The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  “You’re teasing me.”

  “Am not.”

  “Well, then … how long …?”

  “Um, how long have you been here?”

  “Six months, more or less.”

  “That’s how long, then. To the minute.”

  “Really?” I laughed. “Isn’t this kind of nuts?”

  “If by nuts you mean the best thing in the world,” he said, and sat on top of me, kissing me over and over, everywhere he could reach. Then he sat back and smiled happily. “You make me goofy with love,” he said. “But now listen.” His face suddenly looked so serious, my heart clutched. He reached down and started locating our clothes, handing them out. “What we won’t do is get all worried about this, okay? Life has a way of taking good things and making them agonizing if you’re not careful. This, baby, is a gift from the gods. I’m just going to live in it as long as I can. For this moment. Now.”

  “Now,” I repeated.

  He kissed all ten of my fingertips, and it was sealed.

  JEREMIAH AND I had to scheme to make love; we were creative geniuses when it came to stealing moments and finagling our way to long, languid hours in the afternoon. I’d turn down jobs on days when he’d figured out a playdate for the children, pretend to leave the house with Grant and Carly, and then double back once they’d gotten on the subway. Once, on a workday, we met uptown in a movie theater during my lunch hour, and then we very nearly had sex in the dark back row before I had to get back to the doctor’s office where I was working.

  It was so good. It was religiously good. It was choruses of angels on high good. You want to know how good it was? It made me a better person, this falling in love business. I went around smiling at strangers, giving up my subway seat to anyone who looked even the slightest bit tired. It was as though my heart was beating a little faster all the time, my lungs took in more oxygen, my eyes took in more light. I moved through the world in a dreamlike state of grace. At work, in my temp job at the doctor’s office, I was cheerful and energetic, willing to do all the hard jobs, even run the urinalyses and talk to difficult patients on the phone. And at home—well, at home, I was positively, preposterously magnanimous with everyone: with the twins, who were suddenly so dear to me because they came from him, they held parts of him in their DNA; and with the poor, benighted Grant and Carly, I was unfailingly kind and available.

  I felt sorry for them, was the truth of it. Grant was nearly the best friend I had, and it pained me that I couldn’t share this joyful news with him. I’d crawl into bed next to him at night, and see him burdened with his papers and his classes, see the furrow of his brow, feel his distracted hand reaching over to brush my hand away, and I’d just want to lay my cheek against his and say, “Grant! You have no idea how meaningless all this is, when you consider the grand scheme of things. Think of love, Grant! You really should fall in love. It’s great!”

  We even made love, he and I. It wasn’t the same as what I had with Jeremiah, of course, but it had its merits. Although there wasn’t any of the wild, screaming-banshee wanting that I was getting a little addicted to, there was a certain sweetness with him. You’re not supposed to compare, I know, but it was all I could think about. For Grant and me, sex was friendly, conciliatory, thoughtful, companionable. We smiled at each other, touched each other’s faces, settled afterward into a kind of lulling tiredness. Sex as tranquilizer. But with Jeremiah, I was always finding myself out on the frontiers of the stratosphere, quaking and hoping eventually to be readmitted to my body.

  There was, of course, the thrilling, scary part—trying to make sure we didn’t get caught. There were close calls: a ringing phone and a spouse wanting to have a conversation about dinner when you were rocketing your way to a climax. A sudden change of plans, the necessity of streaking down the hall with your clothes under your arm, slamming the bathroom door just as the front door opened and the wrong person came home unexpectedly. An adventure any way you looked at it.

  One rainy day in bed, Jeremiah asked me about my brother, and I had to bury my head in his chest for a very long time, because I was crying too hard to speak. I hadn’t truly cried for David, and now everything poured out: the drugs, the danger, the sweetness, the things that might be my fault, the things that were clearly my parents’ fault, the uselessness of blame in any case. All of it, running down my face. And Jeremiah holding me, taking it all in, asking me questions, comforting me. Not saying, as Grant would have, “There, now, let’s look at the good part. At all the things David can do.” Or: “There’s really not much point in worrying for him—he wouldn’t want you to.”

  Jeremiah knew how to hold all the grief, to balance it in one hand while holding me in the other—and that was the day that we got so much closer to each other that we very nearly missed the sound of the front door opening and closing, and he had to hide behind my bed while I hurried out to the kitchen in my bathrobe, sniffling and complaining to a harried Carly that I had somehow caught a terrible cold and had been in bed most of the day. While I talked to her in the back of the house Jeremiah sneaked out the front door and then made a big show of coming home.

  After dinner, while he and I were washing the dishes, he said to me, “We need to come to some other solution for space. Someone’s going to get hurt, and it might be us.”

  The next day, though, we were at it again.

  We had just finished making love in the bed I shared with Grant; we were very democratic that way, using different spaces throughout the house, even the kitchen floor on one notable occasion, although I hadn’t liked it as much as I had thought I would. The hard Italian tile floor was cold and made my head hurt. The living room couches were nicer, although more vulnerable—you might not hear the front door opening until someone was standing right there in front of you.

  Anyway, we were in my bed—mine and Grant’s—and we were lying together afterward, in the tangle of covers, and he said, “You know what I can’t believe? That Grant is so oblivious to the woman he has in his own bed. To think that he could have been the one getting this instead of me. You’re his wife and he’s not even getting any. How completely screwed up is that?”

  I had a moment of surprise, and guilt. Did he think—did he honestly believe that I wasn’t sleeping with Grant? Worse, was I somehow supposed to be not sleeping with him, in Jeremiah’s view of things? But the twins had awakened from their naps and were screaming outside the door. Jeremiah jumped up and pulled on his jeans, groaning. “Two things have to happen. I’ve got to find some day care for these kids, and you and I need to find a place to go,” he said. “I can’t be timing my love life to toddler naps,” he said and blew me a kiss. “It’s making me neurotic.” He kissed me quickly and ran out of the room, and I could hear his cheerful, fatherly voice herding the twins off to the kitchen for a post-nap snack.

  HOW WAS it, you ask, that our spouses never knew? Were we such good actors that we could conceal all this passion? Magda and I used to have endless whispered phone conversations about this. She thought I was crazy to think they didn’t know, and while she was at it, she also thought I might have lost my mind. She just hoped the fever broke soon, before somebody murdered me.

  “You have now exponentially increased the number of people who would like to see you done in,” she pointed out as though this were really a reasonable concern. “That’s why sleeping with married men is such a bad idea, safety-wise. And a married person sleeping with another married person? I just can’t think how grim your statistics look.”

  I was laughing so hard in the closet that I had to put my hand over my mouth.

  But really, Jeremiah and I were careful not to let our glances linger on each other, and not to let ourselves drift into one-on-one conversations during the evenings when our spouses were with us, not to show any emotion that might be construed as over the top.

  Still, as Magda pointed out in her inimitable way, nobody can be that careful. Looking back, I have to think we got away with this only because
both Carly and Grant were in such cocoons themselves with their careers that they truly weren’t all that interested in us for a time. They had sent our hearts out to play, trusting us to come back when they needed us again. That had to be it. They sat daydreaming about their successes and missed somehow the little zaps of emotion that flew about the kitchen, the way it seemed Jeremiah and I were somehow alone together, even when we weren’t.

  It became excruciating just the same.

  When spring ended, I blurted out the whole thing to a lady at work. Linnea Brown. She seemed like the kind of person who was accustomed to hearing people’s secrets. She was older—probably nearly my mother’s age, and calm and centered and wise. She wore long peasant skirts and hand-knit sweaters and her hair was naturally gray and curly, and she worked in the back office, typing insurance forms and doing the billing. One day, when I was sitting in the back during my lunch hour, helping her fold the bills and put them in the envelopes, she told me that she had been married to a wonderful man, but he’d had a stroke and died three years ago, and she said she’d never get over missing sex. “He was brilliant at sex,” she said.

  That’s how she put it, just like that, as though sex were a subject you could major in at school.

  “I’ve had a few affairs since then,” she said, “but you know, when you have just the best sex ever with somebody, you don’t want to give that up. It becomes everything. My husband was a luminous man. Do you know what I mean by that, dear? Have you ever been made love to by someone who lights up from the inside, and brings that light to you?”

  So I told her the whole thing. I myself was having the best sex ever, I told her, except that the man wasn’t my husband. She didn’t look shocked at that, just drew the story out of me, and she seemed both saddened and thrilled with the details of it, at the way Jeremiah and I were sneaking around, the way we couldn’t give each other up—not that we’d tried so hard. At times she clasped her hands in front of her, smiling and closing her eyes as if she was remembering and reliving this same kind of ecstasy.

  “Of course we live in fear of getting caught,” I said. “Dinnertime, when our spouses are both there, is awful. And whenever we’re in bed, I’m always halfway listening for the key in the lock. We’ve had some close calls, but so far, we’re in the clear.”

  I told her that he and I had agreed to avoid meeting each other’s eyes whenever the four of us were together. It was like a game, really, ignoring him when Grant or Carly was there, pretending not to feel the electricity that just seemed to radiate from him, pretending indifference when his name came up in conversation with one of the others. It made us crazy for each other, was the truth of it. It was like the greatest aphrodisiac in the world, this not being able to touch, or to even acknowledge that we ever had touched.

  Linnea studied my face, taking this very seriously. This kind of love, she said, was a grave and necessary business. When it was real, you had to guard it as though it were a helpless living thing. Because it was. It was your soul’s expression of the divine when it was like that. She was convinced of this. “Do you really love him?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. My eyes spontaneously filled with tears, much to my own surprise. “I’m in agony over this. My husband, his wife—I feel so sorry, so bad, that we might be hurting them, but what can we do? It’s become everything.”

  “Listen,” she said. “I’d like to make my apartment available to you and—what is his name, did you say? Jeremiah?”

  “Oh, no, no, we couldn’t possibly accept,” I said.

  “Yes, you could. You must, in fact. You can’t keep making love in the place where you all live together, my dear. Dreadful things are going to happen. And if you don’t have a quiet place to do this, then how are you ever going to figure out whether or not you really do love this man, or whether this is just your sex year?”

  “My … what?”

  “Your sex year.” She laughed a little and smoothed out her skirt. “I have a theory that we all have a year in our life when we’re meant for sex. It’s the year you think of nothing else. We all have it. It’s a marvelous time, really, although it can bring about a lot of agony, as you describe it. It’s as though all of life is only about sex during that year.” She cocked her head and smiled at me. “You’re a bit young for it. I was thirty-three when mine hit. But you may just be precocious. Or who knows? Maybe you’ll get multiple sex years. This one might just be your first. At any rate, you have the right to explore this, darling, and you need a safe, quiet place to do it.”

  So he and I started going to Linnea’s apartment, a walk-up on the Upper West Side. It was a simple space, clean and orderly, with bookshelves, Turkish rugs, mismatched furniture, and a spacious queen-size bed that we carefully covered with towels before we made love there. We would turn on the stereo and fall on each other, rolling around on that bed, marveling at our good fortune—that the twins had been accepted to a nursery school, that there was no need to half-listen for a key turning unexpectedly in the lock, no need to suddenly leap in the air and throw on clothes. I brought baskets of food with us—chicken and olives, pita bread and hummus—and we would lie there, talking and eating. He would bring his novel, and read me the scenes he was writing. His voice was as naked and vulnerable as the rest of him as he read to me. I have always loved being read to, and long after that book was published, when years later I read it while hiding in the stacks at the public library, it seemed to me to be a book that could only be understood naked. I couldn’t make any sense of it at all with my clothes on.

  One Wednesday, in the late fall, he said, “Carly has no idea what a great debt she owes to you.”

  “Uh-huh. And what might that be?” I kissed him twenty times down his chest and abdomen. “For taking her husband off her hands?”

  He gave me a long, sly look. “Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose. And Grant, too. I guess you could say I’m doing him the service of taking care of his wife for him, so that he doesn’t have to waste his precious academic mind on something as mundane as sex.”

  “But …”

  “I shouldn’t talk about them. We can’t waste our time at Linnea’s talking about this,” he said. “This is a Grant-and-Carly-free zone. Sometimes I guess I just think of how we could have missed being together. That’s all. I mean, it’s such an accident, really, when you think of it.”

  “How did you and Carly meet?” I asked him.

  He waved his hand dismissively. “It doesn’t even matter. My life,” he said, “is divided into two parts. The part that took place before I met you, and the part that is now. The Annabelle part of my life.”

  Such talk thrilled me. I had always been a rather disposable girlfriend, the one who was willing to have sex and go places but who was expendable. I had never affected anybody who was so sophisticated. Even though Grant loved me, and I knew that he did, I didn’t imagine that I really moved him. He had given up his bed for me and slept on the floor, sure, in the apartment in Isla Vista, and he had possibly saved my life by giving me a reason to leave California, but would he have found a day care for his children specifically so that he could sleep with me? Would he have dared take a risk for me? Hell, he wouldn’t even let me kiss him in his office.

  “Grant,” said Jeremiah, kissing me on both cheeks and then on my eyelids, “is a fool.”

  But things had to change. Linnea had warned me that something would happen; there were no thirty-year affairs, she said, especially when two couples lived together.

  “Be ready,” she said.

  And one evening, after we’d been doing this from the summer through the winter and all the way until late spring, I found out what she meant. It started innocently enough. Grant, in an unusual display of public affection, grabbed me around the waist and kissed me while I was trying to get Lindsay to eat the rest of her yogurt. Across the room, I felt Jeremiah freeze. I knew him so well that it was as if my own blood froze in its tracks, too, along with his. I pulled away, awkwardly,
from Grant, but Jeremiah swooped down out of nowhere and grabbed Lindsay and left the room with her.

  “Owie! Stop, Daddy!” she yelled.

  “Hey, I was just trying to get her to eat …” I said.

  “She does not ever have to eat the rest of her yogurt!” he said to me as he went past me. He did not come back out. He spent the rest of the evening in his room with Carly, and the next morning when we got to Linnea’s, we had the terrible fight I knew was coming. I had not been able to sleep for fear of it.

  “I watch you with him, and I don’t even recognize that person,” he said. “You’re not you when you’re with him.”

  “Really? Who am I, then?”

  “Yeah, really. Who are you? You’re—I don’t know—so passive and submissive. Submissive, that’s it. Not the woman I know, the one who’ll take chances. Who has a soul that needs expressing. You’re conventional, is all.”

  It was, for him, the worst sort of insult. This is what set him apart, his unconventionality. Throwing away Columbia to write a novel. Throwing away his dancer wife to sleep with the wife of his friend. Even talking to street people, offering them cigarettes. Everything he did was for effect. He was just another kind of snob.

  I could feel my face turn red. “Maybe I really am conventional,” I said. “Did you ever think of that? That I’m a shallow California girl who was raised on the beach? That I’m somebody who doesn’t see why life has to be so hard?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. I like the Californian in you.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know. It’s not that.… It’s just the way you are sometimes, with Grant. Like you have to look up to him, or something, be the little woman. You know? It’s disturbing. It’s actually a little bit sickening, the way you act.” He stared off into space. I looked at his naked chest, and his big, graceful hands and tapering fingers resting there on Linnea’s bedspread, and I got mad and scared all at once. This could end. He could drop me! He could see things in me that he didn’t like anymore. He was operating under a moral code that I suddenly realized I’d never inquired about. It was okay to do this because we fell into unconventionality? It defied the power structure? But what if it didn’t do that anymore? What if it became just another personal obligation? A relationship with requirements and assigned roles.