The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  I replayed scenes in my head. It went from bad to worse, this feeling I had. It was as though I were physically ill. Grant noticed. “Could you be pregnant?” he said to me one morning when I was too tired to even get out of bed.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, then, what is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you’re depressed. Maybe you should talk to somebody.”

  “I don’t need to talk to anybody.”

  “Why not? Maybe depression runs in your family. Your brother certainly—”

  “I am not like my brother!”

  He looked away. “Sorry. Forget I said anything.”

  Oh, I am still not getting to what happened next. You see how I delay? How I circle around the subject, and remember all the little stuff—that silly little argument with Grant, who was simply being a well-meaning, concerned husband? That’s what I do, in my guilt. I make him the well-meaning one and don’t talk about all the other times, the days he stayed so late at the university and then, when he came home, graded papers and listened to music on his headphones and didn’t come to bed. How he forgot to bring home the milk and didn’t notice that I’d changed the furniture around and never saw that I had a new haircut, and didn’t take me by the hand or look into my eyes, not even once. How I was a piece of furniture to him. And then, when I was sad, he wanted to know if I was pregnant.

  But I am getting to it.

  I ran into Jeremiah in the park one day. It was not totally unexpected on my part. I knew he sometimes went there with Brice and Lindsay—and so I walked there one morning, rapidly, with my head down. It was winter by then, and the day was suddenly sharply colder, the kind of day that reminds you that nature holds all the power.

  And there he was. Our eyes caught each other’s. I lifted my hand to wave, but he strode right over to me. He left the kids in the fenced-in little play yard with the other children and nannies, and came to me and pulled me behind a tree, where no one would see, and we started kissing, just madly kissing. And groping, touching each other wherever we could reach. His fingertips were nearly digging into my arms. When we stopped and pulled apart, he said, as if he were in great pain, “I can’t bear this. I have to see you.”

  “I miss you more than I’ve ever missed anything in my life,” I said.

  So we started up again. Throughout the rest of the winter, even though he was teaching again, we made time for each other. We went back to Linnea’s, and when her place wasn’t available, we used my apartment. Grant was never home; there was no chance of getting caught. Jeremiah said he didn’t care anymore if we got caught anyway. It was different now, we were different now. For one thing, we didn’t mention Grant or Carly. In the time we had together now, we undressed each other with less hurry and abandon, and although we’d sometimes spend hours just lying on the bed, holding each other and kissing and not even having real sex, the whole affair seemed more passionate and soul-stirring than it had when we were living in the same house. It was lit up differently, was the only way I could explain it to myself. It was now on purpose, not because we happened to meet near the broom closet when nobody else was around.

  Spring came, and somehow still we managed. I couldn’t go more than three days without seeing him. He was the sound track, the backdrop, the palette on which everything else was painted.

  Then one day we were lying in bed and he said, “We are so fucked.” It was late spring, a frustrating time. Change was in the air, but the weather kept forgetting it was supposed to be warm, and there would be cold, rainy, overcast days. As a Californian, I couldn’t believe how long New York seemed determined to resist getting truly warm, to commit to good weather. Jeremiah and I spent our afternoon together in bed, reading his novel and then actually sleeping, my head on his shoulder, wrapped in each other’s arms. He’d awakened first, and when he said that, his breath tickled my hair. It was almost an exhalation, that sentence.

  I didn’t have to ask what he meant. I took his fingers and kissed every one of them, and with each kiss I was thinking, Don’t. I didn’t think I could take it if he broke up with me just now when night was falling and summer was never going to come.

  He said, “Annabelle. I don’t think I can continue to live like this.”

  I closed my eyes and said, “Oh, please, not now. Can’t we wait to have this conversation?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. He rolled over on top of me, and kissed my nose and cheekbones. “I think,” he said, “that we have to come to some decisions we’ve been avoiding.”

  I swallowed and blinked. His eyes were boring into mine. He was going to break up with me again.

  “The fact is,” he said, kissing my eyelids and my nose, “I want you all the time.”

  I could scarcely breathe. “You do?”

  “And.” He took a deep inhalation. “I’ve been doing some thinking. I don’t love Carly. I realize that I haven’t for some time now.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “She and I don’t share our lives. We might as well be living apart. We don’t even kiss. I went to kiss her the other day, and she flinched. She actually drew back like I was going to bite her or something. What the hell?”

  He was looking at me, so I nodded.

  “There was never a whole lot,” he said, and then he shook his head. “No. I made up my mind I’m not going to talk about that. Not going to complain about the marriage.” He sighed. “The point is—the whole point is that she and I can’t stay together when obviously the marriage is a sham and I’m in love with someone else.” He rolled onto his back and lay there with his arm flung across his forehead.

  “Oh,” I said.

  He turned and looked at me. His eyes were lit up in a way I’d never seen before. “That’s what you say? Just ‘oh’? You don’t want this?”

  “I do,” I said. I scrambled up and sat cross-legged next to him. “I’m just … taken by surprise, is all. I mean, this is a lot to think about. And what about the children?”

  “We’ll work that out. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You are my life. You’re the person I wake up thinking about and you’re the last person I think about before I fall asleep. It’s you that I tell things to, it’s you that I want next to me.”

  “But Brice and Lindsay—”

  “I won’t have to give them up, Annabelle. People share custody. We can do that, too.”

  I pushed my hair behind my ears. “Will Car—”

  “Of course she will. She’s no monster. She realizes as much as I do that it’s better for children when their parents are happy. You know that. We both come from families where the parents stayed together for the sake of kids. They did us no favors, did they? Listen to me. This will be hard. It’ll be hard as hell. But it’s the answer. It’s the only way.”

  “Jeremiah, what happened to make you feel like this? I mean, are you sure? Have you thought this through?”

  “What do you think? Have I thought this through? I’ve thought of nothing else. Come on, you feel the same way I do, I know you do. I see the way Grant lets you down. I shouldn’t speak against him, I know. He’s a great guy. A brilliant historian. A decent person. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from him, but, Annabelle, hear me out. He doesn’t love you the way I do. Or maybe—what the fuck?—maybe he does and I’m just blind here to whatever the two of you have. I shouldn’t think about it, I know. It’s none of my business what you have with him. But you need me. I’m your lover. I am falling at your feet. I will do whatever it takes to make you happy. You tell me what you want, and I want to be the one who provides that.”

  My heart was pounding. “But Carly and Grant will be so stunned. It hurts to think of their faces.”

  “Collateral damage,” he said softly. “That’s what they are: collateral damage. It’s very sad, but there’s nothing we can do.”

  I wanted to call a time-out, put him into suspended animation, and go to the phone right that minute and call
Magda. Jeremiah wanted me and only me? I mean, I was thrilled, but I was doubled over with heartburn and something else. An adrenaline rush. A sick, horrible adrenaline rush. My hair was in my eyes; I had to keep pushing it aside. Dusk fell across the chest of drawers, where Grant’s clothes were stacked, with mine, on the top. This room would have my husband in it soon. I suddenly saw it all in a kind of speeded-up, time-lapse photography, a comic sequence of a camera pointed at the bed: Grant and I waking up there this morning, stretching, getting out of bed, dressing, me making the bed. Then me lying there this morning after he’d left, watching a television show, reading a book. The bed is empty for a while, and then the camera shows Jeremiah arriving, us ripping our clothes off, getting under the sheets, making love, then sleeping. Then we get up, I make the bed again, and later Grant and I get in the bed. It could be a film: A Day in the Life of a Bed. The bed of a bad woman.

  Jeremiah was now up and pacing. “How will we do it? That’s the question,” he said. “That’s what we have to do next: work out the details.” I turned on the lamp, hoping that would help me calm down. His face was drawn as he put on layer after layer of clothing. I had always maintained that in California, people had much less suspenseful fucks. Clothes practically fell off. In New York, to undress you had to be determined. Every day a striptease.

  Two days later, he called me on the phone and said, very fast, “Okay. I’ve worked it out. I want us to leave.” He’d been talking to a guy he knew who had a cabin in the woods on his property in upstate New York. We’d go there now that the semester was over and stay for the summer, and he’d finish his novel. This would give everybody a chance to get used to the idea. Carly would be upset, but she wouldn’t be surprised, not when she truly thought about it. They hadn’t been really together for so long. She deserved more. In the fall, we’d come back to the city, and he’d resume his life at Columbia and see the kids twice a week like all the other divorced dads he knew.

  By then I had talked to Magda and Linnea, and both had agreed that things had to come to a resolution. Certainly it seemed—especially the way I told the story—that Jeremiah was the person I had the most connection to. If I could only have one of them, and apparently that was the rule, then it would have to be Jeremiah. He was the one who made my heart sing, as Linnea put it. Magda had some lingering fondness for Grant and the way he’d saved me from my parents’ crazy drama, and also for his commitment to my doing art. But Linnea knew that Jeremiah was the one for me. She’d seen me blossoming with his love, and tears came to her eyes when she heard that he wanted to make it official.

  “He’s a good man,” she said. “He’s like my Paolo.”

  I got more and more excited by the idea as he and I made the plan for our getaway. I loved him. And it was so clear that I couldn’t live without him. Just the way he looked, making those plans, made me happier than I’d ever believed I could be. This face, this shoulder I tucked myself into, this wonderful sexy body—all of this was going to be mine.

  • • •

  WE DECIDED to leave the following Saturday. According to the plan, that afternoon he would tell Carly he was leaving her, while at the same time I would tell Grant, and then we would meet at Grand Central at six. We would catch the 6:37 train to New Haven, where we would spend the night with his college roommate, who had a car he wasn’t using for the summer.

  “It will be a hell of a bad day, but then we’ll have each other,” he said to me. “I’ll meet you by the clock at six. No later than ten after, you hear? No matter what happens, no later than ten after. My heart won’t be beating right until I see you.”

  I actually had to make an appointment with Grant so I could tell him. He had been planning to spend the whole day at the library, as usual. But he agreed to come home at three o’clock, which would be perfect. I spent the morning packing my things and putting the suitcases under the bed so they wouldn’t be the first things he saw. Then I paced the tiny apartment while I waited for him to come home. I pictured Jeremiah at his house, doing the same thing: packing and waiting until it was time to tell Carly and the children good-bye.

  My stomach hurt with shooting pains every time I thought about him. How was he going to be able to say good-bye to his babies? Even I had barely been able to tell them good-bye when Grant and I moved out, and I had only known them for a few months. But he was sure it would be fine.

  “I tell them good-bye all the time,” he said. “They won’t know when I leave this time that it’s any different. How could they know?”

  What I thought was, But you know. You know that you’re not going to be there to put them to bed anymore and you’re not going to smell how delicious they smell when they wake up in the morning, and how it feels when they laugh, and even what will happen to them when you go.

  “You worry too much,” he said. He bent me back into a passionate kiss. “That’s part of what I love about you: the way you feel everyone’s troubles, almost more than your own.”

  So that’s what I was thinking of as I packed everything into our wedding present luggage. The apartment felt echo-y when I had finished. I didn’t even pack all that much, just my clothes and toiletries, and some things from the kitchen. Jeremiah had requested that I bring my garlic press and my Moosewood cookbook. I took a painting down off the wall, something that my art teacher had made for me—a watercolor of an oak tree near a lake.

  At three fifteen, I heard Grant’s key in the lock, and I sat down on the couch and wiped my palms on my jeans. My mouth was dry, and I wished I’d thought to have a glass of water near me, but I didn’t feel able to get up and get one now. My knees were weak.

  He came in and put down his backpack and then just stood there, looking at me in surprise. He looked like a rooster, with his hair sticking up in a million cowlicks. “Well, hi,” he said and smiled. “Why are you sitting there … like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “On the edge of the couch. Like you’re waiting for a train or something,” he said. “You look weird. Did you just get off the phone?”

  “Grant,” I said. “I have something to tell you.”

  “Can I get a snack first? You want anything?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Really? Have you eaten lunch? I had some peanuts from a vending machine at the library, but obviously peanuts can only take a person so far.” He opened the refrigerator and stared inside. “Oh, there’s this leftover takeout. Can I have this?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Moo goo gai pan,” he said. He said it a second time, in a singsong. “Moo goo gai pan.” He came walking back into the couch area—you couldn’t call it a living room—with the cardboard container and a fork. He would never even try to use the chopsticks they always put in the bag. “Hey, you know what? This is actually better than it was the other night. Of course, I was eating it at one in the morning, and I had heartburn all night, so maybe that’s coloring my memory. But it’s good. Sure you don’t want a bite?” He held out a forkful in my direction.

  “Grant,” I said and swallowed. “I have the most difficult, horrible thing to tell you, and I don’t know quite how to do it, so you have to sit down and let me say it.”

  He put down the container and stared at me with wide eyes. I could see his Adam’s apple working up and down. “Something’s wrong?” he said. “Is it your brother? Oh, no. Did he—?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not him; it’s me.”

  He sank down beside me on the couch and took my hand. “Are you all right? Did something happen? Are you—wait! Are you pregnant?”

  My eyes filled up with sudden tears, which made him reach over and take me in his arms. And this was so much worse than anything I’d pictured happening—worse, in fact, than the rampaging I had prepared for. It hit me that I hadn’t really thought about the actual words to use.

  “No,” I said through tears. “No, I’m not pregnant.”

  “Then what? Oh, you poor baby,” he said, and I had to pull awa
y from him, stand up, and march across the room. I had to harden myself to this, to stop crying, but I couldn’t stop. My eyes just kept making more and more tears, and Grant felt sorrier and sorrier for me. Finally I yelled at him, “Stop it!”

  He sat back, blinking in surprise. “Well, then, tell me. What’s going on?”

  I started sobbing for real. “I-I’m leaving you,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, but the light went out of his eyes in stages. After a moment, he folded his arms like he was pulling them in for protection. Somehow this gave me courage. I had to go forward now. There wasn’t any way of going back. Jeremiah had said, “When you’re telling him, picture my face. Visualize what it will be like Saturday evening when we’re together on the train. How happy we’ll be.”

  “I’m not happy, and I want to leave,” I said and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  He looked down, rubbed his thumb on the toe of his shoe. “Okaaaay,” he said. “I see. And when did you decide this?”

  “I guess I’ve been deciding it for a while,” I said.

  “You’ve just been deciding it.”

  I nodded. “For a while. I’ve thought about it long and hard.”

  “Have you now?”

  “You and I don’t seem to have anything together anymore.”

  He took that in, filed it away, nodded. “Is this … is it your family?”

  “No. Yes. Well, maybe a little.”

  “So you’re going back to California, are you?”

  “I don’t think so. Not right away.”

  “But—what will you do? Why are you doing this now? I mean, it’s crazy for us just to live apart. We can’t afford it, and besides that, if you—if you don’t like me and you need time away from me, you’ve pretty much got that.” He stopped talking, and then he said, “Oh. Ohhh. How idiotic of me. There’s someone else.”