by Kim Wright
“Okay, so maybe you surprised him a little too much,” Jeff will say. “The important thing is that you not read so much into this one reaction…”
“She spent the night on the couch.”
“He made fun of me.”
“The important thing is that you realize this was just one little hiccup,” Jeff will say, his voice muffled because he’s facing the wall. “A tiny misunderstanding. The important thing is that you remain open to the sexual possibilities between you.”
“You don’t know her,” Phil will say. “Elyse is the kind of woman who’s capable of making a very big deal out of something like this.”
Chapter Thirteen
They think I’m going to New York to see a friend named Debbie. Debbie is my escape chute—every married woman has one. The friend from your single days who stayed single, the friend in another city, the friend whose life you can periodically disappear into without raising alarm. My mother agrees to stay at our house. She’ll get Tory after school and make sure she has her homework done, and I suspect that she’ll also have her fed and bathed by the time Phil gets home. It’s only three days, she tells me, don’t worry about it. I sound like I could use a break.
Phil is not concerned either. “Have fun,” he says. “Tell Debbie hello for me.” Debbie doesn’t like him. He doesn’t like Debbie. But I’m surprised that getting away is this easy. I’ve already begun to wonder how long I should wait before I try it again. But no, I’m getting ahead of myself. A couple of kisses and a few giddy phone calls don’t mean that Gerry and I will hit it off in the real world. Not that a hotel room in New York necessarily qualifies as the real world.
I’m going up on Tuesday afternoon. I will spend the night in a room he has reserved and paid for, in a hotel that he says is very nice. He will be there early Wednesday morning. This is best, we decide, since his plane lands at 8:15 and otherwise we would have to wait until three to get into the hotel room. We can’t afford to kill most of the day walking around and having lunch. Time is too important, we have too little of it, so I will come up a day early and check into the room.
On Tuesday I wake up at five. I feed the cats twice. When Phil kisses me goodbye he misses my mouth and the kiss stays, a damp smear on my cheek, until I wipe it off. I drive Tory to school and hug her too hard as I say goodbye. “Have a good vacation,” she says. “Break a leg.” She is taking drama for the first time this year and she loves that phrase, loves the idea that it’s bad luck to wish for good luck and you should always say the opposite of what you mean.
I have allowed a full two hours to get to the airport. At the last minute, as I am backing out of the driveway, I look down at my wedding rings, then cut off the car and run back inside to take them off. I start to put them by the bathroom sink, but that seems risky, like I’m practically begging somebody to knock them down the drain. That’s the curse of the women of my family. Over and over again, through the generations, we keep managing to knock our wedding rings down the drain. My mother did it multiple times, my grandmother too, and both of my aunts. My earliest memories are of plumbers frantically summoned in the middle of the day to fish rings out of sink drains before the husbands got home. We can’t let the men know how stupid we’ve been. How careless. It’s almost as if we want to get caught. If you didn’t know us better, you’d think we’re the kind of women who enjoy trouble. Oops, there they go again.
Besides, if I leave my rings by the bathroom sink, that would be too dramatic a gesture to be ignored, even by Phil. I move them to the top drawer of my bedside table and leave a note for my mother on the kitchen counter, telling her all the things she already knows about Tory’s schedule, the phone numbers of doctors, the location of insurance papers, and what the cats eat. It’s pure compulsion, or maybe superstition. If this were a fairy tale then something horrible would happen while I was gone fecklessly fucking this stranger. A fire, an earthquake, a carelessly slung baseball bat, a monster crawling out from beneath the village bridge.
I want to make sure that I’m gone before she gets here so I scribble the note fast. My mother’s no fool. She would ask too many questions about what I was doing in New York, she would demand the name of a hotel, the exact times of my flights. She would notice immediately that I was not wearing my wedding rings. My mother has a natural talent for guilt and a keen eye for detail. When the plumber would pull her rings out of the curve in the pipe, she would always collapse into fits of weeping. “Another close call,” she would say to me. “That was another close call.”
It takes a long time to get my bags and find the shuttle, and when I arrive at the hotel and unpack, my suit is wrinkled and I realize I’ve left my makeup bag at home. I took it out at the last minute to get mascara and it must still be there, beside the sink.
It’s a sign, clearly, a sign I need to simplify. I wash my face and walk out into the street. I want a red lipstick. One single elegant tube.
It turns out that this is not easy to find, not even in New York where you can find anything if you’re willing to walk long enough. There’s one called Plainly Red at Macy’s but the adverb offends me and I keep searching. Finally I see it in a Chinese herb shop in Chelsea. Red. Seventeen dollars. I want to pay more.
The shop owner holds a small mirror while I very carefully paint my lips and then I am back out on the windy streets of Manhattan. Maybe this is enough, I think, maybe I have had my big adventure simply by coming this far. I like this new face—plain, pale, with a single slash of color. I stop on a corner and dig into my purse until I find an elastic band and then I pull my hair away from my face and that’s even better. Maybe I need bigger earrings and to have my brows professionally arched, but it’s growing dark and these are things for another day. For now, my mouth will have to carry me through.
Back at the hotel I order three vodka tonics and a spinach salad from room service. I take a shower, wrap the complimentary basketweave bathrobe around my wet body, tip the girl ten dollars, and settle down with the food on the bed. The robe is soft and has a hood and the minute the cloth curls around me I think, “This is what it feels like to be a mistress.” God knows what this suite is costing Gerry but it pleases me that the hotel is so elegant, so discreet and obviously expensive. It pleases me that he has arranged for flowers to be waiting in the room. Tory has given me a flower too. When we stopped for gas this morning on the way to school she asked me for two dollars and I gave them to her, thinking she wanted a candy bar but too distracted to object that this was not a good snack for 7:45 in the morning. She came back with one of those roses they keep wrapped by the convenience store register, the kind that never open and never die, the kind that just eventually go soft and begin to droop while still in the shape of a bud. I carried the rose on the plane. I carried it in my hand in the cab. Now it is slumped in the hotel ice bucket, its head barely visible above the broad chrome rim.
But the suite is nice. It tells me that he likes me and that my eagerness has not yet devalued me in his eyes. I down the first drink and suck the small lime. I rub the almond-scented lotion from the bathroom into my feet. I read all the guest copy magazines on the bedside table and study what is showing this week in the museums because my mother will ask me how I spent my two days in New York and she will expect to hear something sensible. When I call home to let her know I got here okay, I dial the first four digits from the room phone and stop. It would not do to have the number of a Mandarin Oriental show up on our caller ID. So I use my cell phone, that savior of infidels, that invention that makes it so easy to claim that you are where you are not. I dial my own number—funny how hard it is to remember it—and leave a vague message. Then I pick up the second drink and walk to the window.
Across the street from my hotel there is an office building. Many of the windows are still lit, although the clock beside the bed says that it’s almost nine. A man is sitting at a desk. I can see him quite clearly, even the can of diet Coke beside his computer screen, and I think about the telescop
e we had when I was a kid. My father developed a great thirst for astronomy during the Kennedy administration. He subscribed to Omni magazine and watched The Outer Limits and told me that by the time I had children, it would be a routine matter for anyone, even civilians, to fly to the moon. In the meantime he used the telescope to look through the neighbors’ kitchen windows. He would play with the focus, nudging it this way and that with his stubby fingers, until he could see every item on their countertops, and then he could lean back and say with great satisfaction, “Nabisco.”
I suppose spying is in my blood, this sort of mindless, pointless need to observe the minutiae of other people’s lives, and I press myself against the glass of the long, narrow hotel window, willing the man to look over. Perhaps he will notice me across this great divide, and I think that if he does I will flash him, drop my robe, or maybe use my fingers to signal my room number, something wild. There are so few days when I am alone. For a minute I wonder what would happen if Gerry didn’t show. I haven’t talked to him today. It’s possible he could be the one with a last-minute attack of panic, or conscience, or sanity. The man remains bent over his desk as if he were praying. It is only when I give up and push away from the glass that my focus wanders and I see another man, three floors higher. He is standing at his window too, gazing down at me and smiling, and I jump back as if I’ve been shocked.
Gerry will be at the hotel by 10 a.m. tomorrow. My best suit, my only Armani, is all wrong for this weather but it hangs on the showerhead, unwrinkling, in case we go somewhere nice for dinner. There are men everywhere here, all over the city, looking down from office windows or even higher, suspended in mid air, circling in planes, heading to the beds of women like me. Women who take off their wedding rings, women with bright red mouths who wait alone in darkening rooms, drinking Tanqueray. I lie down and pull the nubby gray comforter over me. I am drunk and alone in a rented bed. Nobody here knows me and nobody at home knows exactly where I am, and I think, somewhat illogically, that this is the happiest night of my life.
Chapter Fourteen
When he knocks on the door the next morning, I jump. Even though I am expecting the knock, even though he has arrived, in fact, within fifteen minutes of the time we predicted he would arrive, even though he has called me from the cab to tell me that he’s landed and to get the room number, even so, when I hear the knock, I jump. I push off the bed and walk to the door. I have been up for two hours. Plenty of time to order breakfast, shave my legs, and blow out my hair. I painted on the red lipstick and then blotted it, blotted it again, and finally rubbed it off, leaving behind only a faint stain of red, a color that could possibly be the color of a real woman’s lips. I don’t want him to think I’ve put on makeup. I don’t want him to think that I’m trying too hard.
I stand on tiptoe. This is the moment I become an adultress. My hand is on the knob, my eye is at the spyhole. He is looking to the side, which is good because this is the angle I know him best. This was how he looked to me on the flight from Tucson to Dallas, a profile, a man on a coin. What’s he watching? Is housekeeping coming down the hall with their carts of toilet paper and towels or is he just nervous, afraid of being caught? But this is New York, the most anonymous place in the world. He looks first one direction, then the other, as if he is getting ready to cross a street.
And I say to myself—out loud, like a crazy person—“This is the moment.”
But it isn’t, of course. Our actual affair began sometime back. Yesterday morning when I boarded the plane, or perhaps last Tuesday, when he e-mailed me the ticket information, or maybe it was even earlier, when I agreed to come to New York, when we set a date to meet. Or maybe the turnback point was the very first day he called me, when I was watching Tory on the ball field, or when I kissed him, in the chapel in Dallas. The idea that you can change your fate is illusory and I do not indulge it for long. This decision was made years ago. Before I ever met Gerry Kincaid.
He knocks again.
I open the door.
I’d like be able to tell you that the sex is not a big deal.
It’s a revelation.
Not just that there is sex like this somewhere in the world. I already knew that. There was a part of me that always knew there were people out there somewhere having sex like this. The surprise is that it’s happening to me.
He kisses me until I am weak with it and I roll my head back and forth on the pillow and mumble, “I want love.” I am immediately shamed. This was not our deal and why am I such a blurter? But he just as immediately takes my hand and says, “Okay, let’s go find some.” He may as well be wearing a pith helmet. He may as well have picked up a walking stick and a canteen or strapped a knapsack to his back. He never releases my hand and I have the sensation that I am moving across space, of closing my eyes in one location and opening them to find myself somewhere else. There are so many emotions that it takes a while to realize that chief among them is the feeling of relief. All these thoughts that have been inside of me for so long, that have circled around and doubled back upon themselves, that have almost convinced me I’m sick and strange and unfit for love—suddenly all these thoughts have somewhere to go. He catches me looking at the clock at one point and I’m trying, I’ll confess, to calculate how long we have been doing this, how many years I have lived upon this bed. But he doesn’t want me to know what time it is. He reaches toward the table. His shoulders and back are glazed with sweat. I expect him to turn the clock to the wall but instead he lifts it with a jerk, a movement so abrupt that for a second I think he is going to bring it down on my head like a stone. But instead the plug releases from the outlet with a pop and the red numbers sink immediately into a sea of darkness.
“You killed it,” I say, or perhaps I just think it. He flings the clock across the bed, its black electrical cord slapping back against his arm. This is the point where most men would smile, a quick grin to blunt the violence of the movement, to acknowledge the irony of the situation, but, as I am to learn through the course of this long, hourless day, Gerry is not a man who smiles during sex. In fact, he looks like he’s dying.
It’s big of you to go slumming like this,” I say. “Flying up to fuck me when I’m not even a Yankee or a banker or anything.”
“Trust me, the fact that you’re not a Yankee or a banker is working entirely in your favor.” I pick up Gerry’s gray jacket and slip it on. The silk lining is cool against my skin. “The smartest people I ever knew were southerners,” he says. “Like Custis.”
“Who’s Custis? Can I lie down in this jacket?”
He inches over and I crawl in beside him, putting my head on his shoulder.
“This broken-down old guy who lived on the farm where I worked summers. The farm belonged to my mother’s uncle—she’d found the pot under my bed and decided I needed to know what real work felt like. That’s what she said—real work, man’s work, although God knows where she got that idea. My dad was a lawyer. It was hot as hell, no shade anywhere, but Custis, I swear he must have been a hundred and he had this kind of folk wisdom.”
“It doesn’t get hot in Boston.”
“This wasn’t Boston. It was in Virginia.”
“So Custis taught you…”
“He taught me about life. I don’t know exactly what my parents were trying to prove sending me down there to bust my ass for two sixty-five an hour, but Custis showed me how to do all kinds of things.”
“Like what?”
“It was Custis who taught me how to fuck a watermelon.”
“You’re kidding.”
“A watermelon was my first.”
“I can’t believe you lost your virginity to a gourd. That’s not just going out of your species, that’s a whole new phylum or genus or something.”
“No, they’re good… really they are. Because they’re pulpy, pretty much like a woman, and when they’re just off the vine they’re still warm inside. Body temperature.”
“And they don’t talk.”
> “A melon’s never going to tell you what you’re doing wrong.”
“So you split them open… how does it work?”
He shakes his head. “No splitting. You take your pocketknife and cut a hole. Small enough to give you some kicks, but big enough to impress the other boys, and then you go behind a bush…”
I’m laughing, and he is too, flattening himself on top of me, opening his jacket and rubbing the tender arc beneath my breast as we roll back and forth. “This feels good,” he whispers, and I stop rolling. We’re face-to-face but not looking at each other.
He feels heavy all of a sudden and I shift my weight a little. “Watermelon fucking doesn’t sound like something that takes a lot of skill,” I say. “Where did Custis come in?”
“He taught me how to choose a good one.”
“You thump it?”
“There’s more to it than that. You get your eye on a particular melon out in the field and you watch and wait until it’s the right size. Every day you pick it up and bounce it a little in your hands.” He illustrates, using my breast. “Once I had one in mind I’d go out several times a day and check on it. Because you don’t want to pull it off the vine until you’re sure it’s ready. You want it heavy in proportion to its size, so it’s juicy.”
“You’re so funny. Not that you’d do it, because you were what, fourteen or fifteen? But you had this whole relationship with it, you were practically dating it.”
“Sometimes I named them.” Now we are giggling again, rocking again. His mouth is close to my ear. “I’m getting hungry,” he says. “What time is it?”
