone can see that he spends too much time in front of a computer. He’s as pale as a fish. And you,” she pronounces. (Other people say things; Meg pronounces.) “You don’t even notice how stressed-out you can get. You’re stressed about work when you have work, and freaked out about not working when you’re not working. You need more structure. Your lack of structure is your stress.”

  “Meg,” I say hesitantly, “your baby will be glorious. And you’re ready to welcome it. But I’m just not ready yet.” Yet. It feels like a tiny lie, like I’m purchasing Meg’s understanding with this untruth; what I want to say is I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. I slurp my tea with great concentration.

  Meg leans in close to me. I can smell the cucumber-melon soap she uses. I look up from my mug, wondering if she’ll try to argue with me, to convince me again to be her traveling companion on the highway to motherhood. “Don’t look,” she whispers, “but the guy across the room is totally staring at you.” She looks down at her bran muffin and giggles. This is Meg’s and my default mode, the screen saver of our friendship: acting as co-conspirators in a battle against adulthood.

  “Nobody’s staring at me,” I hiss. I glance around the coffee shop. Nobody is even remotely looking our way. And if anyone were, he’d be staring at Meg. Even though she wears a size sixteen, even though she sports a shiny wedding band, even though she rarely wears makeup and often doesn’t bother to brush her hair, men make passes at Meg constantly. She’s beautiful, tall and curvy with long, thick, straight blond hair, light brown eyes, and a perfect cupid’s bow of a mouth. It’s ridiculous, really. She’s like the sun. Men are blinded by her light and will do anything to get close, at their peril; she, of course, spurns them with glee. Even women—even straight women—can’t keep themselves away from her. When we were roommates in college, she was always coming home with gifts given to her by strangers. Once, she walked in with a bag of bagels from the deli. “We have so many!” the old lady who owned the place had said to her, pressing the sack into her hands. “Take just a few home with you, darlink!” Another time, at the mall, the Clinique lady gave her a bag full of samples, just because, she said, Meg’s skin was so radiant. I’m a good sport. I have to be. I’ve spent countless accumulated hours sitting at tables in restaurants, coffee shops, bars, as guys come up to talk to her and ignore me. I used to pretend not to mind, secretly loathing myself for not being gorgeous, loathing the men for ignoring me, loathing Meg for being beautiful. Then, years ago, when we were still in college, I had it out with her. We were at the park, and she had just convinced a guy who was trying to pick her up that she was from the Eastern European country of Slovatarkia and didn’t speak English. “Nie! Nie!” she had said to him sadly, shaking her head, shrugging her shoulders. When he finally gave up, she turned to me, ready to burst out laughing, surprised to see me staring back at her, my mouth tight with fury.

  “Do you have any idea how I feel right now?” I had asked her coldly, surprising myself with the degree of my anger. “Do you know what it’s like to be your closest friend, when every single time we’re out together, some guy is ready to fall at your feet in adoration? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be the moon to your sun?” While Meg had been pretending to be Slovatarkian, I had been practicing my speech. “You make a joke out of it every time,” I said. “A comedy routine. I don’t want to be your goddamned straight man.”

  Meg was shocked, and defensive. She told me I was being crazy, oversensitive, and mean. “You go on as many dates as I do!” she’d insisted. “How about that guy in your Shakespeare class who’s obsessed with you?” (It was true; there was a skinny, somber sophomore who kept trying to get me to come watch him perform at the Renaissance Faire and who had, in fact, once written me a sonnet.) Then Meg ticked off a list of all the boys who’d ever asked me out, and, for emphasis, a second list of all the favors she’d ever done for me. “And I’ve never gone out with any guy you’ve been interested in!” By then even she knew she had missed the point. “You’re my best friend!” she finally said. “I would never do anything to hurt you. I thought…these creeps…” She waved her hand around at an imaginary assembly of all the skeezy guys who’d ever wanted her phone number. “I play it up so that you and I can laugh about it,” she said softly. Then she started to cry. Then I started to cry. Then we hugged, and, although in the ensuing years Meg has not grown less beautiful, and I have not become a man magnet, the issue settled between us into something chronic and manageable, less like an angry rash and more like a minor bunion. And besides, we each grew up, fell in love for real, and got married. The things that matter when you’re barely in your twenties seem ridiculous, childish from the other side of thirty. Still, certain patterns in a friendship hold true. What’s more, in a coffee shop with my best friend, without my husband, certain other, harmless feelings can be indulged.

  “Nobody’s staring at me!” I say again. “What are you talking about?” But then I see him, the young, dark-haired man sitting alone across the room. He is unshaven in a sexy, can’t-be-bothered way (but also potentially in an unemployed way); he’s stuck a pencil behind one ear, and a thick book lays open in front of him. Surprisingly, he is staring at me. There’s no doubt about it. I look away and my hand darts automatically to my mouth. I wipe nonexistent crumbs from my lips. “Is there something hanging off my face?” I whisper. “A booger?” I rub my nose surreptitiously.

  “No, Em!” Meg stage-whispers back. “He’s staring at you because you’re a babe!” In fact, I get the ones who are interested in faces with “character.” I’ve been described as dramatic-looking, striking, interesting, and once, “Venezuelan.” I have a mop of shoulder-length curly brown hair that is often more frizz than ringlets, dark brown eyes, and a large nose with a bump on the bridge. I get the ones who want exotic-lite. I get the ones who, for whatever reason, don’t want Meg.

  As I glance back at mystery man, he flashes a shy smile and turns back to his book.

  “He’s blushing,” Meg says. “You’re making him blush!”

  In spite of myself, I’m loving this. I have no qualms about harmless flirting, and I would never do anything beyond it. If a situation like this, which is rare for me to begin
with, progressed past smiling and blushing and a little small talk, I’d cut it off. I think about Kevin and what would humiliate or embarrass him if he knew about it. In the unspoken code of ethics of our marriage, that’s as far as I would go. I presume Kevin behaves the same way, and I don’t mind. After all, he lives in the world, too. I’m glad that we’re both young, that we can attract attention. It makes us more attractive to each other. Not long ago I idly mentioned to Kevin that a guy at the library had asked me out. We were in the middle of cooking dinner. Suddenly, Kevin was all over me. “What did he look like?” he asked, pressing himself against me from behind, nuzzling my neck while I chopped carrots. “What did he say to you?” He ran his hands up and down my sides, reached around for my breasts. Is it some alpha-ape thing? The idea must flip a primal switch in a man: if other apes want my female, then I am the prizewinning baboon. For my part, I think about Kevin’s young female coworkers, how they must nurse terrible crushes on their shy, handsome young colleague, and it excites me, too. After all, they don’t get to have him; I do. Maybe that makes me some kind of territorial monkey, too.

  Meg takes things a half step further than I do, but that’s it. She, for example, would accept a man’s phone number if he gave it to her. But she wouldn’t call him. Steve is the most mature of us all; utterly devoted to Meg, he pays no attention to the writhing world of human sexuality that still breathes around him. It’s as if it disappeared when he met her. I can understand that, actually. But it’s boring.

  “I’m going to get a refill,” I say, grabbing my cup. “Want anything?” Meg is working on her second muffin. She shakes her head and winks at me. “Did you just wink at me?” I ask. Meg is laughing as I walk up to the counter.

  I wait in line as surly-girl takes her time with another order. After a few minutes, I sense someone behind me, a rustle of clothes, soft breathing. I know it’s him, and my palms actually begin to sweat. He clears his throat, and I turn around.