Once More With Feeling

by Megan Crane

  Once More With Feeling

  Once More With Feeling

  MEGAN CRANE

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2012 Megan Crane

  The moral right of Megan Crane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85738 000 5 (PB)

  ISBN 978 0 85738 255 9 (EBOOK)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Megan Crane

  English as a Second Language

  Everyone Else’s Girl

  Frenemies

  I Love the 80s

  Names My Sisters Call Me

  This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs.

  This is not the darkness I was designed for.

  Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

  1

  It could be worse.

  I made the words my mantra. A daily chant, an affirmation – and the best part was that it was true. It could, in fact, always be worse. Pestilence. Famine. Disease. Death.

  Any of those were much worse, obviously, than my own puny little grief.

  There were so many people who got divorced. Many of them had no idea that their marriages were even in trouble until it was all over, just like me. I wasn’t the only one, the only fool. I couldn’t be. Just like I couldn’t possibly be the only one with the great misfortune to come home unexpectedly and find her spouse in bed with someone else.

  It could be worse. Couldn’t it?

  But I was getting ahead of myself.

  I got out of court surprisingly early that day, thanks to a ‘sewage issue’ in the local courthouse I wanted to know as little about as possible, thank you, which meant I had to take a break from fruitlessly arguing Benjy Stratton’s latest DWI charge before the granite-jawed and perpetually outraged Judge Fennimore – who was as unamused by Benjy’s antics as I was now that we were on round three and Benjy was not yet twenty-two. I headed for my car, breathing in the perfectly blue, early September afternoon, and made the command decision not to go back to the little law office that Tim and I had spent the last few years building into a fairly robust practice for Rivermark, New York, if I did say so myself.

  I knew that if I showed my face in our converted little Victorian offices of Lowery & Lowery, a few steps from Rivermark’s picturesque town square, the overtly busty and only intermittently helpful office manager Annette would bury me beneath the reams of paperwork she always claimed to need help in deciphering.

  Help from me, I thought, expertly roaring along the back roads out of the centre of town and up toward the ridge where our house stood sentry. Never help from Tim.

  Instead of dealing with another conversation about why it wasn’t appropriate for Annette to ask me to ‘check her work’ when both she and I knew perfectly well that always meant I ended up doing it for her and then paying her for the privilege, I decided to stage my own, personal revolution and go home. Even though it was barely 2 p.m.

  I could catch a yoga class, I thought giddily, kicking off my appropriate court heels the moment I walked through the door of the house Tim and I had spent so much time making into the perfect refuge, up high on the ridge overlooking the pretty valley that was Rivermark, my home town.

  I tossed my jacket on the bench in the front hallway, and debated whether or not to go down the hall into the kitchen to grab something to eat. I went over the shopping lists in my head – different ones for the local supermarket, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, of course, because we needed different things from all three – and decided that if I hurried, I could make the yoga class I liked and then treat myself to something delicious at the little coffee place next door afterwards, when I would feel lithe and long and more inclined to choose fruit over the chocolate-drenched pastry I actually wanted.

  I started upstairs, thinking about pastries and chocolate and how virtuous yoga would make me feel, and how very much I wanted to feel virtuous after another day spent listening to Benjy Stratton spew out his entitled rich-boy views on his own poor decision-making skills. I also noticed how cool the bare wood was beneath my feet as I walked up the stairs, like some kind of massage.

  There was no sense of foreboding. At all.

  The sad reality is that I simply walked down the upstairs hall, completely unaware, as I’d been doing every day for all three years Tim and I had lived here. Right past the carefully framed photographs that captured choice moments from Tim’s and my life in all their candid glory. Our first trip together to his favourite beach down in Delaware. That first Christmas at his parents’ place in Maryland, when he’d proposed out in their woods surrounded by all that quiet and snow, a whole eighteen months before they’d died so suddenly and heartbreakingly, one right after the other. And our wedding, of course, that slick and spare affair in a modern loft in Manhattan, filled with all of our New York City friends, so few of whom we saw now that we’d moved way out into suburbia.

  I’d put all of those photos together myself, picking and choosing our memories, making a certain group of three pictures real and representative of who we were, of our life together, while casting another set into dusty purgatory in a box beneath the bed. I’d had them all framed in complementary distressed woods, looking at once elegant and inviting between the built-in bookcases that lined the long hallway. I had always been the custodian of Tim’s and my relationship mythology – I even thought of myself that way with some measure of pride – but that day, I didn’t look at any of those pictures. Why would I? They had long since become a part of the décor. Just colourful parts of the wall I really looked at only when suffering from some kind of melancholy. Or P.M.S. Or, as was too often the case, both.

  I walked down the hallway and into our bedroom. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t sense anything. I thought I was alone in the house, as I should have been, at two o’clock on a random Tuesday.

  I was already pulling my blouse off as I went. I’d dumped the dregs of my coffee on myself earlier that morning on my way into court, and was fuming slightly about our outrageous dry cleaning bill. But I’d pulled the blouse up and over my face as I walked through the doorway, just as I’d done a million times before, and as I finished yanking it over my head I automatically tossed it toward the bed, the way I always did—

  Which was when everything slowed down. Turned to glue. Stuck.

  It was as if the blouse stayed in the air for a long, long time. I watched it float in a graceful sort of arc, a silken scrap of royal blue, suspended there before me. I focused on the blouse because what was on the other side of it, what was happening right there on my bed, pale-yellow sheets and crisp white comforter strewn this way and that, was impossible.

  Disgusting.

  Impossible.

  They had their eyes closed. Of course they did, I thought, from some kind of paralysed distance. You’d want your eyes closed if you were going
at it the way they were. With all of that intensity. With so much physicality. I felt as if I were some kind of alien research scientist flown in from an outlying planet to make notes on this strange couple, who could not have anything at all to do with me.

  Who could not be who I thought they were.

  She was on her hands and knees, both hands braced hard against the mattress, making deep grooves in it with her palms. He was behind her, his body curved over hers, one hand on the mattress beside her and the other wrapped around her slender hip, slamming her back against him. Again and again.

  This must be what it’s like to watch porn on mute, I thought dimly. I’d always meant to get my porn on as part of the supposed sex-positive third wave of feminism or whatever, but had never got around to actually doing it. My consequently uneducated impression of porn was that it was supposed to be very loud, filled with all of that desperate moaning and shrieking and oh baby-ing I’d glimpsed in brief moments in sad hotel rooms, but this was not. They were both breathing hard, their sex-reddened faces screwed up with all of that taut, silent, terrible focus. And beyond that, there was the faint sound of flesh slapping against flesh.

  My blouse hung in the air.

  I stood there, frozen solid, not breathing at all.

  Until the blouse landed, right on her face, and everything came to a screeching halt.

  I realized then that I was half-naked, for all intents and purposes.

  This horrified me so much that it was almost as if the rest disappeared. Almost. I wanted to cover myself, but I couldn’t seem to move, and the fact that I was partly naked too, that I was exposed like that in only my raggedy old bra with the slightly stained straps I kept meaning to replace – well – that was what finally sent me over the edge.

  I screamed.

  Because there was, it turned out, no other adequate way to process the fact that I had just walked into my bedroom to find my husband fucking my sister. My sister. There was only the screaming.

  It could be worse. I knew it could. Amputated limbs. Suppurating sores. Cancer of everything.

  There were other thirty-three-year-old women who woke up on a Tuesday morning feeling comfortable – even, dare I remember the hubris, pleased – in their little worlds, only to find the whole of it in shattered pieces by nightfall. Tim was out of the house – a touch dramatically, I could admit, but it turned out that it felt good to throw his fucking clothes out of second-storey windows on to the driveway below, especially his shoes as they made so much noise – that very same night.

  I couldn’t think about my sister Carolyn and the things she’d screamed back at me without shaking violently and nearly vomiting, so I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  My situation wasn’t even anything special, I told myself as I sat where I’d eventually collapsed, in stunned silence in the empty living room, staring at nothing and still wearing the skirt and pantyhose I’d worn to court beneath the sweatshirt I’d shrugged on to cover myself. People went through things like this all the time. Hadn’t someone I hardly remembered from high school posted three different articles on facebook in the last few months about how infidelity strengthened a marriage? It was all about weathering the storm, I told myself piously. Desperately.

  That, I could do. And did.

  I assumed that the abrupt and horrible discovery of his tawdry affair would shock Tim back to reality. I expected that without me in his daily life, he would notice that Carolyn, my faithless sister, older by two years and heretofore obsessed only with herself and the marketing career she’d been let go from eight months ago, was a complete disaster in every possible domestic department. She’d always been very vocal and proud of her inability to do her own laundry, for God’s sake. She’d always claimed loudly that her refusal to perform domestic tasks was a feminist act, while I rather thought it had less to do with ideology and more to do with Carolyn not feeling like washing a dish or her own socks and underwear.

  Tim had always rolled his eyes and agreed. But that was before.

  While Carolyn could perform doggy-style sex enthusiastically – an image I would now be forced to carry with me to my grave – could she make the dinners Tim liked to have ready for him when he got home? Buy groceries and keep the house stocked so that she could toss together a dinner for two, six, or eight clients or friends at a moment’s notice? Make the bed every morning or take care of the house so that an unexpected visit by anyone would never embarrass us? Do any of the hundreds of things I did daily, none of which Tim even necessarily specifically noticed, yet all of which kept his life running smoothly, prettily and competently? All while also maintaining my own career as one half of the practice?

  I didn’t think so.

  I didn’t even attempt to process what had happened. What would be the point? It was unprocessable. It was impossible, and yet it had happened. I simply sat there on the plush sofa, surrounded by all the things Tim and I had gathered over the course of our seven years together, two years of dating and five years of marriage. All the detritus of more than half a decade. The by-products of intimacy. I threw out all the sheets they’d touched and put that mattress on the kerb. I sat. I waited.

  But Tim did not call. Carolyn did. And not with the expected grovelling, prostrate, tearing of hair and rending of garments sort of apology either.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ she said. Her voice did not sound rough with shame. Or grief. Or horror at her own behaviour and the pain she’d caused. She sounded the way she always did. ‘I really am. I never meant to hurt you.’

  I was unable to speak. I wasn’t sure why I’d picked up in the first place. Anger and betrayal and something else that hollowed out my lungs and sent acid coursing through my belly stole my breath, my words. I could only stand there at the island in my kitchen, frozen into place with my cell phone clamped to my ear and the refrigerator door swung wide open and abandoned behind me, unable to process what I was hearing.

  ‘I love him,’ Carolyn said in that same perfectly normal way of hers. But it was impossible. Absurd. And yet she said it as if in her world there was a cresting soundtrack and all the right kind of lighting, making her the heroine of this moment instead of its villainess. ‘And he loves me. I’m sorry. I really am.’

  But she wasn’t sorry enough to stop. She wasn’t sorry enough to give me back my husband, who, she told me, was staying in one of the bed and breakfasts in town.

  With her.

  She wasn’t, I recognized, sorry at all. Not in any meaningful way. Not really.

  It could be worse, I told myself bitterly as, over the next few weeks, I was forced to come to terms with the fact that Tim appeared to be remaining in that bed and breakfast. With her. A step up for Carolyn, who had been riding out her unemployment at my parents’ house. A step down for Tim, I told myself. It had to be.

  I attempted to work from home because I didn’t want to go into the office and face him. Or, worse, the judgemental Annette. Her inability to ever treat me with one iota of the deference she’d slathered all over Tim struck me now, in retrospect, as a clue I should have heeded. There I’d been, furious that she wasn’t respecting me as she should, and meanwhile, had she known the whole time that Tim was sneaking around behind my back? Was that why she’d steadfastly refused to do what I wanted her to do? Had she assumed that I simply didn’t matter enough – to anyone?

  Because that was certainly how it felt. Even from my parents.

  ‘Oh, Sarah,’ my mother said in that sad way of hers that always made me feel as if she thought she was the victim, no matter what the issue was. She patted my hand as it lay between us on her kitchen table, the house free of Carolyn’s presence, but only because she was currently tucked up in bed with my husband, and sighed heavily. ‘We don’t condone what Carolyn did, of course, but we don’t want to get involved. We don’t want to be in the middle.’

  I didn’t understand how there was a middle of this to be in, when it seemed like there was a very clear side to choose here – that this was one of
the very few situations in life that was not grey at all. But I had never had any success figuring out what went on in my mother’s head before, so the fact that I couldn’t now? Not a huge surprise.

  I told myself it didn’t even hurt.

  And it could be worse, I reminded myself when Tim sat me down for a ‘friendly chat’ about six weeks after he’d moved out, and long after I’d figured out how to navigate going in and out of the office without having to see him – i.e., monitoring his calendar to see when he was in court or out with clients. It was strange to see him again, after so much had happened. It was stranger to note that our ‘friendly chat’ had a clear agenda. It was all about what was fair and what we both knew to be true about our marriage (except I hadn’t known anything, a point he glossed over) and the best way for everyone (by which, it became clear, he meant himself and Carolyn) to get what they wanted out of ‘this unpleasantness’.

  I slouched there in the deceptively uncomfortable faux-leather Starbucks armchair, wearing my post-sister-in-bed-with-husband uniform of ancient grey sweats and a navy-blue zip-up hooded sweatshirt, breathing in the competing scents of burnt coffee beans and warm milk, while staring at my husband, the man I had chosen to spend the rest of my life with, forced to contemplate the possibility that he was a complete and total stranger to me. Or, alternatively, a zombie in Carolyn’s evil thrall.

  I preferred the latter explanation, if I was honest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I felt as if I choked on the words, but my voice sounded normal enough, if a little unhealthily high. Also, I wasn’t sorry. I cleared my throat. ‘Did you just call sleeping with my sister “this unpleasantness”?’ I laughed slightly. It felt like a saw and sounded worse. ‘Because I can think of other words.’

  Tim sighed. I knew every line of his boyishly handsome face, every single expression he was capable of producing, and I knew that one, too. I assured myself I was reading him wrong. Because if anyone had the right to look resigned, it was not him.