“How do you know?”
“Because I’m naming her Hailey, so if it’s a boy, he’d better learn how to fight.”
And then everything goes blurry as Claire reaches for me and pulls me toward her, and I close my eyes so that there’s nothing but the sound of that brand-new, still-forming heart, filling the room with the relentless rhythm of its tiny, hungry life.
32
BROOKE’S PARENTS LIVE IN A MODEST, BOXY SPLIT-LEVEL that calls to mind the Brady Bunch house. It’s on the southernmost side of New Radford, where the houses are closer together and not quite as set back from the street, just a few blocks from Jim and Angie’s house. Her father is an engineer and her mother works for the Board of Jurors, and they’re both still at work when I come to pick her up. She’s wearing dark slacks and a white ribbed sweater, her hair tied up in a high ponytail, and when she steps back to let me in, she doesn’t step very far. It would make sense for me to lean in and give her a peck on the cheek, but I freeze up and then the moment’s gone, and to do it now will be awkward and contrived. I know there are men for whom this all happens effortlessly, just as sure as I know that I’m not one of them.
Instead, I say, “I can’t remember the last time I picked a girl up at her parents’ house.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“No, it’s nice. I feel like I’m back in high school again.”
“And my parents are out,” she says, raising her eyebrows in mock seduction. “We could go down to the basement and fool around.”
I must be blushing because she quickly pats my shoulder and says, “That was a joke.”
“I know,” I say.
She steps forward and looks up at me. “What is it, Doug?” she says softly.
“It’s nothing,” I say, shaking it off. “You just look very pretty, that’s all.”
She reaches for my arm and then stands up on the balls of her feet to kiss my cheek. “Nice deflection, but I’ll take it.”
Below the surface, my skin throbs like a sunburn in the spot her lips touched.
Over dinner she tells me about her childhood, how her parents fought constantly, and still do, and how as a child she prayed every night that they would get divorced. How her father would hit her older brother, Ron, and then, when Ron got bigger, how he started to fight back, and then, to the sound track of her mother’s futile screams, they would go at each other like cage fighters, breaking furniture and smashing dishes, leaving cracks and dents and fist-sized craters in the walls. How her mother ultimately grew tired of fixing the holes and would just hang pictures over them, so that eventually the walls were covered with random pictures in mismatched frames at odd intervals, rosy-cheeked childhood portraits of Brooke over scarred drywall, the pretty lies of the past used to hide the ugly truth. How as a child she learned to spot the warning signs and retreat upstairs to her bedroom, playing her records at top volume until the fighting stopped or the cops came. How every time her father and brother bounced off the walls downstairs, the records would scratch, and after a while the skips in her favorite songs became indelible parts of them, so that even now, when she sings along to certain songs on the radio, she’s always somewhat surprised when the music doesn’t skip where it’s supposed to. In her mind, the damaged version is the true one. Even now, long after her brother has moved out, the brawls still occur every time he visits, and Thanksgiving and Christmas generally culminate with the neighbors calling the police.
“Jesus,” I say. “How did you end up so normal?”
“I’m insane on the inside,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to finish college and get the hell out of there. And now here I am, right back where I started.”
“I know the feeling,” I say. “Once I got out, I never thought I’d leave the city, and now here I am, right back in Westchester.”
“Are you from here originally?”
“Forest Heights. Two towns over.”
“Oh. Rich kid.”
“We were comfortable, I guess.”
“You don’t act like a trust fund baby.”
“That’s because I didn’t have one. My dad was determined not to spoil us. He said kids with money have a harder time learning responsibility.”
“I can understand that.”
“I was still a fuckup.”
“Maybe, but a fuckup with means is much more dangerous. Who knows what damage you might have done if price were no object? I see rich kids in my office at school every day, kids whose allowance puts them in a higher tax bracket than me, and their sense of unconditional entitlement is like a congenital birth defect. Your dad’s a smart man.”
“He was.”
“Oh, is he gone?”
“No. But he’s … different now.”
“How’s that?”
“He had a stroke that caused him some brain damage.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. Actually, we get along much better now.”
Brooke sighs wistfully. “I wish my dad would have a stroke.”
I laugh, and then I make her laugh, and we eat some more and we laugh some more, and people come and go, and somewhere behind us a waiter drops a tray, and a family sings “Happy Birthday,” and outside the window pedestrians pass by, kids on skateboards, people walking dogs or pushing strollers or holding hands, enjoying the last few days of mild weather, and all the while something is growing between us like a magnetic field, invisible but palpable, surrounding us, cordoning us off from everyone else, until it feels like there’s the rest of the world, and then there’s Brooke and me, and I remember a greeting card that was popular back in high school, that had a picture of two yellow chicks in an egg, or two kittens in a cut-off milk carton, or two baby monkeys on a tree branch, and it said Me and You Against the World, and then on the inside it said, Personally I Think We’re Going to Get Creamed, and looking at her now, with the candlelight dancing across her porcelain face, I wonder if she’d have been the kind of girl I would have wanted to give a card like that to back then, and if I would have been the kind of guy she’d have liked to receive a card like that from, and I suspect not, but that was then and this is now, and maybe only after she’d been raped and I’d lost my wife in a plane crash did we become the people we are at this very instant, and none of it should have happened, but it did, and so we eat and we laugh and the people come and go, and it’s me and her against the world, and maybe we’re going to get creamed, but we’ve both been creamed before, and there’s something strangely comforting in that knowledge, and so I look up at her and I can feel the naked emotion, as yet undefined, embryonic, burning across my face, can see it reflected in the dark, twin universes of her eyes.
“I wanted to kiss you when I picked you up,” I say.
“I wanted you to,” she says.
It’s suddenly very quiet, like the restaurant is filled with extras who have been instructed only to simulate conversation.
“I was nervous. I don’t know exactly why.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“I’m not nervous anymore.”
It’s so quiet.
“I like the way you look at me,” she says in a light whisper.
“Come closer,” I say.
Her lips, soft and moist, collapse against mine, and I can feel the heat of the table candle on the underside of my jaw as our mouths open, just a little, to form a tighter seal, and she tastes of white wine and the basil from her salad, but underneath it all I can taste something else, an organic sweetness that is only her, the flavor that I know I will always taste whenever we kiss. It’s a tender, unhurried kiss, more confirmation than exploration, and when it’s over we stay close, our heads hovering over the little table like helium balloons, eyes wide, complexions flushed.
“That was nice,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I think you should ask for the bill.”
“You charge for that?”
She laughs and kisses me again. And only then, as I scan
the restaurant for our waiter, do I see Laney Potter, sitting with Dave and another couple at a corner table in the back, staring daggers at me even as she responds to the conversation going on around her. And I should have known, in a town with only three decent restaurants, that something like this was bound to happen, but that doesn’t make the sudden chill in my belly any less icy. I try to focus on Brooke, but suddenly she sounds far away, and I can feel the moment we’ve just shared getting away from me. Laney’s presence is making me squirm, like I have an indelicate itch I can’t scratch in public, and I can feel her eyes on me like hot lasers, burning through my skin layer by layer, and it’s only a matter of time before I burst into flames. I am trapped, like the sitcom kid out on a date when he’s supposed to be home studying, and then his parents come into the restaurant and he has to hide behind his menu and assure his date that everything is fine even as he yanks her down to duck under the table.
I need a moment alone to regroup, so I excuse myself and head back to the restrooms, which are through an alcove and down a narrow hallway decorated with framed prints of pinup girls from the nineteen fifties. There’s only one other diner in the men’s room, a short, bald guy in a suit standing at the urinal and talking on his cell phone. “Wear that lace thong that I like,” he says. “The black one.” He is not talking to his wife, who is back at their table waiting for him to order dessert, and I’m no better than him, this multitasking man who can piss one-handed and have phone sex with his girlfriend and take his wife out to dinner all at the same time. “That’s right, baby,” he says, shimmying on his tiptoes as he shakes out his last drops.
I enter the far stall and lean against the wall, wiping the sweat off my neck with toilet paper, trying to achieve a Zen state of calm by taking deep breaths. I hear cell-phone guy leave, the bastard doesn’t even wash his hands, the hands that will touch one woman intimately and then another. Then I hear the bathroom door open again, and the click of heels across the tiles. A woman’s heels. They travel across the floor and come to a stop in front of my stall door. Through the crack, I can see a flash of red hair. “Am I coming in, or are you coming out?” she says.
“Laney,” I say. “What are you doing?”
“I’m seizing the opportunity.”
“Someone’s going to come.”
“Then you’d better let me in.”
When I open the stall door she steps in, pulling it closed behind her and locking it. She turns to face me, her cheeks flushed, eyes blazing. “Why won’t you return my calls?”
I look at her, wondering how to calm her down, terrified of setting her off. “I’ve been in a bad place,” I say.
“I thought we were friends, Doug. Whatever else we were, I thought we were friends. I cared about you. You fucked me and left. You made me feel like a whore.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“What happened? Is it that girl outside?”
“No. It has nothing to do with her.”
“So what was it? You think I don’t know that you’re dating? The whole town knows that you’re dating. I have to hear about it everywhere I go, everyone telling me who they think we should fix you up with. And I just smile and nod, like the thought of you with someone else doesn’t kill me. Last week you were making love to me, and now you’re having dinner with women you barely know and I have to chase you down in the men’s bathroom. I hate that you’re making me this person. Don’t I mean anything to you?”
“Of course you do, but really, what the hell are we even doing? It can’t lead anywhere.”
She steps closer to me, so that we’re practically touching in the narrow confines of the stall. “I love you,” she says, and suddenly there are tears balanced precariously on the rims of her eyes, poised to fall. “I know I said I wouldn’t, but I do.”
“Laney,” I say, reaching for her arm. “You’re married.”
“That didn’t stop you before.”
“It’s stopping me now.”
“I don’t have to be married.”
I shake my head. “Don’t.”
“I was going to leave him eventually anyway.”
“That may be, but you can’t do it for me. I’m not a good bet.”
“So you can sleep with me but you can’t have a relationship with me.”
“I can’t sleep with you or have a relationship with you.”
“You used me.”
“You used me too.”
And now the tears hit critical mass and fall, streaming darkly down her face like twin exhaust lines, and there’s nothing to do but catch them gently with my thumbs, a gesture she mistakes for an invitation, pressing herself against me and wrapping her arms around my waist, her fingers rubbing the small of my back. “Doug,” she says, nuzzling me.
The bathroom door opens and we freeze in the stall like hiding children, holding our breaths as footsteps approach the urinals. Laney throws her arms around my shoulders, hoisting herself off the floor to rest her feet on the toilet seat, and we remain absolutely still, listening to the hissing splash of urine against the porcelain. And then Laney puts her tongue on the back of my earlobe and pulls it between her teeth. “Doug,” she whispers, her breath hot and moist in my ear. I lean my head away from her, but it’s a bathroom stall and there’s really nowhere to go. She opens her mouth, running her lips slowly down my jaw, her hand sliding down my stomach and past my belt, rubbing and grabbing at my crotch. I grab her hand to pull it up and she struggles against me, smiling like it’s a game, so I twist it and pull it behind her back, which has the unintended effect of pressing her body harder against mine, and she leans down and starts kissing my neck. “You know you want this,” she whispers. The urinal flushes, and there’s a quick spray of sink water, and then the bathroom door opens and shuts. I exhale and twist my body fiercely to get Laney off of me, and her foot slides off the seat and into the toilet with a splash. “Shit!” she cries, pulling her foot out, spraying my pant leg.
“Fuck!” I say, and we pour out of the stall.
“Oh my God!” Laney says, shaking her foot in the air, hobbling erratically across the bathroom. “My foot is soaked.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looks at me and then sighs deeply. “Serves me right, I guess.” And just like that, the fight is out of her eyes, and she leans against the wall, looking sad and small and defeated, which of course, makes me feel like shit.
“Listen,” I say.
“Please, don’t. This is already humiliating enough.” She pulls off her shoe, an expensive-looking sand-colored espadrille, and shuffles like a gimp over to the air dryer. “I really am going to leave him, you know.”
“Laney.” I take a step toward her, but she holds out her hand.
“Just go,” she says, and then hits the silver button and the noise of the air dryer fills the room like a jet engine.
Later in my car with Brooke, in a random parking lot, a simple kiss has grown legs and turned into something more, something sweaty and breathless that fogs up the windows of my Saab. Mouths open hungrily, lips crush against lips, tongues dance and slide over each other, faces are stroked, hands slide easily under shirts to feel the skin baking underneath, sounds are made, soft gasps and moans, the universal dialogue of escalation.
We end up in the darkness of my front hallway, pressed up against the wall kissing and grinding against each other, and the heat from our friction will melt the clothes to our bodies if we don’t undress soon. It’s just that I’m not sure where to go. I don’t want to bring her downstairs to the guest room like Laney, but I’m scared of what it will mean to bring her up to my bedroom, breaking the hermetic seal on Hailey’s last remaining sanctuary, bringing the bulldozers in to the last untouched rain forest, killing off entire species to make way for hotels and strip malls.
Hailey, I think. Hailey, Hailey, Hailey. Just the sound of her name, two syllables, beating in me like a telltale heart.
But Brooke is sweet and sexy and somehow comple
te, and we had that moment back in the restaurant, that perfect kiss, where I felt loosely spinning things in me click into place, felt the planet stop rotating for just the tiniest fraction of a second to pay tribute,
Hailey, Hailey, Hailey … and now her wet lips are shining in the ambient light from the kitchen, and her eyes are smoky, their lids half closed and fluttering under the weight of her desire,
Hailey, Hailey, Hailey … and her skin glows like it’s lit from within, and we’re young and beautiful and we won’t always be, but today we are, soft and hard in all the right places, and we owe it to the world to have sex the way it’s meant to be had, and she tastes like cinnamon and sex and fuck it, this is what we’re meant to do, what we’re built for, and every molecule in our bodies is demanding it, and there’s nowhere to be but here, nothing to do but this.
So I lead her up the stairs and into my bedroom, and shirts come off and the smooth skin of her belly is soft and hot against my lips, and her flesh against mine is electric, and I’m not thinking about Hailey, am not thinking about the last time we lay in this bed, the night before she got on that plane, how she finished on top, covering me like a blanket, her knees up beside my ribs, face flushed, smiling down at me through the hazy mist of our evaporating sex. How we were wrapped around and through each other, naked and sweating and thinking that it was just another beautiful day in happily ever after. I had a wife. Her name was Hailey.
“What’s wrong?” Brooke says, pulling back breathlessly to look at me.
“Nothing,” I say, but something has changed, some unknowable but vital element in our chemistry, and she can taste it.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you not want to do this?”
“I do.”
“Maybe it’s too soon.”
“It isn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Because we don’t have to.”
“I know.”
And now it’s officially arrived, the moment when you have discussed whether or not you are going to have sex too much to now go and have it, and I can feel levels falling, dials spinning furiously in reverse, molecules deflating as the air around us loses its charge.
How to Talk to a Widower Page 20
