by Sarah Bird
“Just different, OK? Forget it. More workout. Less talk.”
The weight in his hand is heavier than any I’ve ever seen him use before. He props his forearm on his knee and lifts. As his chest beneath the gray fleece rises to meet his fist, his whole body trembles from the effort. I don’t know if it is from the effort of lifting the heavy weight or the effort of keeping something out of his mind that he doesn’t want to think about.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Not now,” I whimper to myself as the Bentley slows to a stop. Not with Aubrey God knows where and my life at the point of greatest disarray it has sunk to since he left. In the dream scenario, Martin would have driven past while Aubrey and I and our hunky, successful, sensitive, insanely smitten boyfriends were romping on the front lawn together, joyous at sharing the perfection of our lives. Maybe we’d be playing badminton or some other sport that would allow the sun to illuminate our radiant complexions and stream through our golden hair and spotlight the obvious adoration of our menfolk. It would be a scenario that would leave Martin withered with envy and stupefied by the full extent of his idiocy in throwing away such paradise and the angels who dwelt within.
Not this. Not Aubrey gone and me looking like Courtney Love after a bad bender. I lick my finger and rub as much smeared mascara from under my eyes as I can. I don’t have time to do more: I have to get to the porch before Martin does and preempt any possibility of him getting a peek inside at the warehouse of untouched college supplies. He has no right to any image of my life that I don’t choose him to have. And I choose the Cape Cod version.
On the porch, I take a breath and brace myself for Martin to step from the car. But, instead of Martin, Martin’s father emerges. A second later, he disappears and Martin, sixteen years older, is there in his place. Where Martin had once absorbed light—dark hair, dark olivey skin, dark thoughts—this middle-aged man reflects it. I see now that the shielding palm in the more recent photos had also hidden hair that has thinned and turned the color of ash. A pair of silver-rimmed glasses now magnify his eyes, giving Martin, in the instant he sees me again for the first time in sixteen years, the goggling, bewildered look of a newborn.
Is he wondering why my mother has replaced me?
He’s wearing a suit that must have once been expensive. Perhaps it’s the same one he’d worn in the photos I’d seen of him palling around with Oscar winners and dodging paparazzi. Now, though, the rumpled, bagged-out suit has a Dust Bowl–soup line look, as if he’s slept in it for the past few weeks. He removes the glasses, tucks one stem into the collar opening of his shirt, and smiles up at me. A trio of lines strain around the edges of his eyes. More net his forehead. His lips, once almost girlishly plump, are less generous, more sharply etched.
“You’re looking good, Cam.”
“You’re kind of beat to shit,” I call back down to him.
The thought that these are the first words we’ve exchanged face-to-face in sixteen years runs like the steady crawl beneath a chaotic disaster story.
“You’re wearing glasses,” I point out, really saying, What about Opt Tech, Mr. Master of the Universe?
“I am.” His answer rejects my hidden sneer. He opens the trunk of the Bentley, removes a tire iron, and holds it out to me as if it were an olive branch. “Wanna hit me in the face?”
“Is that an attempt to defuse the situation?”
Arm raised, head dipped in thought, Martin hangs for a second on the upraised trunk lid. In that instant of hesitation he is transformed. Like fabric that shows iridescent from certain angles, the Martin I met on a train twenty-two years ago peeks through and again I see the young man who was seeking answers. I see the bump of glossy hair he was always pushing out of his eyes. Like Abe Lincoln, the haunted ectomorph, Martin’s wrists, hands, Adam’s apple were all too large for his gangly frame. There still is the juicy bottom lip that I wanted to kiss immediately.
Martin tosses the tire iron, the attempt at levity, back in the trunk, slams it shut, straightens up, and the iridescence disappears. He points toward the house. “You never fixed that leak.” I glance at the dribbling faucet with a beard of black fungus staining the brick beneath it.
“I had a lazy husband.”
“Must have been a loser.” He saunters toward the porch.
“Oh, he was.”
His walk—cocky, shoulders rolling—is something else that came along with Next. I’d fallen in love with his old walk, his old voice. They were tentative, uncertain. The way Martin mumbled acknowledged that the world was a place of doubt and nuance that could not be battered into line with bluster and positive thinking. After Next that hesitant young man with his boyish awkwardness disappeared. I waited and waited for him to return, for the android stranger who’d claimed his body to release him back to me. But it didn’t happen then, and, aside from that iridescent flash a moment ago, it clearly isn’t going to happen now.
He stops to pet Pretzels. I’m hoping she’ll give him the tennis-ball-in-the-garbage-disposal growl. Maybe a feeble attempt at a bite. But the traitor wags her tail and follows Martin to the porch. When he sees her struggling to climb the stairs, he stops to lift her hindquarters and help her up. As he draws closer, I see that his white dress shirt is speckled with smears of ketchup and mustard, a spritz of soy sauce.
Before he sets foot on the porch, before he can get the first shot in, I go on the offensive. “You changed the trust. You changed it without consulting me.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I thought I needed to address that enturbulation in person.”
“Could you not talk to me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like with those bogus words made up by …” I can’t bring myself to say, “Next.” Next is the name of the other woman who stole my husband. But that isn’t right. No metaphor is exactly right, except maybe the one involving body snatching; it was confusing when he left that his body was not either dead or in the possession of another woman. And it is confusing now that the body of the man I loved more than any on earth—though now with a few wrinkles, a loud voice, and a strutting walk, yet still, essentially, the same body—stands before me.
“No, you’re right. Sorry. I’m trying to talk like a normal person again, but I lose track of what words come from what world.”
I think of Dori’s article about rekindled romance. There is clearly no rekindling going on here; still, Martin’s voice, even the altered Next voice, is worming into someplace in my brain beyond my conscious control and making synapses I’d thought were long dead sputter back to frantic life, and that annoys the shit out of me.
“You gave a girl you haven’t seen in sixteen years thirty thousand dollars. What kind of a pea-brained numbskull does a thing like that?”
“A panicked pea-brained numbskull. I panicked. Aubrey called and said there was an emergency. She needed to pay her tuition immediately and you were out of the country.”
“What?”
“Clearly you were not out of the country.”
“Jesus. Did it ever occur to you to check with me?”
“I wanted to, but …”
I watch as he decides what to tell me. Aubrey inherited Martin’s dark lashes and the soulful shape of his eyes, tugged down a bit on the outer corners like Paul McCartney’s. Her nose, with its teardrop-shaped nostrils, is his in miniature. These similarities confuse me.
He shakes his head, overwhelmed at the impossibility of making me understand. Another similarity with Aubrey. “Cam, so much was happening. Things got crazy. I had to act fast.”
“You didn’t have time to make one phone call?”
“Yes, actually, at that moment, I literally did not have time to make one phone call.”
“So? What? You amend the trust, then just hop in the old Bentley and cruise on down? That’s a two-thousand-mile drive.”
“Yeah. I’ve been on the road nonstop since I faxed in the codicil. And, just for the record, the car belongs to
the church.”
I note that, although adrenaline, shock, and anger are keeping my mind fairly coherent, the beer has worked its malty magic on my legs. Refusing to falter in front of Martin, I ease back down onto the rattan rocker. Martin takes a seat on the glider, the same glider that he assembled from a kit we bought together at Home Depot. It creaks beneath his weight. I hope he doesn’t notice how new and unworn it is. I hope he imagines Aubrey and me gliding through sixteen summers of happy, firefly-lit evenings and mourns for all that he missed.
As he settles in, his shoulders slump the tiniest bit, and just that minute shift causes the hidden iridescence to emerge, transforming him back into the Martin I lost, and I remember the last time he was in this house.
He’d already moved out by that time, but still came over to take care of Aubrey. I’d given up on nursing and, after my own bad experience with breast-feeding, had decided that Parkhaven needed a decent lactation consultant. So while I put in the hours at the hospital I needed to become certified, Martin babysat.
It was two days before Christmas. I was late getting home that night because the consultant I was training with was working with a baby girl who had developed jaundice and was too sleepy to nurse and a mom brainwashed into believing that nursing was some kind of sacred experience that would be ruined if she jiggled her breast enough to wake up Sleeping Beauty.
I’d splurged on a big tree, hoping that Aubrey would remember the smell of pine, shiny bulbs, and silver tinsel rather than a haggard mother who cried a lot more than she did. But even the biggest tree I could afford looked ridiculous dwarfed beneath the high ceiling of the great room. Martin didn’t hear me come in that night. He was sitting slumped as he is now, in the darkness with his back to me, watching the automatic lights fade from blue to yellow to green to red. Along with so much else, he’d stopped slumping once he’d pumped himself up with Next theology. A box of ornaments sat opened beside him.
When we lived in Sycamore Heights, we used to collect ornaments all year long. Mostly as souvenirs from trips we took together. A Statue of Liberty from a visit to New York spent eating the kind of Italian food it was impossible to find down here and seeing every play we could get half-price tickets to; red satin lanterns with yellow fringe from Chinatown in San Francisco; a tiny ristra of red-lacquered chile peppers from a visit to Santa Fe. At Christmas, we hung them on whatever spindly Charlie Brown tree we put up. Those pretend trees confirmed our belief that we were pretend adults. We rode old, fat-tired bikes everywhere and picked jobs by how casually they allowed Martin to dress and how few hours I could put in as a nurse and still make a living. That Martin could wear cargo shorts and a T-shirt to his software-writing job balanced out the ridiculous hours he had to work. Wardrobe and flexible hours were more important to us than things like earning potential and insurance. The things that I should have been paying attention to.
On that last Christmas, I’d stood at the door and watched Martin for a moment, slumped in the chair, and he was Martin again, the Martin I’d fallen in love with, fully occupying the body I’d fallen in love with. He was the Martin I could have a conversation with about the mom I’d just been helping at the hospital whose baby had jaundice. Then I remembered that that Martin was gone and I armored myself once more. I walked in and my tone was crisp, unapologetic, when I said, “Sorry I’m late.”
I was in front of him before he could turn away. In the stained-glass illumination cast by the colored lights, I saw that he was holding the first ornament we’d ever collected, a drink coaster made of cedar and inlaid with ivory we’d bought in Morocco not long after we met on the train, and that his face was streaked with tears.
Martin put the ornament down and lifted his arms up to me. I held him and he cried into my neck. He pulled my scrubs off and put his mouth and tongue on all the places that he knew pleased me the most. He pushed into me, but even as we surged together, he went farther and farther away. I felt the sliver of connection between us being hammered to nothing and grew frantic. I took him into my body, but he withdrew more and more of himself from me, from our life together, until, finally, he surrendered. His erection obstinate and unconvinced between us, Martin wiped his face dry, whispered, “I can’t,” and left.
The last time I saw him before the divorce proceedings was on Christmas Day, when we gave Aubrey Pretty Hair Purple Puffalump. And now, sixteen years later, he is back. At any rate a body is back similar enough to the one I fell in love with that, despite my howling rage and ardent desire to be beyond caring, its presence agitates me more than the presence of any other male body has in the past sixteen years.
NOVEMBER 14, 2009
Different with us.
I don’t know what that means. Tyler didn’t answer my question about whether he is attracted to me. I’ve always scoffed at stories of women marrying men who came out as gay after four kids and thirty years of marriage. I didn’t think that kind of thing happened anymore. Now I understand exactly how it could happen. How the wife would almost be happy for it to happen.
He likes hanging out with me.
Whatever the real reason, I am sure about that much. For the past week we have gone everywhere together. In the mornings before class, we go to the Starbucks in the grocery store across from school and get coffee drinks with whipped cream, then sit with Tyler’s friends and eat our drinks with a spoon. Serious winter has started and the girls wear their North Face jackets now every day. Just like the Nike shorts, they all have the same style but in different colors.
In the evenings, after school, we hang out at Paige’s watching movies in the media room, playing “Guitar Hero,” and drinking beer from the refrigerator her parents keep stocked just for us.
Tyler and I do the things that me and the other band kids made fun of and that we pretended we had no interest in. We pretended there weren’t any cliques, that there wasn’t a ruling elite. We pretended we believed what my mom and, probably, all of their moms too said: that school is so diverse now that the kids in Computer Club, or the emo kids running the literary magazine, or the choir queers or drama dweebs were really the cool ones. And in a happy, pretty, gentle, glowing-rainbow way, it is true that all the groups are cool. But it is even more true that only one of them is golden.
I can never tell my mom any of this. She would say, “No one interesting is ever popular in high school.” Or, “All the stars in high school end up selling cars or being housewives and mourning their glory days. It’s just sad.” And that would be the end of the discussion. Except to maybe add that Parkhaven is a wasteland and life will be totally different and totally wonderful the instant I leave.
She would never understand how much fun I am having being Tyler’s pretend girlfriend. I make a big point of hanging all over him when we are together. He seems to like that. When we are alone, though, it is completely hands-off. There is no way my mom could ever understand any of this. Especially since I don’t.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
You got an extra one of those?” Martin reaches between my legs and grabs a beer, his gaze falling on the empty cans scattered about.
There would not be this many empty cans of Milwaukee’s Best scattered about in the Cape Cod dream life I want Martin to believe I am leading.
I sit up and explain, “Some friends … several friends, a whole gang actually, were over earlier to celebrate the, you know, going away to college. Some of Aubrey’s friends. She just left with them actually.” Too late I remember when Aubrey discovered the word “actually,” and how often it signaled she was about to stretch the truth.
I add, “To spend the night. Play board games. She has this whole group that gets a kick out of retro stuff. Playing Twister. Things like that.”
Martin nods at this image of me serving Twister-playing minors unlimited beers.
“Their parents were with them. Just a few of the parents—the many parents—that I’m close to. Whole big, rollicking gang.”
He holds the can up—“To rol
licking”—uses the tail of his shirt to wipe off the top of the can, pops the top, drains half the beer in one gulp. A dramatically un-Next thing to do.
I wish I had bought classier beer. Certainly bottles. Then I chastise myself. I am not the one who should be feeling apologetic. I go back on the offensive. “I thought Nextafarians didn’t drink.”
“ ‘With our thoughts we make the world.’ ”
“What is that supposed to mean? How does that pertain to anything? Seriously, one more word of Next bullshit and this conversation will involve lawyers.”
“I thought you liked Prince Gautama. That was from Siddhartha.”
In a blinding moment of clarity, I see how insane it is that Martin, who is wearing a pajama suit with a shirt that looks like a sampler platter of condiments, is sitting on my front porch enjoying a cold one. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He gives the one answer that could have made any difference: “I fucked up.”
At that moment I understand how Elaine, a nurse I go to lunch with whenever our shifts synchronize, felt when her ex-husband, father of her two boys, had come out as a woman mistakenly assigned to a man’s body. A woman with a deep affection for bustiers and mall-rat hair.
If Martin had dropped his jeans and revealed a garter belt and fundamentally rearranged plumbing, I could not be more surprised than I am at hearing him say that he made a mistake. Being right, being ultimately and forever correct, was the cornerstone he’d built his Next identity on.
“Not that I really had any other option, but the second, the instant, I sent in that codicil allowing Aubrey to claim the money on her own, I knew I’d made a huge mistake.”
“No kidding. You invalidated the trust. You know that, don’t you? You flushed not just the first year, but Aubrey’s entire college fund down the drain.”
“It was flushed anyway. It would have been flushed the second I left, and, Cam, I was leaving. That much was certain. I tried to stay in so Aubrey could get all four years of the tuition money. I mean, Jesus, I wanted to get at least that much out of the past sixteen years. But I could barely hang on long enough for her to claim that first year. I don’t know how much she’s told you about our communication—”
