Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  All I want is to see David. All I want is to lie next to him. Since we started sleeping together, my reactions to things are buffed smooth and shiny: immediately upon hearing a piece of news, good or bad or anywhere in between, I want to climb into David’s bed. When Colby Wirth, my editor at Me, rejected my pitch on alternatives to traditional relationships (“Monogamy: The Relationship of Fools?”), I called David, picked him up at his office, and sped back to his apartment; we didn’t even make it all the way to his bedroom. When my mom told me that my second cousin Ronald lost his job, I felt a familiar liquid urge, and I told Kevin I was going to pick up dinner, which I eventually did. And when Heather first arrived, four days ago, I brought her home, made lunch, and then I told her I had to do some research at the library and drove straight to David’s. The immediate consequence of sadness, it turns out, is no different from that of disappointment, fleeting sympathy, or happiness laced with ambivalence. I finish drying off, sit down on the closed toilet seat, and dial David’s cell phone number.

  “Hey,” I say quietly, when he picks up. The image of Dick in his rakish green hat is still in my head. “My boss died. I’m really sad. Are you busy? Can I see you?” I hear the noise of the newsroom in the background. Only seven people work at The Weekly full-time, David has told me, but they yell a lot and generally act like ace reporters from the 1940s, drinking and smoking and swearing. “I’m not writing alderperson! That’s fucking bullshit!” someone shouts.

  “I’m sorry, babe,” David says. “I’m sorry about your boss. I’m swamped, though.”

  For the first time since Dr. Miller’s phone call, I feel tears well up behind my eyes. David has no idea how much Dick meant to me. But still. “Oh. Okay.”

  “I’m on deadline for two articles and the calendar,” he says.

  “Sure. I understand.”

  He hesitates. The din in the background recedes. “You don’t sound so great,” he says.

  “I’m not.”

  David pauses again. “I suppose…I could…Okay, I guess we could meet…. No, why don’t you pick me up here in an hour?” There’s something unrecognizable in his voice.

  “I don’t want to interrupt your work,” I say, barely able to get the words out. How can Dick be dead? How can David not want to see me?

  “No, no,” he says, “no, no, no,” regaining his enthusiasm with each “no.” “Of course you’re not interrupting. Of course I want to see you.” His voice returns, its familiar register and the low crackle of desire. “Meet me here in an hour, okay?”

  We hang up, and I slowly get dressed and wander back into the living room. An hour gives me time to hang out with Heather, who is awake now and has moved to a sitting position on the couch. Aunt Mimi’s blanket is wrapped around her shoulders; somehow, on Heather, it looks almost stylish.

  “Did you sleep well?” I ask, sitting down in the rocking chair across from her. I smooth my hair and try to compose a normal face. The problem is, I have no idea what normal is anymore.

  “You bet,” she says, still groggy, rubbing her eyes. “What should we do today?” Heather used to pounce on me in the mornings, jumping on my bed, sitting on my chest, threatening to drool on my face unless I got up and played with her. “What’s on?” she asks.

  As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I understand that once one thing is a secret, everything is. “I’m going to work,” I say. I can’t tell Heather that Dick has died, because then she’ll wonder why I’m going to the office. The accordion of all the other things I can’t tell her unfolds. “I’ve got, uh, stuff to do this morning. I’ll be back in the afternoon, though,” I say, watching the disappointment skitter across her face and then lift. “We can go for a walk with Mom and get ice cream or something, okay?”

  “I’ve got some reading to do anyway,” she says, motioning toward the stack of books she’s brought with her. Heather is reading up on nontraditional families the way Meg has been poring over pregnancy books lately—in the midst of their giddiness they both seem desperate for guidance, hopeful that a few select tips on what to eat during your second trimester or how to discipline a toddler when you’re not his mother will map the stars for them as they blast off into the solar system. But Dick is dead! And how can you predict anything? Heather studies my face for an uncomfortably long moment. “You okay?” she asks.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “You seem on edge.”

  “Nope. I’m fine.” I’m not fine, and apparently I’m not a very good actress, either. Suddenly an hour seems like an awfully long time to sit here and not tell my sister anything true. “I should get going, though,” I say, rising. And before Heather can catch another glimpse of me, before her sympathetic face forces me to spill everything, I grab my coat and click the front door shut.

  As soon as I see David, everything is all right. He’s waiting for me near the side of the building, his jacket collar pulled up around his ears, his shoulders hunched a little bit against the cold, sunglasses on. The sight of him is a Band-Aid on my heart. I pull in beside a NO PARKING ANYTIME sign and watch him for a minute before he spots me. I know the angles and contours of that body underneath the jacket and gray shirt and faded jeans. I know the taste of it. Just as I’m about to honk, David crosses his arms in front of his chest and looks up at the sky. Even from across the street, I can tell that he’s impatient. He must be as eager to see me as I am to see him, I think; he must crave my body the way I do his. The alternative—that he’s just feeling impatient—is not quite bearable.

  He sees me before I beep and he dashes across the street, folds himself into the front seat, and moves toward me in one graceful motion. The cold air and his leathery scent fill the car. Without a word, he puts his hands on my face and kisses me. His icy fingers and warm mouth create a current that shoots through me. For a second, I consider sliding my clothes off right here in the tow-away zone. He moves his hand up under my hair and tugs it lightly. Just then, a delivery truck drives up and honks at us, so my plans for an uncomfortable romp in the car are thwarted. “Drive fast,” David whispers, and I do.

  When we get to his apartment building, David practically pulls me up the stairs. We haven’t said a word to each other since we turned off Michigan Street, two miles ago. “I just wanted to see you,” I said then, slipping around the Buick in front of me. I thought about Dick again and how I hadn’t even told Kevin yet. I thought about how Dick used to bring me trinkets from medical conferences: a pad of paper or a pen emblazoned with a pharmaceutical company’s logo, a mug or a T-shirt, my favorite souvenir a smiling stuffed carrot sporting the name of a prominent anti-impotence drug. I felt my throat close up again and I had to concentrate on breathing.

  “I know,” David said.

  Now we’re in his apartment, now his bedroom, shedding clothes as we move toward the bed, the wrinkled blue sheets as familiar to me now as my own. Somehow, David wants this as urgently as I do, which seems impossible, since I want to disappear inside him. We’re puzzle pieces; we’re magnets; we’re fast hands and hot breath. Sometimes, with Kevin, I can’t help but think about the absurdity of it all, two bodies plonking around together. With David, no words come into my head, and I feel only friction, skin on skin, soft against hard, fusion. David cries out just as I’m pulling his head down toward my neck. When it’s over I feel just as hungry as I did when we started.

  “I wish I could stay here with you all day,” David whispers a few moments later, still catching his breath. I’m lying in the crook of his arm. My body feels rearranged, a not unpleasant, shaken-up feeling I get every time we have sex. But my brain is still buzzing.

  That’s nothing, I think. I wish I could stay here with you forever.

  “But I really have to get back,” he adds quickly.

  It occurs to me that David’s heated urgency thirty minutes ago might have been more about a newspaper deadline than about having sex with me, but I decide that, in light of today’s events, I will let myself push t
hat thought to the back burner. Besides, the privileges of marriage, where you get to needle your spouse with your every insecure notion, don’t extend to an affair. David still thinks I’m confident and mysterious, which, I sense, is an important ingredient in the stew of our relationship. So I just roll onto my stomach and lean in to kiss him. “I’ll get dressed and drive you back.”

  “No, it’s all right,” he says, already pulling his clothes on. “I’ll catch a bus. It stops right on the corner, and there’s one every ten minutes.” He’s getting public transportation back to work. I’m still warm from our lovemaking and he’s about to jump on a bus. This is tawdry.

  I swallow the lump in my throat and flash what I hope resembles an assured smile. “Okey dokey,” I say, which is a phrase I don’t believe I’ve ever used before. The boulder in my chest that had begun to break apart starts to re-form. I roll over, feel the strange expanse of this bed without David in it.

  “I’m really sorry about your boss,” he says again, and it looks as if that sentence, along with the last half hour, will have to be enough.

  When I get home, feeling strangely removed from myself, Kevin and Heather are sitting on the couch together. This is a somewhat unusual sight, given Heather’s intolerance of my husband’s deadly slow conversational pace. Kevin is leaning slightly toward Heather. A somber-looking gray tome with a cookbook title, The Blended Family, lies open on her lap. They fall silent when I walk through the door, then turn their faces to me simultaneously; Kevin reddens, and Heather quickly looks down at her book.

  “Heather was just telling me, um, how cute Silas is,” Kevin says sheepishly. He shifts on the couch cushion, leans away from her.

  “I was telling Kevin about the cutest thing Silas said to me the other day,” Heather confirms, closing her book and turning it over in her hands. “He said, ‘You’re almost as pretty as my mommy.’” Her fingers tap-dance on the book’s spine.

  “Right,” I say, unzipping my coat. “Cute.” Heather and Kevin glance at each other, silently confirming that they’re the worst liars on the planet. They were talking about me. I turn back toward the kitchen. “Who wants lunch?”

  “Emily,” Kevin calls after me. “Can you come back in here?”

  “Who’s hungry?” I ask cheerily. Are they conspiring against me? “Where’s the blender? I’m in the mood for a blended family!”

  “Please,” Heather says. “Can you just come here?”

  When I was seven, Karen Krakowski and I tried to flush two bologna sandwiches down the toilet in the girls’ bathroom. When it overflowed, a sycophantic kindergartner, witness to our crime, turned us in, and we were called into Principal Vanderbilt’s office to be reprimanded. I was terrified, but I remember feeling defiant, too. This is how I feel now.

  “Yes?” I say, returning to the living room. “At your service.” I rest my hands on my hips.

  “Kevin and I were just talking,” Heather says, studying the back cover of The Blended Family as if it holds the secrets of eternal happiness. “We were just saying how you’ve seemed kind of…I don’t know…weird or something, or…” She looks at Kevin helplessly.

  “I know things between us have been…um…” he says, letting the rest of the sentence drift off. “But something else is going on with you.” His tone is neutral, inscrutable. He crosses and uncrosses his legs. “You haven’t been yourself lately. That much I know. Is there something you want to tell us? Or me?”

  I look around at our cozy living room full of books and plants and things that I love, my grandmother’s candlesticks on the bureau, an array of colored glass bottles on the coffee table. The sunlight is making shifting patterns on the walls that Kevin and I painted together. I think about my double life, my affair with David, the way I’m deceiving Kevin every single day, how I’ve lied to him, to my friends, to my family, how I continue to lie to them. I think about Meg and Heather having families, opening up their generous hearts to new little people, huge changes. I think about how Kevin wants to start that phase of our life together, too, how he deserves to. And now the room is spinning, and I have to sit down, but three feet to the rocking chair seems like an impossible distance, from here to Alaska, so I sink to the floor, and I just sit there for a minute. When I imagined myself at thirty, this is not what I saw. I’m in a deep hole that I’ve dug for myself, and I can’t get out. I let my head fall forward into my hands, because, truly, I can’t look at Heather or Kevin. “Dick died,” I say from behind my hands. It comes out muffled.

  “Fish fry?” Heather asks.

  “Pigs fly?” Kevin suggests, a half beat later.

  “Are you guys serious?” I lift my head. They look serious. They look serious and utterly baffled. My face feels hot and wet. “Dick died. Dick died. Dick died!” It does sound strange, actually, the more I say it.

  “Oh, Em.” Kevin’s voice is full of sympathy. He slides off the couch and reaches for me. He has to crawl past the coffee table.

  “Who’s Dick?” Heather asks, still trying to catch up. “Wait, who’s Dick?!” She’s on the floor now, too, trying to push past Kevin to give me a hug, but Kevin’s fighting her for hugging rights, they’re shoulder to shoulder, both still a foot away from me, and the sight of it is so absurd, my sweet husband and my eager sister in a scuffle on the living room floor, that I start to laugh, which confuses them both again; they look up at me, and now I’m laughing and crying, because Kevin and Heather resemble nothing more than two big pale crabs thrashing about on the carpeting, and Dick is dead, and I’m having an affair, and I think Kevin knows.

  ONE NIGHT TOWARD THE END OF OCTOBER, A WEEK OR SO AFTER I’d started sleeping with David, Kevin turned to me in bed. We hadn’t made love since before David, and I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to touch my husband again. It was bad enough to be cheating on him. I couldn’t fathom actually having sex with Kevin, doing it with two men—making love with one in the afternoon, only to go home and have sex with another in the evening, the memory of the first one, the feel of him, still lingering. How was a person supposed to do that? I had no idea. And, less abstractly, would Kevin know? Would there be subtle clues? Would I move slightly differently, respond to certain of his familiar touches in ways that surprised him just a little, ways that felt just a tiny bit peculiar? Would my body have absorbed David without my even knowing it, and would it then, despite my intentions, spill my secret?

  So I had been avoiding Kevin, going to bed early and then feigning sleep, complaining of cramps or a headache in the late afternoon so that, if the situation presented itself, I could say, No, Kev, remember? I figured Kevin would just think I was still traumatized about our conflicts, and that he would, as usual, leave me to my own emotional devices. For his part, Kevin hadn’t exactly been smoldering with passion for me. On the rare nights we were in bed together and both awake, he usually buried his face in a book and acted like I wasn’t there.

  That night, though, Kevin rolled toward me and rested his hand gently on my cheek. I looked at him, at the lines and curves of his pale face, the shape of his nostrils, the pores on his nose, the arch of his blond eyebrows. His face was a collection of parts, some assembly required. Insert nose roughly in middle of face. Attach pale eyelashes sparingly to eyelids. He inched up close to me and kissed me. Immediately, I started thinking about kissing David; just as suddenly, Kevin’s lips felt like suction cups I couldn’t detach from; his tongue was a squirming fish in my mouth. I pushed him away. “Um, Kevin, I’m just, I’m really kind of exhausted.”

  Kevin was not swayed. He pulled me close and pressed his hand against the small of my back. “I’ll do all the work,” he said, low in my ear, still holding me against him, his breath hot on my face. I wanted to shove him away from me, hard, and retreat as close to the edge of the bed as I could without falling off. I wanted to roll out of his grasp and jump up, claiming urgent stomach troubles. I wanted to shout, “Get OFF me!” I thought of how David explored the bend in my elbow with his tongue, the soft s
kin behind my knee with his fingertips; I thought of the way we held on to each other when we made love, pulling closer and closer until sometimes, in the heat of it, I would look at a body part and think, Whose leg is that? whose hand?

  Kevin slid his fingers up my back and whispered, “Come on, Emily,” and it was Kevin’s voice, urgent and pleading, but it was a voice I had never heard before; it was as if he were inside out, as if I was listening to his blood and his bones. Okay, I thought, okay.

  I went limp. I tried to detach from my body. I tried to separate from myself. I thought that the only way to reconcile making love with the man I was cheating on was to rise above my body, to watch two people move together in my bed. But as he touched me, as he whispered to me and kissed me, I was jolted back to a horrible tenderness. His soft voice in my ear recalled our decade together, our hikes through Oregon, Kevin quietly pointing out the native plants he grew up knowing: bearberry, bitterroot, wild ginger; our language of jokes and references, his likes and dislikes as close to my heart as my own; the knowledge of him, of every inch of him. His hands on my body reminded me of all of the times we’d made love, all the places—the first time, in his twin bed, almost silently, his roommate asleep on the other side of a flimsy wall; in a tent next to a still lake in northern Wisconsin; on the kitchen floor, the first night in our apartment; on an air mattress in his parents’ dark basement; in our bed, our bed, again and again and again. I felt him then, and I thought, I am cheating on this man. This is the man I am cheating on.

  When it was over, Kevin whispered, “Love you,” and he held me, and I lay there, hunched inside myself, silently, with the useless, unbearable knowledge that I loved him, too.

  “SILAS SAID ANOTHER ADORABLE THING THE OTHER DAY,” Heather gushes, swatting a bug away from her peanut butter sandwich. It’s the morning of Dick’s funeral, and Heather and Meg and I are sitting at a picnic table in Lake Park. It feels strange and incongruous to be here, as if my sad, confused autumn self has tumbled down a black hole and emerged into carefree summertime. I was awake for hours last night, tossing and turning, hotly kicking the blankets off and then, ten minutes later, just as desperately rooting around in the dark to cover myself up again. Kevin barely moved all night, breathing evenly, his back to me, and I never knew if he was awake or asleep. When it was finally morning, I fully expected to greet a day that would reflect the sadness of Dick’s funeral, a day to mirror my turbulent soul: I opened the shades anticipating great dark clouds billowing across a slate gray November sky. But today is glorious and warm, Indian summer, and the heavy, sweet smell of wet fallen leaves is the only reminder that it’s late November, not late August.